Jon’s Project Blog

Since my current laptop (2004) is pretty much on its last legs and I don’t feel like wasting or looking for my XP windows keys, I figured I would just migrate my laptop. Similarly, my desktop that was built in 1999 (Pentium 4 A – no hyperthreading) with 512 Mb of ram and non-functional USB ports and dead sound card, has some useful data on it I figured I might as well start with that and see how much of a hassle it would be to backup those systems. I figured the best way would be to some how ‘dd’ a hard disk and then run it in VirtualBox. However, I remember reading something about problems with Windows “memorizing” hard disk information and in general ‘dd’ is super slow.

Luckily I ran across this Lifehacker article via a quick google search. It doesn’t contain much information, except that it mentions this new (Oct 9,2009?) SysInternals tool called ‘disk2vhd’ which supposedly makes imaging windows drives a piece of cake. Some other Ubuntu googling searches resulted in similar recommendations but also noted that there could be some IDE/SATA driver issues and that you had to fix these driver issues “apriori”. I won’t go into the details since it seems all of this can be fixed in the image afterwards.

So I went about my way, running ‘disk2vhd‘ on 2 windows drives which totaled 50+ Gb. This went smoothely on my abandoned desktop and it took about an hour or two to create the VHD. I copy over the VHD, which took a few more hours (did it overnight). However, when I tried to run the VHD in virtualbox it said I had a grub error (error 21). I figure this has to do with the fact that the MBR points to grub, which lives on the hard disk I didn’t image. Anyways a quick google resulted in grabbing SuperGrubDisk. I just ran it, and selected the “Win” option as I had no intention of creating a dual boot VHD system. This fixed the grub problem.

Windows XP started booting up and then I ran into the infamous “0x0000007B” boot BSOD issue. It has something to do with windows not liking a difference in IDE hardware. At this point another quick google seemed to indicate I would have to do the “apriori” fix step. However, I wasn’t about to go spend another 8 hours trying to backup my computer as I already spent enough time trying to make it work. Luckily I ran across this confusing forum post, which hinted that the Ultimate Boot Cd for Windows (UBCD4Win) had something called “Fix_hdc” that could possibly fix the drivers issue. Luckily I had a copy of a UBCD4Win iso lying around. So I load up UBCD4Win iso and find ‘fix_hdc’ and just selected the “Usb option”.

Magically, it seemed to do the trick, and after a reboot of the virtual machine, everything worked flawlessly.

Summary:

1. Run “disk2vhd” from SysInternals on the drives you want to image. (Optionally, run mergeIDE and so forth to possibly avoid step 3.
2. If you had some multi-boot grub setup and grub doesn’t live on the same partition (which it probably doesn’t), use a grubrecovery disk such as SuperGrubDisk.
3. If you get the “0x0000007B” BSOD error during boot, just grab UBCD4Win, boot it up, and then run Fix_hdc. It should be in Start>Programs>Registry Tools>FIX_hdc>Fix Hard disk/USB

Overall, the process was fairly painless. Mostly just clicking a few “auto” buttons. Virtualbox seems to run well, and so far the experimental 3D drivers seem to play relatively nicely. I’ve watched some movies through VM and played a few games (none of them super resource hungry). Music seems to work fine. Ironically, when I ran Windows 7 earlier this year, the audio did not play smoothely, and video clearly didn’t work. Seems that windows media player plays video much more jerky than VLC which is less noticeable. I don’t remember off-hand what my old vlc settings were though, so I can’t comment much.

I’d say the conversion was a definite success, and I will do the same with my old computers so I will have access to software that I can no longer fine that I had installed on my old machines. At any rate, I now have a “working” backup of my old system which can run in several VM packages (VirtualPC, VirtualBox, VMware). I’m fairly certain that such formats will continually be updated (virtualization seems to be the future of everything), and thus it should be possible to keep a copy of my old machines with me on my new computers in the future.

