Rosin Core Solder

Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Stuck During Startup

2011-01-02T14:39:00.001-06:00

Recently, I had been using Movie Studio off and on for a couple of days on a project, and then for no immediately obvious reason, it wouldn’t start up. The splash screen would come up, and it would get to the step “Initializing external monitoring…” and would freeze.

(Note: I didn’t get a screenshot of my PC doing this, so I borrowed the above shot from another forum that was having problem with the same issue, hence the version 8)

Task manager would cause the splash screen to go away, but the process would never die, short of a full reboot. Subsequent tries at launching the software would yield slightly different results, but in the end, it would never launch.

I began by trying all of the obvious fixes

Uninstalled some recently installed software.
Uninstalled and re-installed the Vegas software.
Deleted the software keys from the registry in HKLM and HKCU.
"Plugged a USB headset that had recently been removed back in.
I tried to do a system rollback to a restore point, but found that my periodic backups hadn’t been happening (a topic for another day).
Stopped the real-time anti-virus scanning.

None of these alleviated the problem. Many others were reporting the problems on the forums, but no one had any fixes.

Using the SysInternals Process Monitor, I was able to determine that just before it locked up, the software seemed to be loading or enumerating “Media Interfaces”. That got me to thinking about a problem that I had a few months ago with my sound card.

I had already tried with and without my USB headphones plugged in. The next step was to disable my SigmaTel High Definition Audio CODEC from Device Manager. (Open Device Manager, find the sound card in the list, right-click on it, and select Disable).

A few months ago, I had a similar issue with another piece of software, whereby the software wouldn’t run correctly, because the SigmaTel wasn’t registering that the microphone had been plugged in early enough in the boot process. This made sense as it’s well documented that many people are having problem’s with their Dell-installed SigmaTel audio cards after end-users have upgraded their PC’s to Windows 7 (apparently not a manufacturer-supported configuration).

I rebooted, held my breath, and alas, it got stuck again…

As a last-ditch effort, I left the SigmaTel disabled, unplugged the USB headset, and ALSO my Logitech webcam (which has a built-in microphone). Essentially, every single audio-device on my system was either un-plugged or disabled. Another reboot and WAH-LAH, IT WORKED!

I’ve since plugged the USB headset back in, and Vegas is still working. The webcam seemed to be the culprit, although after all of the problems that I’ve had with SigmaTel drivers, I plan on leaving it disabled and installing a Creative Labs sound board.

I hope that helps someone!

Open Source Spotlight – FreeFileSync

2010-10-27T21:58:00.001-05:00

In our household, we currently use five PC’s for various activities. One drives the television, one for the kids, a desktop that I do work on, and two laptops. Historically, keeping the files up-to-date has been a major drag.

In years past, I’ve tried various strategies to keep our documents, photos, music, and video current. Certainly one good solution is to keep a centralized server, and connect the client PC’s to that server. In this scenario, there is one master set of files, and everyone always has the most current available to them. Microsoft now makes the Home Server, which is designed for this task. I’ve also used various flavors of Linux such as Ubuntu to run a home-based server from.

For us though, that didn’t work. First of all, I’m kind of a backup freak, and having all of my documents stored on a single moving platter doesn’t set well. Sure I could implement a RAID array, but then we start talking about more money and complexity. Secondly, I was beginning to do quite a bit of travel, and back in the day of slow, expensive Internet service, there was just no good way to get to the files remotely. The final blow was when I started measuring the power consumption on various devices, and how much they were costing me to run – that was the deciding factor that I didn’t “need” a dedicated file server running 24x7.

Another strategy that I’ve tinkered with is using an online data hosting service. In the past, these seemed to be more work than they were worth – they had crude interfaces, limited storage, and I still had the issue of relatively slow Internet connectivity. Today, Dropbox.com seems to have a viable option that I may pursue, whereby the files get stored on my local computer, but they get replicated out to the web.

But for the time being, I use a more direct approach file management – FreeFileSync. FreeFileSync is an open-source program that lets you very quickly compare two folders, identify the differences, and synchronize them.

The program has some options to let you customize the general behavior, but usually the default options are acceptable. For me, I point the left pane at my local C:\ drive data directory, and the right pane at my Desktop PC, using a UNC path. Clicking the Compare button will initiate the file comparison, which on modern hardware over a LAN network, takes about 20 seconds for my 15,000 files. A sample of the results can be seen here.

The blue and green arrows in between the left and right pane shows which direction the software has determined that the files should be updated. The software has a fairly sophisticated algorithm to determine the correct action, based on file timestamps, as well as an internal database of past synchronizations. This internal database is how FreeFileSync knows when a file has been deleted, and the corresponding file on the opposite side of the sync should also be deleted.

Any of these default actions can be overridden by clicking in the center column before the synchronization takes place. Once you’ve reviewed the actions, clicking the Synchronize button at the right puts the changes into effect. This usually takes only a few seconds unless I have large amounts of data that has changed. Then the time is dependent on bandwidth of your LAN connection and the speed of your hardware.

In all, I usually synchronize each of the laptops to the desktop about once a week. It generally takes less than two minutes to complete. When I’m done, I have local access to any of my files from each of the PC’s, plus I have three separate copies of my irreplaceable photos and data.

I give FreeFileSync five out of five stars.

Repairs to a DRE-4000 Aviation Headset

2010-08-22T16:15:00.003-05:00

Since getting my ticket back in 2004, I’ve been using a pair of DRE headsets in the local FBO’s Skyhawk. The headsets have worked quite well considering the $150 entry price.
A little over a year ago, I noticed that the cord was beginning to fray. At that point, there were no usability problems, just cosmetic, but it was obvious that it wouldn’t last forever.

Sure enough, one spring afternoon I loaded up the plane, and one the lucky passenger had no Mic audio. He could hear, but not talk.
I priced around a little bit, and I can buy a replacement cord for about $35. Add shipping to that, and you’re not too far away from a down payment on a brand new headset. Instead I decided to dig in and see if a repair was possible.
One of the things that I do like about the DRE’s is that the cord is replaceable with two thumb screws. I pulled the plug, which allowed me remove the cover over the wires.

Obviously the yellow wire has a problem. It’s impossible to visually inspect if any of the other wires have issues since they’ve been potted in some sort of resin. The bad part about this type of design is vibration and movement of the of the potting material can cause the solder joints to break or become intermittent deep inside where they can’t be inspected or repaired.
Begin by taking a pair of pliers and break up the resin that’s encasing the existing wires. Don’t break the connector itself, but the wires will all have to be re-soldered, so don’t worry about them.
When making a repair like this, it’s best to cut the top couple of inches off of the cable and start fresh. Begin by putting the outer shell of the connector back on the wire (near my thumb). Strip the outer insulation back about an inch to expose the wires. Cut the braid off flush with the outer insulation. (Notice the “key” shown here on the shell of the connector. This keeps the connector from only being inserted in one direction, and is critical in later steps.)

Separate the wires, and strip back about 1/8” of insulation on each. Tin them with solder. Also prepare the connector (at right) by tinning the pins and removing any old wire that may have been left.

Before final assembly, notice that there are two sides to the connectors, and that it will only fit into the headset one direction. The order shown here is with the “key” at the back (not visible) of the photo.
DISCLAIMER: Fortunately, I had a second identical headset that I was able to ring the wires and connectors to determine the proper sequence of colors. There’s no guarantees that these colors are the same for any other DRE-4000 headset, but they probably are. If in doubt, consult your avionics shop.
The order (from left to right, with the key in the back) is Red, White, Brown, Green, Black. Solder the wires to the pins, making sure that the shell has already been placed over the cable and is ready to be slid into position.

Like I said earlier, I really don’t like the potted connector/strain-relief solutions, but unfortunately there aren’t many options with this particular design. Once you are comfortable with your solder work, mix up some 5-minute epoxy and drizzle it into the connector shell. This epoxy is the only thing keeping the wires from being ripped out, so use plenty.
Finish pulling the shell down over the connector and then apply gentle pressure to the sides (I used clothes pins) to keep everything tight while it cures. The hole in the headset that this connector fits into is fairly tight, so keeping pressure on it during the curing process is essential.

That’s it. Once it has cured, re-insert the plug into the headset, and replace the thumb screws. If the wiring was correct, you should be good to go for a couple more years. If it wasn’t correct, I’m sorry to tell you that you probably won’t be able to fix it. The plastic used on my plug was just barely strong enough to survive one reconstructive surgery, and I don’t expect it to make it through a second.
Happy Flying!

Replacing the Battery in your Uninterruptable Power Supply

2010-05-03T15:11:00.001-05:00

I decided several years ago (after a brief power outage) that I had better things to worry about than if I had saved my open files recently enough when the power flickers. So I picked up an APC Back-UPS 650VA power supply to keep my computer running through a power outage.

Fast-forward about four years, and I’m sitting at my PC working, when my UPS beeps and the screen goes black – exactly what I had been trying to avoid.

The most common cause of UPS problems is a failing battery. The first step in diagnosing the problem is to open up the case to reveal the battery. Usually the batteries are quite easy to get to – either the front of the box will pull off, revealing a couple of screws, or there will be a couple of obvious screws on the bottom of the unit. For my Back-UPS 650, it’s the latter.

Pull the battery and disconnect the positive and negative battery leads. These are normally just spade connectors on the smaller UPS’s, and no tools are required. This is your first chance to inspect the physical condition of the battery. Many of the batteries that I’ve had go bad actually produced enough heat internally to cause the sides to bulge. If the battery has been deformed, it must be replaced. Sometimes, the battery will actually start leaking, and you’ll see a white powder crusted around the chassis or battery. This is also a dead-giveaway that your battery is shot.

A standard DC volt meter is often enough to diagnose a battery beyond simple physical symptoms. Normally, a battery that is actively being charged will read about 13.8V. Once you disconnect the charger, you should still see about 12.5V. If you read anything less than about 12.0V, then you are missing a cell (or more) in the battery and it must be replaced.

Once in a while, a battery will hold its voltage when it’s sitting idle, but as soon as a load is placed on it, it will drop. For a test load, I’d recommend something that will load it down with about 1 amp, such as a 10 ohm, 20W resistor. Another option would be 12V car brake or dome light if you happen to have one handy. Measure the voltage before you attach the load across the positive and negative lead, and again while you have the load attached. It’s normal to see a drop of a couple tenths of a volt, but if the battery drops below 12.0V, it’s probably shot

While it’s possible for other parts of the UPS to fail or become damaged, 95% of the UPS’s I’ve worked on are because of an aged and/or abused battery. The easiest way to find a replacement is to measure the physical dimensions and look for a replacement on a site such as www.digikey.com. (I say that this is the easiest, because usually the original battery that comes from APC does not have any kind of Amp-Hour rating on it – they do that to discourage you from buying your own replacements…)

Search for “Sealed Lead Acid batteries”, and begin comparing the physical dimensions of the batteries. Normally, you will be looking for a 12V battery, usually in the 7AH to 28AH range. The physical dimensions are pretty well standardized across the industry, just be sure that it will fit inside the chassis of your UPS, and that the battery posts are compatible with the leads on the UPS.

Once you receive the new battery, installation is exactly opposite from the disassembly. Often times there is a small spark when you attach the second lead to the battery. Don’t be alarmed, this is normal.

Put the screws back in, and the UPS is again ready for operation.

Opinions of Windows 7

2010-03-27T13:55:00.000-05:00

I’ve been running ‘7 for four months now, and to summarize, I think that Microsoft has a solid, viable operating system that’s ready for prime-time. It’s time that both businesses and individuals accept that change happens and learn to deal with it.

My personal take was that Vista was simply ahead of its time – it required new, fast hardware that just wasn’t widely deployed. On top of that, Vista changed many of the driver models which broke support for many older devices. And that’s not to mention an almost complete lack of support for 64-bit drivers.

The industry has largely caught up, and Windows 7 capitalizes on that. Unless you’re still running the same PC that was considered old three years ago when Vista came out, you’re probably in pretty good shape to run 7. The video card is the most significant hardware requirement in 7 that I’ve run into problems with, but can usually be resolved for about $45 and 30 minutes of your time.

For those coming from Windows XP, the learning curve is going to be steep, but not insurmountable, even for the least-tech-savvy users. It just takes patience, and maybe some coaching from someone who has made the jump. Many (although not all) of the XP machines will need to have hardware updated or replaced in order to make the jump.

For people like me who updated the hardware and had jumped to Vista already, your curve to move to Windows 7 is pretty much a non-event. Your hardware should be capable, and there aren’t any new major changes like there were in Vista. My opinion is that if you liked Vista, you’ll love Windows 7.

What’s so great about it?

First of all, I really like the licensing change that Microsoft did for home users. If you’re a household like mine, you have multiple PC’s, and the thought of spending $125+ each on an upgrade to the latest and greatest just isn’t going to happen. For that, Microsoft came up with the Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack. For $150, you get three licenses of ‘7 that you can put on your home PC’s. And contrary to to the uber-helpful Best Buy employee’s training, yes it is valid to upgrade your Windows XP machines with this 3-pack license. The only caveat with XP is you have to install fresh, which means formatting your hard drive and starting over from scratch.

