Hitman Film

Hi All,

I am back after a long break! Had stuff to do which meant not much time for much else apart from food, sleep and getting away from the computer! Well tonight I saw the Hitman which was interesting for two reasons, first in that it was a film based on a game a rarity considering Lara Croft's failure after the original and secondly because it tried to do something different which was a plug for the game rather than a game being a plug for a film which is what you expect to happen. The film was good, the first half was fast and interesting and a little bit stupid in places! Sure if you see a man with a bar code tattooed to the back his head he is going to stand out I mean come on a bit of realism here.

It was also really cheesy the way the main character did not have a name but only a number...bit silly considering you need a name just in case you get caught. Apart from the action was good. A bit too run of the mill too many cliché's and there were moments when you could see that the voices were dubbed over and looked like a bad Chinese or Indian film dubbed into English. (See the Russian General near the end and you will understand!) Apart from that it is well worth watching it!

Sleep!

Now what would I be posting this under the heading of sleep? Well..could it have anything to do with the fact I need some more? Or that I see people around me who need some more?

Well it is more to do with the fact I need some more...The thing is just because you know you need some more doesn't mean you are actually fall asleep!

I am a very sound sleeper! Just put on a train of any kind standing up and I will sleep. Planes are one more....(Cars never as I am usually the driver but if I am the passenger please dont put me in the front seat as I will be wide awake and turn into a back seat driver...As my aunt and cousin will testify!)

So here comes the problem what do you do when your magical superpower doesnt work? I had that brief experience the other day....and it was a nightmare...I tried everything....counting sheep, glass of warm milk, reading an O'Reilly Publications book on TCP/IP (yea I know some of you love these but you are all a bunch of weirdo's so there!). Nothing worked! In the end I figured out what actually worked and for this I am glad he is still on TV. Wait for it...It was President George W. Bush making a speech about something which was as comprehensible as an O'Reilly book....This is really scary! So anyway I have figured it out now...All I need is George W. Bush to read me a bed time story on the three little pigs and their WMD! Hmm I see a new line for him after his term ends! Go George!

Here is to my sleep and Pres Bush reading me bed time stories! If all else fails try this!

Hunt for music

I had a very random moment today and suddenly remembered the tune for the title music of Jonathan Creek the magician mystery series that used to be on the BBC several years ago now. Then I suddenly thought hey it must be on youtube. I mean I have found just about anything on youtube. To get a picture just check my Orkut profile and you will see what I mean. So after some very crafty searching I have found it! It is called the Dance Macabre. Want to listen to it then click on the link above. So far youtube hasnt failed me but I am satrting to see them trying to clean it up. My personal advice to the media companies...Are you nuts? I am more likely to buy the dvd or cd of something once I have seen it on youtube. I mean this just means that I will be able to look at some new and old stuff i have never seen before. Surely that is a good thing?

How to keep people listening into techno speak

yes Yes I know I was meant to talk about hubs but I am still working on it ok...It is difficult you know!!! But anyway moving onto another challenge that I encounter quite often is how to explain technical things to people without making them fall asleep and ensuring they understood what I was explaining. Lets face it, I.T is not fun when explaining theory and you can get extremely confused with all the acronyms and new words you have never even heard off in the normal use of the English language. If you want an example as a non-techie then try Polymorphism!If you dont understand the meaning then well done you are sane and probably not a serial killer (For those of us who had the pleasure of receiving the Spot the Serial Killer and Developer email that has been floating around the net for a few years now.)

Well in one of the presentations I did as a team a few years ago, we actually found you can keep your audience following you and understanding what you are explaining by using the Bull Shit Bingo concept. You make sure you create a word list and you ensure as you are talking you get use as many key words as possible. What this does is it makes the session quite interactive and gives you instant feedback from your audience as to whether they are listening to you or not.

For some instant words commonly used try this for size
OSI Model
DoS
DDoS
DOS
AD
Transaction Logs
Information Store
SID
Memory Leak (No this doesnt mean when your memory decides to use the toilets though it can sometimes feel that way!)
Routing
RG Connector
Cluster
Active
Passive
Polymorphism
Inheritance

So the next time have some fun in your meeting but ensure everyone understands what you are explaining!

I am Alive - barely!

So in case anyone is wondering what happened? Well I am very much alive, been on holiday and have some stuff waiting.....So watch this space! Next up why are Hubs useful and why they should be banned from your corporate / home network! Intrigued? Then watch this space.....

