Recursive directory listing in DOS (or Windows CMD prompt)

Found this resource during a data recovery and found it very helpful. Mirroring here.

Recursive list of directory from CMD or DOS

By: PrometheusUnbound
February 22, 2010To recursively list a directory from the CMD prompt or DOS, use the xcopy command.

Let’s say I want to list C:\Documents and Settings\Joe Blow

Go to a different directory, say C:\Documents and Settings

xcopy “C:\Documents and Settings\Joe Blow\*.*” /E /L /Y >>file.lst

The /E will recurse, the /L will LIST instead of copying /Y will suppress xcopy from asking you if you want to overwrite file.lst.

Integrating Google Tasks with Linux Desktop

I am trying to use Google Tasks more and more to stay on top of my obligations and objectives. The web interface is fine, but I prefer having desktop access to ease accessibility.

A little searching and I found out about Prism.

Gmail Tasks in Your Ubuntu System Tray

(via Namsisi)

This led me to dig a little deeper and I found another overview via the excellent MakeUseOf.com

5 Ways To Access Your Google Tasks

For Google Apps users, the URL for Tasks is
https://mail.google.com/tasks/a/mydomain.com/ig

Spent the Night in Utah in a Cave up in the Hills…

Hayduke would be proud. Yet another example of departure on a committed scale.

Moab man embraces simple life living in cave
By Jason Blevins – The Denver Post

Daniel Suelo had an undergraduate degree from CU in anthropology and a promising career in 2000 when he began what he calls "an experiment." Since that time nine years ago, he has lived without money. He eats from dumpsters and from the wildlands. He lives in a cave in the canyon in Moab. And he blogs his philosophy at the library in town. (Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post)

Firefox stealing focus in Ubuntu

Seeing intermittent, but persistent issues with Firefox windows stealing focus and generally not playing nicely. This really started with attempts to add receipts on FuelClinic.com. My efforts to click in that form were a game of click and type fast before Firfeox decided to rescind focus in the forminputs.

My diagnostic steps:

Start in safemode (disabling all add-ons).

firefox-3.5 -safe-mode

Check forms access. Working.

The add-ons I use are fairly common–AdBlockPlus, FlashBlock, Tab Management and the like.

Currently installed add-ons

My initial thought was that the Tab Management add-ons were causing the problem. After some digging through settings there, however, no effect was found.

My next step was to enable add-ons one-by-one in Safe Mode. As luck would have it, the first plugin I re-enabled was the Firefox Extensions for Ubuntu. Seems like those modifications are known to cause the sorts of problems I was experiencing.

Presto! That odd bit of Ubuntu seems to be the culprit. I agree that this should be an optional element of Firefox.

Slow Cooker: Beans

Finally found a nice slow cooker at the local Saver’s here in Boulder. $7.00 out the door for a Rival 3040-BC! Having the removable ceramic makes cleaning so much easier. The best part is the odd glass lid we’ve had kicking around the house fits perfectly.

As an inaugural run, I cooked two batches of stock (veggie/chicken and turkey). Not only did the house smell awesome for a whole day, but I cleared the freezer out a bit.

Now I’m eager to tackle cooking dried beans. Like many of you, I aspire to using more dried beans, but have never been dedicated to the simple process of soaking them over night. My old housemate purchased a pressure cooker to “speed things up” in this regard. I look to the slow cooker for more simplifications.

The following sites offer excellent overviews and things to consider when slow cooking beans.

Stephanie O’Dea (The Crockpot Lady) offers tips in Cooking Dry Beans in the Slow Cooker

Cooking Dried Beans in the Slow Cooker via ChowHound references the CrockPot Lady’s site above, and the user feedback has a few good tips, including indication that I can get away with not pre-soaking.

Central Bean‘s Guide to cooking in the slow cooker offers, in brief, what I think will be my guide.

But beans do not cook that simply in a crock pot. The Low setting is too low, lengthening the cooking time to 16 to 20 hours. And depending upon the age of the beans and the hardness of the water, the beans may not cook at all! If you cook beans on the High settling, a large amount of cooking liquid evaporates. You’ll have to watch the crock pot to be sure the beans stay covered with liquid. If you want to experiment with your crock pot, try cooking soaked beans for 2 or 3 hours on High, making sure they are constantly covered by liquid. When they are just tender, turn the heat setting to Low and let them cook 6 to 8 hours longer. During these last 6 to 8 hours the beans wont need any special attention.

Eager to see and taste how things come out. I can finally knock a dent in my dried bean stocks.

ABit AN8 Ultra MoBo with AMD-64 3000+ vs. Ubuntu 64-bit

I am slowly piecing together a “new” desktop system. Decent by my standards of waiting until the sweet spot of the price-performance curve before upgrading.