Additionally, there’s basically one “Home” license that most people will need for their home PC’s. It’s just the Home Premium version. The only other option would be Windows 7 Starter, but that’s only available for Netbooks. For businesses, you basically only need Professional or Enterprise, depending on whether or not you’re involved with the Microsoft Volume Licensing and Software Assurance.

Performance is good. Some will legitimately argue that ‘7 uses smoke and mirrors to provide the illusion that it’s running faster. Yes, ‘7 does cause some non-essential services to delay before starting at boot-time, and switches off other services by default. In this case though, perception is reality, and boot times do seem faster than Vista, and probably on par with XP.

There are some subtle GUI changes that are really great. For example, I am almost always working on dual monitors either at home or work. Before, if I had a window maximized on the right monitor and wanted to move it to the left monitor, I would have to 1) restore the window 2) drag the window to the left monitor 3) maximize the window. Now, you can grab the title bar of the maximized window, drag it to the other monitor, and release the mouse while at the top of the screen, and it will automatically maximize it again. Sure, there are 3rd party utilities that could do that for you, but it’s nice to have a standardized feature built-in to the core OS.

You can also drag a window to the far left or right of a screen, and it will stretch the window to the full height, but will only take up half of the screen (either the right or left half).

There are also a keyboard keystrokes that stick windows to the right or left of the monitor. Hold down the Windows Key, and press the right or left arrow keys. If you have dual monitors, you can move a window between the monitors by just hitting the left or right arrows a couple of times. Finally, you can maximize or restore a window by using Windows Key and the Up/Down arrows.

The Shutdown option is easier to use than in Vista. It now defaults to Shutdown (instead of Sleep). If you don’t want to shutdown, you can hover the mouse over the arrow right beside the Shutdown option for about half of a second, and a menu will fly-out giving you all of your Restart, Logoff, Sleep, etc options.

If you want to take a quick peak at a calendar, you can simply click on the clock in the task-bar, and a calendar will pop up. You used to be able to do this back in the XP days by double-clicking on the clock, but you had to be careful because that’s how you changed the date/time too. Now, you single-click it, and you have a calendar that you can thumb through the months and years, but don’t have to worry about accidentally altering the system time.

There are several new programs included with the OS that I find helpful. I won’t go into details of what they do exactly, but make it a point of trying out the Snipping Tool for taking screenshots and the Problems Steps Recorder when you’re trying to communicate a problem with Tech Support. The Calculator program has been updated, and has different modes called Scientific, Programmer, and Statistics.

It’s not exactly a program per se, but you can now burn ISO images directly to a CD-ROM or DVD by just right-clicking on the ISO file. No more trying to remember if you installed Roxio or Nero on this particular computer, and where you stuck the shortcut in the Start Menu.

Outstanding Issues

I do have a couple of issues with my installations that I wish I could figure out. At work, I have a Dell Optiplex 755 that used to have a dual-head ATI card in it (sorry, I’ve forgotten the model). The card worked fine on Vista, but after upgrading to ‘7, the fan on the video card began to randomly cycle on and off as if it was hot. Usually a reboot would make it stop doing that, but one day it was driving me up the wall and I wound up cutting the cord to the fan. It solved the issue, and ran fine (which further leads me to believe it wasn’t actually a heat issue, but instead a driver problem). I finally replaced it the other day with an nVidia card out of precaution.

That same Optiplex also has problems shutting the NIC down when it goes into sleep, which was never a problem on Vista. I’ve tried some different settings with no change. I recently flashed my BIOS to the latest A16 version, but since then I’ve had it lock up tighter than a drum twice and needed to be powered down.

Sleep modes are also an issue on my Dell XPS 420 at home. It tries to go to sleep, but randomly wakes up for no apparent reason. Again, I’ve tried changing some of the wake-on-USB and wake-on-NIC settings, but no joy, yet.

I will say that I’ve had more lockup’s and blue-screens on Windows 7 in the last four months, than I had on Vista and XP over the last four years, but most of them can be attributed to getting the sleep work correctly, as well as some new CAD software that I’ve been testing.

Conclusion

I hated to end this on a sour note. Yes, I’ve had some stability issues that are new to this OS, but keep in mind that both of these PC’s are operating on hardware that was not “designed” for ‘7. I’ve also been diving into designing printed circuit boards at home using a whole slew of new CAD programs, some of which I’m finding aren’t the most stable works in the industry.

Beyond that, I love the OS, and have quickly become spoiled to some of its features. To me, XP is beginning to look very dated and archaic.

The migration to Windows 7 does require a person to step outside of their comfort zone and embrace change, but in the end, it’s a good thing.

Robocopy - My New Best Friend

2010-03-27T13:52:00.000-05:00

I’m not sure how I managed to miss this free and useful utility, but Robocopy has recently become one of my favorite Windows command line tools. With a single command, you can keep two directories in sync with each other in a very fast, efficient manner.

In the past, I’ve managed to do some fairly cleaver things with Xcopy and other batch files, but I never felt that it was working very efficiently, and it was difficult to write and maintain. Now, with the Robocopy tool I can quickly copy new files from my working directory, off to a second location for backup or disaster recovery purposes.

Although it has many switches and options, most of my applications utilize either no special switches, or the /mir option.

Without switches, Robocopy will send all new files over to the destination. This is very similar in concept to xcopy /d, which copies over files that have a newer timestamp. Although it’s useful in certain applications, such as wanting to keep a copy of all files in a project, even ones that were deleted mid-stream, this isn’t always what you want. The problem is that if a file is deleted from the source, usually you want your backup copy to reflect that deletion.

And for that is the /mir switch. With this switch, it copies over all newer files just like before, but now it will analyze the destination, and if a file exists in the destination but not in the source, it will delete it. This is an excellent way of keeping a copy of your data files on an external hard drive or on a second PC. Like I said earlier, the mechanism is quite efficient, so even if you’re replicating files to a server off site, only the changes (at a file-level, not block level unfortunately) are copied over.

A case in point, I replicate about 100GB of user data (approximately 80 users) data every day across a 3.0Mbps WAN link, and it takes right at an hour most days. Your mileage will vary…

I don’t have installations of each to verify, but I believe Robocopy is installed by default on Windows Vista and 7, as well as Server 2008 and 2008R2. For XP and Server 2003/2003R2, you will need to download it as part of the Windows Resource Kit from Microsoft. Installation is a no-brainer as shown in the screenshots below.

Once it’s installed, you can execute the command such as the following:

robocopy c:\source e:\destination

Where C:\source is the directory you want to back up, and E:\destination is your backup location. This is a relatively safe operation, as no files would ever be deleted on either end.

Once you are comfortable that things are being replicated correctly, if you want to replicate the deletions in C:\source to E:\destination, add the /mir switch.

robocopy c:\source e:\destination /mir

And that’s it, you’ll have an exact copy of C:\source in C:\destination.

Finally, a few other useful switches.

The combination of /r:3 /w:3 tells Robocopy to Retry files that are in use 3 times, and to Wait 3 seconds between tries. By default it waits 30 seconds, and retries a million times. That seems a bit excessive. Most of the time for me, if a file is in use for more than 9 seconds, then it’s probably safe to move on and try backing it up again tomorrow.

A friend recently found out (almost the hard way) that the /xjd switch makes it safer when backing up user data on Windows Vista and 7 machines. According to the documentation, this switch excludes junction points for directories. In practice, it can prevent circular references to some of Window’s special directories such as C:\Users\username\Application Data\. Note, this option doesn’t exist on Server 2003 or XP.

And finally, if you are scheduling the job, the /log:"c:\logs\backup.log" parameter is handy so that you have a record of what went on. Note that at least one Server 2008, you cannot write the log file directly to the root of the C: drive, so I now always create a C:\logs\ directory to dump my robocopy logs into.

For me, a typical Robocopy command winds up looking like this:

robocopy c:\source e:\destination /r:3 /w:3 /xjd /mir /log:"c:\logs\backup.log"

Keep in mind that this process is intended to copy a working directory to a backup drive/site. If you have two working directories (such is the case if you have copies of your photos on both your laptop and desktop) that you want merged, then there are probably better tools out there.

For that situation, I use FreeFileSync, which is an open-source project on SourceForge. The reason for using a GUI is simple – you don’t always want to keep the file with the newest timestamp. By having a GUI with a list of the proposed changes on screen prior to any action taking place, you get the opportunity to override the defaults.

Good luck and don’t be DUMB! Remember, Disaster Usually Motivates Backups!

DansGuardian Content Filtering with AD Integration

2010-01-08T12:25:00.002-06:00

For our web/content filtering at work, we’ve used DansGuardian for several years with good success. Originally, we used a small service called identD on each of our Windows 2000 and XP PC’s. When Vista came out, the service failed to install. We were also running into complications as we were starting to move towards multi-user Terminal Services environments (the identD service was machine-centric, not user-centric).
I toyed with porting the service over to .NET to run on Vista, but ultimately, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and use a built-in authentication method called NTLM, which could be facilitated by the Squid proxy server.
The following steps were used to configure the system on a Debian 4.0 (Etch) server. The process was largely borrowed from an article on HowToForge.

Theory of Operation

DansGuardian is a web filtering program that watches the content of a web page, and based on a number of criteria, decides whether or not to block the page. Unfortunately, DansGuardian makes it very clear that it is NOT a proxy or transport program, and therefore needs a very close tie-in with the Squid proxy server.
Traditionally, DansGuardian is configured to listen on port 8080, and Squid is configured to listen to the localhost on port 3128. A client PC is then setup to traverse through the proxy host on port 8080. When a request is made, Dansguardian passes the request on to Squid on port 3128, and filters the content bases on Squid’s reply.

In order to introduce NTLM Authentication into the process, we have to utilize Squid’s NTLM_Auth functionality, and therefore the PC needs to talk directly to Squid. Now the PC talks directly to the Squid, which handles the NTLM authentication, Squid passes the request (and username information) to Dansguardian, which in turn requests the information back from Squid on the secondary port 3128. The second request to Squid is what is actually passed on to the Internet for its reply.

The solution is a bit complicated, but in general works quite well with Internet Explorer and Firefox. The problem comes into play when a browser is not NTLM-enabled. This actually happens more frequently than you might think in real life, as most of the Java runtimes don’t seem to be compliant. This causes a number of problems when it comes time to run various Java applets over the Internet, or when trying to hold a Java-based webinar.
Technically, it will work, as Squid is designed to fail-back to a Basic Authentication and the browser will prompt the user for their domain login credentials, however that is annoying to the user at best, and a bad security practice at worst. It really isn’t a good idea to tell staff that it is okay or even normal to provide their domain credentials whenever a web application asks for them.
Hence, we created an ACL group within the Squid configuration that is coded to look for the headers from a group of known non-compliant “browsers” such as Java and Google’s Chrome. This workaround is explained in further detail throughout the rest of this article.

A Few Assumptions

For the sake of example, I will use the following names when defining my network going forward.

acme.local – This is the local (internal) domain suffix.
ACME – The old NetBIOS name for the domain.
etch1.acme.local – This is the Debian (Etch) server that DansGuardian is being installed on.
dc1.acme.local – This is a Microsoft Server Active Directory Domain Controller.
192.168.0.0 / 255.255.255.0 – Class C subnet the PC’s are located in.
192.168.0.11 – Windows DNS name server 1.
192.168.0.12 – Windows DNS name server 2.

Install the Necessary Packages

This article assumes that a Debian 4.0 (Etch) system is up and running, with basic network connectivity established. For the enhanced DansGuardian logging features to be used (covered in a separate post), Apache, MySQL, and PHP will need to be installed, and it is helpful to have phpMyAdmin available for configuration and testing of the database.
To install and setup the filtering proxy server, use aptitude to install the following packages.

squid
dansguardian
samba
winbind
krb5-user
ntp
ntpdate

During the installation, it will prompt you for the following parameters. Answer them as follows:

Please specify the workgroup you want this server to appear to be in when queried by clients. acme.local
Modify smb.conf to use WINS settings from DHCP? No
Kerberos servers for your realm: dc1.acme.local
Administrative server for your Kerberos realm: dc1.acme.local

Once all of the packages are installed, run the following command to configure the Kerberos.

dpkg-reconfigure krb5-config

It will then prompt you with the following questions. Answer them as follows:

Default Kerberos version 5 realm: acme.local
Does DNS contain pointers to your realm's Kerberos Servers? Yes

Configure the Name Resolution

We aren’t using the proxy server as a direct gateway to the Internet (with multiple NIC’s and such), so at this point, we deviated from the HowToForge article. In our case, it’s important that the /etc/resolv.conf file is pointed at our internal DNS servers, and that the search domain is configured correctly. Our resolv.conf file should look like this:

search acme.local
nameserver 192.168.0.11
nameserver 192.168.0.12

Synchronize the Time with the Windows Domain

Next we need to configure the NTP client to pull from our internal domain controller. Edit the /etc/ntp.conf file, and find the section near the top that lists the server(s). Be sure the default servers are commented out, and add a new line:

server dc1.acme.local iburst

Now that the client is configured, initiate a synchronization with the following command:

net time set –S dc1.acme.local

Configure Samba

It’s always a good idea to make a backup copy of the original configuration file that is installed with a new package. Make a backup copy, and vi the original file.

cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.original

Make the following changes to the /etc/samba/smb.conf

On line 53, set the interfaces = 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0.
Uncomment line 59.
Uncomment line 91 and change to security = ads.
Uncomment lines 204 and 205.
Add the following lines before line 217:

winbind trusted domains only = yes
realm = EXAMPLEDOMAIN.LOCAL
winbind cache time = 3600

Now restart the Samba and Winbind daemons.

