Aztekera

The symptom is typical: you check out the partitions on your hard drive in Windows Disk Manager only to find out that there’s a weird, inaccessible partition that’s of the type “EISA Configuration.” What is it? Can I get rid of it?

What is it?

It has become standard practice for manufacturers to include recovery data or utilities on the hard drive to save them the costs of creating separate recovery disks for your computer. The benefit is that you can always restore your computer without worrying about losing your restory disks, but the downside is that it’s taking space on your hard drive, and if your hard drive died, you don’t have any restore disks at all.

The “EISA Configuration” partition is not really an EISA Configuration partition. EISA is an obsolote IBM bus architecture. What’s really going on is that this partition is a regular FAT32 or NTFS partition, except that its identifier in the partition has been changed to 0xDE, which codes for “EISA Configuration.” This way, Windows doesn’t try to mount it so you won’t accidentally mess with the files there.

How do I get rid of it?

Just delete it. You may be able to delete this partition and then expand your regular Windows partition to fill the gap using Windows Disk Management MMC snap-in. Just right-click on “My Computer” and select “Manage…” and find “Disk Management.”

Personally, I recommend using an Ubuntu live CD. With it, you can boot into Ubuntu, run GParted (a partition editor), delete the EISA Configuration partition and expand the Windows partition to fill in the remaining space. Just be careful with your data. Make a backup.

It won’t go away!

You may experience an issue where, after deleting your “EISA Configuration” partition, you boot your computer only to find out that another partition has magically turned into an “EISA Configuration” partition. What happened here was that the manufacturer (Acer has been known to do this) put a small program in the Master Boot Record (MBR), the first 512 bytes of your hard drive. Every time you boot that hard drive, their program runs and blindly changes the first (usually it’s the first one) partition on the hard drive to 0xDE, which codes for “EISA Configuration.” Bad.

What you need to do is write in a new MBR to get rid of this program. Be careful, because the MBR stores the partition table, without which your computer won’t know what partitions exist on your hard drive. There are several tools that can do this; I won’t go into detail on each one.

• fixmbr.exe—on the XP or Vista Recovery Console
• MbrFix.exe—for Windows
• ms-sys—for Linux. This guide to ms-sys might be helpful.

Now my computer won’t boot!

If Windows displays an error message saying that “hal.dll” could not be found (Windows XP) or that “rundll32.exe” could not be found, then what likely has happened is that your partition numbers have changed and Windows can’t find itself anymore. On XP, if you know what you’re doing, you can edit the “boot.ini” file to point to the new partition number. On Vista, you’re best off just running the automated recovery on the Vista Recovery Console disc until it’s fixed. It might take several tries.

My drive C: and D: got switched!

It’s a regrettable problem when Windows, which originally was on the C: drive, suddenly gets switched to the D: drive. You’ll find that a lot of things don’t work like this, but unfortunately, you can’t go into Disk Management and change the drive letters because you’re currently running Windows off that drive letter. Microsoft has a KB article detailing the procedure to switch them back, but the process is simple.

Fire up regedit.exe and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices, and rename the \DosDevices\C: and \DosDevices\D: keys around. Or, you can delete all the keys in MountedDevices and Windows will automatically enumerate the partitions and reassign drive letters.

Firefox Quick Searches have become an ingrained habit for me after a lot of repeat searching. Recently I’ve been working on a Java project and I’ve found myself needing to look up classes in the Java online documentation quite often. To that end, I’ve set up a quick-search bookmark that will take me to the relevant documentation page by typing java [keyword] in the address bar. It uses Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky search:

Just add a bookmark with the string “http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Java%206%20%s“.

So I was typesetting one day…

… and my English teacher wanted us to use a title page on our essay. I was using the mla-paper package in LaTeX, but that package only allowed for a standard MLA paper with the heading on the first page. I needed a title page, and so I hacked mla.sty into mlawithtitle.sty which has a title page instead. It’s not a very pretty hack, but it allows for a separate title page and that’s what matters to me.
Get it at http://files.aztekera.com/schoolwork/mlawithtitle.sty.

Usage notes are in the file itself.

Kokomo team takes regional championship

by Eric Jiang
reporting from St. Louis, Missouri

“Three, two, one, go!” The match begins and two sides furiously battle it out on the 28 by 54 foot field, knowing that one small mistake could cost them the championship. The hundreds of fans in the stands are at a fever pitch, loudly cheering them on in any way they can. This is no ordinary sport. This is FIRST Robotics.

Every year, thousands of high school teams around the world are given six weeks to construct a remote-controlled robot to compete in the FIRST Robotics Championships. This year, two alliances of three teams each must compete to place inflatable “ringers” on a centerpiece contraption known as the “rack” and form rows and columns of tubes. Bonus points are scored by lifting your own team’s robots off the ground at the end of the 2:15 min. match.

