Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

Above is a photo of the latest addition of MIDI controllers I use to write music.  This one in particular is designed specifically for a program called Ableton Live, which I really haven’t used before; I’ve never made anything with it, but I have played with it just a little.  You ever wonder what people like Skrillex or Phutureprimitive are doing on stage at a concert?  On the surface what a controller like this basically boils down to is a sound board.  Sound boards are basically buttons with clips of audio loaded into them that play when you press their button, however the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper then that.

The purpose of a controller (and Ableton for that matter, as it’s the brains behind this operation) is to facilitate a DJ the ability to play multi-tracked music live and allow them to change how all the parts fit together on-the-fly.  So, he’s not the kind of DJ that just has two vinyl record playing with a cross-fader between (aka, “the guy on stage with nothing but a couple of iPods”) but a DJ who has two separate A/B groups of dozens of record players dedicated to individual parts that play when triggered, with their own effects inserted that are also controllable.  Well… I’ve decided to join the party.  Ableton is actually a pretty cool piece of software that I’ve never given a fair shake, primarily because it’s strength requires a proper controller to exploit and I’ve not had one till now.  So far I’ve primarily been using Propellerhead Reason (and I still love the hell out of it).

So sometime soon I’m planning on putting on my own live shows!  Songs old, new and yet to be written will be diced up and rejuvenated with surprise and magic!  But in the mean time, there’s always my soundcloud feed.  Hope to see you soon!

Above is a photo of part of the motherboard of a laptop a client of mine brought to me a few days ago, an ASUS X54C laptop.  It’s not to be confused with a small netbook or anything made by Acer.  In fact this laptop comes standard with a 15.6 inch display, USB 3x ports, Blu-Ray player, and either an Intel Core 2 Duo or an i3 processor.  So in other-words this isn’t supposed to be some light weight, disposable toy judging by the hardware specs.

Now to the problem at hand, the first of its kind that I’ve encountered in the wild.  Now, I’m certainly not THE first person to encounter this in the wild but I’m nowhere near the last.  The 4 black chips you see in the photo above are 4 Gigabytes worth of RAM that were built into the motherboard itself and cannot be removed.  Tragically, the RAM in this particular laptop was defective and unfortunately can’t be simply replaced.  It’s like a car with the spark plugs welded into the engine block on a car.  They go bad, you can’t just buy new spark plugs; you’ve got to buy a whole new f***ing  engine!

Traditionally laptops are built with expansion slots for RAM to be seated in and will come with one or both slots occupied by sticks of RAM that look like this:

Often these sticks are very easy to access and replace with upgrades by removing a hatch door on the bottom of the laptop.  RAM itself is relatively inexpensive so had the RAM on this laptop not been built into the motherboard it would have been a simple matter of replacing the bad RAM with good RAM and about 5 minutes of actual labor performing the replacement; a relatively cheap repair that would have been worth the time and money.

What ASUS has done here is effectively designed a laptop that was not only built with defective RAM but you could also argue that they built a defective motherboard, too.  After all, the only way to replace the faulty RAM is to replace the motherboard and if the laptop is no longer covered by a warranty it would border on being cheaper to just go buy a whole new laptop, especially when you discover just how difficult it is to find parts for ASUS products anywhere online, including from ASUS themselves.  They don’t sell parts for their products online AT ALL.

Now in a attempt to defend ASUS, they probably did this to save money; those greedy bastards.  By building a laptop that didn’t require an assembly line worker to stand in front of a conveyor slotting memory sticks in all day, they’ve saved themselves perhaps 25 cents per laptop, and that can add up if you’re moving 100,000 units.  However, I would have to say that while saving a few cents on thousands of units might look good on paper it doesn’t necessarily make it a smart idea.  I don’t have a problem with hardware being integrated together in a smaller form factor, like an iPad or a smart phone but c’mon ASUS, this is a 15″ laptop.  You have the space to spare and, trust me, the owner would have been more than willing to spend a tiny amount more in the price tag to pay for you to have made this thing like a proper laptop.

