That is why I need to vent now. I know that my blog is not important to the google-sphere, but I still need to proclaim:

Alpari sucks.

TL;DR: They are a broker that will take your money. Thats pretty much it.

They offer demo accounts, and if you (like me) are trying out algorithms, you can pretty much forget it. During the most profitable time, you cannot trade. They also disconnect you and dont let you log back in during very active moments. It is not random, it is easy to see if you look at plots of the spread they vary on a per second basis.

My verdict? As a broker, questionable. As a demo account for testing… terrible.

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!)

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

I’ve never upgraded a Linux distribution before. Actually, I’ve never successfully upgraded any distribution – it’s always a clean install for me.

Since switching to Ubuntu about a year ago, I’ve been pleasantly surprised about how things “just work”. That is the way it should be . And thus far, I’ve had everything simply work (except for installing on a RAID5 array, I had to pull a couple of tricks to get that to work. On the other hand, Windows is a nightmare to install on a RAID array without a floppy drive).

So I thought rather carefully when the update manager said “A new version of Ubuntu (9.04) is available”. Clicking on that button can only lead to a broken system, right?

Wrong. The upgrade went perfect. No problems – none whatsoever! How did the guys at Ubuntu pull that off? Everything just simply works . No screwing around with packages that cannot be upgraded, no strange X problems, nothing. One reboot and I’ve got the latest and greatest.

So – if you’re like me and you aren’t sure about upgrading an existing system for fear of breaking things – take the plunge. It’s a lot easier than you think.

]]> http://www.heavygravity.com/2009/05/01/upgrading-ubuntu-smooth-as-silk/feed/ 0 http://www.heavygravity.com/2009/01/30/remote-radio/ http://www.heavygravity.com/2009/01/30/remote-radio/#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:41:12 +0000 Rob http://www.heavygravity.com/2009/01/30/remote-radio/

I was thinking about getting a radio receiver lately (probably the Icom PCR1500) and I stumbled onto a couple of neat sites.

The first one is called “HamSphere”, and it’s an interesting program that turns your computer into a Ham Radio without any extra hardware. You could also think about it as being a kind of simulator. While it doesn’t transmit any RF (what’s the fun in that, you might ask?) I still think it’s pretty cool in that you can talk with other Hams and using all the lingo that you’re supposed to, with real shortwave propagation simulation.

It is a java program, meaning it will work on Windows, Linux, and Mac. You don’t need to have a Ham license to use this radio.

The next thing I found was also pretty neat – it’s called Globaltuners and it allows you to not only listen, but actively change settings on other peoples’ radios around the world. You can, for example, listen to air traffic in England or a radio station in Australia – all you need to know is the frequency you want (and make sure no one else is listening in at the moment). Unfortunately, there are only a small number of radio stations that you can tune yourself (13 at the moment). But the idea is pretty cool!

]]> http://www.heavygravity.com/2009/01/30/remote-radio/feed/ 0 http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/12/10/the-zalman-reserator-or-how-i-horribly-broke-my-pc/ http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/12/10/the-zalman-reserator-or-how-i-horribly-broke-my-pc/#comments Mon, 10 Dec 2007 12:49:08 +0000 Rob http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/12/10/the-zalman-reserator-or-how-i-horribly-broke-my-pc/ 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.

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!

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.

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!)

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!