Elias Saba’s Blog

The website foundation.biz just went live with their redesign. It looks great except for one tiny element. Something just seems wrong about floating a button on top of someones nose. Above the face makes more sense to me.

Microsoft is bragging that Xbox 360 sales are still accelerating 6 years into its life-cycle. Well no shit, Sherlock. That’s what happens when you release a $150 accessory instead of a new console because the country is in a recession.

Don’t get me wrong, the Kinect is fantastic as is the Xbox 360. However, it’s on the verge of insulting to boast about “changing the tail” of a consoles life cycle when they’re squeezing every last bit of life out of a dying horse and holding the entire industry back in the process. The Xbox 360′s weaker processor with fewer cores is hurting both PC and PS3 gaming. Nintendo is on the verge of lapping Microsoft with their soon to be revealed Project Cafe. When it’s released next year the gaming industry will continue to code for the lowest common denominator, the Xbox 360. Had Nintendo introduced the Wii motion controller as an accessory to the GameCube they would have been able to claim a similar historical tail-changing feet, but thankfully they didn’t. Nintendo got away with releasing a weak console because they introduced a new genre with motion gaming. That isn’t the case with the Kinect. The industry reacted to the Wii by segregating them from block buster titles. The Xbox 360 is too big of a player for the same to happen again and the industry will suffer as a result.

I just came across this little quirk in Internet Explorer.

I have a page with two frames in a frameset that looks like this:

<frameset rows=”50%, 50%,” border=”0″ frameborder=”0″ framespacing=”0″>
     <frame border=”0″ frameborder=”0″ name=”firstFrame” src=”http://one.com”></frame>
     <frame border=”0″ frameborder=”0″ name=”secondFrame” src=”http://www.two.com”></frame>
</frameset>

Inside the first frame I have a javascript function which creates a new frame in the parent and appends it. That function looks like this:

function addFrame(){
     var newFrame = parent.document.createElement(“frame”);
     newFrame.name = “thirdFrame”;
     newFrame.src=”http://www.three.com”;
     parent.document.body.appendChild(newFrame);
     parent.document.body.rows=”34%,33%,33%”;
}

That function worked perfectly in Firefox 3.6.15, Chrome 10.0.648.133, and Safari 5.0.4. However, it did not work in Internet Explorer 8. The problem is with the last two lines of the function. In IE, you need to first “make room” for the new frame before appending it. So the corrected function has the last two lines flipped and looks like this:

function addFrame(){
     var newFrame = parent.document.createElement(“frame”);
     newFrame.name = “thirdFrame”;
     newFrame.src=”http://www.three.com”;
     parent.document.body.rows=”34%,33%,33%”;
     parent.document.body.appendChild(newFrame);
}

The Intel 855GM video driver in the Dell Inspiron 700m is not and will not be supported on Windows 7. The following methods worked for me to get native (1280 x 800) resolution in Windows 7. Everything except Windows Aero and Dual monitors seems to be working with this method.

1. Download and extract the following drivers to your laptop:  DOWNLOAD DRIVER
2. Open a command prompt as administrator. (Click start > type ‘cmd’ > right-click on cmd under programs> select ‘Run as administrator’ > agree to any/all messages)
3. Copy and paste the following into the command prompt: takeown /f c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys
4. You will get a SUCCESS message in return.
5. Copy and paste the following into the command prompt (replace ‘Elias’ with your username): cacls c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys /G Elias:F
6. Type ‘y’ to confirm.
7. Open the following file in notepad: c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys
8. Type ‘a’ to the beginning of this document.
9. Save and close.
10. Open your device manager (Press the windows key + r > type ‘devmgmt.msc’ > click OK)
11. Uninstall ‘Standard VGA Adapter’ under ‘Display adapters’ (Expand ‘Display adapters’ > right-click on ‘Standard VGA Adapter’ > select ‘Uninstall’)
12. Restart laptop
13. After restarting you will see an error message. This is desired and normal.
14. Open your device manager (Press the windows key + r > type ‘devmgmt.msc’ > click OK)
15. Under ‘Other devices, find ‘video controller (vga compatible)’. Right-click on it and select ‘Update Driver Software’.
16. Click on ‘Browse my computer for driver software’.
17. Click ‘Browse…’ and select the ‘Win2000′ folder within the extracted driver files you downloaded above. Click OK.
18. If your screen goes black, wait a few minutes and then press the enter key several times.
19. The laptop should restart.
20. Open the following file in notepad: c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys
21. Delete the ‘a’ you added earlier.
22. Save and close.
23. Enjoy Windows 7 at full resolution.

