This is a work in progress, and needs to be checked against the current NIH Grant application guidelines. Click on the image to enlarge.

Hewlett-Packard Procurve Network Switches

There are dozens of network switches from various companies at both the consumer and enterprise level. One reason to consider paying a little more upfront for HP Procurve switches is that they have a no-questions, no-BS lifetime guarantee. I’ve replaced two or three of these (out of thirty or so that I’ve bought over the years). The latest is a little eight-port unmanaged switch that I have at home that developed an irritating high-pitched whine which I first thought was a fan problem. I opened it up and saw that there was no fan; so it must be some component on the circuit board that has developed an audible oscillation. Anyway, 15 minutes on the phone, with a very short wait, a native English speaker, over a land-line quality connection, and I’ve got a free replacement unit via UPS on the way. Now if HP would just make their printers as robust (as they used to…).

OmniGraffle

I’ve been looking for years for a replacement for Visio for the Mac, and Omnigraffle may fill the bill. Almost any drawing or illustration that I do for presentations is done in Visio, which is a.) a wonderful program, and b.) only available on Windows, and c.) unlikely to be ported to the Mac as it is part of the Microsoft Office suite. I’m continually amazed at how even mildly complex ideas can be conveyed by a simple drawing. You can almost hear the sigh of relief around the conference table as people look at a graphical representation of your data table, budget, design or idea instead of a three page narrative.

In the “why is this so hard?” department, it took about twenty minutes to prepare a USB flash drive as a boot and install device for Ubuntu 10.4. Instructions for this are found on the current download page and the result is a USB flash drive that can be used either to run an “live” version of Ubuntu that doesn’t alter any of the contents of hosted machines hard drive, or to install Ubuntu to that hosted machine’s hard drive, either as a replacement of the existing operating system, or alongside an existing one in a dual-boot configuration.

Why would I want to do this? On older machines it is conceivable that you might not have a working CD-ROM (for Linux), or a DVD (required for Windows 7 installations). We have a version of our set-top box without a CD-ROM drive so that the only way you can install things is either using a USB drive to boot, or to require a workable operating system to be present before downloading and installing applications via the network. The alternative to that is to remove the drive itself and install it in another machine….copy the files needed and then reinstall the drive.

I used the Ubuntu USB to convert some old windows machines that we had taken out of service from Windows XP to Ubuntu. It was both quicker an easier to perform the installs from the USB drive rather than using a CD. Worked like a charm after I wiped the old Windows using Darrik’s Boot ‘N Nuke The one catch on Dell machines is to hit F12 when booting up. This gives you menu to choose which device you want to use to boot the machine, i.e. USB drive, CD-ROM, or the usual hard drive. These machines are the Dell Optiplex GX720 in a small desktop case… a little larger than the $30 computers that I tried and failed to get off eBay awhile ago. Of the five that I obtained four are working fine… and one seems to have a noisy fan, but otherwise seems fine as well. They came with 1 meg of RAM, 40 gig hard drives, 2.8Ghz processors, and they are snappy with Ubuntu 10.04

USB Install for Windows 7

Which brings us to performing the same office for Windows 7. I’ve spent parts of two days trying to make this work… to converting our set-top box from Ubuntu to Windows. The reason for this is that we’re looking to run the most fully developed version of Skype on this little machine, and Skype for Linux is officially still in beta, and behind in several ways from the Windows version.

One thing that needs to be made very clear from the outset is that Microsoft doesn’t appear to support the notion of a “Live-CD” type of USB installation, where, you would essentially carry around a bootable USB Flash drive with a licensed version of Windows 7 that you could then stick into an available machine and run separately from whatever the machine normally runs. Instead they expect that the USB drive will be used exactly the way a bootable DVD disk would be used; as an installation medium for Windows 7.

After searching and trying a couple of different tools (one open source, which appears to be from Russia and didn’t work, a Microsoft tool which also didn’t appear to work, and several step by step scripts which also didn’t work, I finally found a script which did work. Because of all the possible variables; it could indeed mean that I got something else wrong with the other methods. You need:

1. An installation DVD for Windows 7.
2. A USB drive of 4 Gigabytes or larger capacity
3. A working Windows machine to host the items above

1. Plug in the USB drive and note the drive letter. (call it E: for our purposes)

2. Put the DVD in the DVD drive and note the drive letter (we’ll call it D: for our purposes).

3. Go to Start -> RUN, type cmd and then hit CTRL-SHIFT-Enter. This brings up the dialog asking for the admin password, and will then create a command line with administrator privileges

4. Type diskpart

5. Type list disk This show a list of the disks starting with 0. The USB disk will typically be the highest number. In our case, we have:
0 = local machine’s hard drive
1 = DVD drive
2 = USB drive

