First of all, nowhere else is the old adage more true than with Google: if you don’t know what the company is trying to sell you, then they are trying to sell you. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Search, and every other service provided by Google is free. They make money by collecting information about you to tailor advertising, which they sell to others. This should come as a surprise to nobody: why else would Google offer such versatile and useful products for free?

I was honestly surprised that before now, Google was not agglomerating information from all of the different services that Google offers. So for them to do so now is not terribly concerning to me: I think that more targeted YouTube searches, for example, would be useful. If I worry about my searches, I can use Chrome’s incognito mode, or maybe DuckDuckGo. I can get rid of my Google account, shutting off my Gmail, Google+, and everything else. Would it be a pain? Of course. But as a non-paying customer, what do I expect?

Two issues about Google’s collection of information have the potential to bother me. The first is whether they sell that information to third parties, and they say that they don’t. Should that change without an opt-out, that would be a different ball game. The second, and probably more important, is how well they are actually securing the data they collect. To date, Google has not had any major data breaches that I am aware of. They seem to do a pretty good job securing their data. Again, if that changes in the future, that would be concerning, but at the same time, let’s be honest: plenty of companies have a far worse record when it comes to securing personally identifiable information. Zappos lost my data, and I’m not severing ties with them.

I can understand why people would be concerned about what Google is doing. However, let’s keep things in perspective. Google’s unified privacy policy has probably spurred more debate on the subject than anything else in recent memory, which has probably done more for the cause of privacy awareness than anything even the most ardent supporters could hope for. In addition, Google isn’t doing anything too terribly out-of-bounds with the data they are already collecting. Privacy is a very important issue, certainly. However, not every privacy policy is a terrible one.

• Current Mood: Bang
• Currently Listening To: "Purple Rain", Prince

The problem stems from a registry hack that allows Windows 7 to use UTC in the CMOS real-time clock (RTC). All adult OSes expect that the RTC will be in UTC, and then the OS calculates the corrects time to display for users based on the time zone and daylight savings time. Windows has forever expected the RTC to be in local time, however, which can cause all sorts of problems, such as moving the clock twice for a DST change. Recent versions of Windows have incorporated a registry hack to allow the RTC to be in UTC, but it’s not working perfectly, as I’ve discovered.

For when that hack is in place, when you sync to an internet time server, the correct time is not written to the CMOS RTC, as it is when the RTC time is local time. I believe the problem started on my computer when the CMOS battery was dying and the clock was losing time. When I replaced it, I of course had to set the time in the BIOS manually, and so I got it close enough, thinking that after I did an internet time update it would be written with the correct value. However, this didn’t happen: it kept on losing time. At first, I thought the new battery was dead, so I replaced it, going through the time-setting process again, and guessing even farther off from the correct time. Of course, this incorrect time was the time that Windows kept falling back to after I did manual time updates.

Eventually, after many reboots checking the behaviour of Widows with the RealTimeIsUniversal registry key both “true” and “false”, I discovered that Windows will write the correct time to the CMOS RTC when they key is “false”, but not “true”. And hence the problem.

The solution, if you want to keep UTC in the RTC, is to use another clock to manually set the correct time in the BIOS, because using internet time update won’t save the correct time. This is not cool and pretty much makes internet time update useless. Hopefully, Microsoft will fix this in a future version of Windows. As I said before, all other OSes work just fine with the CMOS clock being UTC, and it really does make the most sense from a computing standpoint. Get with the program!

So if you want to install Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop and you keep running into the crazy colored vertical lines, during the install, hit F6, then select “nomodeset”. Presto!

• Adobe Lightroom: Really the best software for cataloging and processing digital RAW files. There are some open-source RAW file handlers, like dcraw, but Lightroom has it all in one handy package and I find it really can’t be matched. I do still use GIMP, though, for bitmap twiddling.
• iTunes: I’ve got too many playlists and ratings in here to switch to something else.
• Quicken: The software on this list I truly hate. Again, it’s an issue of simply having too much data to move anywhere else: 15 years of financial data with tens of thousands of transactions is a tough nut to crack. Quicken is the only software I know of that routinely gets worse with every iteration, and they make you pay for a new version about every three years or so. If there was a good alternative that handled all these transactions and did online banking, I’d use it.