/etc/init.d/samba restart
/etc/init.d/winbind restart

Join the Domain

To join the domain, use the net command

net ads join –U Administrator

As I recall, it prompts you for a user’s credentials who has the authority to join a domain. This can be any Domain Admin account that has privileges to join the domain, such as Administrator.
To test the join, you can issue the following commands and see their output:

etch1:~# wbinfo –t
checking the trust secret via RPC calls succeeded
etch1:~# wbinfo –u
ACME\administrator
ACME\guest
ACME\tsinternetuser
…
ACME\ghost_machine-09
ACME\user1
ACME\user2

etch1:~# wbinfo –g
BUILTIN\administrators
BUILTIN\users
ACME\domain computers
ACME\group policy creator owners
ACME\domain guests
…

At this point, you can be assured that the Linux box is a member of the domain, and that it is talking to the domain controllers.
You can also launch the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in on a Windows PC, and expand the Computers branch. You should see the name of the Linux server listed as a “Computer”.

Configure the Squid Proxy Server

This is the section that I had the most trouble with. I wound up making a copy of the original configuration file with all of the default settings and comments, and then stripped them all out for my running configuration. It just got to be a hassle scanning through 3000 lines of comments for 30 lines of configuration.

cp /etc/squid/squid.conf /etc/squid/squid.conf.original

Then I used a grep command to eliminate the comments.

grep –v “^#” squid.conf > squid.conf.clean

This left a lot of blank lines in the file, but they were easy enough to remove with UltraEdit. After the configuration changes, I was left with the following configuration file:

#
# Squid configuration file -- Stripped of comments for clarity
#

# There are actually two proxies running - 1 for Dansguardian
# (from localhost) and the other for the masses
# The transparent proxy is bound to the localhost IP and listens on 3128
http_port 127.0.0.1:3128 transparent

# This one is bound to all IP's, and listens on port 8080. Port 8080
# is the default Dansguardian port. In
# our case, Dans has been reconfigured to use port 8081 instead to
# avoid confusion.
http_port 8080

# This parameter tells squid to pass the login credentials through to Dans
cache_peer 127.0.0.1 parent 8081 0 no-query login=*:nopassword

# The following 7 lines are default Squid configuration
hierarchy_stoplist cgi-bin ?
acl QUERY urlpath_regex cgi-bin \?
cache deny QUERY
acl apache rep_header Server ^Apache
broken_vary_encoding allow apache
access_log /var/log/squid/access.log squid
hosts_file /etc/hosts

# The following 3 lines configure NTLM authentication for browsers.
# This is the primary method used for proxy authentication
auth_param ntlm program /usr/bin/ntlm_auth --helper-protocol=squid-2.5-ntlmssp
auth_param ntlm children 5
auth_param ntlm keep_alive on

# This is a failsafe authentication in case the client application
# doesn't support NTLM. It uses Basic
# authentication and still authenticates off of the same ntlm_auth piece
auth_param basic program /usr/bin/ntlm_auth --helper-protocol=squid-2.5-ntlmssp
auth_param basic children 5
auth_param basic realm Squid proxy-caching web server
auth_param basic credentialsttl 2 hours

# The following 25 lines are default Squid configuration
refresh_pattern ^ftp: 1440 20% 10080
refresh_pattern ^gopher: 1440 0% 1440
refresh_pattern . 0 20% 4320
acl all src 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
acl manager proto cache_object
acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.255
acl to_localhost dst 127.0.0.0/8
acl SSL_ports port 443 # https
acl SSL_ports port 563 # snews
acl SSL_ports port 873 # rsync
acl Safe_ports port 80 # http
acl Safe_ports port 21 # ftp
acl Safe_ports port 443 # https
acl Safe_ports port 70 # gopher
acl Safe_ports port 210 # wais
acl Safe_ports port 1025-65535 # unregistered ports
acl Safe_ports port 280 # http-mgmt
acl Safe_ports port 488 # gss-http
acl Safe_ports port 591 # filemaker
acl Safe_ports port 777 # multiling http
acl Safe_ports port 631 # cups
acl Safe_ports port 873 # rsync
acl Safe_ports port 901 # SWAT
acl purge method PURGE
acl CONNECT method CONNECT

# These are custom configurations for our environment.
# First we are creating an ACL group for people who were
# authenticated by the NTLM
acl ntlm_users proxy_auth REQUIRED

# This is a generic ACL of valid IP addresses on our network
# that have access to the proxy
acl our_networks src 192.168.0.0/24

# Some browsers don't support NTLM authentication. Rather
# than harass the user with pop-up's, we are excepting
# out known browser issues from the NTLM credentials.
# We know that Java generally does not support NTLM
# (although some newer versions may)
acl non_ntlm browser Java/1.4 Java/1.5 Java/1.6

# Oddly enough, Google's Chrome browser does not support NTLM
# authentication
acl non_ntlm browser Chrome

# The following 6 lines are default Squid configuration
http_access allow manager localhost
http_access deny manager
http_access allow purge localhost
http_access deny purge
http_access deny !Safe_ports
http_access deny CONNECT !SSL_ports

# Now we're actually allowing appropriate users access the proxy.
# The first step is to except out the non_ntlm browsers that
# were defined above. This bypasses that authentication
# scheme before it gets to the allowance of ntlm_users
http_access allow non_ntlm

# We want the localhost to be able to proxy
http_access allow localhost

# And finally, this is the line that allows anyone on
# our network, that has been authenticated by the NTLM piece to
# get through. It's not real intuitive, but it seems
# that it only authenticates the browser when it actually gets
# to this line. In other words, non_ntlm browsers that
# were allowed above don't get prompted.

# Note that any browser that bypasses the NTLM authentication
# will show up in the logs without a username.
http_access allow our_networks ntlm_users

# The following 4 lines are default Squid configuration
http_reply_access allow all
icp_access allow all
cache_effective_group proxy
coredump_dir /var/spool/squid

The important lines are near the top. I’ve included my own comments to explain what was actually changed and why I did that.
At this point, you can start the Squid proxy server, although it won’t really do anything until DansGuardian is setup.

/etc/init.d/squid restart

Set the Permissions for the winbindd_privileged Directory

Squid needs access to /var/run/samba/winbindd_privileged. We can easly fix this but the permissions will reset when we reboot. Jesse Waters on ubuntuforums.org posted a script that will set the permissions on every system boot.
Create a file named /etc/init.d/winbind-ch.sh and paste the following into it.

#!/bin/sh
#set –x
WINBINDD_PRIVILEGED=/var/run/samba/winbindd_privileged

chmodgrp() {
chgrp proxy $WINBINDD_PRIVILEGED || return 1
chmod g+w $WINBINDD_PRIVILEGED || return 1
}

case "$1" in
start)
chmodgrp
;;

restart|reload|force-reload)
echo "Error: argument '$1' not supported" >&2
exit 3
;;
stop)
;;
*)

echo "Usage: $0 start|stop" >&2
exit 3
;;
esac
#EOF

Add this script to the init scripts to run at boot time by running this command:

update-rc.d winbind-ch.sh start 21 2 3 4 5 .

Go ahead and execute this script to set the permissions.

/etc/init.d/winbind-ch.sh start

Configure the DansGuardian Web Filter

Again, I deviated quite a bit from the original article, primarily because I already had quite a bit of experience with DansGuardian.

cp /etc/dansguardian/dansguardian.conf /etc/dansguardian/dansguardian.conf.original

Now vi the dansguardian.conf file and make the following changes:

On line 3, comment out the item that says “UNCONFIGURED…”
On line 44, change the logfileformat to 2 (CSV-style format)
On line 62, change the filterport to 8081
On line 102, I set my filtergroups to 3. We have three groups in our environment – IT, Management, and everyone else. IT gets nearly everything like .EXE’s, .ZIP’s, .DOC’s, .XLS’s. Then we have Management which gets a little less like only .DOC’s, and .XLS’s. And finally, we have everyone else who don’t get to download many of the privileged file types like Microsoft Office types or executables.

Configure the three groups as appropriate. Start by defining the groups. Vi the /etc/dansguardian/filtergroupslist file. Our list looks like this:

#filter1 = DEFAULT USERS (Everyone in this group unless otherwise noted)
#filter2 = IT Users (Can do just about anything)
ACME\administrator=filter2
ACME\ituser1=filter2
ACME\ituser2=filter2

#filter3 = Management (Most things except EXE's)
ACME\manageuser1=filter3
ACME\manageuser2=filter3
ACME\manageuser3=filter3

Now begin customizing the setup of the individual groups by vi’ing the dansguardianf1.conf file: Make the following changes:
Near the top, set the Banned Extension List and Banned MIME Type List to be specific to the filter group.

bannedextensionlist = ‘/etc/dansguardian/filter1/bannedextensionlist'
bannedmimetypelist = '/etc/dansguardian/filter1/bannedmimetypelist'

I have our naughtynesslimit set to 125, which seems to be appropriate for a workplace environment.
Now make duplicate dansguardianf1.conf files for each of the three groups.

cp /etc/dansguardian/dansguardianf1.conf /etc/dansguardian/dansguardianf2.conf
cp /etc/dansguardian/dansguardianf1.conf /etc/dansguardian/dansguardianf3.conf

Go in a edit both of the dansguardianf2.conf and dansguardianf3.conf files to have the appropriate filter directory for the Banned Extension List and Banned MIME Type List. For example, dansguardianf2.conf should read:

bannedextensionlist = ‘/etc/dansguardian/filter2/bannedextensionlist'
bannedmimetypelist = '/etc/dansguardian/filter2/bannedmimetypelist'

Create the three filter directories and copy the two files from the root DansGuardian directory into these new folders.

mkdir /etc/dansguardian/filter1
mkdir /etc/dansguardian/filter2
mkdir /etc/dansguardian/filter3

cp /etc/dansguardian/bannedextensionlist /etc/dansguardian/filter1
cp /etc/dansguardian/bannedmimetypelist /etc/dansguardian/filter1
cp /etc/dansguardian/bannedextensionlist /etc/dansguardian/filter2
cp /etc/dansguardian/bannedmimetypelist /etc/dansguardian/filter2
cp /etc/dansguardian/bannedextensionlist /etc/dansguardian/filter3
cp /etc/dansguardian/bannedmimetypelist /etc/dansguardian/filter3

For each of the three groups, edit the /etc/dansguardian/filter1/bannedextensionlist and bannedmimetypelist as appropriate. The included list files that come with DansGuardian include a list of virtually every possible extension. If it’s listed in the file, then those users won’t be able to download that type. Customize the list by commenting out extensions that you DO want these users to be able to download.
I recommend that management has at least .DOC, and .XLS capabilities, or else they will be calling IT on a regular basis.
IT generally has unique needs, and so they should additionally be given access to download .ZIP, .EXE, and .ISO files.
Finally, we found that some websites consistently come up as blocked, even though they’re legitimate or even directly business related. For those sites, edit the /etc/dansguardian/exceptionsitelist and add the domain name for the offending servers. We currently have about 120 domains that we are explicitly excepting out of the filter for various reasons. Some general examples are microsoft.com (for patches), adobe.com (for Acrobat Reader) and so on.

Configuring the Client PC’s

The only configuration that we have to do on Windows 2000 or Windows XP machines is to configure the proxy server settings. There is a DNS alias A record that points the proxy.acme.local address back to the Etch1 server. The actual settings are normally done from within Desktop Authority with a KIX script named win-ie.kix.
To manually make the change, open Internet Explorer. Click on Tools and click on Internet Options. Select the Connections tab from the top of the screen. Click on LAN settings. On the bottom half of the screen, check to box to Use a proxy server… and set the address to proxy.acme.local. The port should be set to 8080.

For Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines, there is one additional step that is required. By default, Vista doesn’t allow NTLM version 1 traffic to pass. Unfortunately, the Samba project is not quite ready to support version 2, so we have to reconfigure Vista PC’s.
Go to Start-Run and type in secpol.msc. The Local Security Policy manager screen will come up. Drill down into Local Policies, and then click on Security Options. In the list of the right will be Network security: LAN Manager authentication level. Change this option to Send LM & NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated. Click OK and you can close out of the Local Security Policy editor.

Troubleshooting Domain Connectivity/Authentication

To troubleshoot the domain connectivity, refer to the section titled Join the Windows Domain. First of all, you should see the server name listed in the Active Directory Users and Computers. Seeing this indicates that your server has registered with the domain. If it won’t, it’s possible that Samba wasn’t configured, or that the /etc/resolv.conf is not pointing to the correct internal DNS servers.
If you haven’t done so recently, it’s never a bad idea to restart the Samba and Winbind daemons.