Arrggghhhh! I hate those drivers....

So here I am finally on the way to recovering from my flu...and regaining my voice albeit very much frog like....and trying to hit the notes for Atif Aslam's Tere Bin song which is definitely difficult when you have just regained your voice. It sounds like a machine grating sound...so anyway I then was hit by a problem when I was installing this sound card on a friends machine. It had no drivers and I couldn't recognise the chip set used so now I have a problem where I dont even know what the original manufacturer of the device is...

Then as if I had a flashback (here is where you use the ripple effect and some strange music) I remembered when I had a similar issue in Windows 98 about 5-6 years ago...

The solution came to me...which I shall share with you all....

Windows uses Plug & Play to determine if it has drivers for the device.But how does it recognise it?

Well to give you a idea...The best and the least utilised winmsd tool needs to be run...

You do this by clicking on Start...Run...type in winmsd and click on OK.

This will load up a Application called System Information.

This application has been with us in various forms since DOS 5.0 and was ported and changed to its current form when you installed Microsoft Office 97 (Now I really am showing my computing age!)

So this tool has so many uses but I will just explain its most helpful use here....

In the Left Pane..Expand Components and Select Problem Devices.

The Problem devices refers to that Device with a Yellow Exclamation mark in Windows Device Manager. So Now you will see the device that you are having a problem with listed there. It will look something like this:

Sound Device: PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3059&SUBSYS_41611106&REV_50\3&61AAA01&0&8D

So now lets strip this down a little better to make sense of it. We are only interested in a very small part of the string:

PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3059&SUBSYS_41611106&REV_50\3&61AAA01&0&8D

The PCI refers to how the device is connected. So PCI stands for a PCI card plugged in internally, You will also find USB or AGP and the now very rare ISA listed(This is for our Win9.x friends out there!)


So now we have established how the device is connected the next part of the string is the one that wil interest us the most:

PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3059&SUBSYS_41611106&REV_50\3&61AAA01&0&8D

The VEN_1106 refers to the Vendor ID that is used by the creator of the device. You will find some which are more common like VEN_8086 which refers to Intel. Even if you dont know them you dont need to worry as I will explain....

The next part DEV_3059 refers to the actual device this could be anything for all you know. In this case windows recognised it as a sound device, Sometimes in older windows it will just show up as a unknown device. So here is what you can do to resolve this..

Take the string as follows and remember Google is your friend!

Enter the string VEN_1106&DEV_3059 in Google and you will find a lot of discussions regarding this device. It is usually due to various discussions on detecting this device on Linux.

Based on this you will then be able to identify the Original Manufacturer and the Device Model / Chip Set and get the drivers...

This is the painless way of setting up drivers....

Now what do you do if the device driver is the right one but it is not being detected by Windows correctly and when you do a select from list it still doesn't appear?

Don't Panic!

Here is a little known fact...The Driver Manufacturer may have hidden the device from you intentionally in Windows!

So how do you see it. Remember that Windows will look for a .inf file that relates to the device driver.

The .inf file is just a text file which tells windows what to do with the files and how to configure the registry to use this device.

In there you will find a section headed
[ControlFlags]

Below this you will find a list which will tell you what needs to be excluded from selection. In the example below it basically states to exclude everything in this driver information file.
ExcludeFromSelect=*


To be able to view these devices remove the [ControlFlags] and the ExcludeFromSelect=* lines and save the file and try again to select the Device. You will find all the devices listed in the Add New Hardware Wizard!

So there you go that is two ways to get you out of drivers hell!

Now back to my trying to hit those high notes......

Free Imaging Tool for PCs

Well its been a busy few weeks...and I can see a few people think I have turned a bit geeky....Well a little bit yes and a little bit no. But then to live in IT you have to be geeky!(Jas surely you know what I mean!)

So the other day while I was working I kind of realised that there were some licensing issues to using Symantec Ghost which though its a great product is a tad bit expensive when you are trying to work on a shoe string budget in a organisation and got thinking about whether there would be any open source free applications that would work like ghost and create images of hard disks. My search on google led me to several, One of them was the fantastic yet not so free Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/) however it wasnt free and then my search led me to PartImage (http://www.partimage.org) which is a Linux Based application that would image Hard Disks. Now for a Windows Administrator the mere mention of the word Linux brings them out in a cold sweat! So before you all start sweating let me help you in setting this application up until the GUI interface which should be straight forward to anyone who has ever used Ghost.

