asiel's scratchpad » Uncategorized

Fixing Windows 7 MBR

azl — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:16:47 +0000

To free up disk space I recently did some shuffling on my PC that had an old version of Ubuntu Linux installed to dual boot with Windows 7. Since I have Ubuntu installed and available on other systems now I decided to remove this partition. After doing this and rebooting I was presented with a problem.

All I saw after the POST screen was: grub rescue>

I first thought about trying to restore the windows boot loader from grub but wasn’t able to find a quick solution. Then after doing a bit of searching I found my Windows 7 install CD and booted it up for a system repair. The repair option found no problems but I knew better. I opened the command line option.

With some google searching I found two tools that seemed to be related to what I was looking for bcdedit and bootrec.

It turned out that bootrec was what I was looking for. Running the following two commands restored my boot record and removed grub since I no longer needed it without Linux on this system. I found this article about bootrec on Microsoft’s site to be useful as well as this other one on technet about bcdedit to find it wasn’t what I needed this time. In the process I learned a bit about how the Windows boot process has changed since Vista.

These were the magic commands that worked for me. No guarantees they will work for you but if you aren’t worried about keeping grub or another boot loader around they shouldn’t hurt.
bootrec /fixmbr bootrec /fixboot

After running these commands I was able to reboot and go right into Windows without a hitch.

Extremely Slow iPad upgrade to iOS 4.2

azl — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 03:53:30 +0000

Now that iOS 4.2 is finally released I thought it would be an optimal time to upgrade my 16GB iPad to the latest and greatest OS. Like most Apple upgrades I’ve encountered in the past I figured this would be a fairly painless process. I guessed I’d be running new OS in roughly a half an hour. I have the most basic model of iPad after all.

When I started the process the first time I waited about an hour or so and saw a progress bar at what looked to be maybe 5% complete. I figured something in the upgrade process had frozen and I would need to restart the process. So I cancelled what was running and restarted iTunes then started again. This time I waited about two hours. The progress bar still only appeared to be about as far as the first time. At this point I guessed something was up. So I did a little searching on the friendly Google.

As part of an OS upgrade Apple forces a device backup. This is a resonable and probably wise thing to do. The only problem is that they have the slowest backup procedure of any modern system I’ve ever seen. This is a known issue that they will have hopefully fixed in 4.2.

After removing any magazine type applications I had installed I restarted the upgrade process. This time I let it keep running. Then about 20 hours later it was finally complete. So be aware that if your upgrade seems to be frozen it is likely still going but just taking a lot longer than you’d expect. I am using less than 10GB of space on my 16GB iPad so many users may see this take significantly longer than I did. Be prepared to allow this upgrade to go for a full 24 hours or more.

With this type of experience on the only device they have, I would hate to see what would happen if Apple had to support many different devices like Google or Microsoft will for tablets within the next year. Hopefully this bug has been fixed in the latest release so the upgrade to iOS 5 will be much smoother.

Another reason Firefox is better

azl — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:20:12 +0000

For some reason I’m having trouble logging into the Oracle site today. This is frustrating. Luckily though Firefox gives me a hint of why there is a problem. I get a somewhat useful error message.

In IE though the request seems to just go forever with no error and no progress. I’d rather get an error than the illusion that something will eventually happen when it won’t.

Hopefully in the meantime Oracle can fix the login on their site so I can download Oracle XE. How does something as critical as login break on a site like Oracle.com? I thought they were supposed to be the example of high availability and reliability.

Good Points from KDE 4.0 Keynote

azl — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:04:06 +0000

I loved the points that were made in the KDE 4.0 Launch Keynote. They apply to almost any software development in my opinion.

Own your data
Choose your vendor
Explore, create and learn

Web based systems especially fall into this boat. Users should feel free to change. They shouldn’t feel locked in. Otherwise they will lose trust in storing their data on the web and using web based systems in general.

Looks like somebody found a “bug” in google maps

azl — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 14:20:03 +0000

In my usage Google maps has been pretty stable. With all the people that use it there are bound to be bugs that are found. I found a blog link to a very intersting “bug” in google maps. Check it out. I am amazed that this was able to get through the QA team at google. Or maybe it is a hidden “feature”.

stock photos make life easier

azl — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 00:08:04 +0000

Sometimes it is sure nice to be able to find a stock photo for a graphic you are looking for. The downside is that they usually cost money. I found a pretty good stock photo site today that is free. … Continue reading →

Smugmug is the best

azl — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 06:32:24 +0000

From my experience in dealing with online photos Smugmug is the best solution out there. They don’t have the limitations that many other sites have, they are consistently fast, and they have awesome support. Overall I think it is well worth the money. If you get a higher tier account they even let you embed smugmug within your own site and change the css to make it look however you want. This is pretty cool. They also have a neat web services API so that many common tasks can be scripted or done through an external app. For example, I upload my photos through a desktop app because I think it is much easier and more flexible.

Give it a try. Sign up with my coupon and you save $5. Put k3nzPigCBr5qk in the referral code box when you sign up.

I Love Blackberry – execpt when it doesn’t work

azl — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 21:37:58 +0000

I love my Blackberry phone. It has been one of the greatest things I have ever had. I’m currently having my first problem with it though where I’m just not getting my e-mail. It just decided to stop two days ago for some reason. I finally e-mailed verizon today so we’ll see how long it takes them to get it working again.

The funny thing is that I didn’t change anything at all. It was working one day, and then just stopped. I know that is always the description of problems, but this time its really true. How that occurs I don’t know. It is tough to troubleshoot though since blackberry hides almost all the complexity of the setup from the user and they don’t really provide any useful tools to troubleshoot when you are having problems. So I guess I’ll see how fast Verizon can fix a problem.

pharmacy to doctor communication

azl — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:44:08 +0000

There needs to be a standard electronic communication protocol between doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies. This would probably be a good canitate for some type of XML communication.

Some of the issues are authentication and verification of the data, also privacy is a big one. If this were put in place though it would make trips to the pharmacy much easier. Your doctor could ask you where your pharmacy was then send them the prescription. Or if you don’t want to do that or don’t know where you are going you could get a bar code that basically contained a link to where to go in a db to look up your prescription info. Overall this would save incredible amounts of time as well as cut down on mistakes, fraud, and other similar problems.

I thought of this after waiting for several hours to get a prescription for my daughter and seeing how tedious the process was of people bringing in their prescriptions and the pharmacist having to call the doctors office and then fill the prescription. This same type of system could also be useful for insurance, but that is a whole different problem that also needs to be addressed.

testlink still has short ?> php tags

azl — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 17:03:10 +0000

I got bit by testlink still having the short style php tags in its codebase today. It still has tags such as \<\? instead of \<\?php. I also had to tweak error reporting as this was making debugging the problem difficult. We really need to go through the code and remove all these old style php tags.