/etc/init.d/samba restart
/etc/init.d/winbind restart

Another potential problem could occur if the server has the same name as a previous machine on the domain. It may become necessary to delete the computer’s registration from the domain by opening Active Directory Users and Computers, drilling down into Computers, and delete the computer that has the name of this server. At that point, you would need to re-join the domain by issuing:

net ads join –U Administrator

Running the wbinfo command with the –t, -u, and –g should enumerate all of the users and groups on the domain. You can also manually attempt an authentication of a Windows domain account by issuing the ntlm_auth command.

ntlm_auth --username=ituser1 --domain=ACME

It will prompt you for the password for this selected account, and assuming that the username and password was correct, it should return:

NO_STATUS_OK: Success (0x0)

If Squid suddenly stops authenticating users, but the above commands continue to work, then it is probably a permissions issue between Squid and Winbind. The /etc/init.d/winbind-ch.sh script shown in the Set the Permissions for the winbindd_privileged Directory may not be running, or may not be running at the correct point during startup. You can manually run that script at any time by issuing:

/etc/init.d/winbind-ch.sh start

Troubleshooting Squid Configuration

First of all, be sure that the server has Internet connectivity. It should be able to ping a site such as www.google.com. This tells you that DNS name resolution is working, as well as the routing out to a foreign network.
If you are having troubles with getting Squid running, it’s best to bypass all authentication schemes. To do so, make the following changes in the /etc/squid/squid.conf file.

Comment out all seven lines starting with auth_param to disable NTLM and Basic authentication
In the ACL’s section, replace the line http_access allow out_networks ntlm_users with the following:

http_access allow our_networks

Then restart Squid.

/etc/init.d/squid restart

Troubleshooting DansGuardian

Dansguardian itself has proven to be very straightforward in terms of configuration. In the past, we have seem some instability over long periods of time, so I generally have a cron job setup to restart the service in the middle of the night. I add the following line to my /etc/crontab file.

30 1 * * * root /etc/init.d/dansguardian restart

Client Connectivity Issues

Be sure that the proxy server is configured on the web browser. In Internet Explorer, it’s under Tools-Internet Options, Connections tab. Click on LAN settings. Be sure you have the Fully Qualified Domain Name listed, as well as port 8080. For some sites, especially internal intranets, it may be necessary to create exceptions under the Advanced button.
If you go to a website, and a box now pops up asking for login credentials, it means that either your browser isn’t configured to support NTLM authentication, Squid isn’t configured correctly, or your PC isn’t talking in NTLM version 1.
The incompatible browser tends to be the most common. Sometimes it’s not the browser itself, but a plug-in that gets called such as Java. In that case, you will need to determine the browser User-Agent string that is being passed to the Squid, and add it to the list of non_ntlm ACL exceptions. If you aren’t sure what the agent name that is being passed is, then the simplest way is to use Wireshark to sniff the traffic. You will probably see something similar to this in the trace, usually in the first packet that is being sent to the server.

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0…

If all browsers are having the problem, including a modern version of Internet Explorer, you may have NTLM version 1 disabled, especially if this is a Vista PC. If this is the case, see the section title Configuring the Client PC where it talks about using secpol.msc to change the network security parameter.

Summary

This configuration of DanGuardian has been in production for us for about a year now, and is working just fine. The trickiest part of this is really understanding the two portions of the Squid proxy server, and how they interact with DansGuardian.

Windows 7 Taskbar

2009-11-21T21:55:00.001-06:00

The one thing that I cannot get used to about 7 is the new Taskbar. First, Windows 7 replaces the old fashioned task “buttons” with just an icon.

Fixing the buttons is easy enough. Just right click in an open space on the Taskbar, and select Properties. Check the box labeled “Use small icons”, and change the Taskbar buttons to "Combine when taskbar is full”. Click OK.

I could probably get used to just that change, but then they went one step further and removed the Quick Launch too. For those of you who don’t know, the Quick Launch is that area next to the “Start” button/Orb with all of the tiny icons. Out of the box, Windows 7 has the ability to “pin” an icon to the Taskbar, but my opinion is that it just gets in the way of your real “tasks”.

Here you can see I have UltraEdit (UE), FileZilla (FZ), and my KeePass icons pinned to the taskbar, but because Firefox was already open, it pushed those three icons off to the right. Basically, it’s messy and you never know quite where you’ll find your icons to launch a program.

Getting the Quick Launch back isn’t difficult, but you do have to know what you’re looking for because it’s not just a simple checkbox (that I could find anyway).

Start by right-clicking the Taskbar in an empty spot, go to Toolbars, select New Toolbar… When the dialog box pops up, type the following in to the Folder field:

%UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

When done, click the Select Folder button.

That’s all that’s required to get the Quick Launch folder back, but you’ll want to change a couple of things to get it back to “normal”. Right now it probably looks something like this, with huge chunks of text wasting space.

To fix that, right-click in some of the empty expanse taken up by the Quick Launch, and uncheck the two boxes “Show Text” and “Show title”.

That will pretty much get things back to normal, however if you’re like me, you probably have a number of icons already pinned to the Taskbar. For each icon that’s pinned, right-click on it, and select “Unpin this program from the Taskbar”.

That’s it! Your Taskbar should be back to “normal”.

Refinishing a Dining Room Table

2009-11-12T16:42:00.001-06:00

Despite buying a new dining room table from a local, reputable show room, and being very careful with it, I found myself refinishing our table after only three years. I recently re-finished the surface, and was fairly happy with the results.

I took a few photos of the table before I started the process. Originally, a shellac finish had been applied, which provides both the color and a glossy, hard finish. Apparently this is very sensitive to heat, as any place that serving dishes or our plates (yes, our dinner plates that we’re eating off of) would sit, we had chipping, bubbling, discoloration, or some combination of the three.

With some help, I got the table out into the garage and began the process. It had been recommended to me to only strip the top, and leave the sides alone because of the complex curves from the trim-work. I opted to go ahead and strip these for two reasons: 1) I didn’t feel that I would have enough control over the stripper goo to be able to stop it EXACTLY at the edge and 2) I was concerned about being able to match the top color to the side color. I did mask off the table legs and left them alone, as they were in mostly good shape.

The first step is getting all of the old finish off. To do that, I used a citrus-based chemical stripper. As I later confirmed, the veneer is too thin – sand paper is NOT an option. After masking off the base/legs of the table, I applied the stripper in a fairly thin coat using a cheap paint brush. The goo needs to sit a while (about 25 minutes) to do its thing.

I went with the citrus-based chemicals as they are supposedly more environmentally friendly, and less fumes to contend with. I’m not sure about the first one, but I can say that the small wasn’t too bad, especially with the garage door cracked open about a foot. Nevertheless, it is still a potent chemical and it ate through my vinyl gloves in a matter of minutes. I wound up with quite a bit of the stuff on my fingers, and it didn’t leave any permanent affects that I’ve found so far, but my thumb was kind of dried up and tingly for several days.

After a short break, I came back to the table and using a plastic flat-edge scraper, I began pulling up large globs of finish. I found that the best thing was to have a paper-towel in hand to continually clean your scraper to keep the blobs from falling on the floor (which make a big mess). I went through an entire roll of towels stripping the finish off our table.

For me, it took two or three passes with the stripper before I had it down to bare wood. Notice that the coloring is actually in the shellac finish, and did NOT stay in the wood.

Once the original finish is off, it is very important to get all of the stripper residue off of the table before you begin applying the new finish. To do this, you will need a bottle of mineral spirits. Here you can see me pouring the spirits (the milky-white stuff) onto the table, and I used a scouring pad to work it in.

That leaves the table with a residue on it, which I wiped off with a paper towel, and then repeated the process with more spirits. I continued this process until I felt that I had a clean table top.

The mineral spirits dry quickly after being wiped off. I allowed about an hour before continuing with staining.

Here you can see the nice, clean table top after all of the finish was stripped away. I was very fortunate that we had been able to keep any moisture or oils from seeping down through the cracks and chips in the original shellac finish, thereby discoloring the wood. The variations that you see in the oak top was just normal variations in wood colors.

At this point you will need to determine what color of stain to apply. Since I was not re-staining the legs or the chairs, it was very critical that I get a close match. I keep about a dozen samples of various colors on hand, so I took a scrap piece of oak that had similar color and markings, and rubbed in a small patch from each of my options to compare against the existing furniture.

It is important to check your match in various lighting, as fluorescent and incandescent can cause coloring to look much different than when in direct sunlight.

This was the point at which it really set in for me as to the quality of the product and misconceptions that we were left with from the sales-lady. As you can see, the table top has an oak grain to it, and it appears to be several pieces jointed together. The photo above was taken where the table splits for the leaf, and you can see from the side that the top is just laminated onto some sort of pressboard.

This caused me to take note of a few things. First, that laminate is WAY too thin to be able to do any sanding on it, as the thickness in unperceivable when viewed from the side. Secondly, the grain that used to run horizontally along the first lip at the top of the table was actually painted on.

I was really afraid that this second revelation would be the end of this project, but I decided to see how the round-over would take stain. As it turns out, it stained very darkly, to the point that you really can’t tell what it is, and it just looks like another type of wood.

So without doing any sanding (just cleaning with the scouring pad), I moved on to stain.

To apply the stain, I prefer to use a couple of sheets of the blue shop-towels that can be found in the automotive section of your favorite department store. Wearing gloves, I dip the towel into the can of stain and begin rubbing into the clean wood. Honestly, it’s fairly difficult to mess this step up too bad. I do try to keep the towel moving so that I don’t get blotches where the stain sat too long.

Generally speaking, one coat of stain will be sufficient. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that you can get a darker stain by applying a second or third coat. My experience has been that 95% of the stain is applied on the first coat, and I use subsequent coats mainly to touch up any spots where I didn’t apply it evenly enough.

Once the table is stained to your liking, it is important to let this sit for a good 24 hours to let it dry. It doesn’t hurt to run a clean towel over the tacky finish after a few hours to pull up any excessive stain to help the drying process.

Take a good, hard look at the surface, checking for any imperfections. The stain should be free of streaks and the top clean. Be sure that there is no dust or debris on the table. While the fumes can be a bit potent, I prefer to apply the final finish with the door closed, to prevent wind from stirring up dirt.

Based on recommendations from others, I decided to use Deft as the final finish. Whenever I apply polyurethane or in this case Deft, I like to use an appropriately sized foam brush. I find that the foam tends to leave fewer streaks, and you won’t have the problem of bristles falling off into the finish.

Starting with a good clean table, I applied a healthy amount of Deft to the brush and starting at one side of the table, make long smooth strokes across the top going with the grain. Keeping the motions smooth and consistent is the primary key to having a good looking finish. This is also a time when being tall and having long arms is almost a must. If you stop the brush at any point, you will be able to see it in the final product. This is especially true as the Deft begins to cure.

One nice thing that I found about the Deft is that it cures very quickly. The temperatures in the garage were running in the mid-sixties throughout this project, and I found that the Deft had cured totally after about four hours.

Once the first coat is cured, it’s time to go over the finish with a scouring pad. This is about your only opportunity to remove any imperfections or streaks in the finish, although it’s not perfect, and it’s better to get a good coat put on the first time.

Take a paper towel and wipe off the table top, again looking for any imperfections. Apply the second coat of Deft just like the first, again being careful not to leave streaks.

Allow the second coat to cure, repeat the scouring pad routine, and then apply the third coat. After three coats, I normally consider this to be sufficient as long as you feel that they were all good, thick coats.

And that’s all there is to it. I estimate that I put in about 20 hours of labor over the course of a long weekend to refinish the table. Considering the labor, and the cost of various chemicals and supplies, the estimate that was given of $500-$700 seems reasonable for someone to do the project for me. Unfortunately for me, my table only cost about $800 new, and so I felt obligated to eat the cost of labor by doing it myself. Materials themselves cost me about $100.

We now have a beautiful dining room table again that actually is better than new.

Here’s a few of the lessons I learned while completing this project.

Chemical Strippers ONLY! Regardless of what the salesperson may have told you about being “real” wood, it is only veneer, and sand paper would go straight through it.
Be prepared to find anything. Again, even though our table supposedly did not have any painted-on finishes, all of the wood grain from the edge of the table somehow disappeared when I stripped it. I was able to recover, but be sure to go into this process with the attitude that you MAY have a permanent table cloth covering your new “finish”.
It’s not hard work, but it does take time.

Kel-Tec PF-9 Update

2009-11-04T18:54:00.004-06:00

I thought I would give a quick update regarding the status of my PF-9. I've now been shooting it for about nine months, and while I don't consider it a "pleasant" gun to shoot, I've really grown to like it.

I've put about 400 rounds of ammo through it, and have had only a few jams, almost all of which where when feeding the last round from a brand new clip. Since then, that clip seems to have worn in and no longer gives me fits.

There was one other incident that I had with the gun, and that was a split casing from what I later realized was reloaded ammunition. I was just out shooting targets when I felt my face get peppered with hot powder, and the gun jammed. The shell was stuck 90% into the chamber and had to be pushed out with a stick.

