This is interesting:

A major security flaw was revealed in December 2011 that affects wireless routers with the WPS feature, which most recent models have and enable by default. The flaw allows a remote attacker to recover the WPS PIN and, with it, the network's WPA/WPA2 pre-shared key in a few hours. Users have been urged to turn off the WPS feature, although this may not be possible on some router models.

So I just now got into Railgun's setup menus and looked around, and I can't even tell if Railgun supports that feature, let alone how I might disable it. Ye Gods.

UPDATE: Here's more about it. Wifi Protected Setup (WPS) seems to be a protocol to allow things like printers to use Wifi easily. It uses an 8-digit access code, but evidently the real password space is only about 11,000 values, which means it can be cracked by brute force in just a few hours by exhaustive search.

I don't think Railgun has this feature.

UPDATE: Whew! I downloaded the user manual (something I should have done a long time ago) and searched it, and this feature is never mentioned. I think that means that the Netgear SRXN3205 doesn't have it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 05:14 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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For the time being, I don't know how to rename it to be "mintaka". More on that later.

Installation of the new NAS is surprisingly easy. You plug it into the wall. You plug it into your LAN. Then you put their CD into the drive of your main computer and let it run.

It installs a package called "WD Discovery". You run that, and it searches the LAN and finds the NAS. The NAS is preformatted to run in RAID 1 mode, and it has two predefined main directories called "Download" and "Public". You click another button and it automaps those two directories. What with me doing some clicking, I ended up with Download as X: and Public as Y:.

But those didn't show up on Alcyone's "My Computer" window until after I rebooted Alcyone. Now they're there.

The comments on NewEgg's sites about speed are right. I copied 15 GB of large files onto it from Alcyone, and the sustained transfer rate was 13 MB/s. It's not impressive, but it is fast enough to be useful.

Another button on the "WD Discovery" tool supposedly allows you to configure the NAS. When you click it, the browser pops up and connects to the NAS.

And it asks you for account name and password. I don't know what they are, and so far I haven't found an answer in the documentation, so I'm not just sure how I get past that point.

Presumably once you do, that's where you could decide to switch to RAID 0 (which I don't intend to do) or whatever. It's also where you could change the device name. Right now it thinks it's named \\mybookworld and I'd like to change that to \\mintaka.

I'd also like to change its IP. Right now it's using 192.168.1.110, which is one of the IPs I'm managing with the DHCP server on Deneb Railgun. I'd rather assign it a permanent IP (192.168.1.4). (192.168.1.1 is Regulus, the Qube. 192.168.1.2 is Deneb, the WHS NAS. 192.168.1.3 is Railgun, the Netgear wifi/ethernet hub. And all my client computers have IPs in the range of 192.168.1.100+. Railgun DHCP manages a range of 192.168.1.110-150 IIRC.)

The problem is that if, for whatever reason, Railgun decides to change it, then all the mounts and links fail.

So now to do a more serious search of the documentation to figure out how to log in to the darned thing.

UPDATE: Aha! Documentation page 87 says that the default login account name is "admin" and the default password is also "admin".

Of course, once you're in you can change that, and I'm going to just on general principles.

UPDATE: Now it has a permanent IP. And the discovery tool knows that it's named "mintaka". However, the \\mintaka path doesn't work. The automatic assignments are to the IP directly. Which is ugly, but I guess it works.

I suppose I could add "mintaka" to that file which substitutes as a local version of DNS, but I'm having a senior moment and I can't remember its name or its path. I thought it was about three directories down in \windows\System32 but I can't find it.

I had to do that for Regulus (the Qube) too, so it's not really surprising. (And one time I added DotClue to it, which means that when I'm suffering from a complete DNS failure that's the only site I can reach.)

Ha! Found it! \windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

UPDATE: And one short reboot later, \\mintaka works.

For all practical purposes, setup is now complete. If I wanted to set up Mintaka to do backups, or stuff like that, then there'd be more work to do. But I don't. All I want is lots of disk space, and now I have that.

If I ever want Saten or Arcturus to access Mintaka, I'll have to install WD Discover on them too. But for the time being that's not needed.

UPDATE:

UPDATE: I'm pulling 391G off of an old WD USB drive and copying it onto the new NAS. It's been running about half an hour so far. Windows estimates it'll take 19 hours total. That turns out to be less than 6 megabytes per second. The difference between this one and the previous one is that the faster one was made up of huge files (50-150 megabytes each). This one is scads of small ones (less than a megabyte).

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 09:41 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 737 words, total size 4 kb.

So the NAS just got delivered, a day early, and thank you UPS.