Other brands such as Dell and HP have been known to do this with some of their products, but typically only smaller devices such as a 10″ inch netbook which are priced to be disposable, unlike Apples’ next  ~$2,200 Macbook Air which has been dubbed by iFixit.com as “the least repairable laptop [ever]“ for having not just non-removable RAM but also batteries that are glued to the inside of the case, proprietary hard drives that can’t be upgraded, a display panel that is inside a completely fused assembly so if you crack the screen you’ll have to replace the bezel and display.  Also,  if you ever were to find a reason to open one up you’ll need a proprietary screwdriver to do it.  I still can’t believe people are willing to pay more money to get a computer that will be more vulnerable to obsolescence than any other laptop out there, including this damned ASUS I started on about above.

The moral of the story is that you should avoid buying a laptop made by anybody that was built with on-board, non-removable RAM on the motherboard because that just multiplies the points of failure and the amount of money and energy you might have to spend down the road to fix it if something goes wrong.

Recently I had the rare opportunity to tackle a serious problem with a Macbook Pro. For some reason an update locked up midway through and the owner had no choice but to shut the laptop off abruptly after it had been siting on for several hours not making any progress in the update and with no available option to cancel/revert.  I suspect the hard drive is beginning to wear out and failed to read/write something important, locking the system up completely.  When they attempted to power their system on next time it remained stuck with the startup screen (Apple Logo with the rotating “gears” below).

Apple includes a copy of their OS on discs you can boot from to run the included  Disk Utility. This checks the file system for integrity issues, file permission errors and corrects them for you. Unfortunately doing this did not solve this particular problem and the laptop remained stuck. Even booting into MacOS’s “Safe Mode” (by holding down SHIFT right after the startup chime is heard) didn’t work.

Most guides I’ve found on the Internet will tell you to send the system to an Apple Expert at this point. While there is a slim chance they might be able to revert the changes or correct the problem that’s causing a system to lockup while booting, an alternative approach is to do what is termed a “destructive recovery”, where the hard drive is erased and the OS reinstalled on a clean slate so to speak. Before you do that of course you’ll want to pull your own personal files/data off the drive. You can’t do this with the Disk Utility provided by the MacOS install discs, but there is another “utility” that’s totally free to download that you can do this with: Ubuntu Linux.

What You Need

1.  A blank CD
2.  Another computer to burn that CD with
3.  Ubuntu Linux ISO image file
4.  An external hard drive (preferably one that’s formatted to Windows NTFS; I will explain why in a moment)

Burning Ubuntu to a CD

First, visit the link to Ubuntu’s website.  Click the Get Ubuntu button and follow the steps to download the 32-bit version of Ubuntu.  You’ll be asked to download a large (about 700MB) ISO image file.  Once downloaded, you need to burn this file to a CD.  If you are burning this CD with another Mac you can follow this guide that will show you how to use the built in Disk Utility app to burn the Ubuntu ISO file you have to download from www.ubuntu.com.  And if you are burning with Windows, there is a “Show Me How” button you can click on at Ubuntu’s download page that will show you how to use a program called InfraRecorder to burn the ISO file.

Booting Ubuntu On Your Mac

Once the CD is burnt you will need to boot from it.  I have found the best way to do this on a Mac is to turn the system on and immediately after you hear the classic “chime” sound, hold down the Option key on your keyboard.   (Tip:  If you are using a Mac with a Windows keyboard hold down ALT instead.  Also, if you need to eject a disc from the system, hold down F12).  Eventually you will see this:

Double-click on the CD that says “Windows”.  We know it’s not actually Windows, but Mac doesn’t know any better… or Ubuntu isn’t presenting itself correctly.  Anyhooo…

If all goes well (and I can’t promise that it will but it did for me) you will see the Ubuntu boot screen appear (pictured above) with the purple background.  Please be patient as this is a slow process; loading an entire OS from a CD is not a quick and snappy ordeal.  Eventually Ubuntu will load up the Ubuntu installer screen.  At this point click “Try Ubuntu”.

