Xcopy

Last night I got one of those phone calls that computer saavy people hate to get. “Honey, I think my computer is broken. Your father is looking at it, but it says something about reformatting a hard drive.”
Yes, my mother’s hard drive was failing. They got me the computer and this morning I took a look. Sure enough, the drive wouldn’t boot or allow itself to be repaired.
I popped it into my computer to look at it and even then I had trouble getting it recognized. When I finally got it mounted I realized it was in sad shape.


The problem was that some of the files were corrupted and others were fine. I was trying to copy files off of the bad hard drive onto a good hard drive. The problem is that with the drag and drop copy feature in XP, if any of the files you requested copied are bad, the whole copy crashes.
This really bummed me out since I was getting very little copying done due to the bad files. I remembered about Xcopy and figured out a way to copy all the files I needed easily.

How to copy directories with bad files and get the good files
Xcopy is used from the command line, so you need to open a command window. Use Run from the Start menu and type ‘cmd’, this should bring up a command line interface. That xcopy link takes you to the full manual on xcopy where you can see all the parameters possible.
Xcopy is pretty straightforward, xcopy sourcedir destinationdir is the normal command. But since you know you are copying possibly bad files you need to set a few parameters. The /c parameter tells xcopy to ignore errors. This is key.
So if you want to copy the files out of a bad My Documents directory to a new drive, you’d do something like this.

xcopy “D:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents” “C:\Saveddata\” -c -s -h -i

This example supposes that the bad drive you are salvaging is the D: drive and the drive you are saving to is C:. You can use tab to autocomplete path names to make sure the path is correct.
Remember, if your directory name or any part of the path has a space in it, you need quotes ( ” ) around the path. If you don’t use quotes you will get an invalid parameter error. You will probably want to save several different directories, depending on where the data is located, so you can open multiple command line windows and run the xcopies simultaneously if you want to not sit and watch.
When xcopy hits a bad file, don’t be suprised if it hangs on the bad file for a minute or two before moving on. Have faith. The xcopy will ignore the errors, because you commanded it to ignore them.
If this isn’t clear to you and there are things you don’t understand about what I wrote above, you probably shouldn’t be trying to save the drive data yourself. Honestly, if you aren’t command line saavy, you run the risk of seriously fucking up your computer with xcopy. Call your best geek pal and offer him or her a six pack to come save your data from /dev/null.
Back to my own experience, I was able to save most of Mom’s files, the only real blow was a corrupted Outlook pst file meaning that some of her email was gone. I picked a new drive at Best Buy and in a few hours, the computer was up and purring with a sparkling new version of her beloved AOL 9.0 running. The OS patching, anti-virus, and anti-spyware are all set to auto-update. Let’s hope for the best.

How TV gets to your house

At the office I sometimes have to explain things to people about the way that television works. I’m a television engineer, so it all makes sense to me, but to many it’s a mystery. So today I present:
How TV gets to your house


First, you have to make the leap of faith that television networks make a channel in some way and add in all the programs, promos, and commericals that you love. The signal is feed to a large (usually 30 feel in diameter) dish that shoots the signal up into space. The dish and equipment that shoots the signal into space is called a Earth Station.
Up in outer space is a special communications satellite that orbits 22,300 miles up. To compare, the Shuttle visits the Space Station at about 250 miles. This orbit is called a geosynchronous orbit and is about a tenth of the way to Moon. It’s way the hell out there.
The satellite listens to the Earth Station and immediately rebroadcasts the signal back down toward Earth. This allows many places to all see the same signal.
The local cable company has a smaller receive antenna (usually from 10-20 feet in diameter) that is pointed at the satellite and listens for the TV signal.

The receive antenna pulls down the signal and feeds it into a special receiver called an IRD (Integrated Receiver/Decoder). The IRD is very much like a radio that converts wireless signals into something you can see and hear. The IRD sends the channel to a set of modulators that combines all the other channels that the cable company assembles into a single cable feed.
Television networks all over the country bouncing signals up into space and down to cable companies, allowing them to put the various channels all together in their line up. They take ESPN from Connecticut, and HBO & MTV from New York, and Disney Channel from California and a hundred other channels and modulate them all together into a single feed.

Once the cable company has combined all the channels, they send it down the wires that they hung from telephone poles or put underground in your street.
The cable signal gets split over and over as it branches into various neighborhoods and then into specific houses. Even at your house, the signal is split again to the various rooms you want cable. Each time you split the cable signal you cut the power level down significantly. Many people have crappy pictures from cable TV and it’s often due to low cable signal strength.

