It’s my last semester and I’ve been really busy between finishing projects (and my thesis!), trying to enjoy Charlottesville before I leave, and trying to travel a bit and visit friends from other schools. I’ve taken a job in northern Virginia working with a small software consulting startup. The team seems like a really good group, and I’m excited about the opportunity.  I don’t start working until August, which leaves me some time to do some interesting stuff, notably an epic cross country road trip that I will discuss in future posts..

Foxfield. Those within the UVA community immediately have a preconceived notion of the word.  Foxfield Races are horse races that draw a huge portion of students together for a day of socializing. The event has become a signature of Greek organizations around grounds. The emphasis is on socializing more than horse racing, the running joke has become whether spectators even see horses (the course is large enough it’s possible and in fact often true). Presumably from the association with horse racing, Foxfield has also become well known for people wearing their southern Sunday bests; but this often just results in varying levels of seersucker and crazy pastel color combinations. I went for the first time this year, I figured I should partake in the UVA event once in my four years here.

Anticipation surrounding the races were significantly dampened with the prediction of thunderstorms all day. However, the rain held off for virtually the entire day, with the worst rain before most people even arrived.  Additionally, the weather provided a bit of an advantage over some other years where the temperatures often shoot quite high which combining with sun can be quite uncomfortable (I’m told). I had a good time, it was a unique experience and I happened to run into a surprising number of people I didn’t expect to see.

Keep your eyes peeled for new posts..

1. System Restore
2. Explorer isn’t running/ registry WinLogon or userinit.exe isn’t properly set
3. Too large files on Desktop (I can’t find this link now, but most of these are in multiple places)
4. Create New User and import data from the old profile

These weren’t good for me.  System Restore is never ideal, it’s just rolling back to before you made some unknown mistake, and you’ll probably lose stuff on the way. Explorer was running and userinit.exe was running.

I was also tipped off that this was an issue with a local user profile because I had another user account that was loading fine. I didn’t want to create a new user and import data because there are lots of settings and things attached to this account, it also just seems like a messy way to fix this.

How I fixed it, in the registry:

HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Winlogon set FirstLogon to 1

rename HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows to HKCU/Software/Microsoft/WindowsOLD or something like that

Log out and log back in.  This will create most of a clean explorer/windows profile.  The one issue left is preferences don’t seem to save properly (file associations, taskbar, etc…)

The way I fixed this was to export HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer from a clean profile.  Log back in to your original profile.  You have to delete HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer in your registry; As far as I can tell you can’t edit these values regardless of permissions, but it will let you delete the whole directory (Nice one MS). Then import the version you exported previously, log out and log back in.

You will lose a few things — generally settings in Explorer (file preferences, themes, etc..) unfortunately.  I didn’t really feel like chasing down specifically which values got corrupted in mine, but if you were to look within the Windows registry folder addressed above and fiddle it could probably be found without too much effort — I was fine with basically reseting my explorer profile.

Hope this helps someone, if something I said is unclear feel free to ask for clarification.

My traveling was pretty ridiculous to get there.. Flight: 7:15AM. Alarm set for 5:15AM. Dad wakes me because my clock was switched AM/PM: 6:00AM.  No way I’m making this flight. Leave the house: 6:10AM. Check Bags, make it through security and to my gate as regular boarding is finished. Phew! +5 Hours, land in long beach for a couple of hour layover.  3 hour flight to Seattle. First trip to Seattle, rainy, of course. +2 hours, bus finally leaves from Seattle, Vacouver-bound. Takes better than an hour to cross the border, uggh. I’m getting tired, and hungry. Make it to the Vancouver airport a shade before 9PM (West coast time), my friend has pressing issue and can’t bring me. Frantically find a bus that leaves at 9 to go to whistler.  ~1130PM roll into Whistler. Liza comes and gets me and takes me to her cabin, my ridiculous day of traveling is over, but we hang out for a few hours to add to it just for fun. Nearly 24 hours, and 3000 miles. Let’s ski.

