Page 57 – Krunk4Ever!

January 13, 2008January 13, 2008

Weekly Top Posts (1/6/2008 to 1/12/2008)

Here’s this week’s top post:

There’s 2 new comers to the Top 10 list, first being the Windows Update Error: 80070490 that I got a week or 2 ago. Apparently my page is already ranked #4 on Google when you search for: windows update 80070490. Guess it means a lot of people are actually hitting this. Unfortunately, the logs and diagnostic info I submitted to the team investigating this bug proved to be not much help since I no longer am experiencing this problem.

The other new comer is the Butterfly = Symbol of Death? Looking into why there was suddenly a spike in this really old post, it turns out some people on a forum were talking about how butterflies represent the soul and reincarnation, and someone pointed out that it can also symbolize death and linked to that post.

January 12, 2008January 12, 2008

Relaying Salutations

A month ago when Liam came to Seattle, he told me to say hi to Cari for him when I went back to LA. I believe I actually did relay this message, but it got me thinking to how often do I actually relay salutations. I would have to say only once in a blue moon. I recall people telling me to say hi to my parents when I go back or friends telling me to tell other friends, but usually, it just never kicks in when I actually meet the person.

I’m curious how other people fare. What % of the time do you actually relay salutations, either from relatives or friends or anyone. I would say my percentage is probably less than 5%. It’s probably much lower since I can’t really recall all the times I’ve had people ask me to relay salutations.

UPDATE:

After talking to RayAlome, I think several other factors come into play. For time being, person asking me to relay will be called Origin and the person I’m suppose to relay to will be called Destination.

How far away is Origin from Destination?
How long has it been since they’ve seen each other?
How well do I know Origin?
How well do I know Destination?
How well do I think Origin knows Destination?
How many of these requests do I actually get?
How long has it been since Origin made his request and I actually meeting Destination?

January 11, 2008January 11, 2008

Switched to Progressive Auto Insurance

So as my dad and Derek always says, get quotes from at least a few auto insurance companies every time your auto insurance is up for renewal. I just got renewal package from Safeco and I’m not happy. Last time, they decided to raise my insurance by $3. I thought they were still pretty cheap, so I didn’t bother getting quotes elsewhere. However, this time they decided to raise my premium by $40 to $460 for no particular reason. I was also expecting it to drop since I’m turning 25 in a week, and you know when you turn 25, you get a decrease in your auto insurance.

Anyway, I was pissed. I decided to see what Progressive would offer me since they were my insurance company before Safeco and they had the 2nd cheapest policy the last time I checked. All the other insurance companies have always quoted me $800+ for some reason. Entering my information at Progressive which matched my current Safeco policy, I was shocked to find out that the premium was only $326… Do note these prices are semi-annual (6 months) and not annual. Of course I was super happy. I did another quote at Geico just to check to see how they fared and they quoted me a premium of $600.

I decided to give Safeco a call to see if they’d beat Progressive, but apparently they aren’t open 24/7 (at least not the policy service center). So in the end, I decided to give up on them.

I had a few questions regarding my Progressive application and guess what? They have phone and online chat customer support 24/7. I inputted my phone number and told them to call me. When I picked up, there was immediately someone else on the other end. No wait time, no automated answering machine, no elevator music, nothing! The few questions I had was in regards to the fact they only gave me about 20 characters of space for my street address. Even with my abbreviations, it didn’t have enough space for “Way”. The customer support rep gave me an abbreviation that he said would work. I then asked about the policy start date as I didn’t see where to set that. He gave me some quick and simple instructions and I guess I must’ve missed it earlier. The final question I had was in regards to the fact I’m turning 25, but wasn’t 25 yet and if I would get the discount. He says that the premium does decrease when I turn 25 and that the application process takes that into account 30 days before my birthday, so my premium should reflect that. I thanked him for his time and couldn’t be happier with his support.

There was a report a few days ago posted on Consumerist: Complaint Ratios For Top 10 Auto Insurers. I was shocked to find that Progressive was ranked #7 in lowest complaint ratios, while Safeco was ranked in the bottom 10. However do take this report with a grain of salt since it is only complaints filed in New York. What exactly is a complaint ratio? According to the report, Insurers are ranked based on a complaint ratio. This ratio is determined by the number of complaints upheld against companies as a percentage of their total private passenger auto insurance business. The complaint ratio is calculated using an average of two years’ premium data. This compensates for the fact that some complaints closed in any given year are begun in the previous year.

Also, it appears my annual mileage, gas guzzling, distance traveled analysis is due. I’m just too lazy to aggregate all the data for now. Hopefully I’ll do it soon. Here’s a preview:

Total Distance Traveled: 7268.2 mi
Total Gas Used: 253.714 gal
Total Cost of Gas: $745.40

Average Cost/Gallon: $2.94
Average Mileage: 28.6 MPG
Average Distance/Dollar: 9.8 mi
Average Cost/Day: $2.04
Average Distance/Day: 19.9 mi

January 8, 2008

Couldn’t Send/Receive Emails with Attachments Greater than ~3MB

So awhile back, I hit some weird problem with my email. I was trying to schedule weekly backups of my websites and email them to me. My HD-Trailers.net backups worked fine, but my Krunk4Ever.com backups were giving me problems. The email would come through and the size would be correct (~5MB), but the email didn’t have any attachments. I tried copying it over to another directory, and the size shrinks down to a few KB.