At some point during all of this, the extractor (which is just held in by a spring) popped out and was lost. That was frustrating, although if I had realized the situation before I left the range, I may have been able to find it. As it turns out though, I couldn't find it and I was leaving for a trip in a few days in which I wanted to carry the gun.

So doing what any normal person would do, I ordered the $1.50 replacement part, and paid $38 to have it shipped over night. I was very careful to order it first thing on Monday morning, about 8:30 (central), as I knew that the factory was in eastern time. The www.kel-tec-cnc.com website was fairly easy to order, and I left feeling confident that it would be in and replaced before my Thursday departure.

As you can image, I was upset Tuesday evening when no UPS man had shown up. Wednesday morning I gave Kel-Tec a call and asked for a good explanation. The lady that took my call (I'm sorry, I don't recall her name) was very calm and took the time to check into the order. She could not explain why the package left late, but assured me that it had left Tuesday (a day late), and produced a tracking number to prove it. I asked what she was going to do about my $38 shipping bill that didn't exactly work out. She took my number and told me that she'd do some research.

At that point, I pretty well wrote off the lost funds. The part showed up Wednesday night as promised, I was able to fix the gun, and took it to the range to verify proper operation.

I carried over most of my road trip, and felt confident, and comfortable with it. I picked up a ConcealmentT at the local gun show, and really like how it holds the Kel-Tec out of the way yet accessible. But that's another story...

After I returned from the road trip, I happened to be checking my account, and I noticed a credit for the $38 and some odd change (the cost of shipping). Yes, Kel-Tec had some failure to deliver as promised, but they stood behind their service and made it right to the customer. That's worth a lot in my book!

Upgrading a Laptop Hard Drive, Dual Booting

2009-09-21T19:50:00.002-05:00

About a year ago, I bought a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop with a 70GB partition with Windows Vista factory installed. That installation was current and stable, but I needed more space and also wanted to have it dual-boot with Kubuntu (Linux). The laptop was otherwise still working good and fast enough for what I needed, so instead of replacing it, I decided to upgrade the hard disk with a 320GB, 7200RPM drive.

I was really dreading the thought of reinstalling all of my applications in Vista, so I thought I'd try to clone my Vista partition, re-image my Vista partition back onto the drive, and then add Linux. Here are the steps I took, using nothing but free, open-source tools:

The first step in any project like this is to develop a plan and have everything ready. You will need the following:

A good, working PC that's worth the time and monetary investment. Your Windows partition should already be installed and working good.
A download of the Clonezilla ISO boot disc, burned to a CD-ROM. (http://clonezilla.org/)
A download of the Kubuntu ISO Linux installation disc, burned to a DVD. (http://www.kubuntu.org/)
New, larger hard disk. If you're adding Linux to your PC, you'll want to allow at least 20GB to give you a little room to grow.
An external USB hard drive, at least as big as the Vista partition that you'll need to back up.

The basic steps are as follows:

Backup the existing Windows Vista installation.
Swap out the hard drive with the larger one.
Restore the backup of Vista into the original location on the new drive.
Install Kubuntu onto the new system, leaving a room to grow the Vista partition.
Resize the Vista partition to take advantage of the larger disk drive.

Backup the Existing Vista Install

Boot your Vista PC up. It wouldn't hurt to run a defrag on the drive, as I suspect that it would speed the gather times, although I didn't on my PC.
This may seem obvious, but always make sure you have ALL of your data backed up before attempting a process like this.
Shut the PC completely down (make sure you're not just closing the lid or going into Standby).
Insert the Clonezilla CD-ROM and boot the PC. Do NOT attach the external hard disk at this time.
A few questions will come up, asking what language and keyboard to use. Just select English.
Select device-image to use the disk/images functionality of this software.
Select local_dev to use the external hard drive.
It will prompt you to attach your external USB drive. At this point, you can plug in the external hard drive. You will see some data come across the screen as it loads the appropriate drivers. When it is finished, press Enter.
When asked to mount a device as /home/partimag, you need to decide which device listed is the external drive. Usually it will be last in the sdX series (such as sdb), since it was last to be attached. Often the description shown will be a clue that it is an external drive.
Select the directory that you want your disk image to be stored in. I just put mine in the the / (root) folder.
Select the Beginner option.
For my purpose, I chose the saveparts option, since I was ONLY interested in my core Vista installation (and none of the OEM or backup partitions). In hindsight, I probably would have saved myself some time if I had just backed up the entire drive.
I used the default file name for the backup image.
The next screen asks which partitions you want to backup. Again, since I was only concerned with the main partition, I looked through the list to find the largest (69GB) partition. Press the Space Bar to put an asterisk on that line, and then press Enter to start.

At this point, the system is taking a backup copy of that partition and writing it to the external hard disk. A typical image should take at least about an hour, and possibly much longer depending on the size, CPU speed, and disk speeds.

Replace the Hard Drive

Unplug the external hard disk and turn the laptop upside down.
This process depends a lot on the model, but from my Inspiron 1501, there's just two screws and they're "labeled" with a hard drive symbol.
Slide out the old drive, put in the new one.

Restore the Vista Backup Image

This step took me a few tries to get it right, but as best as I can remember, these were the steps I used. Originally when I started this project, I had intended to install Linux first and then put Vista on after-the-fact. As it turns out, something in the Vista bootloader did not like being installed to a different partition number. After several frustrating hours, I went to plan B described here.

Insert the Clonezilla boot CD into the drive. Do NOT reattach the external hard drive yet.
Turn on the PC to boot into the Clonezilla software. Note that after install Kubuntu, you may need to change the BIOS settings on your PC to boot from CD-ROM before the hard disk.

A few questions will come up, asking what language and keyboard to use. Just select English.
Select device-image to use the disk-images functionality of this sofware.
Select “local_dev” to use the external hard drive.
It will prompt you to attach your USB device. At this point, you can plug in the external hard drive. You will see some data come across the screen as it loads the appropriate drivers. When it is finished, press Enter.
When asked to mount a device as /home/partimag, you need to decide which device listed is the external drive. Usually it will be last in the sdX series (such as sdb), since it was last to be attached. Often the description shown will be a clue that it is an external drive.
Select the same directory that you did at the beginning. This is where the image was stored on the disk drive.
Select Expert mode. I'm not totally sure if I wound up changing anything in here or not, but you'll get a much clearer picture of what your options are by using this mode.
Select the option to restoreparts. We want to restore our image to a specific partition on the new disk.

A listing of images on the external drive will appear. Select the one that you just created.

This is the point which I'm not totally sure about – I think after I inserted the blank hard drive into the system, I had the option to recover all of the partitions from the image that was created. While this wasn't my original intention (since there were two other useless partitions that I didn't need to waste disk space on). As I said before, until I installed Vista back to sda3, there was no way that I was able to get it to boot. Instead it just sat at a black screen with a cursor blinking in the corner.

One way or anther, I was able to recover the disk partition structure from my partimage. It was in the menus somewhere, I just can't find it right now. When the list of eligible partitions to restore to comes up, select the same partition that the Vista image came from. We'll take care of resizing it later.
The next screen will list lots of miscellaneous options that you can tweak. I believe that I left these all as default, although I did play with some of them before I got a combination that worked.
The next screen asks if you'd like to create a partition table. I believe that I had already recreated mine by this point, so I chose the -k option to NOT create a partition table.
I had Clonezilla do nothing after I was finished.
Next it will prompt you twice if you're really sure that you want to do this.
It should take less time to restore the image than it did to gather it, but still plan on about an hour.
After the restore finishes, remove the CD-ROM and reboot. If everything has gone well, it should boot into your original Vista installation, just as you last left it!
Shut down the PC.

Install Kubuntu

Kubuntu installed from the Live CD is very simple to do, and is nearly impossible to mess up. The only tricky part to this is if you're wanting to expand the size of the Vista installation (like I wanted to). When you get to the section where you create the installation partitions, you'll need to select the option to configure it manually, being sure to put Kubuntu at the end of the disk.

Insert the Kubuntu DVD into the drive and boot the PC.

When you get to the option to Prepare Disk Space, be sure you change from the default to Specify partitions manually (advanced).
Select the hard disk (usually something like sda). Click New partition table.
You should see some free space show up after your Vista partition(s). Select the free space, and click New partition.
Start by creating a partition for the Swap Space. I did a 8192MB area at the end of the space, containing the Swap Area.
Next I created the main (root /) partition. Logical, 100GB, at the end, Ext3 file system, and the root (/) for the mount point.
Finish the installation, which only takes about 20 minutes.
As part of the install, it should automatically recognize the Vista installation. When you reboot, you should have a Grub bootloader with options for Vista and Kubuntu.
Be sure to test the boot-ability of both Windows and Linux to make sure they're both working.

Expand the Vista Partition

Vista is my main operating system with the tools that I need to do my job. To give me some more breathing room, I left about 100GB of free space between my restored Vista installation and the newly installed Kubuntu install. Now it's time to put that free space to good use.

Shut the PC down and again insert the Kubuntu DVD into the drive. Boot the PC and enter the Kubuntu Live environment.

Once you get to a desktop, open up a console window. Look under the K button, Applications, System, Console.
Begin by expanding the partition size (not the same as the formatted size) of the NTFS (Vista) partition. Type sudo fdisk /dev/sda, or whatever your primary drive is called.
Press 'p' to display the current partition table. If you've done everything correctly, you should see your NTFS partition, and its associated starting and ending positions. The next partition should start somewhere well after the NTFS partition's End. This is the free space that we want to use.
Press 'd' to delete the partition table entry (we're not destroying data, just recreating the partition geometry to be a larger size. Enter the partition number of the NTFS partition. Mine was sda3.
Now do 'n' to create a new partition.
Select the option for a Primary partition.
It should automatically find the same number as you had before. If necessary, override it to be the correct number.
The default Start and End numbers should both be correct. Just make sure your Start is the same as it was before, and that the End is bigger than it was before.
Press 't' to change the Type of partition.
Enter the partition number that you want to modify, again 3 for my system.
When it prompts you what to change the type to, enter 7 for HPFS/NTFS types.
Toggle the bootable flag by pressing 'a', and again selecting your Vista partition.
When you're done, you can press 'p' again to display your changes.
Once you're satisfied, press 'w' to write the changes to disk.
You will now need to reboot your system for the changes to fully take affect. If the Kubuntu DVD ejects itself, be sure to push it back in so that it will again boot into the Live CD.

At this point, you've resized the partition, but Windows is still only using as much as it was originally sized for. Next we'll effectively do a non-destructive reformat of the disk.

Once you get to a desktop, open up a console window. Look under the K button, Applications, System, Console.
Test the resize by typing sudo ntfsresize -i /dev/sda3, where sda3 is replaced with your NTFS partition.
This will run some tests against the disk, let you know if it's in a consistent condition to perform the resize, and also let you know what the maximum size will be.
Assuming that the test returns successful, you can begin the resize by doing sudo ntfsresize -s 170384M /dev/sda3. The 170384M number comes from the maximum size that the parition will hold (according to the test). I took the size reported, and subtracted 1MB from it, just in case there was some rounding errors that might bite me. And finally, the /dev/sda3 is my parition.
This process will only take a minute or so. At this point, it's time to reboot into Vista again.
As part of the ntfsresize, it has flagged the disk to have chkdsk run against it the next time Windows is booted. Let the chkdsk run. It will have you reboot when it's finished.
Reboot into Vista.
Once you log in, you should be able to see your full disk!
You should still be able to boot into Kubuntu also!

You've now just upgraded your hard disk to a larger size, enlarged your Vista partition, and setup a dual boot with Kubuntu Linux!

Great Plains Super Launch 2009

2009-07-19T09:34:00.013-05:00

Thursday
Paul Verhage, KD4STH hosted the GPSL this year in Topeka, KS at the Kaw Area Technical School (KATS). In all, I believe that we had about 10 balloons launched on Saturday morning, and there were attendees from at least eight states plus a couple from Canada.

This was the first year that we were able to do a tour on Thursday prior to the main event, this year at Garmin. Unfortunately, there were no photos allowed during the tour, but it was cool nonetheless.

The group as a whole had about 45 minutes of interaction time with a couple of software engineers from Garmin to ask questions and get a better feel for the direction that the company was going. Afterward, they broke us into smaller groups and showed us the manufacturing (avionics) and R&D areas. We also got a short side-trip over to the G1000 flat-panel avionics support area for a hands-on demo.

Thursday evening was completed with a screening of the movie BLAST at the KATS conference center.

Friday
Friday was of course filled with short presentations from a number of the groups. I took a few photos from the event.

Here Paul was showing his high altitude chamber. Depending on the seal of the chamber (he has three different ones here), he can achieve a vacuum equivalent to 80k-100k feet.

Paul had a Van de Graff generator toy that causes a lite piece of foil (think Christmas tree tinsel) to levitate. I've got to find me one of these.

Bill Brown has been very active lately developing small and disposable tracking systems. Here he is showing one of his newest 6m designs.

Several anti-tree systems were shown and discussed for removing payloads from the top of a tree. As far as the coolness factor goes, this "potato gun" was near the top of the list for launching a tennis ball with a fishing line attached to the back side. This one was actually used on Michigan's payload Saturday morning.

