Poli Bou

I was configuring some linux boxes today and discovered the ntsysv command. This is a great command to see what services are loaded during startup. It pops up a simple GUI where you can enable and and disable services. Just run it at the terminal.

Some pretty awesome technical shots in this commercial. Just thought I’d share.

Seriously. Last October my 3 year old EVGA Geforce 8800GTS started producing artifacts in windows and then on POST. A few days shortly after it completely failed to boot into windows. For some reason, probably pure laziness, I never registered the card which disqualified me from taking advantage of its lifetime warranty. Ouch, lesson learned. So out of options and not wanting to drop some serious coin on a new card I turned to Google with skeptic hopes of a solution.

That’s when I stumbled on a comment that said baking your video card can resurrect it. OK, obviously the commenter must be joking. But wait, further searches reveal the same comment popping up again. Hmmm ok, this is curious…let’s see what happens when I type “baking video cards” into Google.

Right up at the top of the results page is a link to [H]ard|Forum where this whole nonsense originated. After going through the mega thread about baking your card, that’s when I realize this is not another internet pop culture joke, but the real deal with a lot of engineering sense behind it.

Basically, the most common cause of electronic device failure is micro fissure cracks in solder joints which are the results of stress through use and age. Baking a circuit board allows you to liquefy the solder contacts and eliminate these micro fissure. This is actually a commonly practiced technique called solder reflow. So baking a video card in your kitchen oven is just a crude way to use this method.

After a good amount of reading I was thoroughly prepped to do some cooking. I removed the heat sink and fan off the PCB and placed it in the oven with the door open. Then I set the oven to 395F. I left the door open and did not pre heat the oven because I wanted to gradually raise the temperature so as to not “shock” the board and to slowly get rid of any moisture. After about 15 minutes, I felt everything was warmed up enough to start the actual baking. I closed the door and set the timer for 9 minutes. I stayed near by the entire time in case of disaster.

After 9 minutes I shut the oven off and opened the door and let everything cool down for 30 minutes. Then I put everything back together and popped the card back in the case. And then, the moment of truth…I pushed the power button. No sparks. No shorts. Fans are spinning. That’s good. I hear a beep and see my monitor come out of sleep mode with a lovely memory check in progress. This is looking real good. Thirty seconds later I am logged into windows with no signs of artifacts throughout the whole boot process. This is amazing. I fire up Photoshop and a couple of 3D applications and they all run flawlessly. Now this is unbelievable.

It’s been about four months since my video card has been living on borrowed time. It’s been great, but today it started showing failings signs again. The artifacts are back and windows won’t properly load with the drivers. With some culinary experience under my belt now, I nonchalantly re-baked my video card. I am happy to report another success which not only inspired me to do this write up but it would have been impossible otherwise. I wonder how long I can keep this up .

Ever wonder what a $300 dollar 50mm f/1.4 lens look like disassembled? Sorry for the lack of close up shots and detailed info as I didn’t plan to do a write up. I got the lens for a good deal off Craigslist since the autofocus was shot. It still worked fine manually but I could tell the motor was struggling due to some fine grit or sand. So I attempted to take it apart and see if I could clean it up and lube the gearing. I had to bend some of the guide rails back in place. They look like they were over extended and became deformed. After thoroughly cleaning the pieces I used some Mobile 1 motor oil to coat any moving part. Haha, I know…probably not the best thing to use on a lens, but I didn’t really plan this out and it was all I had. A month later and the autofocus is still working fine so no harm done .

I can never seem to remember all these Linux commands. I just had to look up how to create a symbolic link. Here it is for reference:

This will point a file or directory to another file or directory. Why would you want to do this? Well, on our web server we have multiple websites and they share a directory of common include files. So instead of using the server path to get the files, we can just link the local include directory to the global include directory and access the files relatively. It just makes things cleaner.

Here’s how to unlink a symbolic link. Remember not to use a trailing slash. rm will also work.

Somehow you ended up with a query that is taking too long to execute and you need to kill it. First, I’d advise against using this in an UPDATE or INSERT command as I don’t know what will happen. Most likely it’ll will just roll back the DB. For a complex SELECT that just got out of hand, this should be safe.

1. Log into MySQL from your Linux console.
2. Show your running queries and find the ID with a long run time. I prefer to check this first in mytop to get a real time view and to see the actual query.
3. Identify the transaction ID.
4. Kill it.
5. Exit and you’re done.

Looks like we’re finally get manual control! Canon will be releasing a new firmware on June 2, 2009. It will be available here: EOS 5D MarkII Firmware Update Version.

Press Release:

LONDON, UK, 27th May 2009: Canon announced today it will release a firmware update for the EOS 5D Mark II allowing users to manually control exposure when shooting video. The new firmware will be available for download from 2 June 2009 on Canon Europe’s support web site.
Following the launch of the EOS 5D Mark II in September 2008, Canon’s Research and Development team has listened closely to customer feedback to develop additions to the camera’s movie recording functionality.