That’s about it for software I use regularly that isn’t open source. As you can see, a pretty short list.

• Current Mood: Tired

I will admit that OO came up short in one place. I found that for reasons of collaboration, it was generally better to use PowerPoint from beginning to end than to convert between an Impress file and PowerPoint repeatedly. However, for everything else, OO proved to be just as good, and often times less frustrating, than Word. Here are the highlights:

• Styles: OO Writer is awesome at creating and defining paragraph styles, which really comes in handy when you are formatting your 25,000-word plus capstone project. Sure, Word has styles too, but they just seem to be far less intuitive and harder to use than in Writer.
• Footnotes: The reference-handling abilities of OO Writer were incredible. I had dozens of footnotes to keep track of in my paper, some referenced from multiple places. Even when I moved entire sections of my paper around, OO Writer kept track of everything without fail. I’ve never done anything this extensive in Word, so I’m not sure how it compares, but OO Writer did everything I wanted easily.
• Keyboard shortcuts: OO Writer allows you to create custom keyboard shortcuts, something that comes in handy for inserting all those footnotes. Yes, Word does this as well, so it’s a wash when you compare the two, but still, it’s nice that Writer didn’t forget this important ability.
• PDF Creation: You can now rather easily create PDF documents from Word, but in OO, it’s much more comprehensive, allowing you to specify how the PDF opens, how many levels of bookmarks show in the sidebar, copy protection, and more.
• Macros: For my project, I created two spreadsheets, one in Calc and one in Excel. I’ve been doing VBA programming for about ten years now, so I expected the Excel version to be easier to write. Not so. The macro capabilities in Calc were better than Excel; there were some things I could do easily in Calc that I labored mightily to do in Excel, much to my surprise.

There are differences between the two, and like I said, PowerPoint is still better than Impress if you need to share the file with several other people for group editing. However, all in all OO served me very well, and I think I’ve put it through the wringer enough to demonstrate that it can be used by the student in place of Microsoft Office.

Now, if they made a replacement for OneNote (something I’ve never used, but I hear all sorts of awesome comments about), they’d be set.

• Current Mood: Stuffed
• Currently Listening To: "Your Time Is Gonna Come", Led Zeppelin

First, because I back up my stuff, I was never in any danger of actually losing anything. Since I am in the midst of working on my capstone project for my MSST degree, I’m backup stuff up in about a half-dozen different ways. I’m not quite sure what it would take to lose what I have, but the complete devastation of a large swath of this country is probably a necessary condition. So as before, this outage was more annoying than anything else.

It started when my computer shut down suddenly and without warning. Upon reboot, the motherboard, as ASUS M3N78-EM, would not detect either of my hard drives. They simply didn’t exist. For one boot in twenty, my drives were detected, but that lasted an hour or two at most. Aside from that problem, nothing else was wrong: the POST was successful, and there were no error messages aside from not detecting drives. I rearranged and moved drives around, even trying them one at a time, but nothing worked. It seemed that the motherboard had failed in such a way as to not be able to detect the drives, but otherwise show no other faults.

Testing this required a new motherboard, which I got from Memory4Less. I had few options since the board was two years old and out of production. They very helpfully upgraded me to overnight delivery, and I moved everything over from the old motherboard to the new, identical one. And lo and behold, it worked perfectly. Clearly, the old motherboard actually was at fault.

I’ve seen motherboards fail in a lot of different ways. I dealt with a lot of burst capacitors in my day. I’ve seen overheating, dead fans, boards zapped by lightning, and the good old liquid spill. But such a singular failure that didn’t affect anything else was a new one to me. Consider yourself warned.

