Just working out a few things here in the office, and I get an email from my boss asking if this laptop is good for one of the higher up executives for their daughter. So I start looking over the email and specs and such, and it’s not a bad machine for the price they want. I’m not very informed on the Mac side of things but the hardware looks good and some of the reviews were nice.

What really got my attention was at the bottom, a little slogan type sentence stating:
“New design. New features. New technologies. All engineered to standards that don’t even exist yet.”

Reading that, I leaned back, and just thought of all the things wrong with that statement while I laughed. This is impossible. This is one of the reasons we follow standards in a world so reliant on computers and technology. You should always follow a standard, and if there are no standards to follow you really did not look for a standard at all. Saying that it does not even exist seems to me that you threw a bunch of shit together, and called it a day.

Now they might not be talking about standards, as in XHTML, XML and such. They might be talking about customer service and a high satisfaction rate from their customers. The problem is, that levels of very high satisfaction do exist, and that I assure you, Apple does not meet them.

The LUA programming language is a lightweight, reflective, imperative and functional programming language, designed as a scripting language with extensible semantics as a primary goal. As stated by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)).

The World of Warcraft client uses LUA to design the user interface. This allows third party developers to create unique interface customizations and share them with others, as addons.

I have been playing around with some LUA as it is used in World of Warcraft to change a few things in my client without downloading huge addons that do the same, but offer more features that I don’t want to load. Being that I am trying to be memory efficient and save CPU cycles for the game itself.

  Extra WoW Features (3.1 KiB, 364 Downloads)

This will do the following for you:

Move the casting bar down a little (Change inside .lua file, line 21)
Allow you to talk in your second language with a /lan action (Example: “/lan Hello.” Without quotes, will say hello in Draenei if you are Draenei.)
Open all bags when you talk to a ‘vendor’ and close them all when done.
Move your game-tooltips (not items) to the lower right hand corner of the screen.
Add ‘Targeting: Name Here’ to the game-tooltips.
Auto repair when you visit a merchant that is able to repair your gear.
Add tabs to the profession window that allows access to your professions with only one button.

You can of course edit the .lua file yourself and remove anything you don’t want. This is an addon I use for my purposes. Consider this beta code and may or may not work for you.

So last Friday (May 1st, 2009) I was asked at work to upgrade the hard drive in the CEOs laptop. Alright no problem, we go to the closest store and pick up a new two hundred and fifty gigabyte hard drive to put in the laptop. I get the new drive and decide to make sure the old drive has no errors before I image the disk over.

I run the usual Windows `chkdsk` commands and it finds some stuff and fixes it quickly. I put the new drive on a small external USB adapter and throw in the TRK Rescue disc to run a `dd` on the drive. The program completes, and I put the new drive into the system. The new drive boots up and all is fine. I can resize the partition later when I have more time.

A little later I get a phone call saying that there are no folders in the CEOs Outlook Pane. “Alright.” So I walk up and take a look, sure enough no folders under the six PST files that were mounted from the local hard disk. I close the Personal Folders and then remount then in Outlook. Nothing. “Alright…”

So I browse to the My Documents folder where the files are kept and I search around. I find the six PST files. Looking over them, file size: 0 bytes. Yeah, zero bytes. Three of these files were over two gigabytes (2GB) and the other three were in the range of eight hundred megabytes (800MB). Now, we have a problem.

I come to find out that the `chkdsk` run found something wrong with these large files and marked them as zero bytes in the file table on the drive.

So I quickly take the original hard disk down to my system here and throw it on the USB adapter and start running a simple undelete utility on the files. It finds them, but still as zero bytes, and only restores a zero byte file. Now we have a larger problem. So I start searching around the Internet for some utilities that will scan the disk and reconstruct the damaged or missing PST files.

I come to find a program called Office Recovery by DiskInternals. The program installed, and I had it scan the disk. This took forever on my little machine but after many hours found the parts and displayed them to me. I was able to save the mail to a PST file on my primary hard disk. But still a problem, all of the new messages had their times erased and most of the messages have the `From:` field replaced with their Exchange counterparts /O= and /OU= stuff.

