Andrew Emmett

A mystery was afoot and Sherlock Holmes wasn’t available to solve…..

A bunch of graphics cards had arrived and I was all too eager to test them. Alas I currently don’t have a test bed system available, so I decided to use one of my P4 computers….bad mistake.

I opened the computer case and replaced the existing card and switched the computer on. It all then went horribly wrong.

The first hurdle was the motherboard ‘beeps’. Easily enough solved and I reset the computer ram and graphics card. The system at last would boot past the bios.

The second hurdle was the computer wouldn’t load into the operating system. Upon diagnostics I discovered I had badly corrupted the partition table. Drive c wasn’t being recognized and unfortunately it wasn’t a simple repair. A boot cd with testdisk to rescue a few genealogy related files to a second hard drive.

The third issue was a ripping noise. I had bent down and heard a tearing noise. I had completely torn my boxer shorts!  I was in no mood to sew and create a pair of frankenstein boxer shorts.

So with deduction, logic and a new pair of boxer shorts the case was closed. I’m already organising the parts to build a test system.

Until next time.

I enjoy taking photographs. I’m not that great, but enjoy capturing moments. Once taken I rarely modify, no histogram mods, contrasting adjustment, sharpness or cropping etc. Snap, store and sometimes share.

I do enjoy creating panorama’s using the wonderful hugin software. However this post is about photosynths which is similar. Photosynth is a Microsoft free service, tied in with their Windows live service and possibly windows only. It allows you to not be precise, your not worrying about height of adjoining images. Again snap, store and share. Basically you take as many photos of you want of an area. The software will then compare your images, sort and build a photosynth which is viewable online.

I’ve created different types of photosynths from moving forward in my footsteps so to speak along a beach walk I took, to simply moving around 360 degrees from a standing viewpoint. Sometimes I will take a handful of photos showing a specific area such as a ruin, whatever the whim of the moment.

So how does it work and how do you get started?

Photosynth uses Microsoft’s silverlight technology, which I believe is for Microsoft Windows only operating systems. I am unsure if there is an alternative for other operating systems. Microsoft supply a piece of software that you download and sign in with a windows live account after registering for the photosynth service. Give the synth a title, description, set the license type and add the photos. The processing is done on your machine and the results uploaded. They supply an extremely generous 20 gig of online space for your creations.

Now a few of my photosynths are not working on their service. Apparently I may of deleted them according to an error message… um no I didn’t! However it’s free, I’ve still got the original photos and if the online issue isn’t resolved, I can just recreate the photosynth.

Often the software fails to match all the photos and instead of 100% synth results, I might end up with 76%. That’s fine, I just should of taken more closely related photos, but regardless you don’t need 100% synth results to produce an okay photosynth. Remember not to take away from the enjoyment of the moment taking endless photos.

I’ve even started created photosynths from my mobile photo camera photos when the main camera isn’t with me. Just quickly take five or six photos. It gives a better impression to the viewer of an area, rather than viewing related photos individually. A great accompaniment to sharing standalone photos on flickr I feel.

This hasn’t stopped me creating and sharing panorama’s created with hugin. It’s just different, another creative way to share an experience.

You should check it out. http://photosynth.net/

It happened, it just had to happen. Darn it! My laptop hard drive started having problems. At boot it reported the hard drive needed checking and chkdsk found files, too many. Then again a day later. The writing was on the wall and to help matters I had made a serious mistake……

I’m very good at backing up important files, especially so when work is involved, but this was my personal laptop. Where I tinker about with personal projects and I hadn’t backed those files up for a while. I had neglected my laptop. Darn it where was my automation this time?!

Worse yet I had installed some Give Away of the Day software that you can only install on the day given away. So installing on a new hard drive with a clean operating system was out of the question. Where was my partition image backup to help in such matters? Ah yes again personal computer and hadn’t done it. Bollox.

So did I throw a tantrum, no. Did I sob quietly in the corner, thumb firmly in mouth, holding a blanket for comfort… possible. Okay that’s a no as well (close though), instead I wrote a short action plan. Here is what is what I did.

Recovering files

I knew the amount of times I wrote to the hard drive was important from previous experience. Less is better. So I took the hard drive out, put it in a 2.5 eide hard drive caddy and connected to another computer via usb. I copied the important files over to another computer and then backed them up to cd as I should of done already.

