Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone. Here’s hoping that you had a great 2009 and an even better 2010 to come!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas folks, hope you all have a good one and that Santa treats you well!

R.I.P. Saab Automobile AB

For me and many other Saab owners and lovers, today is a sad day in automotive history. General Motors (GM) has officially pulled the plug on its Saab brand as it was unable to find a suitable buyer.

GM will now begin what they are calling “an orderly wind-down of Saab operations”, the meaning of which is not entirely clear to anyone. GM is assuring customers that their Saab will still be serviced and the warranties will still be honored although they are yet to tell anyone where/how to get the service done.

I received a letter from GM a couple weeks ago which was dated Nov 14 informing me that as of October 31, my local Saab dealership is no longer an authorized Saab dealer/service center. Nice of them to be on time with things… letter was dated two weeks after my local dealership was closed and I didn’t even receive the letter till the first week of December. I’m a bit bitter about this whole Saab thing.

Ultimately, it is a sad day for the automotive industry as a whole, Saab were innovators and the industry, let alone current car models, owe a lot of their successes to Saab’s innovations. A quick Wikipedia read reveals the following innovations from Saab:

• 1958: The GT 750 is the first car fitted with seatbelts as standard.
• 1963: Saab becomes the first volume maker to offer diagonally-split dual brake circuits.
• 1970: Saab introduces a world-first – headlamp wipers and washers.
• 1971: Heated front seats are introduced, the first time in the world they are fitted as standard.
• 1971: Saab develops the impact-absorbing, self-repairing bumper.
• 1976: Saab was the first manufacturer to produce a turbo engine with wastegate to control boost.
• 1978: Saab introduces another ‘world-first,’ the passenger compartment air filter (pollen filter).
• 1980: Saab introduces Automatic Performance Control (APC), and an anti-knock sensor that allowed higher fuel economy and the use of lower grade fuel without engine damage.
• 1985: Saab pioneers direct ignition, eliminating the distributor and spark plug wires.
• 1991: Saab is the first manufacturer to offer CFC-free air-conditioning.
• 1996: Saab introduces active head restraints (SAHR), which help minimize the risk of whiplash.
• 1997: Saab introduces Electronic Brake-force Distribution

… and the list goes on. How many modern cars use and profit from these innovations? A sad day indeed.

R.I.P. Saab Automobile AB

I sincerely hope that someone with the right intentions, proper financial backing, and sustainable plan picks up this brand in the future and returns it to its former glory. I will buy another Saab in a heartbeat, as quirky as my Saab is I love every little thing about it.

Google Wave

Can someone please explain Google Wave to me? I got my invite a couple days ago and I have been playing around with it and inviting friends to play with me, but I cannot figure out for the life of me what purpose it serves!

I somewhat understand what it can do… essentially a collaboration suite which can serve multiple purposes, but really what problem does it solve? There are already a zillion applications which do similar things – Google Docs will allow collaboration on documents, any 1/2 way modern calendar application will allow you to create and share events with friends. I can’t see how it will make a good IM solution since you have to be signed into the site to use it, there is no desktop or push notification; I’m finding that friends are now sending me IM messages to say “check your wave” so that I go and see what new IM they posted.

I’m going to keep playing with it and see if I can figure out some neat purpose for it, but if anyone can point me in the right direction please feel free to leave me a comment!

Must resist urge to buy MacBook…

I’m sitting here using a new 2.13GHz MacBook Air which I currently have on loan from a client. I have never actually had an OS X computer to myself before; I have had friends with them, but I’ve never been able to configure one to my liking and really play around with it. I’m starting to buy into the hype!

The ease of use is fantastic and the OS looks great. Don’t even get me started on the physical machine itself, the craftsmanship is superb and the screen is breathtaking! If it were not for the astronomical price ($1,899 for this build) I’d have one already.

I am in the market for a new home computer, perhaps I’ll try my hand with an Apple product… although, I do have some other big ticket purchase plans coming up in the future. Time will tell.

This Computer Cannot Connect to Your Home Server…

This post is for anyone who has ever gotten the “This computer cannot connect to your home server. Check your network connection and make sure your home server is powered on. If your home server has recently restarted, try again in a few minutes.” message.

I recently, for no apparent reason, was greeted by this message when trying to login to my WHS box via the desktop console. I have done some research on the issue and apparently it is caused by your computer being on a different domain than your WHS box. As to why it happened all of a sudden, I’m not sure. It worked fine for me for over a month.

Anyway, here is your fix… you have to add your WHS  box to your computer’s host file. In order to do this you need to first assign your WHS box a static IP address using your router. Since each router is different, I cannot explain how to do this, you’re on your own here. It should be in the documentation for your router.

Once you have setup a static IP on your router for your WHS box the next step is on the computer with which you are having connection issues. Navigate to this address in Explorer: “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc” and open the file hosts using Notepad.

Once you have the hosts file open you need to create a new entry between the lines “127.0.0.1 localhost” and “::1 localhost” for your WHS box in the following format: <whs static ip address> <whs box name>. As you can see in the picture below, the static IP for my WHS box is 192.168.1.106 and the name of my WHS box is grendel; obviously the IP and name of your WHS box will be different so fill it in appropriately.

Once you have the new entry made, save and close the hosts file. If you followed the steps correctly you should now be able to connect to your WHS box again!

Bonus points for anyone who can tell me what “Grendel” is.

Evangelion 1.0 – You Are (Not) Alone

Without much fanfare, certainly where I am located, the first movie in the series of 4 of the remake of the legendary Neon Genesis Evangelion anime was released in Canada. I had heard about this move coming out about a month ago, but did not hear about a release date. I found out it was in theaters 2 hours before the only showing and scrambled out of bed to make it (the showing was at 10 am).