It will proceed to load the rest of Ubuntu Linux right off the disc.  Eventually you will see something like this:

Accessing Your Data

First, we need to browse the hard drive inside the Mac.  You’ll do this using the Places menu.  When you click Places, you will see a list of several common folders like Home Folder, Pictures, etc.  Look past those in about the middle of the list and you should see an item called Macintosh HD.  We will mount it by clicking on it in the places menu.  (Note: It would also be a good idea to repeat this step to mount the external hard drive or media you intend to copy your data on to at this time, just to get mounting it out of the way).  The next thing you’ll see is the contents of the Macintosh HD volume.  Unfortunately there is a lot of data in this drive that you won’t be able to access/read right away due to file ownership and permissions.  But there’s a way around that.

You need to gain full administrative access to the hard drive so you don’t have to worry about file permissions getting in the way.  It is also recommended that you use an NTFS formated external hard drive for this because it will help avoid further file permission issues later down the road when you move your data back.  (If you use a Linux/Unix/Mac formatted external drive the files you copy are going to change owners from you to the Linux superuser account which means you’d have to change ownership of every file after copying them, so it’s just easier to scrape all those attributes off the files by sending them to an NTFS filesystem which does not store those descriptors).

Gaining Full Administrative Access To Your Files

To gain administrative access to the hard drive and browse the contents, click Applications>Accessories>Terminal in the upper left.  A new window will appear with a black background and white text.  From here type:

gksu nautilus

…and press the Enter key.  This will open the Nautilus file browser as the SuperUser (aka, “root” user).  It is exactly the same window you saw open when you mounted the drives from the Places menu, but keep in mind that this new file browsing window that has appeared is the ONLY window with root access.  Any others that were already open are still running at the standard user level, so you can’t drag files from the super users browser to any others unless you open a second terminal window and start a second instance of Nautilus in the same manner.  But it’s pretty easy to do all the browsing you need with the one window using the Edit>Copy and Edit>Paste menu options.

Note: The rooted instance of Nautilus will only let you browse volumes that have already been mounted.  If you’ve not already accessed your external hard drive or the Macintosh HD hard drive using the Places menu as mentioned earlier, do so now and then close or minimize those windows to get them out of the way, leaving the super-user instance of Nautilus running up front.

Copying Your Data

Once you’ve started the Nautilus file browser as the super-user, you can click on “Macintosh HD” in the left hand side of the Natilus window to begin browsing your hard drive.  For most users the most important data is going to be stored in the Users folder.  Simply scroll through the Macintosh HD hard drive to find a folder called Users.  If you browse through it a little you will quickly be familiar with the files you are looking at inside the Users folder.  You just need to copy everything out to the external hard drive.  To makes things simple and quick it’s easy to just copy and paste the entire Users folder to an external hard drive (as mentioned, NTFS drives are recommended purely to make the copying of data back to the computer easier after the OS has been reinstalled).

Also note: Stopping after the Users folder alone may not be adequate enough for some advanced users who may have data stored in other folders, such as the /var folder if the system was an Apache server.  Details about where your production/business critical data is auto-saved should be researched from the developers/publishers of said software or their respective README.txt/help documentation before proceeding to format your hard drive as all data will be lost after formatting.  In almost all cases everything will be in the Users folder, but fair warning to you if you are not certain.  For more information, refer to this official help article about application data storage locations.  By the way, the ” ~/ ” folder they refer to is shorthand for “your home folder”, which is inside the Users folder; you will find that everything they list is stored somewhere in there so you should be good with not copying anything else.

Reinstalling Mac OS

Now with all the user data backed up on an external hard drive you can restart the system with your original Mac OS install discs and proceed to use the Disk Utility to erase and re-format the hard drive and then proceed with installing the OS on a fresh partition.  Just press that Option key again to bring up the boot menu and boot from the MacOS install disc 1.  I would strongly recommend searching for and installing any and all available updates available for the OS and software before moving data back to the computer.

Moving Your Data Back

I have found that moving data back isn’t going to be as simple as moving the entire Users folder at once because Mac doesn’t like to let you merge folders.  You will be able to copy and paste the files and folders in groups to get everything back to where it was originally.  Alternatively you can use this tool called Folder Merge for Mac to help you copy all your files and folders back into place while skipping the ones that can’t be overwritten in their place.