Components

Lian-Li Case $90 via ebay with local pickup
Abit AN8 Ultra Socket 939 Motherboard $40 with the CPU below (and 2×512 memory)
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU
- AMD Documentation
- AMD Athlon 64 microprocessor (via CPU World)
- AMD’s Athlon 64 3000+ processor – Finally, a Hammer without Pentagon pricing (via TechReport)
- CDRInfo Review
Antec Earthwatts Power Supply $50
2x1GB Memory $35

Built the system out fairly quickly. A bit baffled by the Lian Li’s drive mounting rails until I realized that the funny looking screws were specialty items meant to mount the HDs snugly into the rails’ grooves.

Initially, I was seeing memtest86+ errors combining the two memory types. The first sinking thought I had was that I’d gotten bad memory from the craigslist seller but he was kind enough to suggest I tweak my memory timings on the mother board. Sure enough, the settings from the previous owner weren’t playing nicely with my memory arrangement and a reset to factory defaults had me back in business with no memtest errors.

My next area of interest was loading the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 9.10 desktop. I was stymied by kernel panics when I ran on the live CD and the odd error message that indicated “this is not a 64-bit CPU” when I tried a full install.

Perplexed, I reset the BIOS to factory defaults but still saw similar problems loading Ubuntu.

Bad/incompatible memory? Motherboard issues? CPU issues?

I stumbled down the path of altering BIOS settings and multiple reboots with no positive outcomes.

The handy site at CPU-upgrade.com lists the 3000+ as supported on the Abit AN8 Ultra (alternatively, via Abit). It also shows the BIOS rev necessary to support the CPU! I hadn’t considered a BIOS upgrade for the Abit AN8 Ultra board. Turns out my board was 5 revs behind! A bootable USB key and flash of the BIOS later, I was in business! The system boots fine with 64-bit Ubuntu. Even installed Windows 7, too.

Other notes, discoveries and things to consider if there are further quirks.

General Protection Faults – Power Supply related?

10a on the 12v rail is not going to allow that system to run. Sorry but you need a new Power Supply that is built to be usable with an A64 system. You must get one that is 18a or higher on the 12v rail. Whoever built that computer should have known better and they should fix it now before it burns up.

CPU Identification
- CPU-Z is a freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of your system.
- AMD CPU Info Linux Version 3.0.7.118 (64-bit distributions)
- AMD CPUID
Other useful AMD utilities

Vollis Simpson

“If you don’t try something,
you don’t learn anything.”

—Vollis Simpson

Had the good fortune of learning about Vollis in a PBS snippet tonight. My Dad shared with me his affinity for the folk art and clever artistry of whirligigs. We had a small collection about the house growing up. Nothing on the scale that Vollis creates. I enjoy discovering people like Vollis, who are driven to create with a sense of whimsy and determination as their guides.

Some background from the PBS.org site. Video and interviews are also available there…

In 1985, his partners retired and Simpson found himself with a lot of free time and tons of miscellaneous machine parts. “I had to find something that was better than watching television,” he remembers. So, Simpson began to transform his North Carolina farm into an Arcadia of whimsical windmills.

Simpson’s project was initially met with skepticism. “Well everybody made fun of me–[they] thought I was crazy, I reckon, because I started putting them out there in the pasture, out in the front yard.” People began stopping by just to see what Simpson would put up next. With time, however, people have come to admire Simpson’s special salvage. “Some people, like my wife, thought that I was crazy at first. But now she’s pretty happy. Folks can always change their mind, you know.”

Roadside America (another new discovery as I pursued more information on Vollis) has details on how to find the farm.

Seems like PBS has a number of these artists chronicled via the Off The Map Project. I found Salvation Mountain and Leonard Knight there, too! I learned of him watching Into the Wild.

Now I need to learn about the others I didn’t know about! Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey has the right idea…

“Anyone can do anything with a million
dollars—look at Disney. But it takes more
than money to make something out of
nothing, and look at the fun I have doing it.”

—Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey

Two for Tuesday: iDump and inSSIDer

I am working out of the Pittsburgh office leading up to the holiday. Found two good free software utilities today.

I was having problems with intermittent wifi drops from the AP here. A cursory look at settings didn’t reveal any glaring configuration errors and the WRT110′s firmware version wasn’t to blame. I needed a better look at the “air traffic” to determine if the nearby 5GHz wireless phone or perhaps the microwave in the vicinity was causing enough noise to drop my connection (a PITA in that I had to re-VPN after each drop/reconnect).

Unfortunately, the tried and true netstumbler program hasn’t been actively updated in years. This means it doesn’t reliably run on my Asus 1000HE PC’s built in wireless card. A few searches took me to a page that described a new alternative, MetaGeek’s inSSIDer.

