March 31, 2007

Computing Nirvana

I've been threatening to do it for months. Last week, I finally did it. I jumped ship from the Evil Microsoft Monopoly, and purchased a MacBook. The decision was tough. I've been a loyal Dell notebook user for years. My work involves using several proprietary Windows applications. But over the last few weeks, all of the pieces started falling together.

The three year maintenance contract on my current Dell expired, so it was time to get some new hardware. I spent some time looking in to a replacement Dell, only to find that everything comes with Vista now. I wasn't too keen to jump in to a new version 1.0 operating system that boasts that it's the most secure Microsoft operating system ever (right).

Then I discovered Parallels. I could run my proprietary Windows applications on the same desktop as all of my new Mac applications. Time to switch!

A couple of thousand dollars later, and I'm the proud owner of a black MacBook, along with the uber-cool bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Parallels has this cool feature called Transporter that allowed me to make a disk image of my existing laptop, and install it into the Parallels environment by replacing all the required drivers inside the image so that it will run inside of Parallels. I was skeptical at first, but several hours later, after transferring 50Gb of image from my Dell to my MacBook, I was ready to boot up the image. It works! No, seriously - it actually runs. I can run in a window, or full screen, or this incredible mode called coherence which allows the Windows applications to run seamlessly with the Mac applications without the Windows desktop. I can even see Mac bluetooth devices inside the virtual machine, so things like syncing my Windows Mobile smartphone still works.

Needless to say, I'm completely hooked. The Linux junkie in me loves the fact that a Unix command shell is just a button-press away. The corporate side of me loves the fact that I can run all of our proprietary applications. The creative side of me loves the fact that everything just works. I've now got MacOS, Windows and Xwindows applications all running seamlessly on the same desktop. I have a machine that actually goes to sleep when I close the lid - and more importantly, it wakes up quickly and successfully when I open the lid again.

If you've ever looked at a MacBook and wondered if it would ever work in your corporate Windows-only world, the answer is a resounding YES. Take the plunge. You'll be glad you did.

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Posted by Ian at 10:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 13, 2006

Is the Dell Exploding Battery Problem Bigger Than They Admit?

A funny thing happened to me the other night. I was at home. It was late. The rest of the family had gone to sleep, and I was up late trying to win a few more levels on Lego Star Wars 2 on the Xbox. At about 1:30am, I decided to go to bed. As I was switching off the lights, I smelled a strange hot plastic kind of smell. Following the smell, I suddenly realized it was my wife's Dell Inspiron 9200! The charge light was blinking orange and green. The smell was awful. I quickly yanked the power cord out of the back of the machine, and flipped it over. The heat coming from the bottom of the laptop was incredible. I literally burned my hands while ejecting the battery from the laptop. After placing the battery on the balcony, i returned to inspect the laptop. Thankfully, there was no damage - the unit still powered up with the AC cord, and there was no visible heat damage.


Weeks ago, I had already checked the battery serial number against Dell's battery recall site. This battery wasn't recalled, so I thought I was safe. Time to call Dell. At 1:30 in the morning, I was shocked to get to a human in less than a minute - and a human in Canada no less! I explained what had just happened, and explained that I had already checked the battery on the recall site, and that it wasn't a recalled battery. He checked the warranty status of my machine, and told me that it was a year and a half old - well past the one year warranty that Dell places on batteries. He gave me some safety tips on how to store the battery ("Don't put it back in the machine", "store it in a plastic or metal container", "don't handle it excessively in case it leaks", etc). He then told me that Dell would send out a replacement battery, and once I got the replacement to package up this battery in the special bag supplied and ship it back to Dell. The interesting thing is I didn't give Dell the serial number of the battery! They just automatically replaced a smoking out-of-warranty non-recalled battery without any questions!


Lego Star Wars saved my life. If I hadn't stayed up way too late playing the game, I would have gone to bed not realizing I had a smouldering time bomb sitting on my wooden kitchen table. Dell replaced the battery without question. Does this mean that they're aware of other batteries having defects in them that aren't listed in the official recall? If so, isn't that a scary situation to be in? What happens if someone is injured by a non-recalled battery?


