The beauty of my Virgin AMEX card is that as I spend I earn air miles for every pound spent. Being a Virgin card, these miles are redeemable only on Virgin Atlantic flights. But it just so happens that I love to travel AND I’m a big Virgin Atlantic fan, and choose to fly with them over other carriers (so long as they’re flying to where I want to get to, naturally). The Virgin AMEX White Card delivers 1 mile per pound spent, whilst the Virgin AMEX Black Card gives you 2 miles per pound spent. Virgin also have deals with a number of hotel chains and other organisations whereby you are credited with more miles per pound if you use your card to pay.

Downsides of the card is that you’re charged the interest on the full amount you’ve spent IF you fail to pay off the whole balance in a month, and the £115 annual fee on the AMEX Black. Good incentive to pay off the balance!

All good entertainment though

However, one bugbear of mine, which I’ve had ever since buying the Z11, is the lack of support in the BIOS for the virtualization which the Intel Core Duo processor installed in my Vaio offers. I’m not the only one! A quick search will find lots of posts going back since the day of launch complaining about this feature lack. Its also angered some users enough to try and hack the BIOS (of which they did a good job on, but its rather technical and not for the masses).

Today, whilst I was looking for drivers for my newly-upgraded Windows 7 OS, I was on the Vaio site, and stumbled across this BIOS upgrade page, proclaiming that as of the 14th October 2009, a BIOS upgrade was available that allowed you to switch on VT Support. Wohooo!

Why is this important? Well, I’m a developer (working primarily on the LAMP platform), and a tinkerer, and I run various other OS’s in a Virtualised Environment through VMWare. Virtualization support allows me to run the virtualised OS at full performance. In addition, Windows 7 now provides backward compatibility with XP programs through a virtualized XP environment, but requires VT support in order to do so.

There’s also the fact that now I have my hardware doing exactly what its supposed to – not being feature locked any longer by a poor Sony implementation.

However, that said, Kudos to Sony for finally getting this feature live – the question is – why did it take so long?

Having spent the last weekend working on a couple of machines, I thought it’d be useful to list my PC Toolkit, and I invite others to do the same! Now I realise these sort of posts are what were doing the rounds years earlier, but its still a valid topic today given the increased number of devices attached to the Internet, and the number of computer viruses totalling somewhere north of 1 Million.

Virus Scanning Utilities

My current resident favourite virus scanner is AVG (it should be noted, withOUT the LinkScanner utility).

I also back this up on potentailly infected systems with an on-line scanner, such as the Windows Live OneCare Virus Scanner, which works through the browser and various plugins / ActiveX controls.

Spyware Hunting Utilities

I regularly use that old chestnut (I say old, but its regularly updated) Spybot – Search & Destroy. It has a comprehensive database of potential spyware, and has hooks into the browser to try and protect against malware. It also can exclude cookies from your favourite ad serving and tracking platforms.

There’s also HijackThis which is useful to see whats buried in certain key parts of the hard drive and registry, and allows the user to disable or remove certain programs that may load with Windows or the browser.

System Tools

I’ve recently come to rely on the System Rescue CD, which contains a CD-Bootable verison of Linux with lots of useful tools for checking hard drives, working with HDD partitioning, copying – and even rescuing – data from damaged partitions. It provides utilities to handle secure deletion of data should you want to dispose of an old hard drive. I recently used this set of tools to copy a working Vista installation on a partition which contained damaged sectors to an external hard drive (connected via USB) which would soon replace the internal drive.

NTFSCLONE, NTFSINFO & NTFSTRUNCATE to the rescue!

I used to be a big fan of PartitionMagic, but a) it’s commercial software which requires a license, and b) I’ve had a few instances of it crashing mid-operation and destroying my data (thank you back-ups!). Granted, free software can do the same, but I’ve yet to have an issue with any of the utils on the System Rescue CD.

Process & Network Safety

When checking out a potentially infected PC, whats the best way to do it?
Well, I initially run HiJackThis from a known-clean USB key to get a handle on whats on the machine, and clean what I can.
I then uninstall any virus checking software on the machine, install a fresh copy of AVG (again, from a clean USB), ensure the latest virus definition updates are on it, and then do a full system scan.
Once this has completed, then I connect it to the Internet and run a second virus scan, this time using a different tool (e.g. MS OneCare).

How I also connect the PC via a separate network to the rest of my machines / smartphones etc. I have a Draytek 2820 Router which provides my ADSL connection. This has the ability to create up to 4 separate WiFi networks, each of which can be isolated from each other, and even individual machines on the same WiFi connection.
I also use the firewall abilities of the Draytek to ensure common trouble ports are blocked, e.g. TCP Port 25, Port 443 etc, to stop rouge activity potentially taking place whilst the PC is active on the Internet. Not ideal, I know. I’d rather have all ports except port 80 blocked, but I don’t see how the Draytek can allow this to happen (without setting up heaps of rules).

Anyway, thats the basic methodology. Thus far, its enabled me to clean out all detected trojans and viruses, even if it takes a few reboots and scans in order to do so.

So, does anyone have any suggestions / better tools or techniques for recovering a damanged or infected system?

I’ve been meaning to get involved in some Dev conferences for a while now, and keep on procrastinating for this reason or that reason. No longer! Having attended the last day of Yahoo! Open Hack 2009 in May, I found lots of great ideas floating around and decided I need some of that! Normally I’m at SEO/SEM (WebmasterWorld PubCon {though I haven’t attended one for quite a while} or SES Conferences), or the fantastic A4UExpo Affiliate Conference; however this will be one of my first coder conferences.

