http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/06/ics-based-cyanogenmod-9-its-on-track-but-not-for-everybody/

*cradles my MSM7230 phone*

I love CM. That is all.

Well, if it was only that easy eh?

So, poor Andy brings me his laptop with this error. Seems he’d contracted a virus earlier in the day and in the process of cleaning the virus out, rebooted his machine and up pops the error ” STOP: C0000135 The program can’t start because %hs is missing. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.” Whoops!?

So we buggered around with the system quite a bit last night and tried to figure out the root cause of the issue. He had mentioned attempting to install AVG so we had started there with the though that it might be the cause, but he couldn’t be sure since he didn’t actually get the install to launch since his system was acting like a complete maniac anyway. Well, further investigations uncovered that AVG had, in fact, not made it to the hard drive. So what now?

Fortunately, the error is pretty straightforward if you read it. It basically states that the system is having a problem launching off some type of program at boot-up. Due to the nasty blue-screen nature of this thing, it’s safe to assume it wasn’t something that lived in the regular ole startup/runOnce/run section of the registry and it behaved a lot like an error I’d seen before due to a csrsss.exe/winlogin issue. Not a full-blown blue screen with a nice kernel dump, but pretty annoying none-the-less. So, with csrss on my mind and a couple of pointers over googling some ideas, the solution came out of the following:

The virus which he had contracted, modified the registry settings under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems

The value ‘Windows’ was changed from:

%SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,20480,768 Windows=On SubSystemType=Windows ServerDll=basesrv,1 ServerDll=winsrv:UserServerDllInitialization,3 ServerDll=winsrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2 ServerDll=sxssrv,4 ProfileControl=Off MaxRequestThreads=16

to this:

%SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,20480,768 Windows=On SubSystemType=Windows ServerDll=basesrv,1 ServerDll=winsrv:UserServerDllInitialization,3 ServerDll=consrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2 ServerDll=sxssrv,4 ProfileControl=Off MaxRequestThreads=16

The called ‘consrv’ is part of the virus that was implanted into his machine and when he cleaned it up, the dll went missing, thus causing the system to EXPLODE on bootup. Upon loading up the ole trusty Hiren’s BootCD in MiniXP mode and launching a registry editor from it, I was able to modify the two keys from their viral consrv entries back to winsrv.

With all that cleaned up, I was able to run another viral scan against the system, remove any other traces of such things that I could detect and the system now boots correctly. Unfortunately, there aren’t many things that can change in these fields that won’t spin off other types of error messages so if this particular error rears it’s head and you’re not running AVG and this fix doesn’t resolve it… it’s probably reload time. Also, if you happen to jack-up the entries in the registry, you may encounter a STOP: C000021a error on bootup. That usually happens when you’ve mistyped something in the registry entry while resolving this issue.

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/31/justice-seeks-to-block-att-merger-with-t-mobile/?iid=A_F_News

For the record, I believe AT&T needs to go pound sand. The thought of them taking any part in T-Mobile disgusts me. I went to T-Mobile because of extremely poor service from other carriers and their value to cost ratio. AT&T would completely undermine the values of T-Mobile should they acquire the carrier. Not to mention we’d watch our rate plans and phone costs go through the roof. I hope they get burned for this and it costs them that 3 billion in reversal fees. It would serve them right for trying to covertly corner the market by strategically positioning themselves to own almost half of it.

All I can do is shake my head… really? I’m soooooo glad I don’t use PSN. What a bummer for those “70 million subscribers”….

(CNN) — A hacker has obtained the personal information of PlayStation Network account holders and subscribers of the Qriocity streaming service, Sony said in a message to customers Tuesday.

Sony’s investigations over the past week determined that an “unauthorized person” had obtained users’ names, home addresses, e-mail addresses, birth dates and passwords, according to a statement being sent to all account holders.

The attack also has crippled Sony’s PlayStation Network, which has some 70 million subscribers and has been down since April 20. The network lets customers download video games from the Web and play against each other online.

“While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility,” said Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Network Entertainment, which manage the two services, in a joint statement.

The hacker could have taken credit card numbers, card expiration dates, billing addresses, answers to security questions and purchase history, but not credit-card security codes, they said.

Sony is encouraging customers “to protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss” by reviewing credit-card statements. The company also suggested that some customers may want to place a “fraud alert” with credit bureaus.

Sony did not say how many accounts had been compromised. A spokeswoman declined to comment Tuesday.

Some subscribers reacted angrily to the news.

“You waited a WEEK to tell us our (personal) information was compromised?” one PlayStation user wrote on a Sony blog. “That should have been said last Thursday” — the day when Sony first acknowledged the issue.