I called Dell back today to discuss the strangeness of the no-questions-asked battery replacement and whether they had a policy of replacing all batteries whether recalled or not. The helpful service rep passed me on to a supervisor, who advised me that there is no hidden policy about unlisted Sony batteries (although if it was hidden, I'm sure he wouldn't tell me about it, would he?). He did satate that Dell has a policy of replacing any component in any Dell product that exhibits a safety issue, even if the Dell product is out of warranty, for as long as Dell has those parts in stock. I re-confirmed his statement and asked him if it was okay to state that comment on my blog, which he confirmed.


So, there you have it. Either this battery failed for a reason completely unrelated to the recall, or Dell is not being completely honest with the extent of the problems. I guess only time will tell. At least I learned that if I have a part fail on an out-of-warranty Dell product, the failure had better affect the safety of the product!

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June 06, 2006

Compaq DL360 Multiprocessor Problems

As I blogged before, I've been having some fun with some Compaq Proliant DL360 servers we recently acquired. After fixing the Fedora Core 5 install issue on the first server, my second server installed correctly, but upon booting up, it only recognized a single processor. No matter what I tried, it wouldn't see the second processor. I even tried taking the drives from the working machine and putting them in this one. The problem stayed with the hardware.

After attempting BIOS upgrades, BIOS downgrades, system partition re-creates, etc, I finally broke down and did a systematic line-by-line comparison of BIOS settings to see if there was anything going on. There's a BIOS setting labelled "Operating System". On the working machine, this was set to "Windows 2000" (I never bothered changing the setting from when I acquired the machine). On the broken machine, it was set to "Other". I have no idea what deep underlying changes this setting makes, but for Fedora Core 5 on a Compaq DL360, it needs to be set to "Windows 2000". Crazy.

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May 30, 2006

Fedora Core 5 on Compaq Proliant DL360

I recently spent a whole bunch of time banging my head against a wall trying to get Fedora Core 5 installed on some Compaq Proliant DL360 machines I have. Core 4 installs fine, but Core 5 has a problem with the hardware RAID on these machines. The installer fails to identify the driver (cpqarray) successfully, and if selected manually, it finds it but fails to find any hard drives attached.

After quite a bit of searching, I found a posting at the Fedora Forum describing the fix. The trick is to boot the installer with:

linux noprobe noapic noapci

Once the installer fails to find the hard drive, select 'cpqarray' and 'sym53c8xx' drivers. After that, the install will complete successfully. All credit to this fix goes to 'Mesu' from Fedora Forums.

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February 02, 2006

Fixing an XBOX with a bad TSOP

Several months ago, I acquired a second XBOX to use as a media center in my house. I thought I would try to skip the expense of a modchip, and I tried to flash the XBOX's TSOP directly. Unfortunately, something went wrong, and I ended up with an XBOX that wouldn't boot. I had to break down and purchase a modchip to replace the motherboard BIOS. Well, a few days ago, this XBOX developed a nasty problem whereby it would switch itself off after a random amount of time. Because the family is hooked on watching IPTV via the XBOXes, I went out and purchased a replacement, and moved the modchip over to the new unit.


I had a dead XBOX on my desk, and thought that I had nothing to lose by seeing if I could fix it. The first problem was fixing the switching-off problem. After careful inspection of the motherboard, I discovered that one of possibly several electrolytic capacitors had leaked in one area of the board. The main suspect was the 1-Farad clock backup capacitor. I replaced the few capacitors in the immediate area. I also replaced the heat transfer paste between the heatsink and CPU.


Powering up the unit (with a borrowed modchip) showed that the power-off problem appeared to be fixed. Good! Now I needed to address the TSOP issue. I spent many hours scouring the net to find a solution that didn't involve removing the TSOP from the motherboard (a very daunting task). I discovered that I couldn't boot from a BIOS on the LPC bus (that's the header connector on the motherboard that most modern modchips plug into) and then access the TSOP to flash it. The solution ended up being building what's called a 29 wire modchip. Yes, it's as daunting as it sounds. The premise is simple - program a flash chip with a suitable BIOS, and solder address and data wires to the motherboard. As the name suggests, there's 29 wires, and the contact points are very tiny. I used the diagrams at xbox-scene.com to construct the modchip. I also used this article to add the disable switch.