Saturday
It was decided to launch from the KATS parking lot, three blocks from the hotels. Groups started arriving by 6:30am, and the first batch lifted off about 7:40am.

The Northwest Technical Institute (NIT) had an impressive setup for transporting Helium in the back of a truck. The wood rack and cargo straps seemed to hold everything very secure.

Here the NIT and ORB groups are inflating their balloons.

A student from the Minnesota Space Grant Consortium preps her capsule before take off.

EOSS was well prepared and organized as usual. They now break into two teams - a balloon inflation team and a capsule preparation team. The payload is only attached to the balloon after all checks are in place.

Paul with Nearsys begins the prepping of his payload prior to inflating the balloon.

EOSS was the first group ready, and the first group to launch. The air was calm enough that only one group used lanyards at all. Everyone else stood their balloons up, and just released.

Here Paul is making the final preparations before releasing.

Seen here is NSTAR's flight (left) and two UTARC balloons (right) just after release.

I managed to get dubbed the "Launch Meister" after volunteering to do launch coordination with Forbes Field, which was only a few miles away. Even though I was chasing Paul's balloon (Nearys) which launched in the first group, we did not leave for about 30 minutes after the inital launch since I was responsible for clearing the other groups into the air. Then, I hadn't planned our escape route very well out of Topeka, and wound up doing some backtracking.

Crys and I made it to Garnett, KS less than 5 minutes after touchdown, using some new software that I had developed to track the balloons. All worked pretty well until we went to retrieve Paul's capsule.

We drove to the location on the edge of town where it had landed, and actually started getting new packets from the tracker. That was a good sign, except that now it showed the capsule in a different location. So we drove back into town. We were just coming up on the updated location, when we got another beacon from it, and what do you know but it was now in a differently location yet!

At this point, I was getting frustrated with Crys for leading me on a wild goose chase, while in my mind I was trying to figure out if the problem was with my tracking software, Crys's eyes, or Paul's GPS.

I finally gave up and went to help the Michigan group pull their payload out of a tree (we had spotted it from the road during all of these excursions), because at least we knew where that was, and it wasn't going to move on us.

It took about an hour or more to shoot a rope up through the tree. In the end, someone wound up crawling up the tree high enough to get a hold of the capsule and drag it down. Unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera down for this event.

All payloads were retrieved except for ARBONET, which the last I heard thought that they'd had a complete power-supply failure, and therefore was not transmitting any RF. On top of that, they felt that they had ascended at 500'/min, which put their predicted landing sites 20-40 miles further down range from the rest of the group.

Lunch was held at Pizza Hut in Garnett, which our large group quickly overwhelmed. They managed to get food out reasonably fast. Dinner on Saturday evening was back in Topeka at the Cracker Barrel, which could handle our group much better, although the ~50 of use still got spread out.

I did finally figure out the issue with tracking Paul's payload after touchdown during dinner Saturday night. Apparently, his capsule narrowly missed a tree and tell within 10 feet of the owner of a house. The owner picked up the payload, put it in the back of his pick-up, and then called Paul on his cell phone. For whatever reason (to be helpful maybe?), the guy then drove the payload into town and then back to the house where they finally met up with Paul.

Next year's GPSL location is still being discussed, but so far the Dallas/Palestine/Sulphur Springs, TX area is being heavily discussed. Watch the GPSL website for more updates.

Ham Radio installation in 2005 Jeep Grand Cherokee

2009-05-15T19:09:00.008-05:00

I finally traded in the mini-van for something a little more fun. The one thing that I was very scared of was the space (or lack thereof) in the Jeep compared to the older Grand Caravan that I used to drive. I had custom built a center console on the Caravan, and it could hold practically as many radios as I could afford. The Jeep, on the other hand, was another story.

I reluctantly decided to nix the idea of putting HF in this vehicle. I've found that I just don't use it that often, I didn't have room for the radio, and I especially didn't have room to store several Ham Stick HF antennas in the back (like I did in the Caravan). So that left me with a much more manageable problem of where to put my Alinco DR-620 dual band rig, which fortunately for me, included a detachable/remotable face.

In my Grand Cherokee, I decided to mount the radio's head in what used to be a small cubby hole in the front dash. Once I had decided where to mount the head, I started the install by getting through the firewall.

I pulled the plate from the under side of the dash (just under the steering wheel) and started looking for a clear area. In the past, I've had some luck at utilizing an existing grommet that had been placed, but not used - presumable it was for a feature that didn't come with my make/model. There was no such luck this time, and I wound up drilling. The best spot that I could find due to the brake's master cylinder and associated plumbing was just under the accelerator feed.

The round thing on the left is the steering column, and the bar on the right, is the accelerator pedal.

Here you can see the hole from the engine side. The hole is right in the middle of the photo.

I decided to use my lip-mount dual band antenna that I already owned to mount on the hood of the Cherokee. Through the hole, I ran both the power and an RG-142 teflon coax between the passenger compartment and the engine compartment. Using tie-wraps, I kept the cables tied in position to reduce vibration stresses and failures.

The power cable is a molded (zip style) 14 gauge power cord purchased from PowerWerx.com. Although technically the ground could be picked up through the chassis at the radio, and you'd only have to run a power cable, that is not a good idea.

By running the pair all the way back to the battery, you minimize your radiated EMI because of the close spacing between the conductors - I've found this to be very critical on modern computerized vehicles.

Once I had the cables in the engine compartment, I went back inside and started fishing them through the interior. The drivers side seat is electrically powered, but there was still enough room at the front to mount the body of the radio under it. Routing the power and coax actually turned out to be one of the easier tasks - I just lifted up the edge of the center console and slipped them up under the plastic. I had already taken the cover off of the gear selector, so I was reasonably confident that there wasn't any critical or sensitive wiring under there.

The most difficult part was getting the console apart far enough to route my cable from Alinco's separation kit. To do this, I took the gear shifter covers apart, and then pulled the front console's plate back away from the console.

I drilled a 1/2 inch hole in the top side of the cubby hole. This is where the separation cable is routed.

While I was in here, I picked up +12V from the switched cigarette lighter plug. I don't actually pull any significant current from this plug, but instead I use it to drive a relay. That way I can switch off all of my radios (which are powered directly from the batter), any time the ignition key is switched off. I wrote up my wiring concept years ago and can be found on the RCKARA website. Note, I no longer use the "Accessory Line (from stereo)" as the schematics point out - instead I use this cigarette lighter power.

My five year old daughter started helping me at about this point. A smile means things are starting to come together...

Under the seat, I screwed a piece of aluminum angle directly into the floor, which happened to be a flat plastic vent.

The radio rests on the floor under the drivers seat, with the speaker pointed up. There is more than enough audio in this configuration.

The face of the radio is mounted to a couple of blocks of wood, by using the mounting bracket that is supplied as part of the separation kit. I cut two blocks of wood, and painted the forward one black for fear that you might have been able to see it sticking out from behind the radio face. The rear block was beveled up at 25 degrees inclination to make the screen easier to read while driving. I screwed the two blocks together with a pair of counter-sunk screws, then attached the included Alinco mounting bracket to the front wood piece using a couple more screws.

I drilled a hold big enough to pass the RJ-11 connector for the separation cable through the bracket, and after some trial-fitting and trimming, I was ready to install the mounting bracket.

All that was needed was some heavy-duty Velcro fastener. The Heavy Duty stuff that you can find at the hardware store works wonders - just expect to pay $3-$4 per foot for the stuff. Anything cheaper will come loose, so don't waste your time. I put a light coat of polyurethane on the back edge of the rear wood block to help the sticky Velro stick better.

Here's the wood mounting bracket installed in the cubby hole, and ready to have the plastic bracket installed for final assembly.

Once all of the cables inside the vehicle were terminated and secured, it was time to go back into the engine compartment to attach the antenna, and put the circuit breaker in at the battery. Here you can see the 15A breaker sitting on top of the battery, and the black negative lead attached directly to the negative post.

Now it's time for the smoke test! No smoke this time. The install looks good and clean, and I haven't noticed any EMI-related quirks when transmitting.

Here's the completed installation, ready for our first road trip. The dual-band antenna is the one on the right (drivers side).

Low-budget Lighting Analysis

2009-03-23T12:11:00.012-05:00

I've recently been researching the aquarium and plant-growth lights for my wife's saltwater aquarium. There are plenty of acronyms and differing opinions out there to keep a person studying for many months, but I've decided to start collecting the basic equipment necessary to take my own measurements and do quantitative analysis on various equipment.

First of all, a little background information. Carl Strohmeyer actively maintains a great web page that is good at educating a person about the factors involved in comparing lights and lighting systems. I have no intentions of reproducing that information, and at this point can only accept most of what he says as fact. His information can be found at http://www.americanaquariumproducts.com/Aquarium_Lighting.html.

So far, my research has been geared towards comparing light systems that I have access to, with the ultimate goal of reducing my electric bill. To compare systems, the first piece of equipment that is needed is a spectrometer. My first spectrometer was built myself using nothing more than an old CD-ROM disc and a cardboard box. A similar example can be found at http://blizzard.rwic.und.edu/~nordlie/spec/. After some tweaking, it didn't turn out too bad.

I did some checking around, and found a "Precision Economy Spectrometer" from Edmunds Scientific for about $40 bucks. This is the unit that I'm currently using. It has the advantage that it comes with a (albeit crude) calibration card.

You can visually peer through the eye-piece as-is, but I wanted to maintain documentation from my sample subjects, so I rigged up my point-and-shoot digital camera to the eye-piece.

As you can see from the photos, my jig is very crude, but gets the job done for less than $50, not including the camera. Basically, it's a scrap piece of plywood for the base, and then I used some card board to space the spectrometer so that it's at the same level as the camera. A couple of large rubber bands holds everything in place. I chose not to glue or otherwise permanently attach the spectrometer, because at least with my Canon camera, the lens extends from the camera varying amounts depending on the zoom level. The rubber bands allows stuff to give if I zoom too far.

The camera is simply lined up with the eye-piece on the spectrometer. I used a couple of layers of card board to lift the instrument up to be level with the camera's lens.

The camera bolts to the plywood with a standard 1/4-20 tripod bolt. I haven't done it yet, but I intend to put a 1/4-20 nut into the plywood itself so that I can mount the whole unit on a tripod. My exposures tend to be on the order of 1 second, so it's hard to get a shot that isn't at least a bit blurry.

It's hard to see, but there's the faint outline from the spectrometer's calibration tape on the camera screen. When taking photos, be sure it's reasonably dark in the room, other than the light under measurement. Also, be sure that the flash on the camera is disabled.

Here are a few photos that I've shot of spectrums. The numbers aren't necessarily exact (it's been a while since I've calibrated it) but they're close.

This is from the Coralife PC Actinic bubs. You can see lots of output in the bluer spectrum.

This is the output from a 10k Coralife PC bulb. It has a much broader spectrum to it - more like a full-range sunlight spectrum. There are at least four definite peaks in the red, green, and blue parts of the spectrum which correlate with a plants absorption ranges.

This photo is from a 50/50 10k and Actinic bulb in a T5 fixture. You can see very specific outputs in the red, green, and blue ranges.

This output is from a florescent bulb in a cheap shop light fixture. Again, it has a very broad output, but much of the output is wasted in ranges other than what plants need.

A second piece of equipment necessary for comparing light output is a light or LUX meter. I chose a Mustech 5 in 1 digital multimeter which can be found on Amazon.com. The purpose of this device is for comparing light output, in Lumen.

I haven't done as much tinkering with this as the spectrometer. I can say that my wife's old Coralife fixture with three 54W bulbs was outputting about 550 Lux at 1 meter. Those bulbs had been in there for about a year, and consisted of one daylight bulb, and two actinic bulbs. (The fourth four-pin socket caught fire).

The new replacement hood consisted of two T5 high output 50/50 bulbs, with reflectors. It took a couple of minutes after turning on for the value to stabilize, but eventually settled in at just over 3000 Lux at 1 meter. The lights have been in production for about two weeks now, so I'll try to take a second reading after one month to compare their change.

This pretty well wraps up my lighting experiments so far. The end goal is to find the most economical way light the aquarium, while keeping the fish and corals (and therefor the wife) happy. It's of my opinion that LED's will eventually take over in the market, but they just aren't quite there in terms of cost and beam-width.

With enough data collected and shared in this fashion from a number of different technologies and manufacturers, the aquarium community should be able to make much more intelligent decisions in their lighting choices.

Kahr CW9 and the Kel-Tec PF-9

2009-03-22T21:07:00.004-05:00

I had the fortune to shoot a Kahr CW9, which is quite comparable (size-wise at least) to the Kel-Tec PF-9. The Kahr weighs in 17.7 ounces with the clip, which is five ounces heavier. Dimensionally, the guns are about the same size, just a little different shape. The Kahr is on top, the Kel-Tec is on bottom.

Shooting the Kahr was much more pleasant than the Kel-Tec (or the Ruger LCP for that matter). I think this is due to the somewhat longer grip, and the extra weight. I found the sights to be easy to read, and the gun accurate. I can't really comment on the grouping, since I only shot one or two clips worth.

