Category: Rant

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Bad Oracle, Leave Solaris free

I just read Ben Rockwood’s post about Solaris No Longer Free. All I can say is I am severely disappointed in how Oracle has pretty much killed Sun and it’s products. One of the best things that Sun ever did was allow people to use Solaris for free. The caveat was you only got the Security patches for free. About a month or so ago, Oracle decided that you couldn’t get any patches unless you had a support contract. Ok I can sort of see your position on that, but why the hell are you now going to start charging for the OS as well. You have taken one of the best OS’ in the world for servers and basically killed it. What you are going to do is push more people to Linux (eck, I hate linux..). I am not sure why a company that has the number one OS would ever push people away from its OS. Linux is still immature in many ways and can’t scale at all unless you want to scale out and use up more power/floor space.

I hope that the Solaris user community will come around like they did when Sun tried to kill Solaris X86, and let Oracle know what a bad idea this was.

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Firefox 3.6 changes

One of the changes that was in Firefox 3.6 that I didn’t like was when you open a new tab from a current page, instead of it going to the farthest right on the tab bar, it inserts it right after the current tab that is “related”. I did not like this, so to fix it;

1. type in “about:config” in the URL box
2. in the filter, type in “browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent”
3. Double click it to go from True to False.

Much better.

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Windows 7 is naughty

Today I set out to see if Windows 7 would run MS Flight Simulator X any better than Windows XP did. I found that Windows XP on my Mac Pro (Dual Xeon with 10GB of ram) ran very sluggish. Partly because Windows XP (32-Bit) would only recognize about 3.5 Gig of the 10GB of ram that was installed in the machine. So since I recently got a Technet subscription (I seem to have to do a little more Windows stuff now at work, so thought I might as well learn what I have to manage) I downloaded the Windows Ultimate 7 to see how it would perform before going out and buying it. So I did a Time Machine backup of my data on my Mac Pro and then inserted in the Windows 7 disc and hit the “go”. It took a couple of hours to do the install, patch it, update boot camp stuff and install Flight Simulator. Once it was installed I was impressed that it actually performed much better than it did on Windows XP. I could actually turn the graphics stuff up on it and almost run it at 1900×1200 with out any jerking around. I then did a couple of flights and then it was time to boot back in to MacOS to get some real work done. This is when I about lost it..

See when I booted windows 7 it had found the other 3 data drives that were all HFS+ drives in my Mac. It decided to assign a drive letter to them all. I went in and un did that as I did not want Windows to touch those drives. I thought all was well, until I booted in to MacOS. When I logged in, it told me that the drives could not be read, and it couldn’t find my home directory (which was one of those drives). I was PISSED! So the first thing I did was pop up the disk utility and this is what I saw (minus the 2 1TB seagate drives):

What pissed me off was that every partition I clicked on, it said it was an MS-DOS partition. Surely Windows didn’t screw around and format all my drives.. I was at a loss, all my data was on there, 20,000+ pictures, all the video I was working on, everything… So I decided to see what I could see from the command line. So off to the command line, and I ran the “diskutil list” command and saw this:

Yup, Micro$oft had screwed with my partitions.. So I was hoping that maybe it just changed the partition type and my data was still there. So I poked around to see if there was a way to change the partition type. In the gui tool, the only way to do it is to “format” it over, which meant I would loose everthing, and I didn’t have any backups, as the disk2 in there was my Time Machine backup drive. So thinking to my Solaris side, I knew there was a program called “fstyp” that would tell you what a particular disk slice was formated as. So I gave it a shot and MacOS has that program:

So I ran the fstyp util againest one of the slices, and it came back saying it was HFS… Hot diggity dog.. Maybe my data is still all there.. So I did a mount on it as readonly and it worked. I could see all the data on the drive. So I immediatly started copying data from the drive to an external USB drive (the first 1TB seagate drive in the picture above). But the problem now was, I had 3 x 500GB harddrives of information. The 1TB drive only had about 400GB free. So off to Best Buy and I picked up a Seagate 1TB Firewire drive. Brought it home and mounted up the other partitions and started copying the data. It has been going on for about 2 hours or more now on the copy. I will say that the Seagate Firewire 800 drive is spanking the ass off of the Seagate USB drive.

Once I have backed up all the data.. (Hint use the ditto command) I will see if there is a way to change the partition type with out reformatting the drive. If there isn’t then I will have to reformat and then ditto the data back on to the Internal drives..

Hopefully this will help some one else if they get the same problem, and it (MacOS) tells you “you must initialize the drive”. DONT. Tell it to cancel and then you can save your data.. If you initialize it, you may end up loosing all your data.