The intrusions occurred between April 17 and 19, according to the statement. On April 20, Sony switched off the PlayStation and Qriocity online services, which have remained in the dark.

Users and paid subscribers were also mostly in the dark until Tuesday about the reason for the lengthy outage or about when services would be reinstated.

Sony initially said its PS network would be be back online within one to two days.

On Tuesday, PlayStation spokesman Patrick Seybold wrote in a statement that it could take another week before they “expect to restore some services.”

So far? I’m impressed.

I remember the old days of flashing a windows mobile ROM was a “plug-n-pray” operation… Those things were (and I’m sure still are) down right scary. It was all to common to find oneself “bricking” a phone if just one little thing was out of place. Then along came Android.

My G2 is my second Android phone. My first was a Motorola Cliq that met an unfortunate fate after being ejected into the snow during a snowboarding trip in Park City, Utah. Somehow those beautiful photo’s of  mountaintop vistas posted on facebook just didn’t make it feel any better to drop $500 on a new phone. Alas, it was time to move on. I learned some really important things with my Cliq. It was my first exposure to modified ROMS on the Android platform and really made me respect what was actually being done on the back end to create solid custom ROMS that reliably installed and ran well. The guys that ‘cook’ these things up really do some great work. Flashing my Cliq was the best thing I ever did with that phone and it was actually quite easy. Still, nothing compared to how easy it was to flash my G2.

There are plenty of help pages out there on the web to get you going as far as rooting your device and installing custom images so there isn’t any need for me to go into that here. One of the best tutorials resides on the site I obtained my current ROM from. Just drop out to Google and lookg for CyanogenMod. GREAT work being done over there as far as I am concerned. Don’t forget that before even moving foward, you have to root your phone. Otherwise you might as well not even look up information on custom ROMS for any other reason than to look at the pretty pictures and wish you had one. You can’t load a custom image without a rooted device, period.

I for one rooted my phone quite literally the day I got home with it. It’s a must on these devices as the carriers tend to pack so much bloatware and unneeded software on these phones it’s a wonder they even boot. A root and cleanup is almost mandatory if you want your phone to perform well. I don’t blame the platform one bit though as it’s somehow a necessary evil in this market to pack things on for people to have  ‘readily available’ applications and get support from vendors. *rolls eyes* With a rooted G2, all that’s left is to load up ROM Manager (available on the market) which installs the Clockwork Recovery image (once you’ve installed RM, applied the img and rebooted) and of course download CM7 from the site. Once you place the images on your SD card, you can run ROM Manager to get things going. Backup your phone (always important) and let the rom drop into place by installing it from the menu. Keep in mind you should backup important things like contacts (if you’re not syncing them), emails (if you’re not syncing them) and SMS messages if you’re so inclined to retain these things because custom ROMS demand wiped devices on a fresh load. It’s not like backing anything up is difficult these days with all the apps for it out there right? suck it up and go for it!

Anyway, so I loaded up CM7. Right away I noticed the system booted faster. While the G2 was already much faster than my Cliq, the new boot time was much faster than the carrier ROM. Out of the box, CM7 looks and acts smooth. Screen transitions, default notifications, the default launcher were all things that just jumped right out at me. The phone just seemed to run more cleanly. Battery life seems to be only slightly better than stock and the memory usage is a little higher, despite not being able to tell from a performance view. I haven’t run into any problems loading apps from the market and integration of my preferred home screen launcher, Launcher Pro, works well. I am a big fan of some of the upgrades that Gingerbread brings to the table. Things just tend to run a little smoother overall and thus far haven’t experienced any issues at all with wifi calling, tethering, texting, emailing (gmail and exchange), surfing the web, facebooking, blogging, streaming or any other things which I typically use on the phone.

Keep in mind if you want the Google apps you’ll need to load it up in the beginning of your process in the same fashion that you loaded the ROM from ROM Manager. It’s also downloadable from the same site as CM7. I’d recommend it unless you’re into loading your apps manually from the apk files and don’t want any integration with Google. It’s not like it eats up that much right?

Again, I can’t find any real fault with this ROM and can only sing its praises. It runs much better than the default G2 load from T-Mob and isn’t that hard to install. I hope those guys continue to keep up the good work. I can’t wait to see what’s ahead from this project.

Ok, so I figured I would do a few postings up about different things in 2011, specifically, game reviews and other various topics. While it’s fun to put up crazy computer problems, personal updates and rants, I think adding in some more informational things might help out quite a bit as well.

This game review is for “Your Shape: Fitness Evolved” for the Xb0x 360 Kinect.  For a comparison to work with, I have also played The Biggest Loser Ultimate Workout.