Allowing EOS 5D Mark II owners to achieve even more stunning video results with the camera, the firmware update will include the following manual controls when shooting video:

Full aperture selection
ISO speed: Auto, 100 – 6400 and H1
Shutter speed: 1/30th – 1/4000th second

The EOS 5D Mark II integrates full HD movie capability into a high-end 21.1 Megapixel camera; opening a multitude of new possibilities for photojournalists and news photographers. Since its launch the camera has proved its appeal to professionals working in diverse fields, from studio and wedding to nature and travel. Now, following customer feedback, Canon has improved functionality for professional video users, further unleashing the potential of the EOS 5D Mark II for cinematographers and photographers alike.

Working at WallSt I’ve delt with numerous data providers for our financial information. Data feeds are not cheap especially when you have to deal with individual exchange fees. Often times when selecting a provider you are limited by their charts and graphs. You can usually get ticker information in XML, but graphical data is usually restricted to modules or API calls for an image.

One solution is to obtain a historical feed and develop a charting system, but this can be expensive and time consuming. So how can we do this cost effectively and quickly?

Thank you Yahoo. Yahoo provides historical quotes in spreadsheet (CSV – comma separated values) format which can be easily parsed. I have no idea how they can provide this freely. But I won’t question it . Looking at this service, I see that it has changed many times and there are / has been various methods for obtaining their CSV data. So that’s a word for caution should anything change in the future.

Step 1. How to obtain historical quotes:

You can get the data by using the URL below.

http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=YHOO

This will provide you with all the EOD price of a company since its IPO. The method above uses the CSV output on a webpage. Yahoo has other URLs that output a downloadable files. Those work also and can be parsed just as easily.

If you want to be able to select a specific date range you can do it in this format:

http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=YHOO&a=0&b=1&c=2008&d=11&e=31&f=2008&g=d

Here I’m selecting data just for the year 2008 from 01/01/08 – 12/31/08.

Let’s break down the URL string and take a look at each parameter.

s = The requested ticker symbol.
a = The starting month in two digit format. (ie: “00″ = January, “01″ = February, etc.)
b = The starting day. (ie: 1, 2, … 30, 31)
c = The starting year in four digit format (ie: “2000″)
d = The ending month in two digit format. (ie: “00″ = January, “01″ = February, etc.)
e = The ending day. (ie: 1, 2, … 30, 31)
f = The ending year in four digit format (ie: “2000″)
g = The data interval (ie: “d” = daily, “w” = weekly, ‘m’ = monthly. The default is ‘daily’ if you ignore this parameter.)

Step 2. Retrieving and Parsing the Data

I’m using a simple curl function to get the page. Fopen, wget or whatever your weapon of choice should work too. Since we only need the data, I’m removing the column header with a str_replace. The graphing method I will use will take the data in this format so there will be no parsing or manipulating invovlved. That’s all we need to do for this part.

Step 3. Graphing the Data

Building a full fledge charting system in Flash is quite a bit of work. Adobe has simplified this with Flex, which has built in charting support. It’s a great way to go if you have the knowledge and resources to build some very customized. But I’m gonna take this a few more steps down easy street and use a pre compiled flash suite to do the charting.

I will be using charts from amCharts.com. Not just because its free and easy, these are some really well made charts and they look really good. They have a variety of chart types.

Their stock suite can be downloaded here: http://www.amcharts.com/download

I will be using the event chart type in this example. I picked this one because it is the most familiar layout for stocks. It has the standard line chart but also includes the ability to add events. Which for a stock chart, you can labels for news, splits, dividends, etc.

From the download we will need the following files:
/amstock/amstock.swf – The flash file that displays the graph.
/amstock/swfobject.js – Standard flash embed file.
/examples/events/amstock/amstock_setting.xml – The settings file with output parameters

data.php – This is the file we created above.

Once you have all the files, place them in the same directory. Now we’ll edit the files.

First we’ll modify the amstock_setting.xml file.

What I did here was cleaned up some of the XML and added some sample events. I’ve also changed the extension to php since we will be dynamically passing the ticker symbol to the data.php file.

Next we put everything together to display the graph:

The form passes our ticker symbol to the setting file which will dynamiclly call the data file with the appropriate symbol.

So there you have it…a nice looking flash graph with historical data. I’ve left out some error checking for the bare minimum to get this done. You can use this technique for other series data. There is one hiccup to all this. It lacks intraday data. That’s pretty vital information when dealing with stock price. However its just a matter of obtaining a feed. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a free source for this data. This would surely seal the deal in creating a no cost flash stock chart that would rival Yahoo and Google.

Here’s a cool video from Microsoft about the future of computing.

The topic of geo-targeting content has come up from time to time here at work but I’ve never taken the time to really implement it. So today I’ve been searching around for a solution and notice that it usually entails purchasing an IP database and a subscription for updates.

The idea of paying for something before testing out the implementation never sits well for me. So I was surprise to find www.hostip.info Community GeoTarget IP Project. Much like open source, everyone contributes to keep the database updated. Best of all, the API queries are free.

Here’s a sample of the API for a simple GET:

Use the API with a wget or a curl operation and you’re set.