Going to the Bay Area for a couple of weeks this Sunday. Looking forward to catch up with friends and do some touch-and-go's @ RHV http://bit.ly/gEf2QE

Looking forward to the DLD conference in Munich this coming weekend.

Low level format of Samsung drive using DOS formated USB flash disk

My C drive started clicking and windows would stop at times. Managed to clone the entire disk to another one using Acronis. Then changed the motherboard/cpu and strange things happened. The system suddenly didnt recognize any of the commands, icons disappear and no process can be created. So decided it is time to upgrade to Windows 7.

I decided to revive the Samsung so that I can still have the old XP to boot if needed.
To do a low level format of the Samsung, there a utility they provide. A DOS utility. So i needed to format a USB stick to DOS and run that utility. 4 hours later i found the solution:

1) HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (asks for a "dos" directory, point to where the 3 files below reside)
2) The 3 files: IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM are copied.
3) Samsung disk utility

All of them nicely zipped here

Like last year, Sparkfun are giving away $150,000 in $100 chunks to new customers http://ping.fm/Q9I6G

3D printing revolution coming to EU - http://ping.fm/BwHUA ; Can't wait to do things like http://bit.ly/3DPRINT

Love my Nexus One Google phone. Time for upgrading software http://ping.fm/GVf6x

Looking forward to 2wks in TLV starting Apr19 after long absence

Installed Windows7 on HP 4510s laptop following Vista crash

Vista gave in and boot would not end in login screen but in a black screen with a mouse cursor. It seemed like if i press on the icons where previously was a fish for logging in, the disk was more active than not. Safe mode worked. CHKDSK when booting from windows CD did find some errors but then the disk would not boot any more.

I did a couple of backups before adventuring into re-installation. In safe mode, i copied the 2 user directories of the laptop onto a remote PC and then I used clonezilla which runs a Linux from CD with few commands; enough to save the 4GB of data via ethernet (samba) to a windows PC. But that didn't really complete without errors due to some driver bug on the XP driver of the server so i did a second backup to my iPod which had 100GB of unused space.

I used the Windows7 DVDs that I bought for 30EUR as part of Microsoft's programme to upgrade everyone's Vista in 2n half 2009. Yes, i tried to first just run the upgrade but it would not allow to do that in Safe-Mode and I couldn't boot the laptop.

It felt odd to install Windows for the first time. A legal verstion that is. So now I have what everyone is so in love with - Windows 7. Glorified Vista.

Out of the box, fresh install and see below the list of all the processes that are running in this thing. Surely they all must be doing something very important. I recall being able to reduce XP to 7 pocesses and 10 or so services and everything (Office, browser, games) was running perfectly. Obviously in order to justify to people that they must buy Quad core computers with 6GB of memory and 10 terraflop graphics cards with 1GB memory, in order to run the same Office, browser and games that they were running 12 years ago on computers 1/100 the power, MS must throw tonnes of useless processes at the thing to slow the computer down. What will kill M$ eventually is not the fact they are creating need and want out of thin air (people spending a grand a year on a new PC) together with PC manufacturers but the way they are managed and the uselessness of what many employees feel about their jobs ever since around just before Bill left the scene.

From Limor's geeky memoires

From Limor's geeky memoires

From Limor's geeky memoires

From Limor's geeky memoires

Looking forward to GDC in San-Francisco 10-Mar

Took the plunge and hacked my wonderful Nexus

Can't help it but get constantly exposed to the fact that you can get root access on the Nexus. I'm pretty familiar with embedded Linux as i've been playing robotics with Gumstix, RoBoard and Bifferboard so Android on an ARM processor shouldn't be that threatening.

Last week I did the manual upgrade from Google (what's called OTA ERE27 which added multitouch). Today I went ahead and followed the procedure to install custom O/S that is all the rage at the moment. Google are developing Android and giving away the source code. So some people compile that code again and package it into versions of Android that are less restricted than the one that comes precompiled from Google.

1) unlock the bootloader - allowing the loading of alternative ROMs into the flash memory (ie: root access)
2) load a small recovery ROM - which allows backing up the big ROM and performing emergency tasks ( this is like a small emergency boot partition )
3) install alternative Operating System ROM. Everyone loves Cyanogen's ROMs. This modifies and replaces default O/S files. So what I learned the hard way is that you first have to re-install the original vanilla 2.1 Google Android ROM and then install Cyanogen's stuff on top. The modified ROM that I had with the latest ERE27 was not compatible with Cyanogen and so didn't boot and gave me a very stressful afternoon.
4) Install other stuff that is mandatory - (see this) multitouch and google addons
5) Install tonnes of applications not only from Market but also from androlib.com where they have apps for rooted devices. Also installed Hebrew fonts as instructed here

Everything seems to work as it did before + I can see hebrew fonts. Supposedly this Cyanogen thingy that i have installed has a lot of other great features so i look forward to discovering what these are. For now, I managed to get a root prompt which was cool. I even got a root prompt from the PC connected the phone via USB. The command adb.exe that provides a general interface to the phone from the PC, including shell access, comes with the Android development tools that can be downloaded from Google.