My sister called to tell me the LCD screen on her digital camera was cracked. I told her not to worry since the camera was pretty old already, but that I would check to see how much a replacement screen would cost. I first checked my favorite “cheap stuff from china” site, DealExtreme.com, but unfortunately they didn’t carry the screen for he exact model, a Canon SD300.

The next cheapest place to find the right part would undoubtedly be eBay. I loaded eBay’s homepage and searched for sd300 screen (All eBay search queries will be green in this article). That resulted in 9 matches. I’m sure some people would be content with these 9 result, but you and I know better. There must be more than 9 auctions for the item I want. Here is how to find them efficiently.

Searching eBay for sd300 screen resulted in 9 matches. The next thing most people would do is modify their search query. How about the word “lcd”? Some sellers might use the word “lcd” instead of “screen”, right? The worst thing you could do is to just add “lcd” to the query and search for sd300 lcd screen. This resulted in 7 matches. This new query is worse because eBay uses an AND operator by default. This means that searching for sd300 lcd screen will bring up auctions with the word sd300 AND lcd AND screen. All three words must be in the auction title to be a match. You didn’t want to narrow down your search, you wanted to broaden it.

Most people understand that eBay’s search works this way; the more words you add to a query, the fewer matches you will get. So instead of adding “lcd” to the original search, you should replace “screen” with “lcd”, right?  Wrong.  Searching for sd300 lcd returns 13 matches. While we did find more auctions, most of them are duplicates from our previous search for sd300 screen (because they include both “screen” and “lcd” in the title) and even worse, we actually lost all auctions that have the word “screen” but don’t have the word “lcd”.

Our goal here is efficiency. You could of course search for sd300 screen and peruse the results, then search for sd300 lcd and peruse the results, then tweak the query a little more and see what comes up, and continue this pattern until you have scowerd every inch of eBay for the item you’re looking for. The problem is with each new query you will be wasting time skimming through auctions you’ve already seen in previous queries. The solution to this is eBay’s OR operator.

If you place words inside a set of parenthesis and separate them by commas, eBay will apply an OR operator to those words instead of the default AND operator. The easiest way to further explain this is through examples. If we search eBay for sd300 (screen,lcd) it is the equivalent of combining the results for sd300 screen with the results for sd300 lcd and removing all duplicate auctions. In other words, you are telling eBay to give you all auctions that contain the word “sd300″ AND either the word “screen” OR “lcd”. Searching eBay for sd300 (screen,lcd) returns 15 matches. We now have all 13 auctions from the sd300 lcd search, plus the two we lost when we removed “screen” in one efficient list.

Are we done? Of course not! eBay is huge! 15 results is pathetic! There should be more! Strike that, there MUST be more! More! MORE!

While searching for sd300 (screen,lcd) we see many auctions include “sd200″ and “sd400″. This probably means all three camera models use the same screen. A quick bit of research proves this to be true and so our new eBay search is for (sd200,sd300,sd400) (screen,lcd) with a result of 17 matches. This means there were two auctions for “sd200″ or “sd400″ screens which didn’t have the word “sd300″ in the title. If we searched for sd200 (screen,lcd) then for sd300 (screen,lcd) and then for sd400 (screen,lcd) separately, we would have had to sift through 3 different lists with 40 items total just to see 17 unique auctions. Are you starting to see how powerful the OR operator is? No? Then read on.