If all goes well, you should be able to backup the data from your Mac and reinstall the OS in a matter of about 3 hours, most of which is a just a matter of sitting and waiting for things to finish.

Troubleshooting:  What if the drive isn’t shown?

In newer versions of Ubuntu (verions 11.04 and newer) the new Unity desktop interface is used, so there is no Places menu to open up.  However, you can still open your Nautilus file browser by clicking on the Home Folder icon.  Once open, look along the left side of the screen to see if your drive is shown among the other popular locations.

If it is not shown it may be necessary to mount the drive manually via a terminal window.  To open a terminal in Ubuntu 11.04 or later, click the Ubuntu button at the top of your dock bar to open the search panel and type in “Terminal”.  You’ll see the shortcut for Terminal appear which you can just click on to open up a terminal/command prompt.

Once the terminal is open you’ll want to get a list of the drives Linux is able to see.  To do this, type in the command:

sudo fdisk -l

The output will look something like this:

Starting at the top Linux is telling me that it sees an 80 gigabyte sized hard drive and has called the drive /dev/sda.  Within that hard drive are three partitions, called /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda5.  Below that we see there is a second 2000 gigabyte sized external hard drive and it has been called /dev/sdb, with only one partition called /dev/sdb1.  If we were looking at a Mac we’d likely only care about /dev/sda partitions and would only be interested in mounting whichever of these partitions is the largest.  You can quickly determine which is the largest of them all by checking under the Blocks column.

Once you’ve determined which partition is the largest we need to mount it.  For the sake of example, lets pretend that /dev/sda1 needs to be mounted.  Before we can do that we need to create a temporary placeholder folder for this partition to be aliased with after mounting.  To create an empty folder on your desktop called “temp” you would type:

mkdir ~/Desktop/temp

(Note: all linux terminal commands are case-sensitive).  Now we can mount /dev/sda1 into this temp folder with the following command:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 ~/Desktop/temp

You can close or minimize the terminal window at this point and find the folder we created called temp on your desktop and open it.  Within should be the contents of your Mac hard drive, and you can now begin copying data from there into an external hard drive or other external media.  When you are finished it’s easiest to use the shut down menu in the top-right corner to shut the computer down (which will eject the disk for you).  If you were successful at extracting your data the next step would be to boot from your MacOS disc and proceed with using the Disk Utility to remove/format the existing partition(s) on your Mac’s hard drive, create a new partition and install MacOS on top.  I would recommend disconnecting your external hard drive before doing this so you don’t risk deleting your external hard drives partition by accident.

Good luck!

Preamble:   The techniques described in this guide are intended for educational purposes and should not be used to bypass copyright restrictions or download copyrighted material without consent from the respective owners/licensees.  In the below example I use a track by Nine Inch Nails for this demonstration for two reasons:

1.  I already own this album (in fact I own every Nine Inch Nails album; I’m what you would call a “loyal fan“).
2.  The album was published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.  This means I could give you a copy of the song because I purchased it.  Look out for musicians who publish their works under licenses like this.

So let’s get to using this Youtube Downloader thingy!

First, download the software from Download.com by clicking here.

Run/Open the file once you have downloaded it to install the software.  Once installed, you’ll have a new shortcut in your Start Menu.  This is what the program looks like when it’s running:

Leave this window up and go visit Youtube.  Find a video you like and then copy the URL from the address bar at the top…..

…into the first box in Youtube Downloader, like this:

Now click Download.

Once the video is downloaded you can convert it to an MP3 by changing the selector at the top from “Download a video…” to “Convert or play a video…”, like this:

Now all you have to do is click the Browse button to search for the file you just downloaded, and change the “Convert Video to:” box to read MP3, like this:

Now click Convert.  It will ask you about quality settings (and of course it’s best to just leave it on “Best Quality” and click okay).  That’s pretty much it.  A conversion process will happen, taking perhaps 30 seconds,  and you’ll be given an MP3 file that you can play on pretty much any portable audio player out there.  It’s up to you if you want to delete the original video file.

