Scythe Kama Connect 2

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Ok bought the Scythe Kama Connect 2 device from Quiet PC yesterday.  Took delivery and at the same time as ordering it bought a Samsung 500GB SATA 3Gb/s hard drive to connect to it.  The reason for buying this little baby is that I hate opening cases everytime I want to configure a new drive. 

Before buying looked everywhere, did my research to see if any compatability issues with SATA and didnt appear to be so bought it.  Open it all up out of the box, nice little device plug in the Kama Connect 2 and power up my PC which is a shuttle running VISTA ultimate 64bit.  Straight away doesnt recognise the drive !!!  Scour the manual and finally find above the SATA diagram

“This product supports the reading/writing for S-ATA and S-ATA II devices, but not supporting the optional functions such as NCQ or 3Gbps”

great, looked back on the Quiet PC site to see if they had any mention of this none says supports SATA !!!

Next day got onto Quiet PC (Paul Lee) who were very helpful, got one out of the box and it worked for them so what was I doing wrong.  Borrowed another drive off my client and still couldnt read that.  Then thought about it a bit more and noticed there was no light on the power supply brick then looked at the two pin plug and the converter.  Thought about it for a minute what an idiot I had only plugged the plug into the earth socket ie. vertical rather than horizontally into the converter.  Switched it round and all worked as it should.  The disclaimer above about the 3Gb/s is just that it cant get to those speeds due to limitations on USB 2.0, I just thought it meant didnt support them full stop.

It really is a good little tool to have.  I fully recommend it and because Quiet PC were so understanding and helpful (as usual) I even recommend that you buy it from them

http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/components/kama-connect2

 

DBDesigner4, Windows and MYSQL 5

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Ok thought I would have a look at DBDesigner4 as MyWorkbench seems to be taking a long time to get into beta.  DBDesigner4 looks a great product but couldnt get it to connect to mysql 5 then realised that it the designer was designed for version 3 mysql and lots of the old mysql products need to read the myql.user table for id’s etc.

Tried the old trick of using the OLD_PASSWORD function and seems to work what you need to do is this….

1. Open the mysql command prompt.

2. SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = OLD_PASSWORD('rootpassword');

UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = OLD_PASSWORD('rootpassword') WHERE Host = 'localhost' AND User = 'root';

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

all in one line – hit return. 

3. Try dbdesigner4 again and you should now be able to connect.

Vista, Palm Treo 750v and Windows Mobile Center 6.1

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Since upgrading to Vista have had a few problems syncing my Palm Treo 750v with the mobile center.  Read lots of places that upgrading to Mobile Center 6.1 helped well I dont think thats really the problem, the problem seems to be that the (or at least mine) Treo seems to have a mind of its own and gets stuck doing things ie. the bluetooth sometimes doesnt connect as the mobile is busy this seems to be the same with the syncing one minute it syncs the other it doesnt.

I normally find that once I have soft rebooted (taken battery out) the mobile it works fine whether it be mobile sync center 6.1 or 6.0

I run Vista 64 bit here as well for the record, just waiting for Birdie Sync to be compatible with vista 64bit then all will be good as I tend to run a mixture of windows and linux, prefer not to use outlook and use thunderbird instead as it has better support for IMAP.

Napster Media Center Plugin on Vista

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Since upgrading from xp windows media center to vista home premium I have been unable to get Napster to work using its media center plugin the one that allows you to download and listen to music through the media center with the tv remote.  The normal napster application works fine but not the plugin.  It was provided free with windows xp media center edition but it doesnt appear to be there in vista meda center.

Looking on the internet it looks like this is the case that microsoft are not providing it free with media center probably because they have their own music download site now.

So thought I would ring Napster to see what thay had to say about it, hoping they were going tell me not to worry as they would be releasing it soon.  I hoped this because I believe it was rather good and used it rather a lot.

Ringing Napster you are prompted with an automated message about which OS do you run press 1 for XP press 2 for Vista etc etc.  So pressed the appropriate number for vista and the phone got answered by a nice chap with an american accent guess he was in america – lol.  I explain my predicament and he is unsure what I am on about as he has no experience of XP media center, when I pressed him about a similar version for Vista he admitted to me that he hadnt even seen vista now what the hell is he doing on the end of a line where you have to press buttons to appropriate support staff when they havent even seen the basics like operating system. 

Ah well, I immediately cancelled my subscription.  If any one has any news about the media center plugin for vista I would be grateful not to mention restarting my subscription to Napster as I really did like it.

Trouble with that Pesky Mouse

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Not This Mouse

Vista, A Microsoft Wireless Mouse And Intellipoint

Ok since I installed Vista Ultimate about 2 months ago my microsoft wireless optical mouse 2 and keyboard has behaved strangely.  I run dual screens and when clicking from one screen to the other it would sometimes have to be a four or five times double click before it recongised that I wanted to change focus.

After much trawling and swearing found this knowlegebase article – 321122 from microsoft.