Out of the box, Your Shape is much easier to use than The Biggest Loser as far as interface goes. The interface for The Biggest loser is really hard to maneuver and lock onto target while Your Shape has a very intuitive system that actually keeps close proximity to your avatar and allows you to select, then confirm your action in an easy motion. It also helps you to warm-up a little while you’re traversing the menus… rather than small controlled movements of the hand, you’re using your whole arm and moving it around to select options within the menu system. Kinect tracking is also better in Your Shape as The Biggest Loser tends to lose you a lot more. You also have you change your angle a lot and it does a poor job tracking you in different positions. Another advantage to working out with Your Shape is that you’re able to see your body moving on the screen to ensure that your actions are being interpreted correctly by the system and matching the trainer’s poses and speed. The variety of the workouts between the two is pretty comparable, while The Biggest Loser has a little more variety and somewhat easier exercises, Your Shape focuses on form and speed matching the trainer to get the most out of your exercise as possible. When comparing similar timed workouts, I was able to burn nearly double the calories with Your Shape than The Biggest Loser per my Polar Heart Monitor. Both games do a poor job of actually tracking the amount of calories you’ve burned during a session.  Both The Biggest Loser and Your Shape give you some things that keep things from getting too boring in the form of challenges (The Biggest Loser) and Gym Games and Classes (Your Shape). One of the nice things with Your Shape is the expandability and the “classes” they have for things like a Zen Workout, Bollywood Dancing and Cardio Kick Boxing.

While the actual workouts themselves seem to lack some of the detail and technique you’d pick up in an actual gym in actual classes or sessions with a trainer, I personally feel that Your Shape delivers about the best you’re going to get from a video game. Ubisoft has done a great job with a first release workout game for the Kinect platform. While the scoring system sometimes falls on it’s face because the system can’t exactly tell you’re doing the move right or wrong, it still does a better job than The Biggest Loser. The only downside to both of them is they do fall short when verifying correct form and encouraging correct form when your form is improper. However, anyone who knows their body should be able to determine if they are doing the exercise right or not as you should actually feel the exercise as opposed to feeling pain or nothing from the exercise.

My recommendation if you’re looking for a workout game for the Kinect, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved.

Now to get my hands on EA’s new game and see how well that works.

So, another year down… another to go.

2010 had some pretty interesting challenges, lessons learned, blah blah the usual nonsense. What does 2011 hold? Who knows at this point. NYE went pretty well… it was a calm one. Just spent it hanging out with Andy and Amanda and the kiddos gorging on food continuously for the entire evening… gotta get in that last night of crazy eating before those weight loss new years resolutions kick in eh? I’ve actually done really well this holiday season, partly due to the fact I’ve been sick most of it. This cold has been such a pain in the rear end but it seems to finally be getting out of my system.

So much I could throw on the list of new years resolutions and goals but at the very least, this year, I’ve got to do the final kill on these few extra pounds lingering… I’m goaling for the first three months of 2011 to get that done… this past summer really screwed me up with that crazy work schedule. I was within my goal weight by 10lbs and ended up gaining 10 back due to working so much. On my list of goals is to run another 2 10k’s this year and get a better time than last year by at least 10 minutes. I think I can do better than that, but we’ll see. I figure if I can drop 20lbs by April and kick training into high gear from the end of March through the end of May, I should be able to tear up the Bolder Boulder this next year.  Eventually I want to work myself up to a half marathon, but I’m not going that crazy this year. That’s just way to ambitious for me with my schedule, lol.

I’ve got the usual various other goals to work on too… you know those personal goals for finances, the ever looming Camaro project that is slowly but surely moving forward, etc… I just want to make some major dents this year. On the plan as well, remove that horrible old swing set from the back yard and build the kiddos a mega-plex to play in for the summer. Should be a fun project but I’m definitely done with that archaic setup we’ve got going on. It should be a pretty interesting year. But for now, I’ve still got 3 solid months left of snowboarding season and that’s got priority.

So in other news… on the tech side of things… I’ve integrated my blogsite with Facebook. Now it’s easier to login to the site using facebook credentials. Anyone with an existing account can login the same way and link their blogsite account to their FB account from their user profile screen. Also new accounts registering can do so using their FB credentials. This is all part of the eventual removal of the traditional registration/login system that has been allowing about 50 spammers a month to sign up using automated methods. Really irritating. More to come on this as I play with more features, etc.

Anyway… enough boring nonsense.

SO, where to begin?

After going on a serious technology sabbatical, at least from a personal stance, I am back. I think.