Several hours later I had a programmed flash chip (a 29F002 - 256K flash chip scavenged from an Asus P2B motherboard) with a disable switch soldered to the XBOX's motherboard. I had to assemble a working XBOX with DVD drive and power supply on my bench, and hope it would live long enough to re-flash the TSOP. I powered it up, and it booted! I was successfully booting off of the new flash chip. I booted the Xebian distribution from DVD-R (I had to try three different media types before I found one that would successfully read in the XBOX drive). As soon as Xebian booted, I used SFTP to copy Raincoat 0.7 and a bios image file (the same one that I had burned on the flash chip) over to the /tmp directory on the XBOX. At this point, I used the switch to disable the replacement flash chip. I then used SSH to get a command prompt on the XBOX, and ran ./raincoat -p bios.bin. The screen said that the flash was successful. I tried rebooting the XBOX with the flash chip disabled. Success! I was booting from the internal TSOP.


I carefully removed the 29-wire mod and re-assembled the XBOX. I now had a modded XBOX with no modchip, and now every TV in the house has an XBOX running as a media center.

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December 26, 2005

Kensington USB Bluetooth Adapter Problems

It's Christmas, and I'm out in the middle of nowhere (actually, I'm staying at my boss's cabin near Mabel Lake). There's no broadband. There's no cellular coverage. For someone like me, it's a technological wasteland. My only link to the outside world is a dial-up phone line that can get 31.2kbps if I hold my mouth just right.


One of my Christmas presents was a Kensington Bluetooth USB adapter (model number K33085). I wanted a bluetooth adapter for my laptop so that I can talk to my Audiovox PPC6600 cell phone. Against my better nature (and because this whole bluetooth thing is new to me) I decided to actually read the instructions, and follow the installation procedure that came with the device. I installed the drivers from the CD that came with it. After a reboot, I fired it up, and was able to connect to my cell phone. A very short time later, however, I discovered that there were some serious problems. I was rarely able to successfully complete a hotsync process, and I was unable to successfully copy any file to my phone that was over about 2Mb in size.


I decided to fire up the high speed connection to the outside world to see if there was an updated driver available. I searched all over Kensington's web site, but barely found any mention of the device in their support section. I couldn'd download drivers. More googling discovered this page. Ouch! I wished I'd have read that page sooner. Anyway, I still had the device, and I still had a problem. After diving in to the device manager on my machine, I discovered that it appears that the actual manufacturer of this device is MSI. Some searching around their site came across a driver-only download (no bluetooth stack). I didn;t need the stack, because I found references to the fact that SP2 for XP had a built in stack. I used Add/Remove Programs to remove the original bluetooth software, then (after a reboot), plugged the dongle in again, and pointed it to the MSI driver. Bingo! The device was detected, and a whole bunch of Microsoft drivers for bluetooth functions were installed.


After this process, I am now able to hotsync, and I've moved plenty of large files back and forth.


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September 15, 2005

Distributing Video Inside Your House

As I recently blogged, I've set up a Bell ExpressVu receiver to receive NASA TV. Soon after installing the system, I ran in to a TV 'scheduling' issue with the rest of the family (who aren't nearly as interested in watching images of astronauts brushing their teeth in zero-g). Instead of moving the entire setup to a second television set, I decided to move the receiver to my server room, and build a distribution system to distribute the channel to all of the televisions in the house.


I don't use any antenna inputs on any of my televisions, because all of the devices I use (satellite receivers, XBOX consoles, etc) have composite, component, or S-video outputs. This means that every set has an unused antenna input that would be an ideal input to view the NASA TV. Unfortunately, I would have to run a second coax cable to each set just for this. Instead of that, I discovered a way to 'multiplex' the Bell ExpressVu LNB signal and the channel 3 signal from the NASA TV receiver.


The trick is to use some satellite/UHF/VHF combiners (a fuzzy picture here). I put one of these in the server room on the output of the NASA TV receiver to multiplex the channel 3 signal on the LNB feed back upstairs to the TV. On the TV end, I put another one of these to de-multiplex the LNB signal and the channel 3 signal, which goes straight to the antenna input of the TV. This worked beautifully, so I then split the channel 3 signal into 3, ran this in to 3 separate combiners, and multiplexed the signal on 3 separate LNB feeds to separate TVs around the house.