After I did the above it seemed to cure the majority of my problems although I must say its still a little twitchy sometimes but mostly it is fixed. 

Visual Studio 2005, Pushok and CVS on Vista / Linux

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Ok I previously blogged how to get visual studio 2003 talking to cvs using putty and pushok.  This is an update to that, which can be found previous to this entry.

Pre-cursor to this is that you have putty working with your linux / unix machine and that you can open a session using ssh without using a password.

I downloaded the version 1.3 of the cvsscc from pushok, I believe thats the one for unix as they have split their programs from unix and windows cvs since I last bought software from them.

I then opened visual studio 2005 and clicked open from source control which presents you with a cvsroot options dialog in the cvsroot just type :ext:paulfarrow@cvs_server:/500gb1/cvsdata now ext depicts the protocol and the pushok program knows to use putty which you should already have set up and running in the tray with your certificates etc (not covered in this blog entry) and then the userid @ the putty saved session, you can see mine is called cvs_server and then the path for the root here mine is /500gb1/cvsdata.

then once you have put that in click check and it should authenticate against the linux server.  You should then be able to clicke elipse next ot cvs module and it will give you a list of directories / modules in your cvs server.

Glad I got that going took me a little while, my next quest is to upgrade to svn and try the pushok plugin for that, will keep you all informed on how it goes.

ah forgot to mention one thing you need an environment variable to point to plink.exe which comes with putty that is CVS_RSH just set that to where plink resides in my case thats CVS_RSH=c:\ssh\plink.exe then pushok knows to use that for the ext protocol.

Mini Adventure to Berlin – May 2007

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Well it all started about two months ago, when my mate Chris reckoned to go to Berlin for a weekend.  As soon as he said that I thought “YES” but instead of flying I would suggest driving, I thought it would be a blast and due to my last excursion in Brittany France was well up for it.

We left on Thursday 24th May 2007 and caught the tunnel train at around 10pm.  Just as we got on the train a couple of lads from Epsom parked behind us with their Aston Martin DB9 now me being me and Ken being Ken !! thought we would chat to them and get a sit in the DB9.  But before I could say anything Ken was demonstrating how to use their TomTom.  They were on their way to Marbella for the week and were unsure how many miles it was.

Ken giving a lesson on how to use TomTomsneeked a sit in the DB9
And while Ken explained how to program in the complete opposite of how to get to Marbella I sneaked a ride in the DB9.
Ready To GoOn Our Way

It was soon time to get back in the cars ready to get out on the french roads, Ken had a bit of business to attend to in the back of the mini and was heard ranting Buy, Sell etc etc ….

Then once off the train trundled along to the formula one hotel in Calais to stay the night so we would be refreshed for the journey to Berlin in the morning. Once near to the hotel ran into (not literally) the DB9 going around and around, Ken had obviously done the business on the TomTom ho ho … !!! Dumped our stuff and got off to the only place left open in Calais, a disco. Which in the end was actually quite good and we got a few beers in before heading back to the hotel about 3am.

While driving into the locked hotel complex via a coded gate a van decides to follow us in.  Its a bloke driving and he appears to pick a lady up and then realises he cant get out of the gated complex.  He then jumps out and starts banging on the door, its at this point that Ken and Chris decide to wind him up as they knew they were safe on the inside of the locked door.  Eventually after much banging from this guy Chris goes and lets him out.

We finally get to sleep about 3.30 / 4 am after Chris and Ken have sampled the delights of the vending machine.  We all go to sleep, Chris and Ken sharing a double bed – oooolala.  Then next I remember is that I was woken around 6am by a couple of growling tigers, was very frightened until I realised it was just Ken and Chris snoring their heads off.

To be Continued….

Quick Plug For FEL Communications and Nick Roast

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Right was after some 3.5 mm socket savers for my media center and found FEL Communications in Sunbury.   Think they are about the only people that do them as couldnt find anything like it else where on the net.  Very nice chap and collected them personally from his house which incidently was down the same road my friend from Brooklands Technical College used to live – Adrian Turner.

Right so the website is http://www.felmicamps.co.uk.

Thanks again Nick

Accessing Vista with smbclient

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Just bought a new machine and decided to put VISTA on it.  Now biggest problem was accessing the shares via smbclient or Samba.  Hunted high and low on the net couldnt find anything not specific for VISTA and smbclient.

I then looked for windows xp and smbclient and found a post about changing a registry entry.  Up to this point I had tried everything everyone else was saying like enable file sharing, private sharing etc and couldnt get any of that too work at all.

Probably works via another vista machine but not from linux or my apple.

I upgraded samba to the latest version before doing this.  I then added a registry entry in \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy which a hexadecimal value of 1 and bobs your uncle you should be able to access shares and admin shares such as C$ on the vista machine from smbclient or mounting it in the fstab.

Hope that helped you, it helped me no end as I was getting very frustrated about it.  And samba is key to my machines here.