First of all head to the following location(http://www.sysresccd.org) and download the System Rescue CD ISO and burn this using your CD Burning Application.

Now there are two ways to do this one is a Server/Client method which for a Windows Administrator might not make much sense and may just muddle you into disastrous consequences . The other more simpler method is the so called "map a drive" method which I found works quite well!

So here goes.

First boot into the System Rescue CD ISO that you burnt. There are some other very useful tools in this disc which you can explore later...At the boot: prompt just hit enter.

This will start kicking off the Hardware detection phase of Linux until it stops asking for the keyboard Character set.

Now since not everyone reading this is American and since I like flying the flag for British English I choose the country code that matches your keyboard in my case I will type in uk. Now hit return until you come to a prompt.

This is where I tell everyone to RTFM or in my case RTFS(S stands for Screen)

So lets get started first of all by setting up the network card.

You do this by typing the following command:

net-setup eth0

From here just follow the instructions for your network card as to whether it is a wired or a wireless network, whether you use DHCP or you want to static assign the IP address. The easiest option is to use DHCP as most networks have some form of this service.

Once you have made a selection you will then be returned back to the prompt.

Here type ifconfig which is the same as ipconfig /all in windows to check you have got a valid IP address for your network card.

The next thing you will need to do is create a mount point. Those of you familiar with Windows 2003/XP will be familiar with mount points but for those who aren't I will explain what they are briefly. To map a drive you use a drive letter using the net use command or the GUI the same way you can use a folder to map a network location.

Anyway to carry on first create a mount point. You can do use using the following command:
mkdir /mnt/image

Once you have created the mount point we will then map a share based on the server RHUBARB with the CIFS/SAMBA Share called image To do this we will now mount the share using a username and password for the share on the server RHUBARB:

mount -t smbfs -o username=imageusername,password=password //rhubarb/image /mnt/image

This will now mount the share to the mount point /mnt/image. If there are any problems with the above command try replacing the server name with the IP address or try checking the username and password. I have found using a local username and password on the server is better than using a domain account.

Once down you can now launch PartImage you do this by typing in partimage
This will load the GUI interface where you select the Partition you want to image, whether to restore or save an image etc.

You will then need to specify the filename of the image. You do this by typing in the path which you just mounted followed by the filename.

eg.: /mnt/image/Dell/gx210image

Now follow the defaults and follow the simple onscreen instructions. This will then kick off the process of creating the image. You may get a message that NTFS support is experimental. However I have found the support to be fine and to have not had any problems so far.

It is straight forward once you do it. Dont let Linux scare you! It is as simple as Symantec Ghost you just need some patience initially until you get the hang of it. But once you have used this tool you will seriously wonder you want to pay the money for a Symantec Ghost Licence!

Happy Imaging!

How to reset VNC Password in Windows

First a word of warning this is a how to and is meant to be used for legal purposes only! I hold no responsibility for this knowledge being used for illegal purposes and totally condone it! (It means lots of stress for people like me and many sleepless nights fixing stuff so unless you want your ears burning by someone like me just use this for it is is meant for, a way to solve a sys admin's life so that they can do what they love most playing with some new and cool stuff!)

Ok to do this you will need the registry editor for this and administrative rights to access the system registry.

Open regedit on your local machine and browse to the following key:

[HKLM\Software\ORL\RealVNC\VNC4]

Find the Password Valuename. Right click on Properties, select the entire DWORD string copy it. Now click on File connect to Network Registry enter in the machine name. Browse to the same key on the target machine and replace the text on the password DWORD value with the one you copied and select ok. You will now be able to access the VNC session on the machine.

Easy huh?

Ofcourse this assumes you have admin rights on the target machine. Dont ask me how to gain admin rights on the machine in question as that is something there is enough written about on the internet and you should not be doing unless you own the machine and question and wont be breaking the many laws of the land!

Hope this has saved your day!

I have moved!

Hello all and welcome to the home of my blog!

Those of you who have been following me at my old home (360.yahoo.com/rakheshrao) welcome to my new place.

The reason for the move is the Yahoo site just wasnt functional for some of the stuff I wanted to do and so here I am!

Well since Spring has sprung I thought i'd do a little spring clean which ended up being a move.

So welcome and watch this space!