Thinking it might that my Krunk4Ever.com mail server has some attachment size restriction, I tried sending it to my GMail account and the same thing occurs. Do note, I have GMail mapped in Outlook 2003 as a IMAP folder. I see a 5MB email, but no attachment listed. For the time being, I concluded that someone’s restricting the attachment size and I would just go and backup manually once a week.

However, another problem occurred when I was trying to share a video with someone. It was a 3.12MB video and Outlook would just not send it. It kept on giving me the following error:

Task ‘Krunk4Ever – Sending’ reported error (0x800CCC13) : ‘Unable to connect to the network. Check your network connection or modem.’

Searching for that code resulted in some winsock error, but that didn’t get me anywhere. I decided to shoot DreamHost an email and their reply was:

Our email supports up to 40 megabytes for outgoing and incoming emails. Our webmail; however, is limited to smaller file-sizes If you need to send-receive large attachments you would need to install your own custom webmail and possibly PHP or use a full-featured email client such as outlook or thunderbird. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

It turns out not all large attachments were blocked. A few 5MB files have gotten through before, and if I just keep trying, eventually they make it through. I went to GMail (web based) and searched for previous emails where I had sent my backup databases and they were indeed okay and I could see the attachment fine. That led me to a preliminary belief that Outlook or IMAP had some sort of attachment size restriction. Testing it out in Thunderbird was something I had planned to try next, but didn’t really get around to it.

Today, I was trying to email my work email some logs that some Vista people wanted and I hit the same darn problem. I eventually uploaded it via OWA (Outlook Web Access), but then that got me angry. So I began searching around for other people who have gotten the 0x800CCC13 error, but a quick skim didn’t result in anything useful. There were a lot of mentions of firewall and antivirus, but think that my regular email came through fine, I didn’t see how a firewall or antivirus would be acting up…

Then I tried disabling my antivirus and resent the large email. Guess what, it WORKED! !@%$!$#%#!@%@%#!@% The antivirus software I use on my main box is CA (Computer Associates) eTrust, which is what we use at work. Given that Microsoft is a software company and they mandate us to use eTrust, I just assumed it was good enough. eTrust is actually rather nice. It’s small, lightweight, and pretty nice on the system resources.

So I went into eTrust to see if I could configure this weird email problem I was getting. I could not find a single email option to configure. It does mention it scans incoming and outgoing emails, but there was nothing to configure that was email based. The only possible solution I saw was to add Outlook to the exclude list which I didn’t want to do.

I eventually decided to uninstall eTrust and went with AVG which I’ve installed on most of my other machines, and my emails with large attachments appear to be working fine.

January 7, 2008January 7, 2008

Weekly Top Posts (12/30/2007 to 1/5/2008)

Here’s this week’s top post:

Previously…

I changed a bit of the format this week. I’ve added the arrows to the side bar and included last week’s status information inside the title and alt (alternative text) of the arrow image. If there’s no arrow image, it means it has the same rank as last week.

January 5, 2008January 6, 2008

Video Thumbnail Generation

So after I fixed my Vista Media Center yesterday, I got tired of how long it took to generate thumbnails for the video files in Media Center. I understand it has to open each video file and create a thumbnail from that and since all my videos are located on a file server (even though it’s on a gigabit network), I can see why it’s taking awhile. Of course it caches it and stores it into ehThumbs.db, but once in awhile, it decides that those thumbnails are out of date and clears and redoes everything.

I had learnt a trick that if you have a jpg with the same file name (i.e. video1.avi and video1.jpg), Media Center will load that image instead of generating its own. I’m actually not sure if Media Center 2005 supports this, but I know Vista Media Center does. So I decided to check how fast it took to load all those images on a test directory and BOY WAS IT FAST! I had just taken a random image and copied it a bunch of times after naming it after the video files in that directory.

So now I needed a video thumbnail generation software, hopefully something that will automatically go through directories, create these jpgs images, and then name it correctly. Sounded like a very specific program and a brief search resulted in nothing. It did however give me an idea that instead of generating a thumbnail, I can maybe go with a screenshot. I know Media Player Classic and a couple other video software I have allows me to take screenshots, but having almost 1,000 video files, doing that manually would really suck.

So I talked to RayAlome and we decided the best way to do was find a program that can take screenshots from videos via a command line, which I can then script to automatically run that line on all the videos under a certain directory and subdirectories. RayAlome suggested virtualdub, but I decided to take a look at my Gallery and see what it uses to generate thumbnails for the video files. It uses this thing called FFmpeg, which somehow led me to MPlayer. Apparently MPlayer allows you to save screenshots via command line after reading this: Re: Video output to jpeg/png file and Tools for extracting individual frames of an AVI movie file.