Backup of a partition (Windows operating system and applications)

I decided to assess whether I could rescue the installed operating system and not have to deal with a fresh install on a new hard drive. I placed the hard drive back into the laptop and it promptly told me there was no boot record. Ah things had got worse, lovely. So I put in my Windows XP install cd and booted into recovery mode. I then typed fixmbr and repaired the boot record and rebooted. It found more errors, but booted into the operating system. I then shutdown.

I connected another usb hard drive to the laptop and booted the laptop using a Ping cd. Ping stands for ‘Partimage Is Not a Ghost’ and is a free nifty linux based partition clone and restoration suite.

So I decided to risk cloning the hard drive and hoped not too many other errors developed. All so I could use the installed Give Away of the Day software still or hopefully some. Any other circumstance if no previous partition image was available, I would of done a clean install. Anyhow I cloned the faulty hard drive, then put a new hard drive in the laptop and restored the image to the new hard drive.

Et volia it booted. I uninstalled the antivirus and firewall (paranoid of issues) and reinstalled. I’ve not bothered to install XP over XP and no need to reinstall other packages…yet. I placed my project files back on the laptop (and automated a regular backup). I’m sure there could be some issues, but lesson learned and a lucky escape.

Be it personal or business use, make sure your on the ball, have backup procedures in place.

I had neglected my personal laptop. I was lucky this time, next time I will be prepared.

The title of this blog post is an error message. I saw this error message too many times trying to resolve an issue playing a DRM file that I own. It was a movie that I legally brought yesterday. I’m writing this post, in the hope it helps others who experience the same error message with their legal DRM media (audio and video).

I suspect this error or similar is something that many others are going to start seeing as IPTV becomes more popular and I hope the support and systems improve to help novices resolve these issues.

So what is DRM? Digital Rights Management, in principle is a nifty idea. You buy or rent a tv show, movie, music etc to download. Then only you can watch it. There is a huge debate around the whole concept and limitations. What I personally found frustrating was something on my computer changed (probably installing a new CPU) and et voila… blank screen time or in this case an error message: Windows Media Player encountered a problem while playing the file So the computer spec had slightly changed and apparently that’s enough to cause problems.

I am using Windows 7 with Windows Media Player 12. This is what I tried that ‘didn’t work’:

1. I uninstalled any software that is related to codecs. This included Windows Media Player and itunes. To uninstall Windows Media Player I typed optionalfeatures.exe at the command prompt and uninstalled via that method. Then rebooted.

2. I deleted all the registry entries the system would allow at: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\DRM and that didn’t work.

3. I looked for \ProgramData\Microsoft\DRM\ but it was missing! If found I would of removed.

4. I tried to install Windows Media Player 11, but that wouldn’t install. The service provider who I brought the video file from mention specifically Windows Media Player 11.

5. I looked at the DRM video file using a piece of software called gspot and it said WMV3 / WMP V9 (VC-1 Simple/Main). So I thought okay I will install fresh WMV 9 codecs. Did that and rebooted.

6. I tried to watch the video via another media player. Tried winamp, media player classic and VLC. Nope.

None of those worked for me and wasted my time.

So what was the solution?

ResetDRM that is available from Microsoft (a link from that page). I downloaded and ran this as ‘administator’. To do this you right click on it and select ‘run as administrator’. It then did the following….

1. It ignored some registry entries at: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DRM\CLSID\

2. It deleted files at: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\DRM\ . Now I swear I had show hidden files on, I remember checking.

3. It deleted a datapath in the registry (whatever that was?)

4. It registered a drmv2clt.dll file.

Then when I tried to play the DRM video via Windows Media Player 12 it worked. It prompted me to login to the service I paid for the video. Then it asked me to download a couple of more updates and the video worked again. I wish resetDRM was inbuilt into Windows Media Player though.

So now I can again watch the video I’ve paid for. However I need to look at how I make a backup of my license, just in case the next time the company I paid are bust and not available to verify me. I like the idea behind DRM, I pay for content. However something needs to change to make it easier to pay and watch, without tripping up over tech issues.

Hope this post helps someone else and resolves their problem within a minute, rather than the length of time it took me.