But... it didn't require a signature. And the UPS guy knocked once on my door and left the package without waiting to see if I was here. This is an open stairwell shared by six apartments, and easily visible from the sidewalk, and he left a $500 piece of computer equipment where anyone could have walked away with it.

I'm not very pleased about that. As it happens, I was here and did get it immediately, so no harm. But it could have been pretty bad. It might have been stolen.

Anyway, I'm not going to open it until this weekend.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 12:50 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 116 words, total size 1 kb.

1 I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about it.

Posted by: atomic_fungus at December 21, 2011 02:54 PM (VTkqk)

2 That's becoming standard behavior from all the shippers now, and frankly it is getting annoying.

Posted by: Tom Tjarks at December 21, 2011 03:24 PM (T5fuR)

3 at least your shipper didn't toss the gears over the fence, like the infamous youtube video.

Posted by: BigFire at December 21, 2011 08:11 PM (jSRcl)

4 Back in 1990, when I shipped some large boxes home while I was on vacation, I paid UPS extra to require a signature.  I was worried the boxes would arrive the day before I did, and get left in the rain.  The driver left them on the stoop anyway, but luckily it did not rain after all.  UPS insisted that the "X" on receipt proved that someone signed for it... 

Posted by: Siergen at December 22, 2011 03:11 PM (GcG9m)

5 It took me weeks to persuade UPS and USPS to stop hiding boxes behind the column in front of the house that was right next to a sprinkler head, and start hiding them behind the large bench that was placed on the front porch specifically to hide deliveries.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at December 22, 2011 04:38 PM (fpXGN)

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The new NAS shipped today from New Jersey, by UPS 3-day. Considering that it's the last week before Christmas, I wonder if there's any chance I'll get it this week?

I gotta come up with a name for it. Lessee, it's been a while since I used Orion; maybe that would be good. Procyon is another good one.

I've never used Mintaka. Maybe I should use that.

UPDATE 12/20: The UPS tracking page says that delivery was originally scheduled for Thursday, but they're going to deliver it early, on Wednesday. If so, it means they're going to ship it by air. It's in Philadelphia, and there's no way it'll reach Portland by tonight (so it can be delivered tomorrow) if shipped by truck.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 05:42 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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Anyone know anything about this thing? Supposedly it's Network Attached Storage but it doesn't have all the baggage that Windows Home Server has.

Deneb, my WHS NAS, is getting full. 7 TB of HD space on it, and only 1.4 TB left, about 22%. But it's worse than that, because when I store stuff on it, it's stored redundantly. So it's really only about 700G of free space left.

Yeah, that's still a hell of a lot, but MS operating systems get weird when drives are too full even if there's free space left. Besides which, Deneb runs backups on my other computers, so the amount of used-space continues to grow.

I am pretty sure that trying to have two WHS NAS's on the same LAN is a major headache. You can't have more than one copy of Connector running at a time on each client computer, for example, so even reaching the second one would be a trial.

But it also looks like the WD NAS isn't trying to do as much. Seems like it can do backups and so on, but it doesn't have to. I think it's probably running Linux,  but that doesn't matter. It's set up as a turn-key solution.

I'd want to run it in RAID mode, so it would effectively be 3 TB of storage. That's still a hell of a lot, and no, I don't need that much immediately. But I'd rather have too much than too little, so if I'm going to get one of these I'll get the biggest one they sell.

So, any comments?

UPDATE: I ordered it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 10:47 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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A couple of days ago I upgraded from FireFox 3.6 to FireFox 8, the latest version. Why?

Well, one of my Flash programs got an upgrade and claimed to be able to read in a flash and convert it to HTML5. So I tried it, but the resulting file didn't look like anything when displayed in IE8 or FF3.6. "Aha!", I said. "They don't understand HTML5 I bet."

So I upgraded to the latest, greatest FireFox. And how did the file look? Pretty much the same, which is to say, I couldn't see anything. Oh, well.

FireFox 8 has a very peculiar absence: there isn't any "reload" button on the command bar. You can right-click in the page and select "reload" from the context menu, but no button. I have no idea why they got rid of it.

Aside from that, so far not really too much in the way of comments. They completely redesigned the structure of the menus and things like that, so I have to hunt a bit to find the "clear the cache" function.

The Cache display has been improved, a bit. It still isn't what I'd like. I wish it would look like a directory display, allowing me to sort by filename or filetype, or even just by size, but you can't sort at all. But they did make the file entries smaller, so more of them fit on the screen. That's a small win. (Almost infinitesimal, but it's a win.)