To understand what happens in your house, you need to learn a little physics. When you tune an FM radio, you are changing the frequency you are tuning to to change stations. It seems clear that when you go from 93.1 MHz to 103.1 MHz, you are changing stations.
Television works in a similar way. To change stations, you are changing the frequency you are tuning in. A long time ago, the television engineers thought that it might be simpler to give channels numbers instead of frequencies to refer to when tuning. At the time, they only imagined that there might be a dozen or so channels. Channel 1 was reserved for testing and so the first real channel was 2. That’s why Channel 2 is the lowest channel most people are used to.
In cable TV, the amount of bancwidth or space to shove channels is usually between 50 MHz and 800 MHz. Yes, that means that the FM stations are right in the middle of the TV band. But radio bandwidth is so small, it doesn’t take up much space.
Each TV channel takes up around 6 MHz of space, so you can place around 125 channels on a typical analog cable feed. Digital cable systems work differently and I won’t go into it here.
So you can now see that when you change channels, you are actually choosing a different frequency to tune in, just like a radio dial. Old people, like me, can actually remember TVs that tuned with dial like a radio. I doubt my daughters have ever seen a TV with a dial on it.

OK, now that you understand how frequencies map into channels, you can see that a set-top box from the cable company is tuning the channels for you. A cable ready TV is a TV that can tune in the higher channels that only exist in the cable world and not in the over-the-air antenna world.
The cable set-top makes audio and video (or sometimes a Channel 3 signal) that you plug into your your television.
To explain this, I’ve skipped over a lot of details and didn’t get into digital cable, direct to home satellite, HDTV, or many of the other modern methods of television distribution.
I can explain those things if you all are interested, but all of them are variations on the basic idea of television distibution I describe here. Ask away…

Not for Children

There has been some debate in Cruft Manor about the appropriateness of Adult Swim cartoons for the girls. For a while we were watching Futurama, but now it is once again disallowed.
Tonight Zoe and I watched the end of a show around 9PM when the following scene took place:

DAD hits guide on remote, sees Aqua Teen Hunger Force on and switches to it,
hoping to see the talking french fries, ’cause talking french fries are funny.


ANNOUNCER
… and let’s seen what happens when we blow this nun’s brains out with a shotgun …


DAD switches the channel before the shotgun fires.


DAD
Um, I guess that Adult Swim really isn’t for kids…


ZOE
Ha-ha-ha-ha! They said “blow this nun’s brains out”! Ha-ha-ha-ha!


DAD
Your mother is going to be so mad at me.


ZOE runs to find MOTHER.


ZOE
Ha-ha-ha-ha! They said “blow this nun’s brains out”! Ha-ha-ha-ha!


DAD
(attempting not to laugh)
Ha-ha-ha-ha!


ZOE
Ha-ha-ha-ha!


MOTHER shoots flames from her eyes at DAD.

Lesson: Do not switch to Adult Swim while children are present.

No excuses

Some may have noticed that I have not been updating my blog reguarly. This is mainly because I have not been updating my blog regularly. No excuses, I’ve simply not been doing it.
In the latest round of ego boosting into the stratosphere, I’m quoted in Information Week blathering on about RSS and all the hard work other people did at the office that I get to take credit for. There’s even a picture of me looking serious with baggy eyes. I guess I need some sleep.
Here are few sites to read that will keep you entertained. Go, read them, blogroll them, and leave some comments, my faithful droogies.
My old friend from high school, Kirill is blogging away now. Kirill is the smartest person I’ve ever met. Through high school and college we were as tight as brothers. We’ve drifted apart over the years, but I’m happy to see he’s doing well and already retired before forty.
My co-workers Mister P. and Travis have also been posting regularly. Do be sure to check out Mister P.’s site Neoprene Wedgie about his preparation for a triathlon.
Even my friend Paul has posted a bit on his site about Terrible News.
Scott “Lum the Mad” Jennings always keeps me entertained over at Broken Toys.

Camping with pyros

Back in the days before children, Michele and I used to go camping. In fact, we got engaged on a camping trip up through Big Sur.
For whatever reason, laziness or busy-ness, we hadn’t taken the girls camping. So last weekend I took the girls up to Millard Canyon in the local hills for their first outing. I had picked up a new huge tent and a pair of air mattresses to make things a little less spartan than my old two man tent and 15 year old foam pads.
Once we arrived in camp, the girls were excited and ready to begin. They were intrigued by the campfire ring and wanted to play with the fire. They gathered a few twigs and tossed them in. Shrieks of glee filled the campground as the tinder ignited. Soon they were tossing everything not bolted down into the fire ring.


