Jeff’s Blog

To restore grub to the MBR after upgrading XP partition to Vista follow the following sites directions. Usually I just have to chroot in a live cd to the installed partion and run grub-install /dev/hdb1 but I guess when using SATA drives they must be scanned at boot becuase sdb1 wasn’t there in /dev.

All I have to say is thank God for Tivo.  Award shows are so freaking self important, annoying and long for commercial whoring sake. Here are my thoughts.

• I don’t need to hear every song nominated.
• I know all of the current actors and actresses can’t act, but I don’t need to see montages of old and dead actors that could.
• An unbalanced environmental propaganda film is not a documentary.
• Why does a documentary need a theme song unless its a propaganda piece and meant to appeal to your emotions.
• The Departed is the best film of the year?  Is the academy smoking crack?
• Scorsese has been denied best director 5 times and wins it for that piece of garbage. I would give it back if I was Scorsese.  Almost tops giving Halle Berry the best actress award just because she is black but not quite.
• How was Mark Wahlberg nominated for the best supporting actor?  He has 1 character he plays over and over.
• Little Miss Sunshine should have swept it.

powered by performancing firefox

I redid my laptop with the Ubuntu 6.10 and installed xgl and beryl. My desktop is now a 3D cube that I can spin around to go to different work spaces. I also installed VMware and XP and followed this tutorial. Now I have a full screen XP side of the cube. So if I need to use a windows application, I just hit ctl-alt arrow key and when I am done just move the mouse to the edge and the cube spins to the next workspace. I absolutely love this. Now I just need to get the stupid wireless working and it will be perfect.

From the Boston Globe turner is paying 2 million dollars to the city of Boston which “The deal frees Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of the Cartoon Network, and the New York marketing company the Cartoon Network hired, Interference Inc., of any criminal or civil liability for the episode.” Yet the deal leaves the actual people they hired to place the ads around town on the hook for a felony placing a hoax device and misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct. Now I didn’t follow this that closely so the disorderly may be a valid charge, but Turner should not have settled unless they dropped the felony charges against these two guys. Instead they covered their own asses and left their contractors out to dry.

I am still at work making images of the MO disks, but my perl script is complete! A whole 24 lines.   If anyone cares it will also be in the example code section.

#!/usr/bin/perl

$tiffname = “test3.dd”;
$test = “testout.dd”;
open(TIF, $tiffname) or die “can’t open $tiffname: $!”;
open(NEW, “>testout.dd”);
binmode(TIF);
binmode(NEW);
$enum = 0;
$oldbuff = 0;

while (read(TIF,$buff, 32)) {
if ($buff =~ m/II\*/ && $oldbuff =~ m/\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00/) {
$enum++;
$formated = sprintf(”%09d”, $enum);
close NEW;
$new = “image” . $formated . “.tif”;
open (NEW, “>$new”);
print NEW $buff;
$oldbuff = $buff
}
else {
print NEW $buff;
$oldbuff = $buff
}
}

http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/printers.html

http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/printing.html#stairs

http://www.hpmuseum.net/collection_document.php

I learned the hard way never to use DD for windows. I used DD for windows to image 8 MO disks front and back. I just assumed everything was fine, until I actually went to process the data and is probably why they aren’t matching up across the disks. They each were missing several hundred megabytes off the end. I used a 1M block size, which should be fine since the disk are 2048 byte/sector. I riped one again this time with a 2M block size, then a 4M block and more and more data shows up each time! I stopped trying after this. The real red flag should of come when I say \Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 in the DD file. This would never be on the disk, this is just the path to the hardware in windows. So now I am ripping all of them again with another imaging program called R-studio so I am going to be at work late. I could have gotten a knoppix cd and used the real DD but this works and I don’t even know if there is a block driver for MO disks in knoppix.

My latest project at work is recovering Tiff images off of a Magneto Optical disk juke box. Remember the sony mini disk format? Yeah that is what these are except 5.25 inch 5.1 gigs on each. There are two SCSI drives in the juke box and a cartridge loader. It was used in conjunction with an application called paper clip that let admissions scan in and save images. Well the problem is they want to transferee to a different imaging system and they can’t seem to get the images off in bulk. I was brought in to take a look. We tried looking at the disk in backup exec but it didn’t recognize the autoloader, so we had to tear apart the juke box and hook the MO drive into a PC and then we could see the drive but no data. So on to step 2 I pull the raw data off the drive using DD into a file. I look at the file in a hex editor and low and behold TIFF headers I see. I cut one out on the header boundary which is II* and cut at the next header I see and paste it into a new file and it opens up fine. So the program must just stream the data onto the drive with no file system what so ever, they don’t even use a standard tar format, they must just be storing the disk number and an 2 offsets to recover files. I have googled and googled but nothing I can find will recover this, so I am writing my own. This would be pretty trivial but the developers in their infinite wisdom breaks up images over 2 disks if it hits the end of a disk. They must also be writing some other data in there as well because pasting two together will not work. Thus leading me to my point if I had the source I could easily find out what they were doing to write across disks and export everything easily. I guess we are just lucky they didn’t XOR the data or something to mess with us.

I ran into a few DVDs that the audio was out of sync and 1 the video was wacked. After some reaserch on the doom9 forums I found the problem was with multi angle DVDs AutoGK asks which angle you want to use but it almost never works right. I found that if you use ifoEdit and strip the angle to want then open it in auotGK it almost always will work.

After using ripit4me I had no more sync issues with the particular DVD that I was using so I guess my hypothesis was correct that the copy protection is what is causing the problems even though the backed up DVDs play fine. I will try again with the remaining movies that were a problem.