6. Type the following command to partition and format the USB drive
select disk 2
clean
create partition primary
list partition (you should probably only see a single partion, and it will be labeled 1)
select partition 1
active
format fs=NTFS
assign
exit

7. Assuming the Windows 7 DVD is in the drive, now you need to copy the boot sector information from the DVD to the USB.

d:
cd d:\boot
bootsect /nt60 e:

8. Close the command window
9. Now, using Windows Explorer, you can copy the contents of the DVD to the USB drive. I made all the usual mistakes, trying to simply drag and drop the DVD icon on to the USB drive icon. Instead, you have to open two windows, one showing the contents of the DVD. and one showing the USB. Note too, that the DVD needs to be the expanded version of the .iso file…. it doesn’t work to simply copy the .iso file to the USB drive.

Once this is all done the USB drive should boot the target machine. In my case there is a fairly sophisticated BIOS setting in the machine that gives a preference to any bootable device which is connected to the USB connector. So, during the Windows setup, once the files are all copied, and before the machine automatically reboots you need to remove the USB drive before allowing Windows setup to continue.

The final straw in this saga appears to be drivers; Windows 7 doesn’t have sound drivers for this particular motherboard. So, now, I’m off in search of those.

Sigh. I wish someone would do a study of the total cost of ownership of Windows computers vs. Linux or Macs, taking into the account the time required to patch Windows, scan windows, fix the Windows registry, download and install all the updates, etc.

I just fixed my third AV.exe trojan which got past Symantec Client Security. With such a potent trojan out there, I wonder why SCS has let this go through three times.

The AV.exe virus/trojan manifests itself by installing in the startup folder, and then launching itself when the user logs in. Shortly after login you are presented with a very realistic screen that says you are infected with a virus and you should scan your computer now. Naturally the poor user clicks on the button, and gets linked to a web page with another realistic looking screen that prompts you to download and install a new scanner program.

The fix is to start Windows in Safe Mode, and dig into the registry to get rid of the startup programs. Instructions are located in several places on the internet, I used these. Once all this is done, I run CCleaner, and make sure that my virus and Windows files are up to date.

Ten Tips for Working with Windows 7 includes some tips I had never seen before and some that are really useful.

For example, you can run the performance monitor from a command line, or from within the search box with the following syntax: perfmon /report. This generates a system diagnostics report. Of interest is that the report doesn’t appear to give me any idea why Windows 7 on a Boot-Camp partition runs so poorly within a Parallels 5 session.

A reasonable person might ask themselves, what is so great about an operating system that requires you to use GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} as a folderto get to the system settings?

And people complain that Linux is obtuse.

The Don Johnston Inc. family of programs for literacy teaching seem at first glance to be a bit of a mishmash. Our organization has been a long time user of the WriteOutLoud program, which employs a speech synthesizer to read printed text that is typed by the student, or pasted in from another source. I was recently asked to add the ReadOutLoud counterpart program to the same computer, and, after two hours of spelunking found out that we had incompatible versions, and were missing a key third-party component, the Microsoft Dot-Net framework version 3.5. Two calls to the tech support lines, verified the following information:

1. As of May 2010, both WriteOutLoud and ReadOutLoud have a current version 6.0.

2. You cannot install the programs side by side if they are not the same version, i.e. both need to be version 6.0.

3. The programs require the Microsoft Dot-Net Framework 3.5. This does not appear in any error message, either on installation or when attempting to run the program. On starting the application, it just gives a message similar to “Application cannot start because is does not appear to be configured correctly. The problem may be fixed by reinstalling the program.”

Once all these ducks were in a row, both ReadOutLoud, and WriteOutLoud appeared to function well. Don Johnston Inc. has a generous licensing policy which kicks in at about four licenses… for an amount more than four they offer an “unlimited” license.

Still, I can’t help think that they need to ride herd on their programming staff; the lack of a transparent installation process is maddening. Virtually all installations on Windows will check ahead of time for prerequisite required third-party bits and direct you to install them separately. Installshield and similar programs include this check as a matter of course.

After two years (two years!) of languishing with two entries in a WordPress format, I finally bit the bullet and restarted TFHHC as a blogspot blog, which will eventually, I hope, be available under techforhomehealthcare.com. (Whenever I manage to get the DNS settings correctly changed over). Check it out at http://techforhomehealthcare.com/.

Tech for Non-Profits will still be the place for non-profit IT-related ideas and “discussions of things that work and lamentations for things that don’t work….”. Tech For Home Health Care will cover aspects of telemedicine and telehealth delivered to the home in the home.

Update: —- ten days later, another change back to WordPress. This time for good, I think. Link changed above.