This now gives me the ability to watch NASA TV at three separate locations in the house.

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July 31, 2005

How to Receive Nasa TV in Canada

I am a great advocate of Nasa TV. Unfortunately, it's not available through any conventional means up here in Canada. I did some research and discovered that the Nasa TV signal is available in the Dish Networks satellite signal, even if you're not a subscriber. This is a Free To Air signal. This isn't stealing satellite service or anything like that. This is a legal way to receive the Nasa TV signal for us up here in Canada.


The first step is a satellite dish. I used a spare Bell Expressvu dish I had lying around. Bell used to have a cottage program whereby they would ship a free dish to your summer cottage so you could take your receiver on holiday with you - that's how I acquired a spare dish. The dish needs to be mounted and aligned to the 119 degree slot.


The next step is to get receiver working. I took a spare ex-subbed model 2700 Bell Expressvu receiver and card. Other models will probably work, but make sure that it's a model that both Bell and Dish use, otherwise it won't get the firmware update described below. I used a receiver that used to be subscribed to my Bell account. You will definitely need a card in the receiver for this hack to work, but I don't know if it has to have been subscribed or not. Use the receiver to align the dish to 119 degrees. It won't lock on (because it doesn't recognize 119 as a Bell satellite) but you will see the signal strength and satelllite name. Adjust the dish for maximum signal.


Once the receiver has been used to align the dish, we need to get Dish Network firmware into the receiver. To do this, build yourself a JTAG programmer for the 2700 receiver. It's a lot simpler than it sounds - a 25 pin connector and some resistors. Plans can be found here.


Once you have your JTAG interface built, you will need a software package called Jkeys. Use this program, together with your JTAG interface, to erase sector SA5. If you're not using a model 2700 receiver, the sector number will be different. Please check around the Internet to find the appropriate sector to erase for your model. Once you've erased this sector, power down the 2700 and leave it connected to the dish. After about 15 minutes, the receiver will have downloaded Dish firmware.


Congratulations. Your new Dish receiver will now receive Nasa TV (as well as a couple of promotional Dish channels).


I have had this set up and working for about a month without any problems. Your results may vary. Of course, any modifications you make to your hardware is at your own risk.

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July 17, 2005

New Version

I thought it was about time to upgrade my Movable Type software. It's been so long since I upgraded that Movable Type has gone through two ownership changes! We're now running version 3.17.

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April 22, 2005

Linux on PPC

I have an old Apple blue G4 sitting under my bench gathering dust. I played with OS X on it for a while, but as most of my friends would testify, I'm a bit of a Linux nut. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Fedora Project was supporting the PPC architecture in the Core 4 release. I'm playing with Core 4 Test 2 at the moment, and it's quite stable. There's a few issues around the macintosh-only areas that I'm still having problems with, such as video drivers, and the apparent lack of support for the on-board PCMCIA slot (designed to hold a WiFi card). Some of the GUI tools don't work as expected, such as the auto partition option during install, and the GUI for Up2date. Despite these shortcomings (after all, it's still only test2), I think that a Fedora-based Mac will make a permanent home on my bench.

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April 03, 2004

HP4951A Protocol Analyzer

I just recieved a new piece of hardware from one of my many forays into Ebay. It's a HP4951A protocol analyzer from Hewlett Packard. It appears to be just the piece of hardware I need for all of the serial communications hacking I do with my antique computers.

However, when I plugged it in, it made a few encouraging beeps, followed by nothing. The screen briefly showed a green dot in the lower center of the screen, but then nothing.

My background is digital, but my instinct told me that this was probably a display problem - maybe in the horizontal sweep? I carefully pulled the unit apart. I'm absolutely amazed at how well this thing is put together. The copper traces on the circuit board are gold plated. Almost all the resistors are precision 1% tolerance. Most of the chips, however, are printed with a house part number, so repair of the digital circuitry may be impossible.

I found a company in Canada that appears to rent service manuals for various equipment, so I've put an email in to them asking if they are able to rent me the service manual for this piece of equipment.