Analyzing the results of our search further we notice many include “IXUS” in the title. A quick Google search reveals the Canon SD line is called the Canon IXUS line outside of the US and that the sd200/sd300/sd400 are the same as the ixus30/ixus40/ixus50. Since they all use the same LCD screen, we might as well include that in our serach. Now our search is for (sd200,sd300,sd400,ixus30,ixus40,ixus50) (screen,lcd) and returns 20 matches. But we’re not done yet. We need to account for sellers who chose to use “ixus 30″ in their title instead of “ixus30″. The last search does not inlcude auctions with a space between the letters and numbers in the camera’s model characters. The all inclusive search query becomes (sd200,sd300,sd400,ixus30,ixus40,ixus50,”sd 200″,”sd 300″,”sd 400″,”ixus 30″,”ixus 40″,”ixus 50″) (screen,lcd) and ads 3 more auctions for a total of 23 matches.

We have greatly improved from our initial 9 results from searching for sd300 screen. We could stop here and be happy with our selection of matching auctions, but there’s one more group of candidates not included in our search result yet. Skimming the current results I noticed one auction for a broken sd400 camera. It found its way into our search because the seller specified in the auction title that the “LCD works”. Since the price of a broken camera with working screen isn’t much more than a screen alone, it makes sense to include auctions for broken cameras matching our list of compatible models. We could create a separate query just for this group, but there really is now need when we can easily add key words like “broken”, “repair”, and “parts” to our current query. This brings our final search query to (sd200,sd300,sd400,ixus30,ixus40,ixus50,”sd 200″,”sd 300″,”sd 400″,”ixus 30″,”ixus 40″,”ixus 50″) (screen,lcd,broken,repair,parts) which gives us a grand total of 61 auctions potentially selling the item we want to purchase. With all auctions on one list we can sort the results and easily compare our options.

To put our new search query into perspective, it is the equivalent of searching for all of the following and removing the duplicate auctions:

In response to a submission on digg.com entitled “10 cheap and easy upgrades for your old PC”, user gaqua posted a “better” list in the comments that I found funny enough to want to give it its own post on my meaningless blog.
The comment in its entirety:

Here’s a better list.

1 – Clean up your shit, dad. I’m tired of coming over and finding a new toolbar on IE or Firefox every time. I’m tired of thirty icons in the systray, half of which have some bizarre relevance to programs that are no longer installed. Go to add/remove programs, and remove anything you don’t use.

2 – Defrag that shit. 74% fragmented. SERIOUSLY? How is that even possible? I’m scheduling this for every Wednesday night at 10pm dad. I know it’s going to freak you out when it starts doing this all on its own but just leave it alone and let it do its magic.

3 – 512MB of RAM? Do you know how cheap RAM is? PC2700 DDR1? Oh my God…I think I might throw up. For $50 I can get you to 2GB of RAM. $50.

4 – I’m installing Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy – your system has over 200 known spyware problems. I’m fixing them. I’m making this machine bulletproof. Don’t fuck with it anymore. I’m installing AVG anti-virus. It’s going to ask you to update it – UPDATE IT WHEN IT ASKS.

5 – Holy shit I can’t believe this – you’re running XP without even SP1 installed. I’m installing SP3, Dad. It’s a lot more secure. Jesus christ this is like the dark ages of computing.

6 – Oh fucking shit – 3 hours to download? What the fuck – you’re still on that 512k DSL? Mom is paying for Cable! She’s paying for Cable internet, Dad. I’m going to unplug this wire from the DSL modem and plug it into the cable modem. Yeah. No it’s very easy. And I’m calling AT&T and canceling DSL. There, I just saved you $50 a month. And yeah, the internet is faster.

7 – Oh look, you have a cutesy animated desktop background. Yeah, your celeron 1.6 GHz probably doesn’t like that, especially with the 16MB integrated graphics. I’m going to turn that off. I know, I know. But it’s best for everyone.

HOLY SHIT YOUR COMPUTER IS FASTER NOW DAD. Please, tell everyone in the family that you “don’t know what he did but the computer is so much better, you should call him and have him come take a look, I’m sure he’d be happy to!”

There’s nothing I love more than that, dad. I love fixing Uncle Butch’s disgusting laptop with the inexplicably stained keys and I love playing around with the disgusting beige eMachine that Aunt Patsy uses to send all those cool inspirational email forwards with pictures of kittens or penguins or koalas or pandas.