Great program and a workable replacement to netstumbler for my needs. A few hours with the program and watching signal graphs roll by and I was able to determine that another AP on the same channel, coupled with some use of the wireless phone was causing enough noise to drop my connection. Changing to a lesser used channel frequency (from 6 to has maintained uninterrupted wifi for me.

Next was a request from a friend on a means to copy music off of his iPod. I typically deal with this via Linux and sort out the mess iTunes makes of your music with a music tagging program that will rename and organize by album/artist the music. He wasn’t able to make the pieces fit together on his work setup so I found references to ESC Soft’s free utility, iDump.

From their website:

What is iDump
This program will allow you transfer your songs from your iPod to a PC, iDump does come wrapped in installer but you can simply drop the .exe in the root directory on your iPod and run it from there.

Connect your iPod and run iDump and you’ll have access to all your songs, select the songs you want to transfer then pick a destination directory and how you would like your songs to be named. And then sit back and transfer all the selected songs to the PC.

Tested OS: Win2k, XP, Me, Vista (not compatible with iPhone or iTouch)

Didn’t try iDump myself, but he was quite pleased and I’ve added it to my arsenal of good software utilities.

Assembling: mdadm the wrong way

I migrated my external JBoD enclosure over to a different PC this morning thinking I’d sort out the music collection a bit in preparation for the holiday travels. I happily logged in from work and fired off what I thought was the appropriate command to assemble my software RAID-5:

mdadm --assemble /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/md0

NOPE! That /dev/md0 is supposed to be the first directive after the –assemble

e.g.

mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1

I was a bit concerned to see errors telling me I no longer had a valid superblock on /dev/sda1 when I tried to correct –assemble syntax.

mdadm: no RAID superblock on /dev/sda1
 mdadm: /dev/sda1 has no superblock - assembly aborted

mdadm -E would show RAID block information for all of the other drives, but not for /dev/sda1

I was preparing myself for rebuilding the RAID-5. Concerned, of course, that I not further break things or risk compromising a “good” drive and the chance at a “healthy” RAID.

Attempting this suggestion to assemble the RAID with 3 of the 4 drives and then re-add my bad /dev/sda1 didn’t work.

If at first you don’t succeed (don’t panic) and Google again.

That led me to this thread and the comforting post:

oops

So turns out I didn’t erase the superblocks, I just destroyed the device files in /dev. If I had erased the superblock then the create method above would have fixed it, instead a reboot did the trick.

Sure enough, a reboot (I didn’t have the patience at this point to manually rebuild my /dev/sda1) and I was back in business. No degraded RAID and no damage done (except to my head from smacking it).

Lesson: Measure syntax twice. mdadm once!

Operating System on a SDHC card

Saw a deal today on a SDHC Class 6 card and it got my wheels turning with regard to operating system flexibility on my EEE PC 1000HE (I love the built in SDHC reader).

Ideally, I’d like to find a good 16GB SDHC card and migrate my Windows XP environment over to said and keep the HD a dual boot between Windows 7 (pending) and Ubuntu.

The Class 6 speeds seem like they’d support the occasional boot and run of Windows XP, or at the very least, keep a peppy VMWare or VirtualBox image on hand without chewing HD space.

Looking at the A-Data 16GB SDHC Class 6 card reviews on NewEgg I found conflicting information. Some good caveats there regarding the write longevity of these devices and–in essence–a warning that SDHC cards aren’t designed to run an OS off of them. I recall this from the early days of flash memory and I’d be wary of running full bore off of any flash memory, but damn it’d be convenient for those “sometimes” OS’s. And the A-Data 16GB is affordable and compatible with the EEE PCs.

NewEgg Reviews of note:

Scott (aka SLINC)

…looking through the reviews of this, I notice a lot of people using this for applications that it’s not intended (Running an OS on his Asus EEE PC), then giving a bad review becasue the card died during that.

People these cards are not made / designed to run and OS like that or be something that is taking constant transfers. They are a convenience memory made for “Short Bursts”. They are not a Hard Drive, they are to be used in Digital Devices and as Extra Storage, not as your Main Hard Disk.

And Felix adds…

Other Thoughts: If you plan on using this in the EeePC et al, make sure to disable memory caching. These types of storage cards (SD and SDHC) can only handle writing or deleting _whole_ files (such as what cameras do). If you let your PC continually write and rewrite data (as in RAM, or caching), the card will become corrupt and unusable. It doesn’t matter which brand you buy–they’re not meant for OS memory caching!

Further complicating my considerations, I found a few EEE PC forums with people seeming gung ho about installing onto SDHC.

For now, I’ll sit on this blog post and play around with my existing Kingston 8GB SDHC Class 6 to see how it performs. Should the prices for 16GB come down, I may pull the trigger and see what happens when I try to run XP off it

Tim's Mind Organized

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