A word about piracy/file-sharing

Piracy/file-sharing can be a very polarizing topic to talk about, especially when the conversation occurs between professional musicians who make their living off writing music.  On one side of the fence you’ve got your Lars Ulrich and Gene Simmons who see piracy of their music as a direct threat to music sales and thus their paycheck.  On the other side of the fence you have bands like Radiohead and musicians like Trent Reznor who see the sharing of their music as a marketing platform that can increase band exposure, increase their fan base, and subsequently increase their physical merchandise and ticket sales.  Both sides are entitled to their opinions but I lean towards the latter group when thinking about this stuff.

Along the lines of music piracy is software piracy.  There is a software developer who goes by the name Notch who created a computer game called Minecraft by himself that has earned him nearly one million dollars in under a year, and it was still in the Alpha stage when it hit that impressive number.  He has a very keen insight into piracy and I would like to suggest you check out his blog post about the topic if you have the time.  It mostly boils down to distinguishing (or debating) the difference between the loss of potential revenue versus actual revenue lost, determining a fair way to measure the differences.

In marketing there is a strategy known as “loss-leader” and pirated music could be thought of as a loss-leader for a musician who has additional products to offer, like vinyl, or limited “deluxe edition” packages, not to mention concert tickets and who knows what else (one of my favorite musicians offers up everything from autographed cover art by Strom Thorgenson to 5 hour long studio workshops with the band and their very own equipment).  Then there’s new, up-and-coming musicians who don’t yet have anything better to hope for than a chance to be listened to and are willing to let people preview their entire collection in the hopes of turning them into a loyal fan who will go buy all their albums and other merchandise someday down the road.

Shameless plug: Check out my Kompoz profile to listen/download/pirate my music.

Every now and then I post questions on www.techguy.org when I’m having difficultly with something computer/networking related.  It was a good place to get your feet wet when aspiring to become a grade A guru and occasionally pull your hair out if you wanted to get into a civil debate with someone about politics.

Recently, I posted the following in their Networking forum:

I have a new Linksys/Cisco router WRT54G2 v.1 with the latest firmware installed. I currently use port forwarding for things like VNC and SSH into my home PC. However, every time I try to set a new rule (for both TCP and UDP) up for bittorrent, the bittorrent clients I try say the port is closed. I’m using an Ubuntu Linux system, and both Transmission and Deluge will say the ports I select are closed, even if I change the port numbers and do another test. So I’m just wondering if anyone has encountered anything like this before and might have an idea of what could be causing this problem.

The thread was alive for a matter of seconds before a moderator locked the thread and replied with the following:

Please read the rules. We will not help with P2P apps.

I was surprised to see this happen, and that’s probably because I use www.ubuntuforums.org more often than any other forum for technical assistance.  Linux people like me approach the controversial topic of bittorrent a little differently…  I decided to send the moderator a private message to let him know what I thought about his decision:

Sorry for violating the rules. However, I would argue that I did not ask a question pertaining to P2P applications at all but a question strictly about networking problems with a Linksys router. I should also remind you that bittorrent is a common protocol used for the transfer of free, non-copyrighted information spanning from GPL licensed open-source software to free music or movies released under the creative-commons license, which is becoming more popular. There is nothing inherently illegal about using bittorrent (the protocol), but it would seem the moderators of techguy.org hold a contrary consensus that I feel they should consider revising in recognition of the legitimate and legal uses of bittorrent.

The above comment and any replies received in any form will be posted publicly on my blog. Thank you for your time.

I got a reply fairly fast.  Here’s what it said:

We cannot and will not assist in the illegal downloading of software through P2P applications, and that includes any impediments offered by networking components to such downloading. Any legal uses of such software are few and will unfortunately need to be included in this prohibition.

The policy has been in place for quite some time now and will not be changed.

Thank you for your concern,
Elvandil

I like his use of the word “prohibition”; like bittorrent is some sort of drug paraphernalia.  I also noticed Mr. Elvandil happens to be Microsoft MVP and a die-hard Windows user who is probably adverse to anything of value that isn’t proprietary.  This is just my own opinion as he is ignoring the fact that millions of people use Linux and a large portion of us download and share our Linux ISO files (for burning to CD) via bittorrent, among many other things 100% legal to share.  It is a world he is unfamiliar with or in denial about.

Fortunately in the world of Linux it’s recognized that bittorrent itself is not illegal at all and I was glad to see a helpful reply in ubuntuforums.org within minutes; a reply that made me realize that sometimes I can be a completely narrow-minded person, too.  ”Did you check your host-firewall?”  Why… NO!    So I opened my firewall manager Firestarter and sure enough saw blocked events taking place on the port I told my bittorrent client and router to use.  All I had to do with allow inbound traffic to take place on that port.  Talk about overlooking the obvious!

In a stunning announcement made today by the most powerful commercial software giant on the planet, Microsofts’ Steve Ballmer announced  what some are calling a “shocking” new marketing strategy: The next version of Windows will be 100% open-source and cost zero dollars to all members of the public on its day of release late this year.  Ballmer said that this is only an amplification of another recent advertising project Microsoft created recently which is centered around criticizing the high prices of Apple’s Mac OS X, saying that Apple fans are being played as suckers by  “paying $500 more to get a logo.”

Since the founding of Microsoft by Bill Gates, who stepped down as CEO  effectively handing the reigns to Mr. Ballmer, the software company has refused to  release its source-code; the programing used to create their popular operating system.  Keeping it closed-source has been a strategy used by Microsoft to ensure they could maximize profits on sales of their product, but Steve Ballmer said he felt the time was right to go open source for a multitude of reasons.  “Not only did we feel like rubbing it in Apple’s face by removing the price tag from our product entirely, but we feel it’s time to get some help from the public on refining Windows.  Because let’s face it; they use Windows more than we do, so we might as well let them fix it themselves for a change.”

Ballmer went on to explain that with Microsofts’ closed-source model, the repair of bugs and security holes in their software is much more challenging.  “Our studies have shown that software developers and programmers actually become less productive in direct correlation to the amount of money you pay them for their work.  It’s gotten so bad that the shutdown menu in Vista took several months to create and design, and that’s pretty damned embarrassing if you ask me.”

Reactions to the unexpected change have been mostly positive to sarcastic.  Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical which develops and promotes their free Ubuntu Linux operating system, considered the change to be a little amusing.  “You know what they say:  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”  Apple CEO Steve Jobs responded to the move by boldly stating  “So what?!”  When asked if Apple would consider making a similar change in their software development model, he replied in a typical sales pitch: “It takes a lot of money to build computers as cool as ours.  Buy one,” he added with a crazed, hypnotic look in his eyes.  “You’ll LOVE it.”

The open-source version of Windows 7 was originally slated to be released late in 2009, but with the sudden change in development structure, Microsoft actually anticipates this date to be unusually ahead of schedule.  “Now that we’ve shaken our software development department down and replaced our laziest, most expensive programmers with dedicated Microsoft Windows fans who work for us out of sheer love for the brand, we anticipate faster development in the areas of security, stability and most importantly, system performance.”  Microsoft was also originally planning to release seven various editions of Windows 7 (Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, Ultimate and Star Trek Collectors edition), but it has been deduced that by making the software 100% open-source, the user will be able to get any edition they want for free simply by selecting which edition they want during installation at no difference in cost.  “It’s a win win for everyone,” added Ballmer.

Also:  APRIL FOOLS.

Someone I work with has this Santa on their office door:

Being as I work 12 hour shifts there and have a lot of free time on my hands… I thought I’d make a little modification:

I was just browsing craigslist for the Topeka area and came across this thing:

It’s a man shaped computer….robot….thing.  I doubt it’ll do your laundry or cook your dinner but at least it won’t come walking into your bedroom at night asking to borrow money or your wife or something.  But then again, who knows what this thing can do for an asking price of $475.  Maybe it tried to assassinate its creator and they’re trying to pawn it before it gets another shot.  Let the buyer beware.

If you live in Topeka and feel like buying this thing, you’ll find it here.