AlanBarber.Org
Computers & Technology
Friday, August 12, 2005
Shesh! What a mess!
My uncle dropped off my grandfather and grandmothers computer tonight. My uncle was trying to show my grandfather how to resize pictures or something and the computer keep on locking up.
I said to send it my way and I’ll take a looksy at it. I’ve spent the last few hours cleaning the cruft out of the thing.
Let’s see.
First I did the standard scandisk / defrag. Just want to get the basics out of the way first. Then I fired up the registry editor and checked out what was set to run on start up on the computer (this is windows ME by the way). Whoa! Talk about a lot of useless junk. Well I remove the junk and whip out my handy dandy usb thumb drive. Pop that sucker in and install Adaware and Spybot Search & Destroy. EEP! Even more junk! Between the two apps I manage to find about 20 different pieces of spyware/malware on the system. Well I wiped all that out.
Right now as I write this I’m installing windows updates from the Security Update CD I blogged about last year. It’s outdated sure but it still has important updates that aren’t on the system. I’m on dialup remember so I’m not going to bother downloading more updates. They can just take what I give them.
I’m not sure exactly what type of picture resizing they were doing so I can’t reproduce exactly what they were doing to cause the lockups but tomorrow I’ll see what I can find.
If I didn’t hate doing this so much I should do this for a job. I could make big bucks cleaning peoples computers of the crap they manage to put on them.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
My brother's new computer
Where has the time gone? My little brother is off to college in another month. So, I get to build him a box. Whoopie! 
Well here’s the specs:
Shuttle SN25B SFF Case (with skt 939 nforce4 based mobo)
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Venice core) CPU
1GB (2x512mb) Corsair XMS PC3200 Ram
200Gig Western Digital SATA Drive
Plextor PPX-712SA SATA dual layer DVD Burner
CONNECT3D Radeon X800XL 256M PCIE Video Card
Should be a nice system for college. Plenty fast yet won’t take up a lot of room in a dorm. All the parts should be here in a few days so once I get it tossed together I’ll run a few benchmarks and show off the numbers.
This will be my first real SFF system. My girlfriends system was in a very small case but was still a micro-atx based system. Jamming all that junk in a 8x8x12 inch box sounds like fun!
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Fixing SQLAgent is not allowed to run error
This is for anyone running Sharepoint on Microsoft Windows Server with MS-SQL and you are getting an error along the lines of “SQLAgent is not allowed to run”.
All you have to do is make a small registry change. Navigate to:
“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/ SOFTWARE/ MICROSOFT/ MICROSOFT SQL SERVER/ SHAREPOINT/ SQLSERVERAGENT”
Look for the key “GUID” and delete it.
the SQLAgent service should now start up without problems.
I had a heck of a time figuring out this problem but after some searching this seemed to do the trick.
Cheers!
on 07/20/2005 at 06:55 PM
Computers & Technology • Tips & Tricks • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Coverity scans FreeBSD for potential software flaws
I saw an interesting news article on SecurityFocus last week titled “Open-source projects get free checkup by automated tools”
Coverity makes code-analysis software that can scan source code for potential flaws, bugs, etc. They’ve been scanning for free some open source projects to help detect and clean up possible bugs and flaws. It’s a nice thing to do but of course the reality is they’re doing it to prove the quality of their tools.
Anyways, they just finished doing a scan of the FreeBSD OS. They found 306 potential software flaws from the scan. That might sound like a lot but most are really not flaws. The FreeBSD guys are saying only five issues can be triggered by user input and twelve are buffer overruns. Plus, either way they [FreeBSD programmers] have looked over the issues and have corrected them. So there are updates available now and all future release will be safe from these flaws.
I must say this is pretty nice of Coverity. I mean sure as I said it’s just something for publicity but it’s cool to see them help out open source software. I would hope that they think about doing yearly scans of the projects. Now that would be awesome to have them do yearly checkups of many of the big open source projects like Linux, FreeBSD, MySQL, Apache, etc.
Monday, June 27, 2005
Three questions to ask an engineer at an interview
Joe Kraus, founder of JotSpot and Excite, posted a little entry on his blog about three questions that should be asked at an interview for an engineer. These are not questions about technical skills as a programmer. These are questions to find out about intangibles. Those being communicating, tinkering and passion for coding
Without future ado here are the three questions:
1) Do you have a blog?
2) What’s your home page?
3) Do you contribute to an open source project?
The first question helps answer the need to know how well the person communicates. A person with a blog obviously does have the ability to communicate their ideas. They’ve taken the time to publicly write and express.
The second question shows if the person is a tinkerer or not. This might seem kind of odd but it does make logical sense. If the person makes their own custom home page, as opposed to just using yahoo or some other portal site, it shows they are not satisfied unless they get their hands dirty and do things better.
The final question is a way to test for passion. A person that takes time to work on a open source project shows they aren’t into coding just for the money. Not to say people that want to get paid to code are bad. On the contrary! It’s just a good way to find a real geek/coder vs. someone that became a programmer because they heard in high school/college that computers were a great industry to make money.
You know Joe might just be onto something here! I’ve done plenty of interviews and in so many of them they do nothing but ask the usual generic questions. Tell us about yourself, where do you want to be in five years, how well do you deal with stress, do you like working in groups or alone, etc, etc. There’s nothing wrong with these questions but they’re standard fair that they really don’t tell you much about a person really. As far as how well the person will actually do their job.
Well here are my answers just for the record.
1) Yes I have a blog. You’re reading it right now!
2) My homepage is custom made. You can see the sanitized version here (I removed any links that could cause security and/or privacy issues)
3) Well I don’t contribute any code to open source projects but I do follow several very closely including FreeBSD, Subversion, Haiku(openbeos) and SQLite. I monitor mailing lists daily to keep updated on them.
on 06/27/2005 at 09:34 PM
Computers & Technology • Work • (0) Comments • Permalink
Monday, June 06, 2005
HA! Oh, now this is funny! Apple is going to switch to Intel CPUs
Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006
I’m not joking here folks. There were rumors last week that Apple would announce they were switching to Intel CPUs. It’s been said before in the past and Apple always said it was B.S. so I like many figured it was just another round of that.
However, Apple had a press confrence today and Steve Jobs said they would be switching to Intel hardware. This is good stuff people. When the new G5 PowerPC cpus came out for the Mac Apple made all these claims about their systems being “super computers” and so much better than Intel based systems. Now they’re claiming Intel will be better! That’s rich man!
The basic plan is to a slow conversion. First lower end systems in ‘06 and by ‘07 the high end boxes will be Intel too. Now the big news is they’ve been secretly maintaining dual versions of OS X. PPC and x86 side by side for some time now. It’s apparent that they probabbly finally realized that PPC while a powerful and advanced system is basically dead in the water thanks to IBM. Where as x86 cpus are growing faster and more powerful all the time. If they want to keep the Macs in the game as far as power is concerned Intel is the way to go.
You can read the official statement here:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Are you folding yet?
Just a quick post to ask for all your help. I know you all have computers running that sit idle most of the time. Put that idle time to some good use and help out the folding@home project. Folding@home is a project that uses distributed computing to do protein folding simulations. These simulations can help researches in finding cures for Alzheimer’s, ALS, Parkinson’s, etc.
So please go download their special screen saver program that runs these simulations and help out the world. Oh and when the setup program asks for a team number enter in 11108. That’s the Maximum PC Magazine team. We’re currently 9 overall so we could use all the help we can to get to that number 1 spot!
Thanks!
on 05/26/2005 at 08:33 PM
Computers & Technology • General • (0) Comments • Permalink