In particular I’m looking forward to the talk by Joe Stump of Digg.com fame on his war stories with PHP scalability, and perhaps the introduction to iPhone programming, which is something I always keep saying I’ll get around to one day..

If you’re going, let me know – @japes on twitter, and I’ll look forward to meeting up there!

Now, anyone got a recommendation for a good hotel nearby the Tuschinski Theater?

Fast forward 5 years to the present, and I’ve been through upgrades, re-installs due to the boxes dying (one was a blown motherboard through a dodgy power supply).

I’m now running MythTV in back-end only mode, using a low power VIA PC1500 Platform Motherboard, with 1.5TB of disk space, 2GB Ram, and a Hauppauge Nova-T-500 (Dual Digital Tuners). This box sits in the spare room, with an internal ariel providing the feed for Freeview. I have the box connected to my home network via a pair of ZyXEL PLA 400’s, which connects nodes via the electricity wires already in my flat.
I’m stilling running MythTV, but instead of spending hours upon hours building and configuring MythTV from scratch, I now use a purpose-built distribution of MythTV called MythDora. This distribution is based on Fedora (Current Version is 10), and after doing everything manually from the command line, I have to say this distribution is outstanding – configuration was straightforward and painless, and one I easily recommend.

My current box runs in Backend-mode only. This is accessed via web interface which allows me to select what programs to record. It also allows me to download recorded programs to my PC to view locally. MythTV also has UPnP AV MediaServer built into it, which means the recorded content can be shared on a network with any devices which can understand this protocol. In my case, this means to view the recorded content on my TV in the lounge, I’ve a choice of either AppleTV, which I’ve hacked to run Boxee, or Playstation 3, which natively shows the content on MythTV.

I’ve also got PHP installed on this box, and have built a Twitter interface for MythTV (Coded in PHP), so it Tweets completed recordings to a special account I have setup. If anyone wants a copy of this, just let me know.

Therefore, I decided to upgrade it to 1TB, which should be more than adequate for our households’ recorded viewing needs.

The box uses a SATA interface, therefore any low power HDD model should suffice (though I take no responsibility if you follow this guide and it doesn’t work).  I used a Western Digital HD103UJ (1000GB/7,200 RPM) and it worked without problem.

Here’s a guide detailing what to do, should you wish to do the same.
Note:   There are no warranty stickers to peel off / break through, therefore if the box dies you could (in theory) replace the HDD with the original,  and then call Sky to sort it out.

What you’ll need:

• Philips Head Screwdriver
• Replacement Hard Drive
• A PC with a spare SATA header and free disc space

Dismantle The Box

So, to start, unplug the box, and look at the back of it. You’ll see a single screw in the middle top, which holds the cover onto the back.  Unscrew this.

Turn the box upside down.  Within the outer black strip (for the cover), there are 6 recessed holes, with screws at the bottom of the holes.  Remove all of these.

To take the cover off, you need to lift up the three tabs towards the front of the box and pull the cover forward slightly away from the box.  As you can see in the picture, I’ve placed some knives and a screwdriver under the tabs to lift them away from the retaining bumps.

With the tabs clear of the bumps, you are now free to pull the box out of the cover.  Turn the box over and this.  You may find it a little easier if you also pull the two sides of the cover away from the box slightly as you pull.

With the cover removed from the box, you’ll see a controller daughterboard on top, a circuitboard on the front which holds the indicators and other controls, and three screws on the left hand side of the box.

Remove these three screws first, and then turn your attention to the daughterboard.  This is held in place by four screws, and has a ribbon cable linking it to the circuit board at the front of the box.  Remove these screws, and move the daughterboard so its hanging by the cable over the front of the front circuitboard.

You can now lift the metal cover off of the top of the box, exposing the motherboard, power supply, and hard drive in the bracket.

Swapping the Hard Drive

Unplug the red SATA cable and the power cable with four wires from the hard drive.

Remove the screw at the right back of the bracket which holds the hard drive bracket to the motherboard.

Then remove the screw at the front right of the hard drive bracket.

You can then pull the hard drive up and away from the case.

Remove the three screws on the side of the bracket which hold it to the hard drive.

Remove the foam triangle from the top of the hard drive.

Plug the removed drive into your PC and boot up. You’ll need to use Sky Copy+ to clone the old drive onto your new hard drive. I recommend you follow these instructions. I would use suggest you do not copy the Sky Anytime files, as this process can take a long time; even longer if you include the Anytime programming.

Once finished, reverse the process listed above, starting with attaching the all-important foam triangle!

The Sky box will always reserve 140GB for the Anytime programming, but the rest of the hard drive space is yours for recording purposes.
Enjoy!

At the Google I/O conference yesterday, they showed off their work-in-progress demo of Spotify for Android. Yes, it’s coming! It’s a great looking app; it’s responsive, it syncs playlists between handset and desktop in seconds, and it can search the whole of the Spotify library just like you’re on your desktop. One much needed feature which they’ve given though to is the ability to cache tracks offline, so you can carry on in your listening pleasure without a Wifi or 3G/GPRS signal, i.e. on the underground tube here in London.

Take a look at the shiny new Spotify for Android application below. Exciting times!

I used to blog about my experiences with MythTV, amonst other things, but due to work and continutally getting the work / life balance wrong, I left it slip in favour of getting things done.

So now its fast approaching the middle of 2009; my life is somewhat more organised, and I’m setting up this site using WordPress to see what this modern blogging tool can do, and to see where this blog can take me…

Stay tuned.