Technology Tales

Starting a fifth...

While it is difficult to believe the passage of time sometimes, there are events that provide the occasional reminder. The fourth birthday of this outpost on the web is but a small representative of the genre. An initially frenetic posting rate slowed over time and new entries appear on here when there is something to share rather than trying to work to a schedule. That went by the wayside a good while ago...

Over the years, appearances have changed, but the same raison d'être remains: to share useful snippets regarding the digital technology that pervades this age. Sometimes, these are things that I need to store for my own future reference, yet there are others that I scarcely have seen elsewhere. Even with the power of Google or Bing, it can be challenging to track down the knowledge that you need these days, so that's why I keep on adding to the collection of material that you find on here.

All in all, we seem to be in a time of major upheaval. During the past year, I had one of my own; the result was a change of job and place of work. However, there are many more momentous ones than that, with plenty to be seen in the world of technology. Digital photography is taken for granted nowadays, with the next likely battle between DSLR's and compact system cameras. Then, there's the increasing mobility of computing and the increasingly clever packaging of diminutive yet powerful devices. It appears that everything is all change, so that may bring me more things about which to write on here. 2011 may become an interesting, if very challenging year ahead.

Ubuntu 10.10 and Citrix

Many of us with the opportunity to work from home will have met up with logging via a Citrix server. With that in mind, I set to getting an ICA client going on my main Ubuntu box at home. There is information scattered about the web in the form of a question on the Ubuntu forum and a step-by-step guide by Liberian Geek. To summarise the process that I followed here, you have to download a copy of the Citrix Receiver installer for Linux from the company's website. There, you'll see DEB and RPM packages, along with a tarball for other systems. The latter needs a bit more work, so I got the x86 DEB package and installed that in the usual way, using Ubuntu's Software Centre to do the installation following the download. Needing to start the Citrix connection via a browser session meant that a browser restart was needed too. That wasn't the end of the leg work because Thawte certificate errors were to stop me in my tracks until I downloaded their root certificates from their website. Once the zip file was on my PC, I extracted it and copied the required certificate (Thawte Server CA.cer from the thawte Server CA directory) to /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts on my system; it helped that the error message had told me which was the one I needed from the collection in the zip file. With that matter addressed, the connection happened without a glitch, and I was able to get to working without recourse to a Windows virtual machine. For once, Linux wasn't to be excluded from one of the ways of using computers that has been getting more prevalent these days.

Update 2012-04-14: On an equivalent installation on Linux Mint Debian Edition, I found that the installation location for the certificate had moved to /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts. This was for the 64-bit edition.

Update 2012-12-17: The above applied to an installation of version 12.10 on 32-bit Ubuntu GNOME Remix too.

A spot of extension bother with Firefox

One keystroke that I use a lot when typing on a computer is Control + Shift + [an arrow key] but I found myself in the awkward position of it not working in Firefox any more. The nuisance level was enough to set me investigating in the name of resolving the problem. Using the following command to start Firefox saw the keystroke being returned to me, so I needed to find which plug-in, extension or add-on was the cause of the matter.

firefox -safe-mode

Then, it was a matter of disabling one extension at a time and restarting Firefox each time to see when the keystroke functionality was returned to me. The culprit turned out to be Firebug 1.6 and there's a discussion on their bug forum about the issue. Even the good folk in the Firebug project noted how many folk were experiencing the inconvenience based on a quick Google search. Since that didn't turn up the answer for me, I had to do some digging of my own, and I hope that it has saved you some time. Of course, Firebug comes without cost so we cannot grumble too much, but I'll be keeping it disabled as much as possible until a new version makes its appearance.

Update 2011-01-15: This now seems to be fixed in Firebug 1.6.1

A lot of work ahead

Recently, I tested Ubuntu 11.04's first alpha release on both a VirtualBox VM and a spare PC. As expected with alpha software, it had issues. The new Unity desktop environment didn't work properly on either system: no top or side panels appeared, and applications lacked menu bars. Others appear to have had better experiences, possibly because they did fresh installations rather than upgrades like I did. I might try a clean install or wait for the next alpha release. The final version will include Firefox 4 along with the desktop changes. Overall, Natty Narwhal promises to be an unusually significant Ubuntu update. I'll monitor its development before deciding whether to upgrade. There's still plenty of time, as the release is months away.

