Happy Hallowe'en!

From Fall 2008

A Weekend At Home

This weekend was one of the first weekends we had at home (and without something going on like a sleep-over, TaeKwonDo belt testing, etc.). We were blessed with another gorgeous weekend weather-wise, but we didn't spend a whole lot of time outside. Yesterday I had a hankering for leek and potato soup. I'd never actually had it before, and figured I would make it from scratch along with a fresh loaf of bread while I was at it. I went with one of the first recipes I could find online, dug up a recipe for a quick loaf of basic brown bread from The Bread Book and went for it. Although we didn't eat until about 7:30pm, I think the results were worth it. It was delicious (even if I do say so myself!).

From Fall 2008

Today we went to the Liddel family farm and got our pumpkins for the Hallowe'en season. The Liddel farm is a little cheezy, but the kids love it, the prices are awesome, and we like to support the small, local farm while still enjoying the bigger guys.

From Fall 2008

After that we went to the Schantzholm farm to go through the corn maze. We did this last year, and ever since Drew thinks every corn field is a corn maze. We had a long walk through the maze, saw the animals, and had a very nice drive home amongst the fall colours.

From Fall 2008

We ended the day with a nice pork roast with vegetables that Sharon managed to find the time to prepare (whilst elbow-deep making apple sauce) which gave me time to put my motorcycle away for the season. All-in-all, a very relaxing Canadian autumn weekend!

Ant Wizardry

I've been spending a lot of time messing around with builds lately and that means reacquainting myself with my old friend, Ant. Back in the old days, I always wished there was an easy way to do simple string replacement/concatenation, creating a new property as a result. Sure you could use the antcontrib tasks, but I usually did not have access to them when it really counted and it was one more dependency to worry about. The other option is to mess with temporary files or some other naughty-feeling hackery (I think I used pathconvert once to do something like this and felt really dirty about it).

Anyway, as of Ant 1.7, check out what is possible. Run the following build file:

<project name="test" default="test">

  <target name="test">

    <loadresource property="abc">
      <string value="One two three four" />
    </loadresource>
    <echo message="abc=${abc}" />

    <loadproperties>
      <string value="one=two${line.separator}three=four"/>
    </loadproperties>
    <echo message="one=${one}" />
    <echo message="three=${three}" />

    <loadresource property="test">
      <string value="${one} two ${three} four" />
    </loadresource>
    <echo message="test=${test}" />

    <loadresource property="test2">
      <string value="${test}" />
      <filterchain>
        <replaceregex pattern="f(ou)r" 
                      replace="f\1l"
                      flags="g"/>
      </filterchain>
    </loadresource>
    <echo message="test2=${test2}" />

  </target>

</project>

And you will see this output:

C:\testing\>ant -f testbuild.xml
Buildfile: testbuild.xml

test:
     [echo] abc=One two three four
     [echo] one=two
     [echo] three=four
     [echo] test=two two four four
     [echo] test2=two two foul foul

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds

I wish I had this in my back pocket about four years ago...

Mandatory Software

As Doug has already mentioned, an interesting product from Google is being released tomorrow: Google Chrome. I guess the rumors were true after all! Since I have recently re-formatted my computer and I am currently in the midst of re-installing all of my applications, their timing is relatively good.

I discovered something interesting while re-installing software on my PC. After re-ghosting my machine (and installing various hardware drivers, Windows XP Service Pack 3, and a large number of updates), I installed the following software first:

• Opera
• Google Talk
• Steam (and various games...)
• Python
• 7zip
• Eclipse + PyDev
• Vuse (formerly Azureus)
• Irfanview
• Notepad++
• Foxit PDF Reader
• ...various other programs...

So Eclipse wasn't the first thing I installed, but it was quite near the top; and Vuse uses SWT under the covers so that's a pretty good showing for Eclipse-sponsored software in my little world. Also keep in mind this is my home PC, not my work laptop - so this list is not particularly tailored to full-on software development (hence the Steam install). I'll have to do another list when my work computer gets reincarnated. ;o)

I remember the Python blogging community chipping in about what programs they use daily (and would install first on a new machine) and it was quite interesting. I wonder what other people's short list might look like?

A Tale of Three Partitions

Lately my home PC has had issues, the most annoying of which being that it would fail to install any Windows Installer (.msi) based product unless I dropped to a command line and forced it to install manually using:

runas /user:Administrator "msiexec.exe /i C:\full\path\to\installer.msi"

This was getting really annoying, and I have also been having my 13-in-1 card reader sporadically "go missing". I have a fairly new Dell XPS 710, and it is a pretty sweet machine. I can't complain about this thing as it is built like a tank and it is definitely a luxury model compared to past PCs I've had. Dell really knows how to build a machine.

Anyway, the Windows Installer thing has been bugging me for weeks because I have flexed all of my significant geek muscle trying to fix this problem and have come up empty handed. I was quite proud when I figured out the "runas" workaround (without it all installers just flash up a window and silently fail), but the fact that I cannot fix this problem just drives me nuts. I've tried removing almost every Windows-based component (.NET, Silverlight, etc.) and hacked around in the registry all to no end. So yesterday I decided to buy a second 500GB hard drive, and start from scratch (preserving my significant amount of data on the original 500GB drive).