But I'll be damned if I can understand any reason for getting rid of the reload button. Sheesh.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 05:45 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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I keep running into this: software which is originally developed for the Mac, and then ported to the PC, is nearly always at least partially crap.

It may actually work pretty well, but it will seriously betray its Mac origins in many ways. Poser was like that, for instance. Flash is like that. The UIs of those programs don't really follow Windows norms; we get an island of Macness inside our PCs. (It wasn't until OSX came out that Poser finally started using threads, for example, instead of round-robin cooperative multitasking implemented at the app level. Because that's what you had to do in Mac OS Classic; even when it finally supported threads, they didn't work very well and no one who was sane used them.)

This is part of why I hate the Mac. Mac app programmers saw PC users as heathen, to be converted to the One Truth (i.e. the Apple way of doing things) rather than as a ten-times-larger market who really should be given what they want and are used to. (Apple itself was guilty of this, too; I have nothing but foul memories of all my experiences with QuickTime and now I won't allow it anywhere near any of my computers.)

So now I've got another example of that. I hadn't really realized that Handbrake was originally a Mac program, but now I know it for sure.

I just upgraded to the latest version, 0.95. And all the presets are Apple stuff: iPod, iPhone, iPod touch, iPhone 4, iPad, AppleTV, AppleTV 2, and several others.

There aren't any presets specifically for anything that isn't Apple. It's rather annoying.

I'm seeing whether it can convert one of the Dog Days m2ts files into an MKV. Unfortunately, I'm a little afraid that it's hard-coding the subtitles.

The subtitles on the BD are in PGS format, which apparently is a bitmap, like the DVD subtitles. PGS is 256-color, as opposed to the DVD 4-color, but it's still a bitmap.

I will give Handbrake credit for using all four of my CPU cores, though it's a bit disconcerting to see the CPU usage meter pegged and hearing the cooling fan running full blast. Speedfan says that my CPUs are 78C, which is a bit uncomfortable. I'm going to have to check the settings on Handbrake to see if I can limit it to three, or two.

With 4, it's converting about 11 frames per second. Considering that this is 1920*1080 video, that's not actually shabby at all.

I didn't mess with any of the video settings, except to tell it that I wanted the output file to be about 1.3 gigabytes. After I see what the quality looks like, I might do it again with a bigger or a smaller number.

And if it really is hardcoding the subtitles, then I'm going to have to hunt around to see if there's any other tool I can use for this.

A few years ago I had a pretty cool program which would convert a DVD's bitmapped subtitles into text. It relied on the fact that character generation for DVD subtitles was consistent, no matter what it was, so as it parsed the bitmap, whenever it ran into a character it didn't know, it would display it and ask me to type in what it was. That was only necessary once per character, so at the beginning it happened a lot, but after the first couple of minutes of material, it was pretty smooth sailing for the rest of the file. It may still exist around here somewhere on some backup, but I don't know, and I don't remember what it was called.

I'd be willing to do something like that for PGS, too.

UPDATE: No, it didn't hardcode the subtitles. But it didn't soft-code them either. They're not present at all, which makes the result useless for me. Grumble.

I know this is possible; I downloaded a rip of these exact same BDs which had conversions of the subtitles. So it's a matter of finding out what tool they used.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 06:30 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
Post contains 686 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Avidemux has the OCR capability you are looking for, at least theoretically. When I tried it, the resulting srt file didn't sync with the video at all, and there were some weird problems with things like quotes (and I think at least one or two other characters) but you may have better luck.

WRT the rest of the post, Mac users hate Windows ports just as much. See Microsoft Word 6.0.

Posted by: benzeen at November 27, 2011 08:12 PM (R9i5E)

2 What makes you think character generation was necessarily consistent on DVDs? Sure, it's like that almost all the time, but those were just bitmaps; I could and did paste non-ASCII art into the subtitle stream on more than one occasion. (Granted that you had few colors and low resolution, so I didn't use it for much aside from dropping heart marks and stars in the Lucky Star song subtitles...)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at November 27, 2011 09:11 PM (pWQz4)

3 Avatar, there's no rule that says they have to be, but in practice they mostly are. At least the ones I was converting were.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 27, 2011 09:14 PM (+rSRq)

4 Good point. And you're right, of course, hardly anyone would have any reason to do anything different.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at November 27, 2011 09:32 PM (GJQTS)

5 What about Linux transplants, like GIMP and Blender? I do not count Firefox, because Mitch has instituted a strict Windows-first policy years ago at Mozilla.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 28, 2011 09:39 AM (G2mwb)

6 I just recently converted to mac - bought a mac book pro, and i really like it.  However, I am not interested in evangelizing - everyone has their preferences.