Do we need to pay for disk partitioning tools anymore?

My early explorations of dual-booting of Windows and Linux led me into the world of disk partitioning. It also served another use since any of my Windows 9x installations (that dates things a bit...) didn't have a tendency to last longer than six months at one point; putting the data on another partition meant that a fresh Windows installation didn't jeopardise any data that I had should a mishap occur.

Then, Partition Magic was the favoured tool, and it wasn't free of charge, though it wasn't extortionately priced either. For those operations that couldn't be done with Windows running, you could create bootable floppy disks to get the system going to perform those. Thinking about it now, it all worked well enough, and the usual caveats about taking care with your data applied as much then as they do now.

For the last few years, many Linux distributions have coming in the form of CD's or DVD's from which you can boot into a full operating system session, complete with near enough the same GUI that an installed version. When a PC is poorly, this is a godsend that makes me wonder how we managed without it; having that visual way of saving data sounds all too necessary now. For me, the answer to that is that I misspent too many hours blundering blindly using the very limited Windows command line to get myself out of a crux. Looking back on it now, it all feels very dark compared to today.

Another good aspect of these Live Distribution Disks is that they come with hard disk partitioning tools, such as the effective GParted. They are needed to configure hard drives during the actual installation process, but they serve another process too: they can be used in place of the old proprietary software disks that were in use not so long ago. Being able to deal with the hard disk sizes available today is a good thing, as is coping with NTFS partitions along with the usual Linux options. While the operations may be time-consuming, they have seemed reliable so far, and I hope that it stays that way despite any warning that gets issued before you make any changes. Last weekend, I got to see a lot of what that means when I was setting up my Toshiba Equium laptop for Windows/Ubuntu dual booting.

With the capability that is available both free of charge and free of limitations, you cannot justify paying for disk partitioning software nowadays, and that's handy when you consider the state of the economy. It also shows how things have changed over the last decade. Being able to load up a complete operating system from a DVD also serves to calm any nerves when a system goes down on you, especially when you surf the web to find a solution for the malady that's causing the downtime.

Restoring the MBR for Windows 7

During my explorations of dual-booting of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.10, I ended up restoring the master boot record (MBR) so that Windows 7 could load again or to find out if it wouldn't start for me. The first hint that came to me when I went searching was the bootsect command, but this only updates the master boot code on the partition, so it did nothing for me. What got things going again was the bootrec command.

To use either of these, I needed to boot from a Windows 7 installation DVD. With my Toshiba Equium laptop, I needed to hold down the F12 key until I was presented with a menu that allowed me to choose from what drive I wanted to boot the machine, the DVD drive in this case. Then, the disk started and gave me a screen where I selected my location and moved to the next one where I selected the Repair option. After that, I got a screen where my Windows 7 installation was located. Once that was selected, I moved on to another screen from I started a command line session. Then, I could issue the commands that I needed.

bootsect /nt60 C:

This would repair the boot sector on the C: drive in a way that is compatible with BOOTMGR. Though this wasn't enough for me, it was something worth trying anyway in case there was some corruption.

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot

The first of these restores the MBR, and the second sorts out the boot sector on the system drive (where the Windows directory resides on your system). In the event, I ran both of these and Windows restarted again, proving that it had come through disk partition changes without a glitch, though CHKDISK did run in the process, but that's understandable. There's another option for those wanting to get back their boot menu, and here it is:

bootrec /rebuildbcd

Though I didn't need to do so, I ran that too, but later used EasyBCD to remove the boot menu from the start-up process because it was surplus to my requirements. That's a graphical tool that has gained something of a reputation since Microsoft dispensed with the boot.ini file that came with Windows XP for later versions of the operating system.