I haven’t updated for awhile because of qualifying exams and research. Now that is done and over with, I will try to make updates more frequently. Several packages I would like to write reviews for soon and make little demos for are:

1. Meld (A Diff tool. So far I’ve been quite pleased with it’s unique way of displaying diffs.)
2. Paraview 3.6.1 – Now that I have more time I hope to take another stab at the new and improved version.
3. TurboVNC – Modified version of tightVNC that works very well for media over 54Mbps wifi and 100Mbit LANs. I’ve been able to watch videos, play tux racer, and starcraft over wine without noticing any differences. In fact, I’ve run several OS’s in virtualbox remotely using TurboVNC for some computer repair training sessions over G wifi and no one noticed any latency.

I’ve updated some of the SCPD code, and I’m also working on some small short term projects.

Several times I’ve had to save authenticated wiki content to my phone to view it on long flights (across the US). I found wget + Firefox 3.0 (Export Cookies extension) to be quite sufficient. The extension page explains a bit about how to use wget.

The basic strategy is:

1. Login to website, and export cookies and session information to a text file (“cookies.txt”).
2. Run wget and try to figure out what a reasonable download rate is. Some websites obviously don’t like bots, and so you may need to look through the wget options to slowly go throught the site. You may also need to periodically update your cookies or session info via the text file so don’t be too greedy.

As usual, you may want to look into the following wget options:

-I,-r,-l,-p,-k,-np

You may need to play around with the timing as websites generally don’t like being spidered. It also may be be illegal should check the Terms of Service.

The following is a sample commandline used to save webpages and attachments to a directory for offline use. I’ve noticed that firefox on the mac has issues with lack of extensions from wiki sites.

Example:

wget --random-wait --load-cookies=cookies.txt --save-cookies=cookies.txt --keep-session-cookies -r -l 2 -p -k -I /pages/ http://***:8080/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=xxxxxxx download/attachments

I’ve been working on a poster for a research conference, and decided to try my hand at generating nice plots using gnuplot, tecplot, and paraview. Paraview is “open-source” and can handle a variety of datasets. It touts itself as a great tool with tons of features.

In reality, paraview is fairly difficult to use. It’s not intuitive. You can’t import data easily (csv, text). Best of all, Kitware charges for documentation!

While paraview may technically give their source away, I argue that it is not “open”. First. if paraview was indeed “open” in spirit, why do they charge for documentation? Now I don’t care so much about all the nitty gritty details. I just want to be able to find a doc with information about it’s python classes and write a little filter to import 3D point data + faces. However, to my knowledge, no such document really exists. At least it’s not in the top 3 or 4 pages of google search, which means if it does exists, it’s been hidden.

Second, if paraview was “open”, why is CSV not properly supported? I just wanted to plot data from a spreadsheet/matrix/whatever. Why do I even need to use a python filter to read a file and import it?

Also, I will grip about how the doxygen docs are next to unusable. They aren’t even in alphabetical order!

In conclusion, while the features exist in paraview as Kitware hypes it up to be, paraview, at this point in time, can’t really be an open-source application and is entirely unusable for general purposes. Yes, there are nifty filters, which, after you spend a few hours trying to figure how to operate work spectacularly well. Yes, it does do a lot of nifty things, like create movies, extract surfaces, and points. There are a whole slew of things that are nice about paraview. However, the following “issues”, mar whatever Kitware claims paraview to be:

• Lack of any useful documentation, aside from learning how the interface works (Yes, the GUI and pipeline system are SO intuitive that you need to look at a manual to operate. I will say that it is more user friendly than blender, which doesn’t mean much.
• Inflexibility in importing data. If I can’t import my data, how can I even render/plot/manipulate it?

Therefore, Paraview is open-source, as in “I show you the source”, but it fails in being “open”-source, as they blatantly withold information from you. It is nothing less than intellectual blackmail. I think I will stop trying to use paraview for the time being. It’s a big waste-of-time/time sink. Five hours of messing around just to try to get a contour plot and I still haven’t gotten it to work. Although I think I figured out how to do it theoretically, ideally I would modify the python programmable source filters. However, as I mentioend before, there is no documentation on it that is useful. I just want to add mesh data via faces.