I did some searching on the net to see what I could find. I didn;t come across very much at all. One gem I did come across was this usenet posting. There were no responses, but it definitely was the description of my problem. I decided to email the gentleman, and to my surprise I received a response within a couple of hours detailing his problem was in the focus circuit, and identified a 750K resistor that was open. I stripped down my unit, and sure enough my unit had the same problem! unfortunately, it's Saturday afternoon here, and there's nowhere open to find a replacement, so I'm going to have to wait until Monday. The fact that I've found the very same component that failed is very encouraging.

I posted two images in my moblog showing the board and the component. It's difficult to see with my cell cam, but the faulty component is located just to the left of the focus pot (it's removed in this picture). I'll let you know how I got on once I get a replacement part.

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January 03, 2004

A Blast from the Past

I was pawing through the latest issue of Circuit Cellar when I came across an article describing a new development kit from Zilog for their new eZ80acclaim! modules.

I remember playing with Z80 hardware and assembly programming 20 years ago! Before I knew what was happening, the credit card jumped out of my wallet and ordered one of the kits. $99 later, I had myself an eZ80F91 module, a development board, an in-circuit emulator, an ethernet switch, and all the cables I needed. Some manufacturers want to gouge you for their evaluation kits - not so here.

The kit comes with a full function C compiler and IDE. A few minutes after hooking up, I was compiling and loading the sample apps. Very easy to use. Who'd have thought - a Z80 with ethernet!

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November 15, 2003

Free Samples

I was doing some research on the Texas Instruments website the other day looking up some specifications on some serial interface chips for a project I'm working on. I happened to stumble upon the fact that the have a free sample program! I was a bit skeptical while I entered my order, but yesterday UPS showed up on my doorstep with a package from TI! I didn't even have to pay any shipping, and it arrived 2 days after my order. Very impressive.

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November 08, 2003

Moblogging

A few days ago, I acquired a new cell phone from my local provider Telus. It's the LG 5450 camera phone. Along with a camera phone comes moblogging. It took me a few days, but I've got the moblog working (note the pictures on the left of the main page). I'm using TextAmerica.com to host the pictures. They've been very helpful. I had an issue with the way that Telus formats their email message containing the image - they were very quick to modify their code to accept Telus postings.

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November 04, 2003

Toshiba Magnia SG20

Yet another cool piece of hardware has made its way to my test bench. This time, it's the Toshiba Magnia SG20. I would hazard a guess that Toshiba made way too many of these things, because everyone and his dog is selling them on Ebay.

What's inside? Within 15 minutes of it arriving, I had it ripped apart to see what made it tick. Very impressive. This box is ideal for a small all-in-one server application. My original intention was to use it as a captive access point for some public-access Wi-Fi hotspots that a few friends and I want to set up (as an aside, check out the software that we're thinking of using - NoCatNet). After ripping it apart, I'm thinking that it might work better as a mobile server for my truck.

I've tried doing some searching on the net for any links to people hacking this unit (there must be people hacking it - it's just so... hackable!). All I've been able to come up with is a Latvian site with some nice pictures. A bit more digging, and I found a Yahoo group.

I found one tidbit of information somewhere (I can't find the link at the moment) that mentions that 'telnetuser' and the admin password is used to telnet in to the box to get a command prompt. I'll test that theory as soon as I've put it back together!

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September 28, 2003

I have seen the future

and it's incredible! Sitting in bed surfing tge web with my Sharp Zaurus PDA. Now, 've used other handheld devices for Internet access, including a Blackberry and several cell phones, but there's always been something missing. Well, not so with the C760. A nearly-usable keyboard, an amazing 640x480 resolution, wireless network access, and a web browser that does surprisingly well on just about any web site I've thrown at it!

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September 26, 2003

Sharp Zaurus PDA

Incredible! That's all I can say! I acquired a Sharp Zaurus C760 PDA this week. It's a Japanese-only PDA that runs Linux. I am very impressed with it. It's hands-down the most powerful and versatile PDA that I've ever seen. Being tge Linux hacker that I am, I'm having imense fun playing around. Drop in a wireless card, and now I can do just about any system maintenance remotely. Thats enough from me - back to playing!

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