No, I understand. As the oldest and most computer knowledgeable, it’s my responsibility. Just like Uncle Mason would help us all out if we got into legal trouble right? Well, if he weren’t disbarred for fraud, I mean.

Acronis True Image Home, or simply “Acronis” for short, is a backup utility which allows you to create an “image” of your entire system which you can then use to restore your system to the exact state it was in when the image was created. If you are familiar with Symantec’s Ghost software, it is very similar.

This isn’t a post about how to backup data or how to use Acronis; rather it is simply a comparison of the different compression options provided by Acronis.

Among many options, Acronis allows you to choose the compression level of the backup image being created. Additionally, Acronis allows you to choose whether you want to validate the backup image once it has been created. I set out to determine the cost in time and hard drive space for each combination of compression and validation.

Test System
I used my 4 year old Dell 700m laptop as my test system. This laptop has a 1.6 Ghz Pentium M with 2GB of RAM. I formatted the system and installed a fresh copy of Windows XP Pro with all the updates. The laptop has a 60GB IDE drive which is formatted into two partitions; 35GB and 22GB (with 3GB lost to the hard drive fairies). Windows XP with Service Pack 3 and all other updates takes up 5.95GB of the 35GB partition. All backup operations used the 35GB partition as the backup source and the 22GB partition as the backup destination.
I used the boot CD created by version 11 of Acronis to do all backups and restores.

Results

Column Explanation
Compression Level: The level of compression chosen
Estimated Size: The size of the backup image estimated by Acronis before staring the backup process.
Estimated Time: The amount of time Acronis estimated it would take to complete before starting the backup process. (Note: Acronis does not increase the time estimate when validation is selected)
Backup Size: Actual size of the backup image.
Backup Time: Actual amount of time the backup process took without validation.
Backup Time w/ Validation: Actual amount of time the backup process took with validation.
Validation Cost: The percentage of time increased by selecting to validate the backup image.
Restore Time: Amount of time the restore process took. (None of the backup images were validated before restoring.)

Conclusion
Many variables come into play when benchmarking a backup utility. The speed of the processor, the size of the data being backed up, the composition of the data, and the media used as the backup destination are among many variables which can vary backup times and sizes. That is why this should not be viewed as a benchmark of Acronis itself, but rather a benchmark of the different options within Acronis as compared to each other.
Here are some findings from this comparison test.

• Even with no compression chosen, the resulting image was smaller than the original data size.
• Validation cost decreases as the compression level increases. This is likely due to the smaller file being validated.
• Maximum compression provides a very small decrease in file size compared to the large increase in backup time. If time is an issue, maximum compression is not worth it.
• Increasing the compression generally decreases the restore time, except when maximum compression is chosen.
• High compression is the best all around option. You get a decent amount of file size decrease as compared to normal compression for not much more time increase. Plus it provides for the fastest restore time.

So you connected a hard drive to Windows XP, you right-clicked on the drive inside “My Computer”, you selected “Format…”, you went to change the “File system” option from NTFS to FAT32, and finally you mashed your head into your monitor because windows is not giving you the option to select FAT32 even though you know you’ve seen it there before.

Don’t fret. I just went through this process moments ago and here is how I got around it:

NOTE: This process will delete all data on your drive!

1. Download fat32format.exe (zip)
Don’t worry, you don’t have to install anything. It’s just a single file standalone utility you’ll use once and delete.
2. Place fat32format.exe in your C:\ folder
3. Right-click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”
4. Click “Disk Management” on the left under “Storage”
5. Right-click on the drive you want formated to FAT32 and select “Delete Partition…”
6. Click “Yes” to delete all partitions
7. Right-click on the same drive and select “New Partition”
8. A wizard will open up, click “Next” to continue
9. Select “Primary Partition”
10. Enter the partition size
11. Choose a drive letter and remember it (for example: “F”)
12. Select “Do not Format this partition”
13. Click finish
14. Open a command prompt (Start menu -> Run… -> type: “cmd” -> Click OK)
15. Type “C:\fat32format F:” and hit enter (where “C” is the drive you placed fat32format.exe in step 2, and “F” is the drive letter you selected in step 11)
16. Type “y” and hit enter
17. Close everything and enjoy your FAT32 drive.

