Sorry it’s been so long since I posted. Things have been busy this summer with family reunions, family visiting, on-call of course, and all the normal fun of life.

So here’s at least a little fun to share. I’m sure you occasionally want to chop up a PDF file into tiny bits and then re-assemble it. For instance if you’re teaching a class and you want to give students the chapter they’re working on and the glossary at the back.

Enter pdftk onto the scene. It allegedly runs on *nix, Windows and Mac. I can only testify for the Windows portion of it. I know, you’re saying, “BUT THIS IS A UNIX BLOG.” Well, I decided that something was better than nothing.

So anyhow, it’s free, go download it here and try it out. Like many command line commands it’s a bit enigmatic, but try the –help flag and you’ll be jamming in no time.

Well, I’m a geek.  So it was inevitable that I would eventually cover Dr. Who in some way shape or form.  I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the new revival of Dr. Who for the last four years.  Now the executive producer, Russell T. Davies, is going to move on and the top writer, Steven Moffat, is going to take over the helm.  I’m not worried about the change, but for some reason the BBC has decided to only do 4 specials in 2009 where both Davies and Moffat work together before kicking off a Davies free season in 2010.  So I’m going to go through withdrawal next year.  Please bear with me as the DTs hit me.

Source:  blog.wired.com

This web page is a mirror of the web page that used to live at http://www.freshscoop.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5%C2%A0%C2%A0.

It is currently cached by google here.

But in case freshscoop.com doesn’t come back up I’m going to mirror this for a while as a fair amount of my readers link through me to that original site.  I want them to be able to get to the tools.

Maybe you have come across this or maybe you havent but if you even put in a hard drive and go into the Disk Manager in Windows XP and the system tells you the drive is a GPT Protective Partition and you try everything to format the drive with no luck here is how you get around this.

There are 2 ways to do this one is quick the other a lot longer.

The quickest method isto aquire a copy of XBOX Hard Drive Perparer V1.3. We were able to find the application here.

Choose the offending drive and for Zeroing select Only 1st 4096 sectors of partition and hit prepare zeroing out the first 4096 sectors. Now reboot and then you will be able to create partitions and format the drive for use.

The second method would be to aquire your manufacturers low level format utility. This can take a very long time depending on the size of the hard drive and is an alternative if you have nothing better to do with your time.

IBM(Hitachi)
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Seagate
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/utils.html

Maxtor
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/index.htm

Fujitsu
http://www.fel.fujitsu.com/home/drivers.asp?L=en&CID=1

Samsung
http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/index.htm
FAQ: Low level format

Western Digital
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

Hope this helps and if you have any questions of comments please feel free to post it.

It might help some of your less techy friends and family understand how Net Neutrality works.  I do have to apologize that the video won’t play on this website and will instead take you to foureyedmonsters.com, but it appears to be a fairly benign site.

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

Apparently Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire won an award called the NHS Live Award  for coming up with a system to help Bipolar patients manage their own conditions.  The system sends messages to the patients asking them how they’re feeling and the patients respond with pre-arranged answers.  It’s a pretty cool use of text messaging.

I’m not really sure why text messaging isn’t being used for more things, like:

• Letting you know when your table is ready at a restaurant
• Remind forgetful patients to take their medicine or dress their wounds
• Notifying you that Wal-mart is done changing your oil
• Playing cards with other users

Here’s the article about the British Mental Health Texting system.

I was trying to reinstall a Tripwire agent on a Solaris 9 box when I ran into a problem during the package add. You see the agent in question needed to be upgraded, so I had removed it via the bin/uninstall.sh script which worked quite well. It appears that directory group permissions was the problem. Perhaps if it was a fresh install I never would have run into this.

I had sudo’ed over to root.

# uname -a
SunOS jobs-1 5.9 Generic_122300-02 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraAX-i2

# ls -ld /usr/local/tripwire/te/agent
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 512 Jul 3 12:26 /usr/local/tripwire/te/agent

# pkgadd -d te_agent.pkg TWeagent

Do you accept the terms of the License Agreement? (default: n) [y,n,?,q] y

Where should this package be installed? (default: /usr/local/tripwire/te/agent) [?,q] (I entered a CR)

ERROR: pathname is a read-only mount.

Where should this package be installed? (default: /usr/local/tripwire/te/agent) [?,q] /usr/local/tripwire/te/agent (This time I tried to force it to accept the destination)

ERROR: pathname is a read-only mount.

# chmod 775 /usr/local/tripwire/te/agent

# pkgadd -d te_agent.pkg TWeagent

And then the install works. This was for the 7.1 Tripwire Enterprise Agent.

It was only 5 years ago when me and several of my friends at Sprint started playing with some new handsets we’d been given.  Of course we loaded them up with goofy ringers(this is before anyone was selling them, you just found them and downloaded them or made them with your own tools) and then we started making thumbnails of our co-workers and putting them in the phone memory.  So when the phone rang you’d see the picture of your bosses face and the Imperial March would begin to drone.  It was a good time, but it only took about 30 minutes before one of us piped up and said, “Why don’t we have the option to play video when the phone rings?”