—Update

As I waited for the data to finish copying I decided to test some stuff on my time machine drive. I read a bunch on the GUID labels that are on the disks. Using the gpt command i did a listing of the GUID info for the drive. Using that information I deleted the index 2 and added a new one with the Apple HFS GUID label:

gpt -r show /dev/disk2
gpt remove -i 2 /dev/disk2
gpt add -b 409640 -s 976101344 -i 2 -t "48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC" /dev/disk2

In the above, you can see I removed index 2. As soon as I did that, this window popped up:

I just selected ignore on it. Then went on to put in the new GUID label which was the third command in the shot above. The numbers (409640, and 976101344) are taken from the line that has index 2 on it above. You MUST use the exact same numbers, otherwise you are going to change the partition size and may corrupt your data. The value after the -t is the GUID value for MacOS HFS (HFS+), which I found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table, you can also see that the one that was listed before I removed it was a Windows Basic Data Partition.

As soon as I hit enter on the gpt command to add it in, the gui disk utility immediately changed and now showed me my data was there. It also mounted the disk like nothing had happened.

I am going to wait till the copying is done and then do the other two drives and then I should be back to where I was before I installed Windows 7.

More info on the Apple GPT is at : http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2006/tn2166.html

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Another Internet Explorer exploit

Just released, another exploit to Internet Explorer 6 & 7, that allows “hackers” to install software on your machine… What do the major Antivirus people say:

“To minimize the chances of being affected by this issue, Internet Explorer users should ensure their antivirus definitions are up to date, disable JavaScript and only visit Web sites they trust until fixes are available from Microsoft,” Symantec said.

How many mom and pop’s out there even know how to disable java script, and only visit sites they trust? Let alone make sure their antivirus definitions are updated. I have seen some virus trick Symantec’s AV in to thinking the definitions were up to date, and then I go to find hundreds of virus’ on my parents computer. This is just another reason why building the web browser in to the OS is a bad thing and why it should be sandbox’d off in to its own little area.

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XM Radio Customer Service

I believe that XM Radio’s Customer Service is probably the worst I have ever seen and has gotten worse every year I have had to renew my radio. This year their “trick” is that they are now going to start charging an extra fee to use the online part of the XM Radio service. Right now it is free but according to this:

Because you are a valued customer and you enjoy listening to XM Radio online, we are offering you a special opportunity to continue to listen online at no cost if you renew your subscription now with one of our longer term plans.

On March 11, 2009, the XM Radio Online listening platform will be upgraded to a higher quality digital audio and no longer included as a part of a base subscription at no charge. If you renew now at www.xmradio.com/lockintoday, you can continue to listen online for FREE for the length of term you choose — but only if you act quickly. Rest assured, any credits on the account from earlier payments made will be applied to your renewal – you’ll only be charged the difference.

Act before March 10!
This is your only chance to keep your online listening at no charge. Beginning March 11, if you wish to listen to XM Radio Online, you will need to purchase a supplemental Premium XM Radio Online subscription for $2.99* per month. Your current XM Radio Online listening privileges will be available at no charge until your next renewal date.**

It’s Easy to “Lock In” & Save.

They are going to start charging for the online service. So I decided to “lock in” and renew my subscription for my car for 2 years, just so I would have the online service for free for the next 2 years as well. So I went to the web site they listed, and did a 2 year renewal and filled out all my information. The last thing I see is:

xmrenew

So I thought all was well. Well it has been 8 days since I did that. No charge has showed up on my credit card, and my “listenercare” site on XM’s web site still shows that my I still have the 1 year service, and it was last paid on March of 2008.

I then went back to XM’s site, and filled out a billing contact form to ask them what was going on… What did I get back from them:

XM is proud to announce our exciting new lineup. Along with your favorites, we have added new channels, shows, legendary DJ’s and celebrity hosts, giving you more of what you love about satellite radio. You’ll get 69 commercial-free music channels covering all genres of music, including new channels like Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Radio, the Grateful Dead Channel, Elvis Radio, Jimmy Buffett’s Radio Margaritaville, Siriusly Sinatra, Metropolitan Opera Radio, Eminem’s Shade 45, Jam On, Little Steven’s Underground Garage and more. Plus, you’ll also get new personalities and exclusive shows like Barabara Walters, Chris Mad Dog Russo and Jeff Foxworthy. And, even more entertainment including Doctor Radio, Blue Collar Radio and the Foxxhole.

Everything you need to know about the new lineup is online at www.xmradio.com/newlineup. Download the new channel guide and keep it by your radio. With all of the new programming and personalities, Everything Worth Listening To is Now on XM.

Absolutely nothing to do with the question I sent them. I still have not even received any information about what is going on with my account either. So I decided to call the number listed on the email.. Got a man name “samual” with an obvious indian accent. He had problems with my account and could not understand why my stuff did not work. He then transfers me to his manager “winston” with another indian accent. He then “fixed” my account and told me that my credit card would be billed at midnight when their system does billing. So we will see if it works or if I have to make another call back to them yet again.

One thing that XM really needs to do is work on their web site and their customer service. It is just piss poor.