This year, Kokomo High School’s robotics team, the TechnoKats, traveled to St. Louis to take part in the regional competition from March 1st to 3rd. The TechnoKats were one of 45 teams attending St. Louis, each with their own unique strategy for scoring points.

Their robot was simple: six wheels, an arm that went up and down, and a pneumatic claw. The operators, seniors Kyle Love and Nick Bailey, spent many long hours practicing for this event. The TechnoKats had some of the most impressive performances, managing to score as many as seven ringers in a row, a feat few teams accomplished.

The TechnoKats, in an alliance with the Lightning Lancers from Missouri and Warren Central from Indianapolis, advanced to the final matches on Saturday. One of the most valuable robots on the alliance was Warren Central’s; its main duty was to act as a ramp to lift the other robots off the ground. Every match, they managed to lift at least one robot, scoring huge bonuses. These bonuses were what led them on an unstoppable winning streak to first place. The final match between them and the regional finalists was decided in a landslide victory: 66 to 16.

But FIRST, which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is not just about scoring points and winning. FIRST, founded in 1992 by Segway inventor Dean Kamen, is there to inspire students to be engineers and scientists, to give them experience working in a team, and to teach them “gracious professionalism.” That is why the most prestigious award, the Chairman’s Award, isn’t given to the team that scores the most points. It is given to the team that “best embodies the principles of FIRST.” Chairman’s Award winners often have a history of sportsmanship, community service, and even starting and mentoring other teams. “Ten years ago, when I graduated from high school, there weren’t any programs like that established. It gets [the students] way ahead of their peers for college,” said Amy Przybylinski. Przybylinski helps manage team scouting, marketing, and award submissions. For junior Andy Gibson, the most important part about FIRST was “teaching people how to work together to achieve something more than what they would normally achieve.” Indeed, the judges noticed that in almost every interview they conducted, students cited teamwork as the most important thing they gained. The TechnoKats came in this year with a brand new rock ‘n’ roll theme. Their new look includes concert-style tickets, golden record awards for other teams and a new logo inspired by 80’s rock band Journey.

Not only were the TechnoKats regional champions, but they also took home the Motorola Design Award. The Motorola Design Award recognizes superior engineering and an excellent robot design.The TechnoKats have more competition ahead. They will be heading out to Purdue for the Boilermaker regional from March 15th to 17th. Soon after that, they will journey down to Atlanta, Georgia for the world championships, held from April 12th to 14th. “Hopefully the same amount of fun we’ve had [at St. Louis] will be at Boilermaker and nationals,” said Gibson.

The TechnoKats are certainly making a big comeback from last year’s unimpressive performance. Said Przybylinski, “The exciting part for me was seeing that after a couple years of having less success than we used to.” Exclaimed lead mentor Andy Baker, “This year, we are ‘Back in Black’!”

Eric Jiang is a sophomore at Kokomo High School and is a member of the TechnoKats.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

From the who’s-running-this-place-anyways department.

Background story:

I went to Fry’s Electronics to get myself a laptop. I would’ve gotten it locally, but Best Buy said that they were waiting for Veesta, so they didn’t have squat in the inventory. I live an hour away from Fry’s, but they seemed cool enough at the time. I chose an HP dv6110us, took it home, and immediately got the battery jammed. I couldn’t take the battery out, so after a couple weeks (I needed it for something important), I took it back. They replaced it, and right after I got home I got the remote jammed in the defective slot.

When I took it back this time, they said they couldn’t evenly exchange it. They claimed they didn’t have any more of this model left in the store (that was functioning), so they offered to either repair it or to give me in-store credit so I could get a different laptop. No refund. “OK, this is kinda annoying,” I thought. I went to their laptop section, and every laptop they had either cost more than my current one, or was inferior. A lot of them were new Veesta computers.

“Forget it,” I thought. I went back and asked about having mine repaired. They said repairing entailed returning the laptop back to the manufacturer and waiting. Two months. The good thing was, they said, was that they would give me a loaner that at least matched this computer’s specs. “Well, I guess I could use a loaner for a while.” Some guy went to find a loaner, and finally came back with one.

It was a dv6110us. 0_o.
“Huh? Can you just give me an even exchange for this one? It’s exactly the same.”

“Well, it’s not exactly the same. Your’s was a refurb, and this one is not,” pointed out the Fry’s guy.

I looked on the box.  Apparently this one was an “open box” item.  It had several orange stickers on it, with one saying “Reduced Price.”  This “open box” cost less than what I originally paid.

“Umm… can I just buy this one instead?”

“You can’t, because your laptop is already out of its return period.”

“Yeah, but I can get credit for it.  That’s what the other guy said.”

“Oh, really?  Hans?  Hans!  Does he get credit for this?”

Eventually, they figured it out somehow.  Not only did I get my laptop exchanged, but the new one cost $38 less than what I paid, so I got $38 of credit.  Plus, there was also a $50 refund that I somehow missed out on when I got it originally.  ???  That’s like, almost $90.  They seriously have no idea what’s going on.