Using Data Step to Create a Dataset Template from a Dataset in SAS

Recently, I wanted to make sure that some temporary datasets that were being created during data processing in a dataset creation program weren't truncating values or differed from the variable lengths in the original. It was then that a brainwave struck me: create an empty dataset shell using data step, and use that set all the variable lengths for me when the new datasets were concatenated to it. The code turned out to be very simple and here is an example of how it looked:

data shell;
    stop;
    set example;
run;

The STOP statement, prevents the data step from reading in any of the values in the template dataset and just its header is written out to another (empty) dataset that can be used to set things up as you would want them to be. It certainly was a quick solution in my case.

Manually adding an entry for Windows 7 to an Ubuntu GRUB2 menu

A recent endeavour of mine has been to set up a dual-booting arrangement on my Toshiba Equium laptop, with Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7 side by side on there. However, unlike the same attempt with my Asus Eee PC where Windows XP coexists with Ubuntu, there was no menu entry on the GRUB (I understand that Ubuntu has had version 2 of this since 9.04 though the internal version is of the form 1.9x; you can issue grub-install -v at the command line to find out what version you have on your system) menu afterwards. Thankfully, I eventually figured out how to do this and the process is shared here in a more coherent order than the one in which I discovered all the steps.

The first step is to edit /etc/grub.d/40_custom (using sudo) and add the following lines to the bottom of the file:

menuentry 'Windows 7' {
set root='(hd0,msdos2)'
chainloader +1
}

Since the location of the Windows installation can differ widely, I need to explain the "set root" line because (hd0,msdos2) refers to /dev/sda2 on my machine. More generally, hd0 (or /dev/sda elsewhere) refers to the first hard disk installed in any PC, with hd1 (or /dev/sdb elsewhere) being the second and so on. While I was expecting to see entries like (hd0,6) in /boot/grub/grub.cfg, what I saw were ones like (hd0,msdos6) instead with the number in the text after the comma being the partition identifier; 1 is the first (sda1), 2 (sda2) is the second and so on. The next line (staring with chainloader) tells GRUB to load the first sector of the Windows drive so that it can boot. After all that decoding, my final remark on what's above is a simple one: the text "Windows 7" is what will appear in the GRUB menu, so you can change this as you see fit.

After saving 40_custom, the next step is to issue the following command to update grub.cfg:

sudo update-grub2

Once that has done its business, then you can look into /boot/grub/grub.cfg to check that the text added into 40_custom has found its way in there. That is important because this is the file read by GRUB2 when it builds the menu that appears at start-up time. A system reboot will prove conclusively that the new entry has been added successfully. Then, there's the matter of selectively to see if Windows loads properly like it did for me, once I chose the correct disk partition for the menu entry, that is!

Changing the earpiece volume on a Nokia 1661

Since the Nokia 1661 is an entry-level phone, you'd have thought that they'd have made it obvious how to change the earpiece volume on the thing. However, it turns out to be something for which you do need to consult its manual, and it's not as user-friendly as it could be either. Seemingly, the earpiece volume only can be adjusted while you're already on a phone call: you need to use the scroll key (push in left and right sides as needed) that could be right up against your face at the time!

My way around this is to phone the speaking clock (123 in the U.K.) and adjust the earpiece while that call is in progress. Then, you're set for future conversations with real people. Well, anything's better than not being able to hear the other person due to background noise, and my Nokia 1661 came with its volume set rather too low for me if I recall correctly. While I can appreciate the need to look after your hearing, you do need to have coherent phone conversations too.

A hidden cost of sharing Excel workbooks

Recently, I encountered a reason to be wary about creating shared Excel spreadsheets when one ballooned in size. It ended up growing to around 130 megabytes before I tried turning off sharing to see what happened and the size shrunk to under 200 kilobytes. From this, it would appear that the version control information was the cause of the explosion in file size.

With that in mind, I set about to looking through the settings to see if there were any that might need optimisation. While the default action is to keep thirty days of change tracking, I have this reduced to a single day in order not to be keeping too much. Quite how much you need to retain is up to you, but I will be keeping an eye on things now that I have done this.