We roll out of bed hoping to ski by a bit after 9am, closer to 10 we’re on a gondola to halfway up. It’s a beautiful sunny day, probably 25 degrees, no clouds, this is awesome.  Whistler is surrounded by some absolutely beautiful mountains, surrounded by peaks in every direction. It’s beautiful snow, and not crowded, we were having a great time.  We cross to the other major peak, Blackcomb via a new gondola (436m above ground at highest point!), for some new terrain.  We ski across sections of the mountain and spend a lot of time near the peak, cautiously venturing beyond the avalanche warning signs into some wild bowls. Drew, a friend of Liza, is a terrific skier, and challenges us a bit in a great way. At one point we drop off some pretty serious faces, occasionally so steep you can hardly see what you’re about to go over. We ski all day, and it’s amazing. Blackcomb peak is supposed to be just over 8k feet and the base camp just over 2k.

The next day is similar, we don’t venture quite as far distance, but take the skiing up another notch, venturing to create some paths down the peak, and challenge ourselves on many runs.  By the end of the day, we’re starting to drag — this skiing is real exercise. These aren’t the hills of the US east coast, these are world-class mountains.We finish on the Women’s Olympic downhill course.

The next two days other friends come up from California to join us, and the weather by now has worsened into a cloudy, often above freezing arena.  At some points it’s clear at the bottom of the mountain, raining halfway up, and snowing at the top, it’s pretty unreal. Sometimes the conditions were whiteout at the top. These days of skiing had stretches of easier skiing, which by now was a much-needed break. Cam and I conclude our skiing with a “peak-to-creak” run, stretching the whole elevation available.

I had a great time, reunited with old friends, and had loads of fun. My nearly day-long travel return is completely worth it.

*Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my camera for the days of nice weather, and only managed a few pictures.. And a video of the whiteout..

WhiteoutWhistlerPeak

My good friend, Miles, from high school was graduating from the U of Miami, so a bunch of us went down to visit him.

We showed up in the middle of December, but it was 70s most of the time we were there.  It was bucketing rain when we were first there, but it came around and was nice and sunny for us.  We took a trip to the beach and were playing football at the ocean, which was awesome, even sweeter because it was december. Miles led us through the U, and showed us across town and South Beach.

I made it to mass on Sunday night, and it had dropped into the 60s (when the Miami population starts fearing hypothermia). Wearing a polo shirt and pants put me about a jacket and scarf behind the rest of the churchgoers. On the way out, the priest semi-seriously warned me not to catch a cold — haha, welcome to Miami!

While there, the biggest snow storm in 13 years hit the DC area for a bit more than 2 feet. We were greeted to it when we came back, and it was quite a shocking transition.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Important and Helpful things I learned or used in this exercise:

Preparation

WARNING: there are commands in here that if used improperly can do serious damage to your install, tread lightly. BACKUP your home directory.  Use an external hard drive and run something like:

rsync -ahv –delete –exclude=/Downloads/ –size-only ~/ /Volumes/BACKUPDrive/username/ From the Terminal in your home directory. (Apple or Command key + Space to bring finder search type terminal in this window).

Running the Snow Leopard disc yielded my major issue: My Mac disc showed a yellow triangle and wouldn’t let me use my mac drive for the upgrade. Following a note I had seen online, I used Disk Utility (on the booted SL dvd) to resize the partition — DOES NOT WORK WELL –  it in fact seemed to mess up both of my other installs (win7 and ubuntu 9.10), uggghhh.

Accepting the inevitable and having backups of my data, I decided to run with this, I took the opportunity to clean all of my installs.

Partitioning

From here, I believe I made two mistakes.  My first mistake was when I repartitioned my drive I created 3 partitions, one large one for OS X and 2 smaller ones for the others, but I didn’t format them, just left them as free space.  For some reason I believe this messed up how the computer decided to boot from them, it was like the GPT/EFI support with MBR got somehow confused.