I will say that the Kahr has a much better feel to it than the Kel-Tec. The recoil is is more manageable, but more importantly is the quality of machining. The obvious differences are that there is no seam in the plastic, and when you release the slide, it just feels better. The gun only had about a hundred rounds through it when I shot it, but everything was very smooth.

All in all, I liked the Kahr in terms of quality. It also was more comfortable to shoot. The extra weight is definately an issue for carrying, but could be partially mitigated by stepping up to the Kahr PM9.

Kel Tec PF-9 vs. Ruger LCP

2009-02-23T17:55:00.013-06:00

I've been casually looking for a concealed carry weapon for quite some time. There are quite a few choices out there in small guns, but many aren't necessarily light. Two of the smallest are the Kel Tec PF-9 (9mm) and the Ruger LCP (380 Auto).

I've only owned these for a matter of days, so I can't speak to their long-term reliability, but initial impressions are quite favorable for both.

First, the Ruger LCP. It is chambered in the 380 Auto, and the clip holds six rounds, with the potential to have a seventh round carried in the chamber. There are obviously two things going for this gun: it's a well-constructed name-brand gun, and it's one of the smallest guns available. If your jeans are the least bit baggy, you can easily conceal the gun in your front pocket. The Ruger weighs in at 9.4oz (empty).

At the range, I found the gun simple to shoot as there are no safeties. Rack the slide, pull the trigger, and it goes bang. I can barely get two of my fingers on the grip, and I had a hard time holding on during recoil. The gun was usually tipped up slightly in my hand after each shot. I put a couple of clips worth of ammo through it, and I soon became comfortable with more of a rapid fire.

The sight picture was the hardest thing for me to get used it. It was obviously made with small sights to keep from snagging on a holster, purse, or pocket lining. For any kind of target practice though, the LCP's sites are practically useless.

Note that on the photo above, the gun is actually all black, and the "white" half-circle at the top is just a reflection from the camera's flash. What you see is what you get - there's not much.

So far I have about 50 rounds of ammo through it with no jams or other extraction problems.

Next for the Kel Tec PF-9, chambered in a 9mm Luger. The PF-9 clip holds seven rounds, with the potential for the eighth in the chamber. As you'll see later, this is a somewhat larger gun, weighing in at 12.7oz (empty).

Just like the Ruger, and most other carry guns, there are no safeties on the Kel Tec. Rack the slide, pull the trigger, and it goes bang. With my large hands, I found the PF-9 more managable than the LCP, although they both snap pretty good.

The sight picture is much better than the Ruger's. You actually have three white dots, with more or less standard sized sights. With the little bit I've used the gun, I don't feel that the larger sights would be detrimental to its carry-ability.

It is quickly apparent that the quality of the Kel Tec is just not up the Ruger's standards. When you first examine a Kel Tec in the store, you'll notice that the seams in the plastic are pretty rough. This seems to just be a cosmetic issue, until you get out to the range.

Not only is there a seam on the frame, there's also one down the middle of the trigger. I found that it was quite abrasive on my trigger finger. I have noticed that Kel Tec offers a smooth trigger on their website for about $10 that would probably be well worth it. I plan on first trying a Dremel with a buffing wheel to see if I can clean up the edges myself.

I only have about 35 rounds through the Kel Tec, but so far have had no jams or extraction problems.

When you put the two guns side by side, the size difference quickly comes out. Neither are much larger than my wallet.

Here they are laying on top of each other.

Although it's not as pronounced in this photo, the Ruger is noticably thinner than the Kel Tec.

There is very little physical difference between the 380 Auto and 9mm Luger. The 9mm won't physically fit into the 380's clip, but the 380's will fit into the 9mm clip. Obviously I'm not suggesting that you even attempt to shoot the wrong cartridge in your gun, I'm just pointing out that if you're carrying both calibers to the range, BE CAREFUL! The 9mm is on the left, 380 is on the right.

At the range, I set an old 2500 page catalog up to shoot at. The pages are very thin, similar to a telephone directory. I basically fired three shots at the book. From top to bottom: a 22LR (CCI Mini Mag, from a Sig Mosquito), a 9mm, and a 380. You may notice a fourth hole near the top - it was a 9mm shot that came out the top of the book so I re-did it.

After a thousand pages, all holes are very apparent.

At two thousand pages, the 22LR and the 380 are starting to slow down. The 9mm shot(s) are still pushing through.

The 22LR Mini Mag stopped around page 2200. The 380 didn't make it as far, at only 2150 pages. Obviously the 380 made a much bigger hole. The 9mm pushed all the way through the 2500 pages, and was flattened out against the steel back-stop.

As I said, the 380 made a larger hole than the 22LR, although I should qualify that by saying that the 380 (below, right) was basically un-deformed, whereas the 22LR had fragmented into oblivion. The 9mm (below, left) mushroomed out to about quarter-sized. Note that none of these rounds were hollow point - all round-nosed.

By comparison, my .454 Cassull with 300 grain bullets completely destroyed the 2500 page catalog.. :-)

My wife has shot both guns and considers them managable (though she much prefers the 22LR). With the guns brand new and not yet broken in, she struggles with both of their slides, but the Ruger is noticably easier for her.

Both guns are double-action only devices, and consequently have long trigger pulls. I don't have a gauge, but the Kel Tec seems to be somewhat easier. Those who have shot both side-by-side agree that they like the Kel Tec's pull better.

Either gun will set you back about $350-$375 new. If you can handle the small size (that is you have small hands), then I'd probably go with the Ruger. If you're grip is larger, the Kel Tec is definitely my preference.

A Windows Vista Evangelist?

2009-01-25T19:20:00.005-06:00

I'm starting to become frustrated with the nay-sayers and Microsoft bashers who have been convinced that "M$" can do no right.

I had intended to buy a new Vista PC just as soon as they had come off the assembly line at the beginning of 2008. I was really excited about this new architecture and all of the promises that Microsoft had made.

Life and reality set in, but I did manage to purchase both a new desktop and laptop just prior to Service Pack 1 being released around March of 2008. By this time, I had used Vista for a few hours at work on a early pilot project that was quickly scrapped due to software compatability problems with some mission-critial apps. So, I already was familiar with some of the issues that I would be running into.

Looking back, I now feel fortunate that by the time I adopted Vista, many of the software apps or their installers had been modified or otherwised fixed to play better with the new OS. Furthermore, disabling the UAC was a well-documented and accepted fact of life by that point. I began the long and tedius chore of installing my dozens of applications, with hardly a glitch. Just for the record, these apps consist of both open source and comercial software such as Visual Studio 2005, Visual Basic 6.0, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, PDF995, UltraEdit, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, and many others.

Almost a year later, I have no regrets. There isn't a single app that I've been forced to live without. While there's a few things that Microsoft changed that I wish they would have left alone (like renaming Add/Remove Programs to Programs and Features), I actually find myself frustrated with features missing from XP machines. For example, I really like the way that Vista doesn't assume that I want to change the file extension when I go to rename a file.

I've even switched my PC at work over to 64bit Vista. That's been slightly more painful, and has caused me to upgrade a couple of applications for compatibility reasons. Print drivers proven to be the most frustrating part (in an otherwise 32bit network), but I'm getting by.

Stability wise, I consider Vista just as stable as my XP boxes were, and in fact have never seen any of my 3 Vista machines blue-screen or otherwise crash. Since I finished installing my apps initially, I've probably only rebooted my main PC a dozen times in the last nine months, because it just doesn't need it. (That being said, the machine does occasionally reboot itself in the night as needed for Windows Updates.)

So am I a Vista Evangelist? No, I don't consider myself to be one. I feel that Microsoft let us all down on the promises of a great new operating system that would be so much better, flashier, and more stable. It's just that I do whole-heartedly believe that for 90%+ of the population, Vista is a perfectly viable alternative for those faced with replacing their PC.

Open Source Spotlight - KeePass

2008-12-16T19:40:00.002-06:00

Like many of you, I have too many passwords to remember. Passwords for my online banking, my billpay, my blog... the list goes on. And like many of you, I was resorting to writing them down, reusing the same password over and over, and other bad ideas that aren't secure and will wind up getting you in trouble.

A couple of years ago I was introduced to KeePass. KeePass is what is known as a Password Safe. Basically it is a database of passwords that is encrypted and hidden behind it's own password. Only it's a little more user-friendly than just that.

It gives you a single place to categorize your passwords on your PC so that they can be found or even searched. It also gives you a place to keep other useful information like the URL to the site that you're logging into, your username, and a notes section where you can document all of your "security question and answers".

Not only is the database encrypted using must stronger techniques than a password protected Word document (I've cracked those in a matter of minutes), but it also has tools that can make your online life more secure. One of the best thing that you can do is have completely unique passwords on each site. KeePass makes this easy with a random password generator.

By selecting the parameters (length of password, upper case, lower case, numeric, etc...), it will generate a password and store if for you.

The password database can also help mitigate the risks of being infected with spyware/malware programs called key loggers. Key loggers are basically programs that capture anything you type in on the keyboard and send it to the "bad guys". With KeePass, entering a password on a site can be done with a couple of clicks of the mouse - no typing on the keyboard and it even flushes the password off of the computers clipboard after a few seconds so someone else can't stumble across it.

Like any piece of technology, it has it's drawbacks. With this, it is increasingly important to back up your data files on a very regular basis. Also, if you let it randomly generate your passwords, you become dependant on KeePass which can be frustrating if you're at a friend's house or otherwise don't have access to your KeePass file.

I give KeePass four out of five stars.

Advanced Halloween Construction Techniques

2008-11-30T20:52:00.007-06:00

I had been anxious to try my hand at some "cool" Halloween costumes since my now four year-old daughter was born. My aunt had made me and some of my cousins a series of costumes when we were kids - like airplanes, helicopters, robots, etc. Now it was my turn.

Using some model RC airplane techniques that I'd learned along the way, I set out to build a costume from corrugated cardboard. I wanted to build a replica of my all-time favorite plane, the Fairchild PT-19.

Here is a photo of a fine looking model of John Hooton's PT-19.

I started by taking measurement's of my my daughter, and sketched an airframe around that. I used old corrugated cardboard boxes to cut the pieces from, which mainly consisted of several formers, and a wrap-around fuselage.

After some careful bending, and plenty of carpenters glue, I had a 3-dimensional airframe taking shape.

I wanted the nose and tail to slope downwards, like a real plane does. I suppose that I could have mocked up the exact cuts using a paper model or even CAD, but I found it simple enough just to cut a triangle shape from the side of the fuse, and then glued the sides back together with a cardboard doubler on the inside. The final step was to trim the bottom side flush.

In the tail, I scrounged together some Styrofoam blocks to make the final former. Next, I cut the fail feathers out of cardboard. I cut one of each the horizontal and vertical stabs, and then used it as a template to cut a second. The pairs were glued together on top of each other to double their thickness, thereby adding strength.

Using the actual parts as a guide, I cut slits into the Styrofoam blocks in the rear of the fuse that my tail feathers would slide into. It was very important to have a nice tight fit, and to not cut ALL the way through the Styrofoam block, so that it retained some of it's inherent strength. The block gave me plenty of gluing area, and I used Gorilla Glue to secure them in place.

To build the wings, I first cut a single piece of cardboard to the size and shape. Using that as a template, I cut three more corrugated wings. I bought a 4x8 sheet of pink Strofoam from a big-box home improvement store. Note, I used the denser pink board as opposed to the white bead board.

I peeled the plastic backing off of both sides of the foam (that backing is one of the few things that I've found that Gorilla Glue won't stick to - I saved mine for later as I needed to keep the wings from being glued to the fuselage). I smeared the glue all over the cardboard wings, and very carefully laminated the foam with cardboard on either side. I had pretty good luck having the top and bottom line up. After it dried, I cut the excess foam away from the cardboard, and wound up with two extremely strong wings.

Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of the mechanics of the wings, but I took one of those ~6 foot fiberglass rods from the home improvement store (I think they're used for marking your drive way for the snow plow), and cut it in half. I drilled holes through either side of the fuse, and threaded the rods across - one in front and one behind the pilot. This gave the wings something solid to lay on, but was still narrow enough that it would fit through most doorways.

Because there's no way that the wings would make it through doorways, I bought a couple pairs of cabinet hinges and glued them onto the edge of the wing. Some 3 inch drywall screws along with plenty of Gorilla Glue made a good attachment point. I then propped the wings in place, and glued the other side of the hinge to the side of the fuselage. I used some of that plastic film from the Styrofoam board to keep everything from sticking together. Now, when it came time to get through a narrow area, the wings could be pulled up to a vertical position, and the costume was only about 30 inches wide.

Once the glue was dry and I knew exactly where the hinge needed to be, I was able to drill through the fuse and, using some scraps of aluminum sheet metal, I bolted the hinges to the fuselage.

It was time for a test flight!

I spent the next several nights putting drywall primer and latex paint of the rought fuselage. Admittedly, I got a little lazy, cheap, and quite frankly, short on time, and just painted blue and yellow. It took several coats brushed on rather heavily to cover.