After working so much during the summer, I tried to get back into my usual personal technology quests (blogging, mobile modding, gaming, home server/network stuff, etc) but just found that by trying to dive back into my personal time with technology, I came to hate it even more… so I just quit for a couple months. It was actually a pretty nice “break” for me. I still couldn’t avoid it since technology is my career, but not engaging in activities involving it after hours helped to smooth over my jaded feelings towards all things tech.

And… after a few days of “hitting it hard” again, I actually feel pretty good about technology once more. I’ve upgraded the blog site software running on this server, updated the VMWare installations for the hosts, updated the VSA software, rooted my Cliq, loaded a vanilla android installation on it, reloaded all the apps I wanted and pruned out 66 bogus user entries… Oh, with that, if some of you notice that the email coming to your inbox for notifications has switched out mysteriously to another mail account, my apologies. I was playing with a little tool that links up Facebook accounts to WordPress blog accounts and accidentally pulled down the email address you have posted in your Facebook profile. If you want to change it, just log in and update it with another email account.

I’m also pretty stoked about the beginning of my favorite time of year… SNOWBOARDING SEASON!!!!!!!!!!!! *happy sigh* This is my time to relax, my time to destroy myself on the mountain and feel like I really do something recreational besides a routine daily workout. Can ya tell I’m excited? This season should prove interesting since two more members of the family are now geared up and ready for the fun. Arwen got a gear reload this year so she’s all set and Amanda got geared up right at the end of last season so she’s all good to go as well. Hopefully plenty of funny stories and good pics ahead!

With that… updates on the family. Family is doing great… Travis Jr is two now, I can’t believe how big he is. I seem to remember him coming home from the hospital just a few weeks ago, where has the time gone!? Hopefully I’ll get around to updating some recent pictures in the gallery today or perhaps tomorrow. Today will be consumed with cleaning, grocery shopping and a lot of XBOX Kinect. That seems to be our new fun thing to do around here… I think it has something to do with the fact even the kiddos can play it. No controller gaming, a 7 year old girl’s absolute dream, especially when she gets to play with virtual tiger cubs for hours. *rolls eyes* lol. I’m still torn on what my favorite game is. I would have to say independently playing I’m partial to Kinetc Adventures and Dance Central. Group playing I would have to go with Kinect Sports and Dance Central. Those are just really fun “party” games to enjoy with a group of people. Kinectimals is a pretty cool idea, kinda fun for the kiddos and Biggest Loser Workout is a workout, so I can’t count that as a ‘Game’ per se. Between our collection and my buddy Randy, I think we’ve got all the games and reviews covered.  We’ll probably pick up another game or two over the next couple of weeks as these start to lose their “new car smell”.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. Nothing really dramatic going on and life is slowly returning to “normal”, whatever that is. Busy day ahead so I’m going to end this for now…

So, I spent quite a bit of time digging around on the internet and came up with no solution to this issue. So I’m posting the solution to this one. I ran across this one while moving a mailbox from one site to another physically across a WAN. Moving mailboxes on the server from one datastore to the other worked just fine, however every time I ran a mailbox move from one location to another, it bombed out with the following error:

[5/10/2010 6:57:36 PM] [0] [ERROR] Error was found for Test User (test.user@testdomain.com) because: Error occurred in the step: Moving messages. Unable to unlock mailbox with error:
MAPI or an unspecified service provider.
ID no: 00000000-0000-00000000, error code: -1056749254
[5/10/2010 6:57:36 PM] [0] [06876] The operation has finished.

One might immediate think there is an issue with permissions since this was a common item found when doing a search on this particular error and showed up most often when doing a migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. In this particular instance, it is due to a problem with a WAN accelerator.

The best way to confirm this is to complete a dump on the interface on the source and target exchange servers when conducting the move. If the WAN accelerator is interfering it may manifest itself by showing a packet on source side that differs from the expected packet on the target side.

In this case, it was a transparency mode configured on a RiverBed device.

Hopefully this post will help someone keep from smashing their head into a keyboard for a couple of days since they can’t find the answer and point them in the right direction.

Figured this oddity was worth posting.

I was loading up a server today and for some reason, despite setting the nic with static ip, gw and dns information I couldn’t hit outside ip addresses.

When I submitted an “ipconfig /all” I noticed my gw in the config but also noticed 0.0.0.0 listed with and above it. Wtf?

Anyway, reboot didn’t fix it, resubmission of configuration didn’t fix it, but the following did.

1) Open up ‘cmd.exe’ in administrator mode.
2) Type ‘route delete 0.0.0.0′
3) Resubmit your ip settings putting the correct default gateway in.

Should be fine now. (Even after reboot) =)

Not sure what the deal was, but at least its a simple fix for a stupid issue.