I need to recover the files themselves, not the contents. So a little more searching and reading up and I find out that a program I found a long time back can help. So I installed X-Ways Forensics, and had it scan the external disk. Following some bits and pieces of information around the Internet I was able to do a File Recovery by Type. This scans the entire disk for any files with the particular header, looking for PST files you need to search for the header: `!BDN` in hex of course. It found the files, so I told it to grab four gigabytes (4GB) of data starting from the beginning of each PST file. This of course pulls tons of useless data with it, but does get the information that we need.

I then had six four gigabyte PST files sitting on my primary disk. Alright, lets try this. I loaded Outlook and File -> Open -> Personal Folder, I selected the first of the PST files and clicked OK. Nope! Outlook threw out some horrible errors and told me to fix the corrupt file. But for once… Just once, it told me how to do this. I then located `scanpst.exe` which comes with Office and using the utility chose to fix one file at a time. This reduced the file size to an acceptable level and I was able to import them into Outlook successfully. Once in Outlook, I created a new Personal Folder and moved the contents into the new folders so I was sure they would not be corrupt. After working on this for eight hours, I decided that was probably the best I was going to do, and the most data I was going to be able to recover.

This morning I put them back on to the CEOs laptop and for now she is happy. But this entire problem would not have been so huge if we were allowed to make backups. We have on many occasions, multiple times a month gone up with external drives and blank DVD’s to help back stuff up, and we are never given time to do so. She does not want her data stored on the multi-thousand dollar SAN we have setup for such things.

How do you tell the CEO to use the technology we have for the company to store data, that is protected for her access only and strictly monitored? You want data protection and backups and security, yet will not allow us to back it up, blow off I.T when we want to help you back up from your local machine.

Either way, this could have had a much worse outcome, I think she will let us take backups and give I.T the time it needs to do so as well.

So playing around with some registry and networking settings I was able to lower my latency by about one hundred and fifty by applying this registry tweak.

Go to Start -> Run, type in `regedit` and click OK.

On the left open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Services -> Tcpip -> Parameters -> Interfaces -> (Choose your card here, it will be the only folder that contains the most data in it, that appears on the right). In here right click on the right and make a new `DWORD Value` when you can name it, type in (case is important) `TcpAckFrequency` and press enter, double click it to modify the value and change it to `1` and click OK.

You will need to restart your computer for this change to take effect. If you find that this did not help at all, or messes something else up, just delete the `TcpAckFrequency` DWORD item you added.

Along with this, you can also do another tweak which seemed to help a lot on my Windows machine for in-game latency.

Open Control Panel and then Network Connections. Right click on Local Area Connection (or your network adapter) and choose Properties. Near the top you should have a Configure button to the right of the name of your network adapter. Click Configure at the top you should have some tabs, click Advanced and on the left choose the option that is related to Checksum Offloading (you may not have this option, or it may be called something else like TCP/IP Offloading IPv4) and turn this Off. Save your settings and restart the machine.

Let me know if it helps you as well.

I suppose we can start out the new month with a informative post today. At work some friends were setting up some Windows XP machines and wanted to image the disk so that the process for setting up all eight machines went faster. Having no access to disk imaging software at the moment I suggested that they just use `dd` in Linux to do the image. None of them had really heard of this program, so I explained to them how to use it.

A easy way for anyone to do this is to grab a boot-able Linux CD, we used TRK, and grab a external USB hard disk.

Boot from the CD, and choose the first boot option. Mount your USB disk somewhere easily accessible. We did ours as such: `mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt0`then we created an image of the first computer (the one we are currently on, and has Windows XP installed on it already and configured): `dd bs=16384 if=/dev/sda of=/mnt0/image.img`.

Once the process is complete power off the machine and take the USB hard drive and CD to the next, boot from the CD and mount the hard disk. Issue the command: `dd bs=16384 if=/mnt0/image.img of=/dev/sda`.

As you can see, `if=` is the Input File for dd, and `of=` is the Output File. `bs=` is the block size to copy between the disks, you can increase this if you wish to see better performance in faster machines.