Last night I started out by downloading a copy of the Linux-based Clonezilla LiveCD, and I used it to successfully clone my old drive to the new one. I knew from previous hacking that there were two other partitions on my hard drive besides my main data partition and I figured these were special Dell system partitions involved in the restore process and further investigation showed that they were in fact partitions containing the Dell diagnostics as well as a ghost image of the factory default WinXP installation. I basically now had two disks containing the following:

+------+--------------+-----------------+
| 47MB |   496GB NTFS | 3GB System      |
| Diag |   (Windows)  |    Restore      |
+------+--------------+-----------------+

Sure enough, I was able to boot from either drive and ended up with an identical working installation of Windows XP. So the next step was to restore the factory default disk image. I had what I thought was a recovery CD and proceeded to boot from it. It turns out, it was not a recovery CD, but a re-installation CD. I figured there was a chance it would still somehow use the system partitions to install the old factory image onto my 496GB NTFS partition. Well, it installed Windows, but it did not restore the factory install - it just installed Windows. As a result, most of my hardware did not work; not even my network card so I couldn't even access the internet to figure out what to do next!

So I decided to boot from a boot disk and have a look around the third 3GB partition and found there to be a couple batch files and executables (basically Norton Ghost), and a ghost image that *was* a backup of my factory default. I was able to manually run recover.exe and restore the ghost image to my NTFS partition, but when I rebooted I was greeted with an error message that indicated Windows setup was not completed properly and to install again. Weird. At this point I figured there *has* to be a way to restore my machine from this ghost image using Dell's built-in support for this. A little Googling revealed I should be able to simply press Ctrl+F11 after the initial boot screen to initiate the restore procedure. After trying this, I was greeted with the error message Cannot recover. Much more searching and I found this very informative Dell forum thread:
http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=dim_other&message.id=274416&query.id=299988#M274416

This ultimately led me to this website which contains a very detailed breakdown of the Dell system partitions, what they contain, and how they are used during the boot process. There are also utilities there for fixing your master boot record code, partition types, and more. Wow, this looked like just the ticket! However, after repairing everything (my MBR code and partition types were messed up during the cloning/re-installing of Windows process) I was still not able to get Dell's built-in recovery procedure to work.

Eventually, I tried resetting the partition types on the original disk to be normal FAT16 and FAT32 partitions (as opposed to special, hidden partitions) using the ptedit.exe utility, then re-cloning them to the new disk with Clonezilla, resetting them *back* to hidden, then attempting to recover by manually running recover.exe, as suggested by the owner of goodell.net in another thread. It was suggested that perhaps the source partitions being configured as odd, hidden types would confuse the cloning software causing things to be cloned incorrectly. Setting the partition types to standard FAT16 and FAT32 types before cloning may alleviate this problem. This time after restoring from the ghost image and rebooting it worked, and I am up and running with a fresh installation of Windows XP (with no Windows Installer issue!). Now to re-install all of the programs I use every day, and slowly migrate my data over from the old drive.

On a positive note, I can't say enough about the build quality of Dell computers. I have 6 SATA ports on my motherboard, and this computer comes with a neatly routed power connection and SATA cable to every drive bay in my machine. Also, every drive bay has a plastic drive carrier inserted in each location. The amount of money you save in not having to purchase cables and plastic bits and baubles alone is staggering. Finally, there are no fasteners required on anything. There is a spring-loaded mechanism on everything so pretty much any drive or component can be removed by pressing a button or sliding a lever. Check this out:



Anyway, here's a big "thank you" to Dan Goodell for his awesome utilities and instructions. You've obviously helped a lot of people with this in the past and you've just helped one more. I owe you a beer!

Thanks a lot, Murphy!

Well, it is our last full day here in Scotland and we have no plans for the day except trying to accomplish some more work, and packing up for our flight in the morning. And as luck would have it, it is gorgeous and sunny outside. It is probably the nicest day we've had all week!

I guess I can't complain. We had a really nice day yesterday and I managed to get in a full day of fishing on Loch Rusky. The trout were rising all over the place and while Bob and I both had many strikes each, we just couldn't seem to hook the buggers! I did end up with one small brown trout though, and I had a second one on Loch Lubnaig later in the day that got away before I got him to shore.



Sharon, Stella and the kids went to Ayr (not St. Andrews like I had originally posted!) and spent the day at the beach. They also had lots of sunshine and the kids had a blast. All-in-all, it was a very good day.

NOTE: Since someone anonymously commented about this (on the wrong post) I did *not* keep this fish. It was released immediately as keeping brown trout on Loch Rusky is forbidden.

Still Raining

We have been in Scotland almost two weeks now and it has rained every day except two. Bob and I decided to go out fishing on Loch Lubnaig on Monday, and planned to have a BBQ lunch with Stella and the rest of the family. It looked good when we left in the morning, but ended up raining pretty much all day, and poured rain while we were out on the Loch fishing in the late morning. We didn't see a fish much less catch one. We still had a small BBQ and I think everyone enjoyed themselves despite the rain.

Tuesday was the nicest day yet and we had a full day of sunshine as we visited Kelburn Castle. The scenery, gardens and countryside was amazing. There are miles of walking paths there and it would take much more than one day to see it all. It was the first nice day where I could get some more pictures and I have placed them all on the Picasa page. The gardens had some really amazing trees including a couple yews that are estimated to be over 1000 years old, and an absolutely huge tree called the Weeping Larch that covered 1/4 acre. Its branches grew into the ground and back out again in a tangled, twisted mass. They also had the outside of the castle painted up in what the call The Graffiti Project, which is quite cool to see (don't worry - it is temporary):



Today it rained pretty much all day again, but we decided to take the day off and Sharon and I both worked all day while the kids watched movies and played the Wii. I managed to get a full day's work in, most of which was spent writing Python scripts to automate a lot of grunt work that needs to be done before Friday's release which I hope to accomplish from here.

I'm hoping for a better day tomorrow as Bob and I are heading out for our last kick at the can fly fishing. It should be lots of fun if the weather holds. We are heading out on Loch Rusky, which is a private loch but we were invited out for the day by our ghillie from last week after a rather disappointing salmon outing. I'd better get some sleep!