This is just an ongoing list of Linux commands I keep having to look up. I’ll be updating this list as things come up.

Compress & uncompress (tar.gz) a directory
Compress: tar -zcvf archive-name.tar.gz directory-name
Uncompress: tar -zxvf archive-name.tar.gz

Return Path for all directories of a given name (directory search)
find / -type d -name ‘DIRECTORYNAME’ -ls

File which specifies a servers root http path
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
Restart after making changes by running: /etc/init.d/httpd restart

Count number of files in a directory
cd to the directory
ls -1U */ | wc -l

Check directory size
du DIRECTORY
result is in KB

Copy a file from one machine to another
scp -P MACHINE_PORT_NUMBER -p FILE_TO_BE_COPIED USERNAME@MACHINE_IP:NEW_LOACTION
example: scp -P 22 -p file.php admin@255.255.255.255:/home/admin

Change file owner
chown NEWOWNER FILENAME
example:  chown nobody index.php

Remove a directory and all files inside
rm -rf direcotory_name

Get size of directories
du -h (all directories and subdirectories in the current directory)
du -sh (total of current directory)
du -sh (all files and directories in the current directory)

Firefox is by far the best web browser available. Here are five features I use daily that you may not know about that will turn you into a lean, mean, browsing machine.

1. “Ctrl+F” is so last year. All the cool kids are using “/”.
If you hold “Ctrl” and press “F” you’ll bring up the standard find bar in Firefox. Boring. This is fairly common knowledge. What most people don’t know is that if you press “/” (slash) you’ll bring up the quick find bar. The difference with the quick find bar is that it clears and closes itself once you click anywhere or stop typing for a few seconds, leaving you to continue on your merry browsing way.

Time saved by not having to: Close the find bar when you’re done using it.

2. Make searches come to you.
How often do you load a website and immediately use their search box? Well, you can make the search box come to you. If you right click on the search field of any website you’ll see the option to “Add a Keyword for this Search…”. When selected, you’ll bring up an option box that looks a lot like the one used to bookmark a site with the exception of the extra “Keyword” field. This essentially allows you to bookmark a search. Typing “KEYWORD+SPACE+QUERY” will bring up the search results for the search field you bookmark as if you typed your query directly into the sites search box. For example, if you bookmark dictionary.com’s search with the keyword “define”, simply typing “define chide” would bring up the definition of “chide” on dictionary.com.

Time saved by not having to: Load a website’s front page when you just want to use their search.

3. Acknowledge your mouse’s bastard child; the Middle-Click.
Firefox utilizes your mouse’s middle click (i.e., pressing the scroll wheel down), so you should too. You likely already know that middle-clicking a link will open that link in a new tab, but did you know middle-clicking anywhere on a tab will close that tab? This comes in especially handy when closing multiple tabs because you don’t have to keep moving the mouse to the next tab’s “X” icon as the tab sizes keep changing with every tab you close.
Time saved by not having to: Use that pesky hand-eye coordination.

4. Copy&Paste into Google no more!
Highlight any text on a website and then right-click on it. What do you know, there’s an option to “Search Google for…” the text you have highlighted. Well I’ll be a copy and pasting monkey’s uncle!
[UPDATE] – Jeff G, from the comments, pointed out that this feature does not always use Google, but instead uses the default search engine you’ve selected in Firefox.

Time saved by not having to: Ctrl+C, Ctrl+T, type google.com, hit enter, Ctrl+P, hit enter.

5. Show your Auto-Complete who’s boss.
Using auto-complete is a great way to be more efficient. That is, unless your auto-complete brings up dozens of junk-complete options for you to choose from. Next time in the email field of a web form and Firefox brings up a mile long list of all those bogus emails you’ve used in the past to avoid spam, just press the down arrow once and hold down the delete key to remove all those useless “suggestions”. You can also use the up and down arrows to pick and choose which items you want to remove.
Time saved by not having to: Fish through a list of junk.