This seems to be a huge issue the big companies “get” and the little companies neglect.  When designing software, make a good interface.  So many times, a piece of software can’t rise up into the big leagues because the interface is horrendous.  The workflow in a program should be efficient, intuitive, and simple.

Case 1:

I downloaded Alibre Design Xpress, which claims to be a full-featured 3D parametric CAD application that’s absolutely free.  I tried it out, and in a few seconds I could see what was wrong with it.  But first, let me give you a little background.

I started out in CAD by learning Autodesk Inventor, a very capable (and pricey) 3D parametric CAD modeling program.  Everything about the program was intuitive and simple, but advanced users could accelerate every step of the process by learning keyboard shortcuts and other little tricks.

Enter Alibre Design. I began by drawing a simple part, and immediately the program was already hampering my work.  I wanted to dimension the box, and I was used to just hitting “D” on my keyboard to select the dimensioning tool.  Nope.  Alibre Design forced me to click the button in the toolbar, which takes a little getting used to.  Same for extrusion: I couldn’t hit a key to extrude, like in Inventor.  It was another tiny little picture on a bar, and I had to hover my mouse and read the tooltips.  Then, Alibre got even more annoying when I went to extrude another sketch on the side of the box.  Apparently, any excess lines besides the closed figure causes Alibre to grind to a halt.  For extruding sketches, it’s either all or nothing.

That said, Alibre Design is a powerful program, and experienced users could easily work around these little annoyances.  But, it does need some deeper thought put into the workflow.

Case 2:

I needed to composite some video, and I tried out T@B’s Zwei-Stein 4.  Wow.  What a nightmare.  To begin with, the interface is the sluggiest interface out of any program I have.  It looks like they tried to invent their own GUI toolkit, with abominable results.

The interface is one confusing mess.  They try to justify this on their website, saying that they favor creativity over simplicity, and that’s why their interface is so bad.  There’s no way I can be creative with such a bad interface.

For starters, to import a clip, you’re forced to use their ugly file tree.  It goes like this:

1. Click on a video clip.
2. Wait.
3. See the thumbnail of it appear in a completely different tab (apparently importing video is a multi-step process).
4. Drag the little green arrow on the toolbar beneath the preview into the “MediaMixer.”  Oh wait.  You can’t, because the little green arrow takes forever to show up.  This is on a dual-core Turion.

And that was just a small taste of what was to come.  Arranging video in the timeline was much, much worse.  You can’t just select a video clip by clicking it on the timeline.  You have to click its name on the sluggish list in one of Zwei-Stein’s multitudinous panes (bad pun here).  To move a video clip, I’m supposed to Shift+Drag, but it doesn’t work like it should half the time.  The only way to precisely position video is to use their horrible GUI and manually type in a start time and clicking the “=” button.

Lesson learned: Don’t make your own GUI toolkit.  If they really wanted cross-platform compatibility, they should’ve used GTK or Qt.  It might’ve made their program at least slightly bearable.

In the end, think of the user.  Too often, people write programs only thinking about themselves.  They don’t actually give the program to a user and see what happens.  By actually testing it on end users, they can see what parts of the interface need a little repolishing (or a complete rewrite, in Zwei-Stein’s case) so the end user isn’t completely confused.

Found on Slashdot:

“Psssst…. want some Open Office?”
“I don’t know. My dad says to stay with Microsoft Office”
“Come on! It’s free!”
“But at school, they said that OpenOffice is a gateway program, and that I’ll soon be hitting the heavy stuff like Linux”
“This ain’t linux! What’s wrong with just trying just a little bit of OpenOffice”
“But my friend Jimmy started on just a little bit of OpenOffice, now he spends all of his time trolling forums and posting in Vi vs. Emacs threads. I wanted to play some Quake with him last night, and he said that he was too busy rebuilding his Gentoo system from Stage 1 with some really cool flags some guy gave him on the internet.” *Starts Crying* “I don’t want strange guys on the internet giving me flags!”
“what are you, some kind of wimp?”
“I’m going to walk away now. Friends don’t let friends use Open Source”

This message brought to you by Open Source Abuse Resistance Education. Just say no to Open Source

I host a “to be” verbs analyzer on my site, but many didn’t understand why. The number of “to be” verbs is an indicator of the quality of a piece of writing. A high number of “to be” verbs indicates that the writing is excessively wordy and convulated.

Consider:

They were the ones to truly challenge conventional wisdom.

As opposed to:

They challenged conventional wisdom.

Note that the second example is more direct and concise. Wordy sentences can be confusing, ambiguous, or just wasteful.
Good writing is concise and straight-forward, while maintaining a certain style.

I’ll be coming back flying United, but it’s my birthday! I can celebrate my birthday on the plane!

I went to Wal-Mart here. It’s the kind of slick inner-city store you’d expect from the leader in putting other stores out of business. It’s a two story store in a big mall in a big shopping district in a big city. Of course, all the stuff they sell is suited for China.