The camp host Lonny showed them a pile of old lumber that he said they could burn and they went to town, hauling and burning. Poking and prodding at the fire, they were grinning ear to ear. Of course, they burned themselves with hot poking sticks, as all children do, much to my chagrin.
They started to clamor for the marshmellows to roast. I threw a few clean burning logs in and soon set them up to cook a traditional S’more.
Giggling like the schoolgirls they are, they roasted the marshmellows while I prepared the chocolate and graham crackers. Soon enough they were chowing down on S’mores.
On the second batch, I was able to snap this quick photo before they wolfed it down.

Throughout the trip, the girls were enthralled with the fire. “Daddy, can we feed the fire?” was the most oft heard phrase of the day. Once they realized they could burn the baby wipes I brough to keep them clean, they became the most hygenic children around constantly finding excuses to wipe up and toss it into the fire.
True pyromaniacs to the core. They are truly my daughters to have such fire loving genes in their DNA.
When I asked the girls what we should on our next camping trip, their answer was, “more wood”.

Newegg Lanfest 2K5 ftw !!!1!!1

I went to the Newegg Lanfest yesterday at the Pasadena Convention Center. It was mainlining PC gaming direct to the brain, and not for the faint of heart. BTW, the acronym ‘ftw’ stands for the gaming term ‘for the win’, denoting something that leads to success.
There were three main parts of the Lanfest. First was the trade show of probably 20+ vendors of high level PC hardware. There are some truly impressive monitors out there if you are willing to part with the cash. The high end LCD screens are truly fantastic. The vendors helped contribute to the gooie bag given away to each attendee. Full of swag, and even including a t-shirt, the goodie bag was instantly put to use by the gamers.
Second was the Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) area, where you can bring your gaming rig from home and match it your skills against others in the room. At the Lanfest, there was room for over 400 BYOC computers. When I sat down at 4PM on Saturday, it was hard to find an empty seat.


The third major part was the tournaments. Newegg was giving away over $70,000 in cash and hardware to the winners. The tourneys were run on the hardware provided by Newegg to ensure that everyone had a level playing field when it came to the computers and made sure that skill was the deciding factor.
People are damn serious about these tourneys. Teams compete in most of the tourneys and they had practiced a lot for this. I heard several heated discussions aobut performance by teams that were sitting next to me in the BYOC area.
The tourneys even had their own play-by-play provided by Inside the Game. To a gamer like me, this is just as compelling as any other sport on TV.
Turning to my experience, I had a good time, but the next Lanfest I go to, I’d like to go with friends. I did talk to many people, but it would have been nice to have a few buddies around to eat with and watch my gear when I wandered around.
I arrived at around 4PM and setup my computer. The Lanfest goes all night, so I told Michele I didn’t know when I’d be home. I started gaming with Call of Duty, just to see what it was like. It was pretty much like playing on a public server, with uber-chaos in Deathmatch.
After about a half hour, I moved over to Battlefield 2 and had a good time. People were using a little voice communications, but for the most part it felt like a very speedy public server with minimal coordination. The lack of coordination could be frustrating if the other team got a hold of most of the aircraft and rained down destruction.
In the evening, Newegg brought in pizza for everyone and it was all-you-can-eat. Watching hungry gamers wolf down free pizza is not a pretty sight. Also, thoughout the night, Newegg had scantily clad young women doing give aways of free stuff based on your wristband number. They must have given away a hundred different items. I didn’t win, 🙁 .
Around 2AM, I realized that I had been gaming for ten hours straight and was having trouble staying alert, as I nodded off while waiting to respawn. I decided to go home. I packed up my stuff, made my way through the three levels of security that made sure I was only taking my stuff.
Overall, a good time, but would have been better with a friends to squad up with. Newegg did a great job in pulling this thing off and it was well worth the entry fee.

Lanfest in LA

I’m planning to attend the Newegg LanFest 2k5 this weekend.
It looks like a lot for fun with a Bring Your Own Computer section of over 400 seats for gaming. With Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty being played, I’ll be in heaven.
So if you are a gamer, maybe I’ll see you at the Lanfest this weekend.