• Current Mood: Spring
• Currently Listening To: "I Can't Quit You Baby", Led Zeppelin

I made a number of minor changes to the stock custom-ocs file, but they were powerful enough to get the job done.

mount /dev/sdb2 /home/partimag/

This is often overlooked, but make sure that you mount the proper location for your image files! On the external hard drive I used for imaging, I have two partitions: the first is tiny and has the Clonezilla software, the second is huge and holds the images. Hence, I want the second one (/sdb2) mounted as the image store.

echo “Type c to create image; defaults to imaging computer if nothing typed.”
read -n 1 -t 7 createimg
echo
if [[ $createimg == "c" ]] && [[ -n "${createimg}" ]]
then
echo “Image will be created from current machine.”
else
echo “Hard drive will be overwritten with disk image.”
createimg=”g”
fi

This code determines if I want to create a new image from the current machine, or push an image onto the current machine. The “read –n 1 –t 7 createimg” line reads one character (-n 1) into the variable createimg, with a 7 second timeout (-t 7). The “if [[ $createimg == "c" ]] && [[ -n "${createimg}" ]]” line tests to see if createimg is equal to ‘c’ and not empty. If so, a reassurance that the image will be created from the current machine is displayed.

x=`sudo dmidecode -t 1 | grep -i Product | tr -d ‘\n’`
y=${x#*: }
y=${y// /}

Here is the most important section. This determines the model of the attached computer. It looks hairy (like a lot of bash scripts), but it’s not too bad. It pipes the dmidecode output of system info (-t 1) to grep, which pulls out the line containing “Product”, and then trims the newline. The next line (y=${x#*: }) removes everything before the colon, and the following line (y=${y// /}) removes all the spaces. You are left with a variable containing the Product Name as stored in the BIOS, without spaces. Very convenient.

echo The following model has been detected:
echo $y
echo Please press q to abort.
read -n 1 -t 5 abort
if [[ $abort == "q" ]] && [[ -n "${abort}" ]]
then
echo Aborting!
exit 1
else
echo Continuing…
fi

This displays the just-detected model information, and once pauses for input, this time for 5 seconds (-t 5). This way, if something terrible has gone wrong and the wrong model has been detected, or you made a mistake, you can abort. I set it up with timeouts like these so when I plug my external HD into a computer and boot from it, it will automatically push the image onto that machine without any further intervention from me. If you are nervous, then remove the timeouts and do things manually.

echo Running Clonezilla
case $y in
OptiPlex780*)
if [[ $createimg == "c" ]]
then
echo Now saving image…
echo y | /opt/drbl/sbin/ocs-sr -q2 -c -j2 -rm-win-swap-hib -z1 -i 2000 -p poweroff savedisk “Dell780″ “sda”
else
echo Now ghosting machine…
echo y | /opt/drbl/sbin/ocs-sr -g auto -e1 auto -r -j2 -p reboot restoredisk “Dell780″ “sda”
fi
exit 0
;;

*)
echo The computer could not be correctly identified!
exit 1
;;
esac

Here’s where each individual model is handled. In this sample case block, the only listed model is an OptiPlext780. If ‘c’ was pressed earlier to signal the creation of a new image from the current machine, then the line echo y | /opt/drbl/sbin/ocs-sr -q2 -c -j2 -rm-win-swap-hib -z1 -i 2000 -p poweroff savedisk “Dell780″ “sda” does that for us. Going through, it echoes ‘y’ (so we don’t have to hit it manually) to the Clonezilla script that creates an image using partclone, with confirmation, with the hidden data between the MBR and 1st partition, removing the swap and hibernation files, with gzip compression, with the image split into 2000 MB pieces, power off after completion, save the entire disk, call it “Dell780”, and save device “sda”. If c was not pressed, and the image is put onto the machine, then it’s almost the exact same thing, with a few different parameters (“restoredisk” instead of “savedisk”, for example).

The default block is run if none of the model numbers match. Always a good sanity check.

If you had several different image types for each model, you could add additional prompts with read and case in each model block. The functionality is limited only by your needs and technical expertise.

Ever since I set up this custom-ocs file, it has run beautifully, needing only tweaks to add new models as necessary. It makes imaging a breeze.