I have a problem with nimbuzz (skype, gtalk, msn.. combined) not being able to connect to their server when using wi-fi, only when using 3G.

Nexus phone doesn't cease to amaze me

I was a big fan of plaxo for ever since they started in 2001 because of their ability to update my outlook contacts every time someone updates their contact who is also on plaxo. However, during the past couple of years i've stopped using outlook when i moved to gmail and macbook and now Nexus. On macbook i had plaxo doing its thing and even bothering my desktop with useless status updates from people. didn't want to stop them in their holy mission of updating my contacts with live information. But after my macbook was stolen, and until i buy some netbook that can run Hackintosh, my 3000 strong contact book is still with these guys who have recently started playing anti-utopian games wanting money for their service.

Finally i found a way to transfer all the contacts from plaxo to my Nexus. They have a "sync point" with yahoo. done that, then i used gmail contacts to import yahoo contacts which took a couple of hours. Then automagically my Nexus has all 5000 contacts combination of the old Plaxo contacts (from the XACCT/Xpert days) and the more recent contacts.

Very happy also that Nexus syncs with Facebook contacts and it would be great if everyone on Facebook would put their phone numbers and emails but Facebook sure don't make that task easy.

I have been installing loads from Android Market apps. Installed manually the latest ROM from Google that adds multi-touch features. I'll consider rooting (getting admin access to the Android linux O/S) in order to add some missing fonts but on the other hand Google seems to be on top of things and they will surely release all fonts sooner than later.

Nimbuzz is a unified messenger app with voip. Skype finally works like a charm! and i'm seeing everyone who is online in yahoo, msn, facebook and skype on one screen..

Alternative web browser called Dolphin allows gestures to be mapped to web page bookmarks. It also has tabs and supports multi-touch.

Finally the real magic came when i installed Qik. It broadcasts my video live. I could actually see my live video broadcast online http://qik.com/limor freaky stuff!

Looking forward to go to TLV 8th-15th Feb

I won a Google Nexus mobile phone at #DLD10

Had the privilege to attend the #dld10 conference and met some amazingly tallented people.
But winning a Google Nexus mobile phone just masked any sensory input and potential associative memories making their way to the hippocampus for long-term storage.

Getting a Google Nexus is one mofo way of transitioning from Sony Ericsson 750i into the real-time web world.

Looking forward to go to Munich tomorrow - dld-conference.com (#DLD10) Sun-Tue.

OTRS instalation adventures

Support at RoboSavvy is currently given by phone and email and we kind of have rolls of who does what. But as one of the employees left all of a sudden, it became evident that lots of important stuff was in her gmail account and inaccessible. Gmail is great in many ways. One of the important features in terms of providing email support is having full-text search of email archive and threaded messages.

It is time to look around and see how to organize the email support, and in addition maybe upgrade the way other tasks are performed such as ordering from suppliers, discussing custom pricing with suppliers and customers, promising things that will happen in the future pending other things. Currently this is done with paper and it works but some automation would not hurt.

OTRS is a German old-school public domain software in Perl that dates back more than 10 years. So it doesn't have the Web2.0 coolness but it seems to have many many features to discover. Their support is given via mailing list.. oh no!

OpenOffice's feature roadmap is defined by Microsoft (conspiracy)

I really believe that OpenOffice's entire blessed effort is completely useless for business use because of a handful of features that are absolutely essential.

Word

• track changes
• outline

Excel

• Cut and paste - when you "cut" 10 lines you would expect "paste" to insert them elsewhere without having to first insert 10 empty lines
  

Back to Windows

I've had a MacBook now for 3 years and I've gotten to like it. I even changed the hard drive to 7200 rpm (by hacking a WD Passport) and installed the latest version of Mac O/S last year after the disk crashed (as it did for 2 other people i know that same week) and also had the palm-rest area plastic replaced by the kind people at Apple center after warranty period expired because my crack were experienced by tens of thousands of people.
Fortunately I was given a free HP ProBook 4510s with Vista Business when moving office telephone service package. Can't complain. Decent specs. So now i'm back to Windows and trying to get rid of the tonnes of useless software that comes pre-installed on this thing and customizing it to make it look and feel a bit more Mac/Unix'ish. I've also applied for a legal upgrade to Windows 7 upgrade program for 30EUR. Still waiting to hear from MS's outsourced reps if my laptop is eligible. Otherwise 2-3 gigs of dvd will take an awful lot of time with utorrent/jdownloader.

Here's the list of things I'm installing on Vista: