I recently had a chance to work on a Cuban Music website – http://www.cuband.com – and hope that it ends up working out.  It has a pretty big catalog of Cuban Music in MP3 format and targets a small market – people that are interested in the classics from Cuba and the newest sound from a whole bunch of genres.

There don’t appear to be too many other sites like this, and certainly none that are as easy to use.  If Cuban Music is your thing, then check out cuband.com today!

(Yeah, this is a shameless plug!)

I’m not sure about you, but I don’t know what these are:

TI-83 (Plus):

n=82EF4009ED7CAC2A5EE12B5F8E8AD9A0
AB9CC9F4F3E44B7E8BF2D57A2F2BEACE
83424E1CFF0D2A5A7E2E53CB926D61F3
47DFAA4B35B205B5881CEB40B328E58F
p=B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD
q=B7207BD184E0B5A0B89832AA68849B29EDFB03FBA2E8917B176504F08A96246CB
d=4D0534BA8BB2BFA0740BFB6562E843C7
EC7A58AE351CE11D43438CA239DD9927
6CD125FEBAEE5D2696579FA3A3958FF4FC54C685EAA91723BC8888F292947BA1
e=11

TI-84 (Plus):

prp77 factor: 67070508990537181066342707695603050521324524613874331879259881495826493920589
prp78 factor: 186923771200711284770368041572205320486346816476524340240220962467860568859381

n=EF5FEF0B0AB6E22731C17539658B2E91E53A59BF8E00FCC81D05758F26C1791CD35AF6101B1E35
43AC3E78FD8BB8F37FC8FE85601C502EABC9132CEAD4711CB1
p=94489014C63CC9E1E1ADB192DBBDD1F78F90A630DA9C86EFC4CBCA44E5B4D54D
q=19D431AF2794229620B884E3750D622D1C74F2E4569DC15486FC8D5A3BCDFE2F5
d=2A3E1B2010F318D9BD7C7E19300980B055A0E2A9554B77E7142E23CDF7C7CA13C233A3D462FDFC
968B1F9CEAF2AC2CF305147992AD9E834192ACEBB517DB9941
e=11

TI-89:

prp76 factor: 2231124525637629443181963045297394875470510167130210300957267082210173784611
prp79 factor: 3226885534240147415018248397410101286362761128614350056368675111071170873486957

(these are factors of 71995834568684773636720438651160472297127884480206535156843307841378050889714332
73011970552138960583799368215373582308591928985045059261105298431035818727)

Hopefully someone out there would find this useful. Oh, and they might have something to do with this: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Suppressed_Texas_Instruments_cryptographic_signing_keys,_28_Aug_2009

Oh, the gods were angry at me last week. Very angry. They not only put me through the hell of completely destroying my computer (or so I thought), they also influenced me to exhibit my geek stubbornness and not replace anything, but instead break out the soldering iron and spend some frustrating hours soldering wire traces together that should never be attempted by mortal man.

In the end, I guess it was worth it. I mean that I stubbornly decided to fix things instead of junking my fantastic (and now old) computer. And I have the Zalman Reserator completely to blame for the whole thing.

The Zalman is a water cooling device that has no fans. Before, my computer had a total of 6 fans keeping it cool (CPU, Case, Graphics Card, and 3 in the power supply). Turning it on was similar to the noise of jet aircraft taking off from an aircraft carrier. Now it has just one, and it’s barely audible. The Zalman itself is inaudible and works flawlessly, so I feel somewhat bad for placing the blame on it. But how did this great travesty begin?

Due to the small yet real influence the angry gods had on me that fateful Thursday, my hand slipped as I installed the new heatsink of the Zalman onto the CPU, and suddenly a few copper traces were now exposed to the world in a way that god had not intended. They had, in fact, been severed by the edge of my needle nose pliers, and – as much as I tried to ignore the cut traces – the computer simply wouldn’t boot despite all of my anguished bleating. Yes, it was a sad time.

After a restless night of tossing and turning, dreams of soldering teeny tiny wires and conductive pens made for gnomes that could fix my sub-millimeter problems, I awoke the next day with newfound energy for fixing things, and putting my world back in order. I mean, how hard can it be to fix some silly wire traces coming from a CPU on a PCB? It’s got to be POSSIBLE, yes?

Now if I actually had some sort of measuring device to tell you how small these traces were, then I’d tell you. But I didn’t. My best guess is that they were 0.000001 mm wide. Well, they seemed that small anyway. Take a look at them – see the shiny colored copper areas? I had at this point scraped some of the coating off to inspect the damage and prepare for soldering.

Notice how there are two traces next to each other? Yes, that makes for a lot of fun – they are so close together that it’s not easy to get solder on just one trace without hitting the second one. To get an idea of the size of these traces, look at the socket on the left – the holes are for the CPU pins. The traces are less than half the width of the holes that the CPU pins fit into.Now if I actually had a soldering iron worth a damn, or some kind of PCB repair kit or a conductive pen with a tip the size of a mosquito’s schwanz, then I’d have been optimistic. But all I have at home is a Harry-Homeowner-I-Solder-Once-A-Year iron to work with. On the positive note, I can now tell you that it can be done. Even with crappy tools.

So here is what I had to do. First of all, I had to make a suitable tool to solder with – which meant taking that ugly soldering iron tip and sharpening it to a point. Any self respecting geek will have a dremel tool (or a cheap knockoff like me) with the appropriate grinder tip to do this with.

While certainly not the best tool, if you’re desperate like I was, then this will do. This is pretty easy to do.

The next thing to do was to rip apart a copper stranded cable and get a thin coating of solder onto several strands. This part is pretty easy as well – it just meant grabbing any old electric cord, chopping out a section, and then getting a coating of solder onto each of the strands.

At this point, things were going pretty well. But after this point, things got a lot hairier.

I don’t know if anyone in the world does this kind of PCB repair for a living, but one thing is certain – they probably have the correct tools to do it with. And they must also have a lot of patience.

I spent a few hours fiddling with these small wire strands and attempting to solder them to the broken traces. And yes, I was extremely pleased when I finally got the traces repaired. This involved touching the wires quickly with the iron while they were on top of the metal traces (to get them to initially stick) and then afterwards applying a small bead of solder to make sure that they stayed stuck in place. This was a lot harder than it sounds. But in the end, the wires were stuck. I mean, how geeky is that? Here is what my terrible soldering job looked like (there is a metal stud where the hole was in the previous picture).

Ugly, but functional (or so I thought). After getting finally getting a post, I quickly assembling things in my ignorant optimism – with it only to refuse post at all after the assembly was complete.

After another deconstruction, lots of coffee, re-heating the solder contacts, conductivity tests- it looked like things were actually going to work.

And here I am writing this blog entry on the one and the same, with those very horrifying looking solders (but with the naked eye you can’t really see how bad they look). And yes, I didn’t have any microscope or special magnifying tool to help with this.

So what’s the point? Perhaps I can at least encourage someone out there that has jammed a screwdriver into their motherboard to try to fix it, even if you only have primitive tools – there is at least one other person out there that has successfully done it

Of course, now that I’m concerned that the solder joints might “go bad” in the future, I guess it’s time to start looking for an upgrade. Now that I have a good reason, that is, I’m looking forward to it!

BTW, the Reserator works great, but one missing point in the instructions led to me sticking a tool in the computer in the first place, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. There is a mounting plate on the bottom of the motherboard directly below the CPU which has to be swapped when installing on a socket 939 board (in my case, with an ASUS board, it was glued on, so it took some careful prying to remove it). However, if you follow the picture instructions that come with the Reserator, you’ll install it upside down like I did, and then the nuts will pull through when you attempt to tighten the metal pegs that hold the heatsink bracket. And if you’re as unlucky as me, you might even cut some traces along the way.

I was recently looking for an easy way to encrypt individual files and directories (recursively), and I ran across the linux command mcrypt. This nifty little utility does just what I want, but doesn’t do anything fancy – it just does encryption on a single file or standard input.

With a wee bitty script, however, you can encrypt anything you like quite easily. You have to have mcrypt installed (and also tar & bzip2, but you’ve likely got that already). Check this out:

#!/bin/bash
IFS=$’\n’
if [[ -z $3 ]]
then
echo “Use: encrypt [file/directory] [password] [outputname]“
exit
fi
echo “Encrypting $1 with password $2 into file $3″
tar -c $1 | mcrypt -p -q -k $2 > $3
echo “Done with encryption.”

Save it as “encrypt.sh” or whatever other name floats your boat, give it execute permissions, and you’re all set. It will tar, compress, and encrypt your file(s) and directories into whatever output file you specify. Just make sure you don’t forget the password you use to encrypt the file with: there isn’t any easy way to find out what it was if you lose it.

In order to decrypt your data, use this little script:

#!/bin/bash
IFS=$’\n’
if [[ -z $2 ]]
then
echo “Use: decrypt [file/directory] [password]“
exit
fi
echo “Decrypting $1 with password $2″
cat $1 | mdecrypt -q -p -k $2 | tar –x
echo “Done with decryption.”

Save it as “decrypt.sh” and give it execute permissions, and now you can easily decrypt your data as well. It can’t really get much easier than that!

There are lots of things out there on the net related to getting your mail out of Outlook and into Thunderbird, but not really anything that deals with the reverse. I’ve been using Thunderbird for a while, and as much as I like it, I really want to give the new Outlook a try.

Unfortunately, Outlook has pretty lame importing features, so you have to jump through hoops to get your mail into Outlook from Thunderbird. This unusual method should work for importing any mbox formatted mail (Thunderbird, for example) into Outlook. I tried it with Outlook 2007; it should work fine with all older versions as well.

You’ll need to have Outlook Express installed on your computer (if you have XP or 2000 installed it should already be there) and you will also need to install Eudora from http://www.eudora.com/ (you can uninstall it later when you are done).

The whole process is painless, but it feels really unecessary to have to go through so many steps to import your email into Outlook. The basic problem is that Outlook doesn’t have the capability of importing mbox formatted email or Eudora email either. Considering that the mbox format has been around for 11 years or so and the commercial version of Eudora for 16 years, I wonder what the holdup is.

Anyway, here is what you need to do:

1. Install Eudora.
2. Import your mbox file into Eudora.  To do this, you need to copy your mbox file to the default location of the Eudora mailbox file.  After you have done this, Eudora will open your mbox file and index it.
3. Import your Eudora mailbox into Outlook Express (yuk!)
4. Import your Outlook Express mail into Outlook.

So why can’t Outlook import mail as well as Outlook Express does (meaning you’d get to skip a step here)? Who knows. Someone somewhere at MS might know why Outlook seems has such lame importing features.

Another method that I’ve used is the following (if you use Linux):

1. Import your Thunderbird mail into KMail (the KDE mail program).
2. Select the mail messages you want to export.  You can use shift-click to select a whole group of messages at a time, but you’re likely going to have to do this for messages inside of each folder separately.
3. Right click and then click “Save”.  It will save the selected emails into a single mbox file.
4. Install IMAPSize.  This is a free Windows program.  You will have to now move your mbox files to your Windows computer.
5. With IMAPSize, use the tool “mbox2eml” under the tools menu on your mbox files.  All individual emails will now be extracted from the mbox files into separate eml files.
6. Now import your mail into Outlook Express by dragging the emails from Windows Explorer directly into the Outlook Express window.
7. Finally, import the mail from Outlook Express into Outlook.

Anyway, if you really really want to get your mail out of Thunderbird into Outlook, this is probably how you have to do it.

I recently had an infrequently used hard drive fail to mount, and upon inspection I found that it was no longer recognizable and an error was being produced at the console:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc1,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog – try
dmesg | tail or so

And doing a dmesg gives the following output:

EXT3-fs: unsupported inode size: 0

So what to do, what to do? What does this mean?

