Philip Norton » windows

PC Rebooted

Philip Norton — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 17:11:27 +0000

I was just thinking the other day that my computer was running fine, and I hadn’t needed to re-install it for at least 6 months. However, I think I might have thought too soon as when I got home on Thursday it was acting very odd. For some reason it wouldn’t allow me to paste text into Word and it kept spontaneously logging me off of the internet chat program I use (Pidgin). So I do what I normally do in that situation and restarted the machine to see if it would be okay.

The answer was a big no. The thing wouldn’t start again. It would get to a file called “mup.sys” and just utterly fail. No amount of fiddling would stop this file crashing the machine. Looking into mup.sys it seems to be a resource controller file, so I can only assume that whatever it was controlling was corrupt. It has taken me 2 days to get the thing back into working order as I had to make sure I have backed up all of my files. It’s still a pain in the posterior.

I like Microsoft, I think they do a pretty good job, and their usability is quite good as well. But why can’t they make an operating system that doesn’t need a full reinstall ever 6 months? It’s getting a bit annoying really. I have tried to move over to Linux (I have SUSE 10 installed on my other hard drive) but I just don’t know where everything is, and anything even slightly complicated involves editing system files and using the command prompt.

Still, everything is sorted now so I should be aright for another 6 months.

Windows Vista

Philip Norton — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:19:43 +0000

I should mention, or I couldn’t call myself an I.T. professional, that Microsoft released their Vista Operating system to everyone today. Previously it has been only available to developers and businesses, just so that they could run their applications on it before the system came out to the rest of the world. It also seems to have the most complicated pricing structure I have ever seen of any microsoft product, and each type is called something odd that doesn’t really describe the difference between one version and another.

Pricing options aside, the question you are probably wondering( or if anyone actually read this they might be wondering) is this. Will I be buying it?

Probably not. I tend to wait until the first service pack comes out before I commit myself. So if there are any major security flaws they will be fixed before I get hold of it. Also I don’t see why I should pay out a lot of money (over £100) to get a brand new Operating System when I have a nice working copy of WindowsXP. I would be buying it for the Aero graphics system alone. I think in about 6 – 8 months I will probably have a more serious look but for now it´s a luxuary I can´t afford.

CCTV Trials

Philip Norton — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 12:04:00 +0000

I have been trying to get a CCTV system running using only components that I have at the house, and not buying any software. These are

Second hand 1MHz Pentium 3 with intel motherboard
20Gig hard drive
100MB SDRAM
USB Webcam (MSI StarCam 370i)
SuSE Linux/Windows98

So where to start? I didn’t want to use my good computer because it uses way too much power for a simple thing like this. Also, I eventually wanted to position the unit around the house in different posisions, and that just wouldn’t be feasable. The other computer I had Windows98 installed allready so I started out trying software for that. The software the comes with the StarCam wouldn’t work on this system so that was a dead end. I found something written in Java called grabMotion, which seemed to work, almost. However, I just couldn’t get my camera recognised by the software.

After must installing and uninstalling on Windows I decided to try and use something I found that runs on Linux. The program is called ZoneMinder and has a very professinal feel to it. So I installed SuSE Linux 9.1 with Apache, Mysql, PHP and Perl already installed using the very lovely YAST that help you install stuff with SuSE. After some (well a few hours) of fiddling I eventually managed to get the software working, along with all of the JPEG and PNG libraries needed to create images. However, the down side is that I couldn’t get my web camera working with it. I’m sure that if I knew the first thing about installing USB Web cameras on Linux it would have worked. ZoneMinder tells me to point to a file, which presumably should be in /dev/usb, but no picture is ever found.

So does anyone know how I can install a USB camera into Linux? Any help would be great!