The first movie, Evangelion 1.0 – You are (not) alone, was a faithful retelling of the first 6 episodes of the original series. There were some reanimated scenes taking advantage of some new-tech CGI stuff and there were also some extended scenes and new pieces added. The animation is top notch, as it was in the original series.

I’ve been doing some digging about this new, 4 movie series and have come to find out that the next three movies will take the series in a new direction. The aim of this retelling is to “make the series more accessible to the general public”. The original got very strange, very fast after the first 6 episodes or so; to me this retelling is a welcome change and I hope they can make more sense of it. Apparently the ending will be completely rewritten and easier to follow.

The second movie, Evangelion 2.0 – You can (not) advance, has already been released in Japan and if the lag time on 1.0 is any indication it’ll be two years before we see 2.0 in Canada. It’ll be the longest two years of my life…

Do yourself a favor and go see this in theaters if it’s still playing around you, you won’t be disappointed.

The Offspring @ Citadel Hill = Amazing

So I’m typically not one to do this whole microblogging thing, but I’m going to give it a shot.

The Offspring just tore Citadel Hill apart, best live band I have ever seen… I can’t wait for them to come back to Halifax!

How’d I do? Less than 140 characters?

How to install uTorrent on your WHS box

First of all, let me say that the credit for this goes to Philip Churchill at mswhs.com. He wrote the original article in July, 2007. It has become a little dated since then, but for the most part is still relevant. I’m just changing some things here to make it work for 2009.

The idea of this article is to run uTorrent on an always-on machine in your house. The WHS is typically on 24/7 so you might as well use that. Then you can schedule uTorrent to only soak up your bandwidth in the wee hours of the morning and not have to worry about having multiple computers on all the time. Once we are done here uTorrent will run on your WHS box without having to have a logged-in user. Read on to find out how this works!

Create the New User

First of all we need to create a new user on the server. This is done for security reasons as we do not want to install uTorrent under the default Administrator account. Once this step is completed you may continue with the following.
Install and Configure

Connect via the Remote Desktop Connection as the user you have just created e.g. “WHS” and your newly created password.

Download the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools and install rktools.exe using the default options.

Next install the latest version of µTorrent and install using the default options.

If this is the first time you have installed uTorrent on your server then a dialogue will appear asking if you want to associate .torrent files with µTorrent. Click Yes. If a Windows Security Alert pops up asking if you want to Block or Unblock uTorrent Click Unblock and if the Speed Guide appears set your Connection Type and the Current Port that you would like to use.

You will now need to forward the port you selected above into your router. Details of router setup screens can be found at portforward.com (select your router and then uTorrent)

In uTorrent select Options then Preferences. Make sure your General screen matches this one:

Make sure that your directories screen matches the one below. You can change the location for your Put new downloads in but do NOT use a server share. It has to be under a drive letter on the WHS otherwise the Drive Extender Migrator Service will cause data corruption errors as it tries to move the file onto another drive while uTorrent is in the middle of writing to it, or just before uTorrent tries to open the file to write to it again. The Move completed downloads to can be changed to any server share location. The Automatic load torrents in directory location can be changed to any server share location. This setup enables uTorrent to monitor this specific folder for .torrent files and start downloading them automatically. All you have to do to start a download is place the .torrent file in that folder and uTorrent will do its stuff.

Using the Scheduler tab you can set your downloads to occur during “off-peak” periods by setting up a schedule if you so require.

As below, under Advanced Web UI Enable Web Interface and configure a Username and secure Password of your choice.

Click the OK button and close uTorrent.

Next download the uTorrent add-in for the Windows Home Server Console. Do NOT run it but place it in your Add-Ins Shared Folder (\\SERVER\Software\Add-Ins). Log In to your WHS console and go to Settings, Add-ins the Available tab and then click Install under “Windows Home Server – uTorrent”.

Once the console re-starts log back in to the console and go to Settings, uTorrent and for Server type in http://YourIP:Port/gui/ e.g. http://192.168.1.110:22345/gui/
YourIP is your server name or IP address and Port is the uTorrent Port that you set up earlier.

Next insert your User Name and Password as set up earlier. You can press Test Configuration to check all is OK. Red is not and green is fine. You may now OK out of the Settings and close the Console.
Create the User-Defined Service

From your Windows Home Server (Remote Desktop Connection) click Start then Run and type cmd. In the window that opens type the following which is all on one line, including the quotation marks.

“c:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\instsrv.exe” uTorrent “c:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\srvany.exe”

NOTE: Cut and paste will not work, instead highlight and copy the above line and then right-click in the open CMD window and select paste.

Press Enter on your keyboard. Once the screen displays The service was successfully added! you may close the cmd box.

We need to now create a .Reg file using notepad and paste in the 3 lines of code below.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\uTorrent\Parameters]
“Application”=”C:\\Program Files\\utorrent\\utorrent.exe”

When saving make sure that Save as type is set to All Files *.* and save as service.reg. Double click on this saved file to import the settings into the registry on your server.

Now click the Start button and then select All Programs, Administrative Tools and then Services. Find uTorrent right-click and select Properties.

Select the Log On tab. Click the This account button and enter WHS as the This account and enter the Password you setup earlier for this user account and confirm the Password.

OK out and close the Services dialog.

Click Start, Shut Down then Restart.

That’s it job completed. You can now connect to uTorrent either via the web interface using your browser using the format http://YourIP:Port/gui/ or via the WHS console (uTorrent heading).

All you have to do to start a torrent download automatically is place the .torrent file in the \\SERVER\Public\Torrents folder and forget about it.

BMW Driving School at AMP – June 6, 2009