I understand what you are talking about vis-a-vis ports to Windows.  I get it, no one wants to support significantly different code bases, but please (software development organizations), suck it up and do it.

Windows apps work a certain way.  Mac apps work a certain, slightly different way.  Linux apps are yet again different.

I used to work for a storage company that started out building primarily for *nix environments.  They bought Neuron Data in order to compile for Windows with no code changes.  They wound up with a dodgy old *nix app running horribly under Windows.  It was embarrassing.

(For really bad implementation, see Lotus Notes on Windows - I don't know how in the world anyone ever thought that was a good idea, but I think it probably morphed out of a DOS version - if I had to guess.)

Anyway - whenever I end up with a bit of software that just doesn't look like it was designed for the OS on which it is running, I wack it.  I don't have time for annoyances, and there is always another bit of software out there that can do just as good a job (give or take).

Posted by: dkallen99 at November 28, 2011 09:50 AM (2lHZP)

7

I don't think there's any Linux transplant that I've used extensively. I think I installed GIMP once and used it for a few minutes, but it doesn't really offer me anything I need that I don't already have with Photo Magic and Paint Shop Pro. And you know how I feel about VLC.

Anyway, the Linux folks don't have quite the religious fervor about their GUI. Generally they try to stay consistent with Windows standards, because they're trying to woo Windows users to start using Linux instead.

Whereas for the Macolytes their different approach is a badge of honor, a symbol of spiritual purity, and suchlike.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 28, 2011 09:54 AM (+rSRq)

8 Every so often I run into a *nix app (fio, for example) that the author couldn't be bothered to properly port, and they expect me to go install cygwin in order to turn my Windows machine into a crippled weird version of *nix, in order to run their app.

Then you get an island of *nix-ness inside your PC.

Maybe I see this more often due to the niche in which I work.

Posted by: dkallen99 at November 28, 2011 10:53 AM (2lHZP)

9 There's no Linux religious fervor about their GUI simply because there isn't a single Linux GUI, at least a GUI such as Mac and Windows users understand it.

Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at November 28, 2011 06:05 PM (Lbkvv)

10 Ahh... I think I might have accidentally started a thread drift.  Apologies, if so.

Posted by: dkallen99 at November 28, 2011 08:26 PM (PP7wf)

11 SubRip?

I don't have Windows here, but it seems to work reasonably well under Wine.

Posted by: benzeen at November 28, 2011 08:44 PM (R9i5E)

12

I don't think that's the program I used (back in 2003) but it looks like it would work for DVDs. However, they don't mention BDs, and I bet it doesn't work for them.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 28, 2011 09:02 PM (+rSRq)

13 Hmm...I have neither any BDs nor a BD drive, so I can't really test it, but SupRip (S-u-p, not S-u-b) claims to do it. I can confirm that it at least launches .

Posted by: benzeen at November 28, 2011 09:48 PM (R9i5E)

14 I used to be a Mac programmer (Pre OSX) and once in the early 90's had to port OpenMail's UI from Windows.  I'd say the principle and most annoying difference is that the Windows code had all these procedures laying around with no indication as to how they ever got called.  While the Mac code had a clear entry point and execution chain.  Basically the OS in windows owned every single bit of your User Interface and called you when it deemed appropriate.  While the Mac would ask the UI for events and in the process yield the processor until it got one.  It's basically a difference between who dominates, the OS or the App.  The Mac system allowed a bit more control, so if you hit a key or clicked the mouse in a spot that didn't necessarily go to the current focus, you could handle that yourself.

As a User, I mostly have a few issues that are probably related to Windows UI actions that were dictated by the old Apple lawsuit.  For example: in a Mac text box, clicking below the text puts you at the end.  In Windows, it puts you somewhere in the last line based on your x coordinate.  Annoying.

But that's as far as I'm going to go on this bit.

Posted by: Mauser at November 29, 2011 02:09 AM (cZPoz)

15

Mauser, what you're describing is how Win 3.1 worked.

Win 3.1's application model was a travesty. But it was changed completely with the WIN32 API, first introduced with Win95, which is more normal and modern.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 29, 2011 09:31 AM (+rSRq)

16 True, that was 1992.  I'm sure both OS's have changed a lot since then, especially with OSX.  But I've totally fallen off the Coding horse since the Tech crash killed my software career.

Posted by: Mauser at November 29, 2011 01:43 PM (cZPoz)

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Thanks to reader David, I have discovered the Shark007 codecs. It's a competitor for the Combined Community Codec Pack, but unlike CCCP it supports 64-bit players, like Media Player Classic x64.