The way you should partition for triple booting a mac is to use the command line it seems with something like:

diskutil list This should yield the drive and volume number you need for the next command

sudo diskutil resizeVolume diskDRIVENUMBERsVOLUMENUMBER 80G “MS-DOS FAT32″ “Linux” 15G “MS-DOS FAT32″ “Windows” 15G This seems to be the best way to re-size.

From here you should be able to continue installing your operating systems of choice. rEFIt is the best way to triple boot, it should be installed now if it hasn’t already been.

Installing Linux / Ubuntu

My second mistake: the most important thing to note in Linux is to install GRUB to the Linux Partition rather than the MBR (default).  In ubuntu, near the end of the install there is an advanced options tab which will allow you to install it in the local partition, you want to do this.

If however, you are dumb and mess up like me, you have to fix this later, because windows and linux will fight and will result in only one being bootable.

grub-install /dev/sdaPARTITIONNUMBER will install GRUB to your needed partition.

You will also want to delete the GRUB MBR entry (alternatively, install Windows at this point which will overwrite it without asking). This is a little more interesting:

The Power of dd

dd is a very powerful and useful command, I ended up using it for several different things during this installation. dd provides relatively low level access to disk reading and writing functions. BE VERY CAREFUL TO GET PROPER if= AND of= ARGUMENTS.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=440 count=1 will clear your MBR. (OS X equivalent would be of=/dev/disk0 however it doesn’t let you do this to that partition.  I saw reference to using fdisk on the /dev/disk0 partition (the 200mb EFI partition), but I’d like to avoid that if possible. DON’T GET THIS ONE WRONG, and backup the MBR by basically inverting making if=/dev/sda and of=/path/to/backup.efi

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/whereveryouwant/DiskImage.iso bs=2048 is a good way to make ISO images of CD’s/DVD’s (use diskutil list to verify if=/dev/disk1 )

dd if=/whereveryouwant/DiskImage.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m    is a good way to make a USB drive boot an image. (use diskutil list to verify if=/dev/disk1 ).  ***This will almost certainly wipe whatever is on the USB drive (/dev/disk2) so make sure you don’t need whatever is on there.  Under OS X this is the best way I’ve found to make bootable USB flash drives.

Back to the Point

Avoiding redundant GRUB entries avoids refit from displaying phantom legacy OS boot options, or extra linux options. Installing windows will overwrite the MBR and you should be able to boot from any of your operating systems.

How to: Bypass Windows 7 Upgrade “Key is Not Valid”

If you do things as terribly out of order and with partitioning as I did that you need to reinstall windows, you might come across a windows upgrade issue.  Windows 7 has a new way of verifying if you are using an upgrade DVD — rather than asking you to input an old CD or DVD, it will look on your system for pre-installed versions of windows. However, having just formatted everything this is an issue.

Solutions: 1) Reinstall XP/Vista (NOT IDEAL). 2) Plug in external or other hard drive with XP/Vista Install (NOT IDEAL).  3) Install Windows 7, make it through the install to where it asks for your key.  If you put in your key (and you’re sure it’s correct) and it says “key is not valid” (Note: this is in the initial key entering, not activating), then you seem to have no way forward.  However, if you reboot and relaunch the installer, Windows seems to detect the install you just created as a valid install, which will let you input your key the second time without harassing you.

Other Useful Tools/Notes:

rEFIt has a partition tool.  This is a way to use gptsync, and this is very useful. There were a few situations I needed it in, sometimes you have to help the computer sync MBR/GPT. It will basically auto correct differences in the table that it detects.

gparted is a useful linux tool for partition management.  I needed this for a few small things and it can help point to where your issues are.  There is a live image or you can find it on most live distributions (ubuntu).

To answer why, after all this I triple boot rather than virtualize… I’m running an old 32-bit Core Duo macbook — I don’t believe they have the Intel Virtualization Technology. More importantly, I use Ubuntu generally for certain low level tasks (i.e. Wifi card in promiscuous mode). I use Windows for (limited) gaming/weird hardware access and most of the solutions that port graphics don’t support my chip (VMWare Fuzion).

I’m sure this process ended up being far more painful for me than it needed to be, but I’m back to happily triple booting.