• Current Mood: Monday
• Currently Listening To: "Run Like Hell", Pink Floyd

Although in my post last September I wrote that I didn’t really care if the upgrade to 2.1 came, as time went on and I was unable to install apps more and more frequently because I still had 1.5, it became an issue. The lack of feedback or progress from Motorola was just rubbing salt in the wound. When they finally announced that Cliq XT users would be left out in the cold, I wasn’t too surprised. A lack of surprise didn’t mean a lack of outrage, though.

What was even more infuriating was the fact that the Cliq XT was more than capable of running 2.1. Plenty of people had rooted their phones and done an unofficial upgrade (rooting is to Android phones what jailbreaking is to iPhones). Once I learned that an official upgrade was not happening, I decided to root my phone myself. Rooting your phone is dangerous, and you are definitely on your own if it goes wrong. However, I was not terribly worried, and I followed the instruction at this forum and successfully upgraded my phone to 2.1. There were a lot of steps, and it took several hours, but at no point was I afraid that I had screwed up. Knowing Linux definitely helped, but even a novice can handle it if the instructions are followed meticulously (note: I, like everybody else, am not responsible for whatever happens if you decide to root your phone).

Now my phone is happily running 2.1, and the Cliq XT is more than up to the task. This is definitive proof that the reason that Motorola gave up on the upgrade was due to their own resource-hogging MotoBLUR™ technology. What I really don’t understand, though, is why they just didn’t give up on MotoBLUR itself and pushed ahead with the upgrade. Motorola has made it clear that MotoBLUR will not be a part of their future products. They’ve decided that MotoBLUR isn’t worth it, and apparently for good reason. So why don’t they just acknowledge it and make available the BLUR-less version of 2.1 that I have running on my phone, more or less? They’d at least make a lot of people happier than they are now.

All in all, Motorola really demonstrated a complete lack of customer service know-how here. As a result, they’ve lost me as a customer for life, and I know I’m not the only one. As for T-Mobile, we’ll see. I’m going to complain to them and see if they are willing to assuage me. Yes, it’s a bit unfair since the fault is with Motorola and not T-Mobile, but since T-Mobile partners with Motorola, and is in face the outlet that these phones were purchased from, they are going to be held responsible too. I’ve never had a problem with T-Mobile in the past, but our contract is up in a year and Verizon is certainly getting more and more attractive…

Moral of the story: as I said before, under-promise and over-deliver. Not vice-versa.

• Current Mood: Frustrated
• Currently Listening To: "Black", Pearl Jam

Why did I switch? Well, essentially because I like the interface and functions better in KeePass. The UI looks a bit better, and there is a graphical representation of how strong a password is. Other than that, though, it’s almost identical to Password Safe. Password Safe is even a bit easier to use for the novice, as it doesn’t have quite as many options to fiddle with as KeePass. One issue with KeePass 2.x is that is requires the .NET architecture, which isn’t always available, especially if you plan on using it on a computer that you don’t have control over.

I’d unhesitantly recommend either of the two for your password manager needs. Play with both of them and decide which one you like better. But pick and use some kind of manager. Using strong, random passwords is an important part of security, and password managers help make doing so simpler.

• Current Mood: Cyber-educated

In short, Clonezilla has worked great. The custom script I created didn’t miss a beat, its speed is fantastic, and I never had a problem with a bad image or any data corruption. In addition, not changing the SID has so far made zero difference in our environment. As long as the computer names aren’t duplicated, we have zero problems.

The only issue I had to deal with wasn’t a Clonezilla issue at all, but a more convoluted method of setting up a default profile in Windows 7. Microsoft has never officially supported copying profiles to the default, although it always worked just fine with Windows XP, and frankly, it’s not worth it to use their Preboot Environment and everything that entails just to set up some custom desktop icons for users. Windows 7 is more complicated than XP, but by following the steps in this thread, especially the steps involving searching and deleting keys from the Registry, it has worked well.

All in all, Clonezilla works great and I do not foresee the need to switch back to a product like Ghost.

• Current Mood: Friday!
• Currently Listening To: "Back in the U.S.S.R.", The Beatles