There is a 32-bit package, downloadable from here.

And there is a 64-bit addon, downloadable from here.

If you have any other codec system installed, such as CCCP, you have to uninstall those first. Then you have to install both of these packages. (And unfortunately, they automatically and unconditionally install both the Bing toolbar and the Ask toolbar on every browser you have installed, so you have to go turn them back off again if you don't want them. That's the only obnoxious thing here.)

Once they're installed, go into the install directory for the 32-bit package (it's "program files (x86)\Win7codecs\tools") and run "settings32.exe" as administrator.

Then go into the install directory for the 64-bit add-ons ("program files\Shark007\tools") and run "settings64.exe" as administrator. You only have to run those as administrator once.

I didn't make any changes to the settings, and MPC64 works beautifully with every MKV I tested, including those encoded using Hi10P.

Shark007 gets the Chizumatic seal of approval.

UPDATE: The best way to get rid of the Bing bar and Ask bar is with the "Programs and Features" applet in the Control Panel. Each one shows up there and can be uninstalled from your system completely.

UPDATE: I just noticed that it also changed my search provider in FireFox to Ask.com, without my permission. I can't figure out how to change it back again, but it doesn't matter because I never use it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 05:28 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
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Can anyone tell me how to make Win7 stop doing this?

These damned popups keep showing up. I can make them go away by sweeping the mouse pointer over them, but most of the time when I do that, they pop up again, or a different one does. They eventually go away on their own, but it takes something like 30 seconds.

I have never needed them. I have never wanted them. If this feature could be deactivated somehow, I would be very happy. Does anyone know how to do it?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 09:55 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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This evening I tried upgrading from uTorrent 2.2.1 to uTorrent 3.0. After a few hours I switched back again.

I have a dedicated torrent computer which runs 24/7. I'm seeding about 200 torrents, of which maybe 20 are active at any given moment. (And that is how I've gotten my BakaBT exchange rate up to 10.7.)

When I first started doing this, I let uTorrent use as much upstream as it wanted, and Comcast capped me at 240 kbytes per second. So I set uTorrent to limit at 200 kb/s and it's been like that ever since.

With all the versions of uTorrent I've used up to 2.2.1, it's always saturated the uplink, if it possibly could. There are occasional events which can cause my uplink to falter a bit, but the vast majority of the time it's right at the rail. But with 3.0 it only averaged maybe half that.

And nearly all of what it was using was on the one-and-only download I've got running right now. I'm trying to get the 1080p raw for "Sacred Blacksmith", which has been a bit painful because there isn't a reliable seed for it. It comes and goes, but over the course of a couple of days I've managed to reach 92%. I've also done a fair amount of uploading on that torrent, and right now my ratio is 1.09.

Under 3.0, that was pretty much the only torrent I was doing any significant uploading on. There were a bunch of others where I was running maybe 2K/s, and I was running anything from 50K to 150K on this one. The rest of my bandwidth went to waste. In the few hours I tried 3.0, I don't think it ever saturated the line.

They've completely rewritten the strategy code which allocates bandwidth, somehow. I looked all the way through the configuration frames and I couldn't find anything that would make it work the way I want it to. Which is to say, to work the way 2.2.1 does, which divides the upstream evenly among every leech irrespective of the torrent they're on.

It looks like 3.0 prioritizes torrents where your exchange rate is low. And once your exchange rate tops a certain threshold, it says "To hell with those guys; what have they done for me lately" and chokes them.

So I retreated back to 2.2.1 and I'll be staying with it.

UPDATE: Actually, I did find what I think was controlling that. There was a field which defaulted to "150%" which seemed to indicate that when it reached that upload threshold (which either means 1.5:1 or 2.5:1) then it would crank back. But the documentation also said that changing that field in the setup frame would only affect new torrents. I would have needed to change all the existing ones individually -- and I have 161 running. (I used to have 220, but a couple of weeks ago I trimmed it back quite a lot.)

Manually changing the settings on 161 torrents is not my idea of a good time. That's why I retreated.

When new versions appear, if they do, I'll be watching the change history closely to see if they did something about it. But for the time being there doesn't seem to be any good reason to upgrade. It didn't look like it really offered me anything I don't already have with 2.2.1.

...so why did I upgrade? Well, the one seed on that torrent that I seemed able to connect to wasn't ever giving me any bytes. It was also running uTorrent 3.0. I wondered if they might have done something strange, and maybe if I was running 3.0 then that seed would start feeding me.

Answer: no. So there wasn't any reason to stay with it, and I retreated to 2.2.1.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 07:26 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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