Sure, it’s helpful to see the bosses face when he calls at 3AM because you’re on-call and you missed a phone call.  It sort of helps jolt you to attention.  But wouldn’t it be a lot more fun to have a video playing of them making goofy faces?  Or superimpose their image with a mushroom cloud, then godzilla, and then dollar signs?

Anyhow, I’m sure you all get the point.  It’s a real shame that it took an outsider to the phone industry, Apple, to bring this feature to the forefront. I’ve also been seeing a little bit more on the SMS ringers feature occasionally, so it’s nice to see American mobile carriers finally start selling some new phone features.  I’m not sure that they’ll sell more phones, but as the networks themselves continue to become less and less relevant, carrying the right feature set on your phones could be the thing that lures new people to your carrier and away from your competitors.  That and of course, the ever necessary, treat your customers well and they’ll make you money.

Sure, sure, if you’re up on the latest in Prius add-ons you know that you can retrofit your Prius with a solar panel for the roof for around 4-6k, but now Toyota is planning on selling this alternative power source as an option. I’m very excited about this trend. Now if they would just sell it to me with a plug-in option, I would definitely line up to buy one. In the meanwhile I’ve pre-registered for this cool trike from Venture One that is backed by BMW and is supposed to 33x safer in a crash than normal motorcycles. Plus it gets 100mpg and the body of the trike rotates while the vehicle is in a turn. Yeah, it’s a two seater but I don’t plan on adding munchkins to my lifestyle any time soon.

Here’s a new report on the VentureOne, but it’s for the one-seater.  I’m looking at the two-seater. I think it’s supposed to sell for $20k:

The important thing to me is that it has a range of a 300 miles and can do up to 120MPH.

I recently bought a Canon Pixma MX700 Office All-On-One Inkjet Printer (2186B002). It’s a flatbed scanner, fax and printer combo. I mainly purchased it because it gets pretty good reviews for it’s ability to scan in documents straight to PDF, which is something I desire as I continue to annihilate my hardcopy records. I’m mainly getting rid of documents because I take better care of my digital records. I actually back up my digital records and even better I use them as I can search quickly through them and find what I need.

Now I’m pretty picky about the hardware I buy, so I looked over the reviews for a few weeks. I was quite happy with the price and when it came in I promptly installed the software and hooked it up, but scanning was not working at all for me. I would press the scan button and the Scanner would happily tell me that it was “Processing… Please wait momentarily.” After a minute or so the printer would return to it’s original screen, not giving me an error, but also not performing any scanning. I could tell it wasn’t scanning as the lamp wasn’t moving back and forth. So I tried to make some copies and that didn’t work as well. I began to panic, wondering if this printer would only work on Vista or some other new technology.

I tried Canon’s web page but it wasn’t very helpful and neither were google searches for this problem. Eventually I realized that I had plugged the printer into a USB1.1 interface. I had assumed that since this was not a data intensive device a 1.1 interface would be fine or that the printer would warn me about this. Unfortunately, that’s not true. So I moved the cable to a 2.0 port and now I’m scanning like a champ. If you run into this, I hope this helps.

Well, I read about this a few weeks ago, but didn’t get around to writing about it.  Embarq has given up on the MVNO model for wireless cellular coverage.  Unfortunately Embarq didn’t partner with the right company for MVNO access as the majority of their local landline service was delivered to rural areas.  And Sprint Nextel, the carrier hosting Embarq’s MVNO on the CDMA spectrum, doesn’t have a strategy that lends itself to good coverage in rural areas.

To this folding of another MVNO I have to applaud.  Embarq did very little to actually differentiate themselves in the MVNO marketplace, it was basically just a sales attempt to get people paying for local service to purchase their cellular services through the same company.  But Embarq, like Mobile ESPN, was smart enough to see the problem quickly and leave the market before it became a drag on their finances.  Information obtained from Rad-Info, Inc.

Also of interest is the ongoing talked between SK Telecom, owner of Helio, and Virgin Mobile.  It appears that Virgin Mobile is set to acquire Helio’s customers and then destroy the Helio brand.  I always liked the Helio devices as they were quite cutting edge but there did seem to be some confusion over what it was they were marketing.

At one point they were attempting to sell phones to the Korean American community, which isn’t a bad move as texting is pretty easy to pull off in Hangul and the Korean American community doesn’t seem to shy away from spending on technology.  Although, it’s a limited community to sell to, so I wasn’t surprised when I later saw it being marketed as a high-tech mobile device, and certainly NOT A TELEPHONE!  And they were using really sort of goofy marketing that I think was an attempt to get the young crowd to buy into the brand.

However in the long run, I just never saw any real people actually selling these devices, it seems like they never made it into Brick and Mortar stores.  And I, like most customers, just won’t purchase a device without being able to put my grubby little paws on it.  Info on the merger was taken from The Street.

Meanwhile Virgin Mobile is now offering $80/month unlimited calling.  That’s a great rate, but unfortunately I don’t think that leaves them very much space to make a profit.  However, with the financial problems of the world seeming to continue, perhaps pursuing customers that want service but don’t want another bill every month is a good strategy.  Not to mention, you don’t have to get a credit check in order to start an account with Virgin Mobile.