What is happening is that the the superblock is corrupted. Fortunately there is a backup of the superblock elsewhere, and the location of it depends on the block size used on the partition. To replace the main superblock with a backup (alternative) superblock, use this command:

fsck -b 32768 /dev/sdh1

Of course, the number after the “-b” switch should be one of these values, depending on block size used on your file system:

• 1k blocks = 8193
• 2k blocks = 16384
• 4k blocks = 32768

The location of your partition (‘/dev/sdh1′ in my case) must be changed according to your actual partition location as well.

So how do you tell what size blocks your partition uses? Well, I have read a suggestion of running fsck with the ‘-n’ switch on your partition to get that information; that didn’t work at all for me. In fact, that would crash with the output of

fsck.ext3[5618] trap divide error rip:2aaefe7b7b57 rsp:7fffac521f50 error:0

So instead, I just made a guess that my drive used 4k blocks (which it does), and fsck worked like a charm. I can now mount the drive and get the data off that I thought was gone forever. (Note: you might want to make a backup copy using dd or something similar before messing with your partitions!)

A friend of mine brought a NTFS (Windows XP) hard drive that had been “erased” by a virus of some kind. I said I’d try to recover the lost data, which was unreadable to Windows.

After wasting some time undeleting a bunch of garbage on some other unimportant partitions, I realized that the main NTFS partition had not been automatically mounted for me – meaning there might be a problem with the partition itself. After manually attempting to mount the partition, I got a message that the boot sector was corrupt. So what to do?

NTFS partitions have a backup of the boot sector located on the last sector of the NTFS partition. There are probably various programs out there that one can pay for to restore this backup copy to its rightful place. There might even be a “Microsoft way” of doing things, which I can only guess requires you to agree to the terms of some EULA and give away any rights you have to your great collection of polka MP3s. Instead, all you need to do is this one line (as root):

mount -t ntfs /dev/sdg1 /media/tmp -o errors=recover

where you need to replace “/dev/sdg1″ with your NTFS partition location (I connected this drive with an external USB carrier) and “/media/tmp” with the location you’d like to mount the fixed partition. That’s all! Once you’ve mounted it, it’s fixed automatically and might even be bootable again (if this is the only problem you have).

This will even work if you accidentally begin to copy data over the beginning of your NTFS partition, since the copy of the boot sector is at the end of the partition. Note: This only works with kernel versions 2.6 and newer.  Can’t get a much easier fix than that!

The installation of SciPy from source would be straightforward if it weren’t for the additional libraries LAPACK and BLAS that need to be installed as well. While I’m not new to compiling packages from source and resolving dependencies, this one stumped me – I ended up with this error:

/usr/local/lib/libflapack.a(slaruv.o): relocation R_X86_64_32S against `a local symbol’ can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC

That’s telling me that I need to recompile using the “-fPIC” option, which I had already done. Strange. Anyway, if you want to get this installed the easy way, stop trying to compile this from source and do this instead:

Open up Yast, and add this repository to your sources:

http://repos.opensuse.org/science/SUSE_Linux_10.1/

If you are using Suse 9.3, 10.0, or 10.2, simply change the “SUSE_Linux_10.1″ to “openSUSE_10.2″, “SUSE_Linux_10.0″, or “SUSE_Linux_9.3″ in the provided link. After you’ve added this repository, open “Software Management” and search for ‘SciPy’. You should find it. You can additionally search for ‘NumPy’, ‘Lapack’, and ‘blas’ (although the dependencies should be sorted out automatically).

I would recommend additionally installing ‘matplotlib’ for plotting. If you do that, you’ll need to grab the matplotlibrc file and stick it in your .matplotlib directory. The only option I had to change to get plotting to work was the backend – I chose “QtAgg”.

Thats it! When trying to set this up, I found lots of Suse users with installation/compilation issues – but nobody seemed to know this simple method of installation.