I ordered a geared motor from All Electronics and bolted it to the front of the fuselage. I used some more cardboard for the propeller, and with a handful of odd parts from the hardware store, I glued the prop onto the motor shaft.

Next, I glued a green LED on the right wing tip, and a red LED on the left wing tip. I also put a red LED on the top of the vertical stablizer. I just used some old flat telephone wiring to supply power, and wound up using Gorilla tape to hold the wiring in place. I wired up a little 555 IC timer to make the tail blink on and off. An old 7.2V NiMH battery pack that I had laying around supplied power, and I put some old toggle switches on the control panel so that the pilot could switch the motor and lights on.

Finally, I used some fairly wide nylon webbing material from the hardware store and wrapped either side around those fiberglass rods fore and aft of the pilot. This served as the "seat belt", which really let the plane rest on her shoulders. I doubled the strap back onto itself, and secured it with a pair of heavy-duty safety pins so that I could adjust the length easily.

A trip down the the local space museum scored us a military flight suit to complete the outfit.

All in all it was a great costume. Coming in at over 11 pounds, it was quite heavy for a 4 year old, but she managed long enough to wow her friends, her classmates, and the judges at the costume contest at the local mall. Next time I would focus more heavily on the weight. I could have easily put lightening holes in the formers. Also, I would have used thinner foam in the wings. Size was also a larger factor than I had anticipated. The folding wings worked well, but it was awkward to maneuver in, and it ALMOST didn't fit into the van.

November Sweepstakes Ham Radio Contest

2008-11-16T17:36:00.005-06:00

I'm just finished up another year of Sweepstakes. I don't really recall how many years I've been doing this, but after 10 years of marriage, my wife knows that there is one weekend a year that I am just not available - and she's a really good sport about it...

Once again I came up just shy of a clean sweep, with 68 of the 80 possible sections, 173 contacts, and a claimed score of 23528. I missed the usuals again - Newfoundland (NL), Quebec (QC), Manitoba (MB), and Alaska (AK). For some reason this year, it seemed tougher to some of the staples, like California for example. I didn't pick up Santa Barbara until the last 3 hours of the contest!

Last year I spent quite a bit more quality time in the contest. This year I did a lot of side projects like fixing a bug on a website, and cleaning out my inbox. I spent some time cruising eBay, as this contest again put me in the mood to upgrade my old faithful Kenwood TS-430S that I've owned for about 15 years. Those new computer-controlled satellite-capable rigs with DSP in the IF stages sure look tempting.

I think the thing that I really miss most from years past is having a choice between vertically and horizontally polarized antennas. I noted years ago at a previous house/antenna installation, that it didn't really matter what your antennas were, so long as you had a choice. Many times a station that was weak on the tri-bander, would suddenly pop up a couple of S-units just by switching to a vertical. Some day I need to figure out how to put up a dipole or beam at the new house without electrocuting myself.

The other item that I feel compelled to get worked out is a better recording/playback setup. I used pre-recorded WAV files with my callsign, and the static part of my exchange. This significantly reduced my operating fatigue, but I doubt my transmissions sounded very seamless (which is a pet peeve of my own).

My logging PC (Vista Ultimate) is finicky at best when setting the recording level of the microphone. That made it frustrating to configure, plus I wasn't using my normal (Heil) communications microphone to do the recordings. I made an educated guess at some equalization settings and applied it with the open-source Audacity project, but I really needed a second receiver recording my audio so that I can tweak the EQ.

Maybe next year...
73's de W0ZC

Unable to install some components of Microsoft Money

2008-11-08T13:55:00.003-06:00

I've been trying off and on to get Microsoft Money to install on my Vista Ultimate desktop for nearly a year. I started with MS Money 2007 Home and Business edition. I didn't keep any documentation of the actual error, but the point is, it wouldn't install completely. I had a case open with Microsoft, but they were going no where with it and after finding that Money would install on my then new laptop (Vista Home Premium), I gave up on my desktop.

I grew tired of digging up the laptop every time I wanted to send out bills, so I naively purchased the latest version of Money Plus thinking that the bug would have been fixed. (For some reason Microsoft just started calling them all Money Plus – my version is 17.0.150.1415, whatever that means.)

I shelled out my money, downloaded it, and behold, another error message: Setup was unable to install some of the components needed to run Money. Try installing Money again.

Aparently this is a rather common error message to get, as Google returned lots of hits.

Before I go any further, I need to disclose that these steps could have unintended consequences, and you should proceed only with caution and a recent backup. You've been warned.

My first thought was that the old version was still partially hanging around, and needed to be deleted. Microsoft conveniently posted instructions in their Knowledge Base Article 895866 of how to manually remove their software. In short, you do an uninstall of the software, then delete any trace of files from the C:\Program Files\ and from C:\Users\. Finally, you download a Windows Installer CleanUp utility from their site and wallah, it's removed. But alas, no joy.

Next I read that it must some obscure security setting that got messed up. Microsoft has a KB Article 313222 that explains how to reset my security settings back to their defaults. For Vista, you fire up a command prompt and run the following command:

secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose

According to the KB article, it is normal for it to through an error message, but to be assured that it did its magic.

I really don't know what settings the above command reset for me, but it didn't help my situation. I haven't yet found any repercussions from it though either.By this time, I was pretty frustrated and it was time to call Microsoft. Only that's easier said than done if you don't have your product key (which is found in Help-About Microsoft Money). Obviously, if you can't install the program, you can't get to the Help menu.

The first heavily accented rep that spoke with insisted that I must have a Product ID, got frustrated, and transferred me to “Roxie”. Again she insisted that I have a Product ID, but finally agreed that maybe she should look up my recent purchased that I'd made an hour before on their own website. “Roxie” took me back through the above steps that I'd told her I'd already done, quickly gave up and transferred me to a fellow with a very American sounding name, “Joe”.

“Joe” and I had our own difficulties communicating, but after an hour, he agreed to email me the steps to reset permissions on all of my files and directories.

First “Joe” had me download a tool called Subinacl from Microsoft's Website http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=23418, which I installed.

Next, I created a .CMD file in my text editor with the following contents:

cd /d "%programfiles%\windows resource kits\tools"

subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subdirectories %SystemDrive% /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subdirectories %windir%\*.* /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %SystemDrive% /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %windir%\*.* /grant=system=f

I saved this as “fix_registry_permissions.cmd” per his recommendations. Why I couldn't call it “fix.cmd”, I fail to understand.

Finally, I right-clicked the new .CMD file and selected “Run as Administrator”. This took quite a while to run. I watched it for about four minutes – you should see a DOS box pop up, and it will have a red bar across the top as it runs. At this point, I went to bed. I'm not sure how long it wound up taking.

Well the good news was that “Joe's” commands allowed me to install Microsoft Money, and it worked just fine. The bad news came after I rebooted.

Fortunately for me, I rebooted that same night while this was fresh in my mind. Usually my PC will go weeks if not months without restarting (yes, even Vista is that stable). After rebooting, I noticed things were odd, like I got some strange error when trying to run an installer file, my LAN connection in the Systray was reporting “Connection Status: Unknown, There's not enough storage to complete this operation”, and my audio icon had a red X across it.

Back to Google for answers, and I quickly found a forum with my problems described to a tee. A few posts down and I had my answer. Assuming that you're running Vista Business or Ultimate, you can use the GUI to do the following.

Click on the Start button
Right-click on Computer, and select Manage.
Expand the Local Users and Groups.
Click on Groups.
Double-click the Administrators group.

At this point, you will probably see the Members listed in the middle as Administrator and then possibly your name.

Click Add to bring up the Select Users window.
Click Advanced.
Click Find Now.
Double-click on the item LOCAL SERVICE
Click OK

You should see that it added the NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE account to the Administrators group. Now repeat the process to add the NETWORK SERVICES account to administrators.

Click Add to bring up the Select Users window.
Click Advanced.
Click Find Now.
Double-click on the item NETWORK SERVICES
Click OK

You Administrators group should look something like this:

If you're running one of the more limited versions of Vista, you'll instead have to make these changes manually from the command prompt, as Microsoft didn't include the Local Users and Groups snap-in with these editions.

net localgroup Administrators Local Service /ADD
net localgroup Administrators Network Services /ADD

Once the changes have been made, reboot the computer, and it will probably come back up normally.

And that's it, my computer is pretty much back to normal with Microsoft Money Plus installed. I have some reservations about adding the two accounts to my Administrators group, as my laptop which has been untouched doesn't seem to have them. If someone has a better or more secure way of fixing the problems initiated by Subinacl, I'm all ears.

Repairing the finals in an Alinco DR-150

2008-09-18T15:12:00.003-05:00

Several years ago I replaced the “finals” in an older 2m ham transceiver. As I recall, it was fairly obvious that it was the finals that were shot, so I ordered a replacement, slipped them in, and the radio went back out the door. After it left, I noticed that the output module had a removable cover, curiosity got the best of me and I took it off. Under the cover with a circuit board of sorts with several discreet components soldered together and basically mounted to a heat sink. As I got to looking, it appeared that there was a hair-line crack in one of the traces. It made me wonder…

Skip ahead about five years and I put a surplus 2m rig in my wife’s car. I got the installation all buttoned up, keyed up the repeater but couldn’t get anyone to respond to me. A little checking and it showed the classic signs of burned up finals - barely kerchuck the repeater, but not readable on the other end. A watt meter confirmed my suspicions, but I noticed that the first time I keyed up (i.e. when it was good and cool), I got about 20 watts out for a few seconds.

I brought it back inside, and cracked the top and bottom covers. I found a familiar looking Toshiba S-AV17 power module in the back.

I’d been curious to know if that old rig just had a hairline crack or if it was more serious than that, but since it had already been repaired and returned, I’d never had the chance to find out. This time however, I popped the cover first. Initially, I didn’t see the problem, although it was fairly obvious. Since I knew I had a heat-related problem, I shot a bit of circuit cooler on the module to see if that would “fix” it. What I noticed was the frost from the cooler causing a red glow at the bottom. Sure enough, I had another crack in a trace.

The repair in the photo looks a little crude. This was my first attempt with a 15 watt iron, which I found to be pitifully inadequate since I was quite literally soldering a heat-sink. But, the fix worked.

I cleaned up the joint a little bit with a larger iron, and re-installed the rig in the car. I've only been using it sparsely for a few weeks now, but so far, so good.

Coralife Aquarium Lighting

2008-09-18T15:12:00.001-05:00

A few years ago I bought my wife a Coralife light fixture for her salt water aquarium. It’s a four-bulb fixture, intended for a pair of Actinic lights, and a pair of daylight balanced (she runs 10k’s). The first year or two, it ran fine, although she never replaced the bulbs.

About two years ago, we started having problems with the lights not coming on, and from the looks of these four-conductor plugs, I assumed that it was corrosion. It took a while, but I was finally able to pry the bulb off of the connector with a blade screw driver, but in the process, I destroyed one or two bulbs. The pins from the bulb were so corroded that they broke right off. This obviously was no good.

I did some asking around, but didn’t really like any of the answers I got, so after re-investing in a new set of bulbs, I set out to try to stop this corrosion.

What I decided to try was some Silicone Grease that I purchased at the automotive store. They call it Spark Plug Grease or Dielectric Grease. About a year ago I replaced two of the four bulbs. After removing the old ones, I cleaned up the plug with an acid brush (although a pipe cleaner would have worked better I think). I squeazed some grease into the plug, and put a good healthy lather on the pins coming out of the bulb.

When I plugged the bulb in, I was careful to make sure that the plug was on as far as I could get it. Not only that, I also made sure that the metal contacts were not exposed to the (salty) air, but were instead all gooped up in grease.

So now, a year later, how has it gone? Well, overall pretty good. This time when I went to change the bulbs, I had very little problem disconnecting the pair that had been cleaned and greased. The un-greased pair was more difficult to remove. Also, you can sort of see in the photo below the difference between a bulb that had grease applied (top) versus one that didn’t have any grease. It’s hard to see, but the top one is more yellow or brassy colored. The bottom one is more reddish-orange from the corrosion.

The only bad news is that on one of the plugs that was greased, it appears that the plug got very hot and actually melted the side of the plug away. At this point, I don’t believe that it was directly related to the grease, although I’m not ruling out the possibility yet. Of the eight pins that were greased (four pins times two bulbs), only one pair had this heat damage. The other six were in good condition.

Below is a photo of the newly greased plug on the right, and on the left is the bulb with a bad plug. The green you see is the bare copper wire that had corroded. This plug will have to be replaced.

Welcome to my blog

2008-09-18T15:12:00.000-05:00

I’ve been wanting to try blogging for quite some time, and I’ve finally decided to jump in. You’ll probably find a of everything in here, but most of it related to computers, electronics, and probably bit of flying.

As a full-time IT guy, and a consultant on the side, I find myself constantly searching the web for solutions to my problems. I’ve gained so much from other people’s experiences that they’ve shared, I occasionally find that I want to share my own. Given the broad spectrum of my projects and hobbies, I couldn’t come up with a single better place to put them then just this…

So without further ado, here goes nothing!