Recently, I have become enamored with the idea of trading currencies. Yes, there is a lot of spam in my inbox due to that kind of thing… but the reality is that forex trading can indeed work – if you are willing to learn a little bit.

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.

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

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.

First of all, this device does work fine in Linux. But unfortunately, this USB device won't be recognized by the Linux kernel and so you won't be able to watch all your Family Guy, Simpsons, or Aqua Teen Hunger Force episodes on your PC without adding one line of code to the kernel module driver (perhaps new kernels will eventually recognize it).

There are more than just one type of WinTV USB2 device: the one I have has "Model 42014 Rev D197 Lot # 4405" on the back of it. If you do a 'lsusb', you should see this somewhere in the output:

The device ID is the problem : the driver for this particular model is looking for "2040:4200", not "2040:4201". So, you simply need to edit the driver code and add the right number. To do this, you need to have your kernel source installed and you'll have to know how to configure your kernel for your other hardware. If you're up to the task, then take your favorite editor and open the file '/usr/src/linux/drivers/media/video/em28xx/em28xx-cards.c '. At about line 249 you'll see this:

You'll want to change it to look like this:

You're simply inserting this line:

Save the changes, then go back to your '/usr/src/linux' directory, and do a normal 'make' and make 'modules_install'. As long as you're running the same kernel as the one you are compiling the modules for, you can now do a "modprobe em28xx" and you should be in business! Of course, there are other modules you'll have to load (or compile into the kernel) to get video working in general (look at the 'Video For Linux' section); but this will at least get your hardware talking.

When I have a fit of nostalgia I often resort to breaking out the Commodore emulator and tooling around with some games from my childhood. When I was a kid (or really, I was in my pre-teen years I guess) I had both a VIC-20 and then later a C64. The C64 I got after I nagged my dad to buy it from a friend of mine that had gotten sick of it and his mom wanted to sell it (along with the thousand or so pirated games). It was basically third-hand when I got it.

Anyway, the VIC-20 I got from an uncle of mine years before that, and it came with one or two cartridges - and that was it. No disks (or tapes) of any kind. The one cartridge that I remember that came with it was called "Pirates Cove". Unfortunately, the cartridge came with no instructions, and it didn't seem to work when I plugged it in. I thought it was worthless.

My first programming experiences came with this computer after I visited a computer repair shop (I think one of the "F" keys broke off or something). They handed me a whole bunch of Ahoy! and Commodore Gazette magazines - which gave me the keys to unlock the world of programming.

There were some drawbacks to my first "type-in" programs. They took me hours to type in. (I don't even know how I realized that those magazines had programs printed in them that could be typed in and run - it seems kind of unusual that I just "figured it out". Well, that's how it happened) Not only did they take forever to do, they only lasted as long as I left the computer on. So after typing in a game for a day, I'd leave it on for a few days (or before it locked up) to play my new creation.
Read the rest of this entry »