So I decided to give it a try:
mplayer.exe -vo jpeg -frames 1 -ss 300 X:\video1.avi

and it worked! I got an image named 00000001.jpg in the current directory. Renaming and moving the file should be simple enough. What was funny was the fact when it created the screenshot, audio was played for about a second. I knew that’d get annoying if it was processing hundreds or thousands of video files, so I added the -nosound option to it.

I got off starting to write a script. I did mine in Perl, though any scripting language would’ve worked. I realized my Perl knowledge was quite lacking after not using it for so long, but searching for Perl commands online wasn’t that bad. Interestingly enough, Perl doesn’t have a way for you to check if an item exists in an array (or none that I saw) and you had to inverse the array (as a hashtable) and check by calling the hashtable’s key. Another weird thing is that their way of defining methods and functions really sucks. They’re actually called sub (short for subroutines) and looks rather ugly.

Anyway, what the final script does is take a starting directory (current working directory if no starting directory is specified) and finds all the files with the preset list of extensions (changeable) and generates thumbnails for it. You’ll need to download MPlayer for Windows and update the path to it in the script.

There’s also a few other defaults you can change. I set the default time to take a screenshot at 300 seconds (5 minutes).

Another thing I added was to skip processing videos that already had an associating screenshot/thumbnail. Since I was testing this script out quite a bit, I realized that it was redoing a lot of screenshots that already existed. However, you can pass in the -f option and it’ll force it to regenerate everything under the starting directory.

One thing you must realize is that if the video file is not long enough to generate a screenshot at the given time, it just skips it. My HD trailers typically run from about 30 seconds to 2 minutes and having a 5 minute capture time basically skips over all of those. I then reran the script with a screenshot time of 30 seconds in that directory and everything came out fine.

Since I feel that others may be in my situation, I’ve decided to share the script here in case anyone wants to use it:
Generate Video Thumbnails for Media Center Perl Script

Usage: generateThumbnails.pl [-OPTIONS [-MORE_OPTIONS]]

OPTIONS:
-d StartingDirectory Sets the starting directory [cwd]
-f Forces Thumbnail Generation [off]
-t TimeInSecs Time in video to grab screenshot [300s]

Use this script at your own risk. I will not take any responsibility for any damage it causes. Of course to use this, you’ll need perl for your system. I also have cygwin installed, so I’m not sure if there’s any environmental differences.

As noted earlier, these are generating screenshots, not thumbnails. So depending on the resolution of your video, it can result in a screenshot that varies from about 30KB to 100KB. I’ve thought about finding a command line utility to shrink the screenshots to thumbnail sizes, but for now, this will work and until either it becomes intolerably slow again or if someone has knowledge of how to do so and is willing to share it with me, I’m probably not going to add this feature any time soon.

After running this script on all my video files, I will have to say that browsing videos in Media Center became a lot quicker and faster. Enjoy!

January 5, 2008June 4, 2009

Windows Update Error: 80070490

So yesterday when I was playing with my Vista Media Center, I was playing around with WebGuide and I was getting long delays when browsing through the folders. I know there was a network transfer bug in Vista that caused it to be slow and since all the files I was sharing were located off box, I decided to see if there was a new patch to fix this. That’s when I noticed that my system hasn’t done a Windows Update since December 5th, 2007. So after clicking on check for new updates, I get this error code: 80070490

Looked simple enough. I thought if I search online for this number along with windows update, I’d get a simple solution on how to fix it. Boy was I wrong.

First, I tried the Windows Update help file. It showed me a different bunch of error codes, but none that match mine.

So the next thing was the search engine. There were a bunch of hits, but none with a simple solution. According to FAQShop.com, 80070490 means Permission denied / [Problem initializing or using session variables] or Element not found. Not really sure what to do about that.

There were no official solutions. People have contacted Microsoft Support, but the only fix is to “upgrade” your Vista. I’ll elaborate later. The 2 most helpful sites I found in regards to this issue were actually threads:

I believe they both originate from the microsoft.public.windowsupdate newsgroup, but there’s several additional replies in the Google one. I also like the formatting of the Google one better as they hide the replies.

Here are the several solutions suggested:

I recently encountered this problem as well, and what the technician told me to do was enter the services menu, and reset the following services in this order: BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) – Cryptographic Services – Windows Update)

then restart your system. that worked for me once but it only worked until i restarted my computer again. any other more permanent ideas would be greatly appreciated, and i hope that these suggestions help somebody.

I wasn’t exactly sure what “reset” meant, so I restarted the following 3 services in order:

Background Intelligent Transfer Service
Cryptographic Services
Windows Update

I then restarted my computer. Windows Update still didn’t work and still returned the dreaded 80070490 error code.

The problem was eventually resolved by Microsoft Support via their free service for update issues – thanks for that advice, PA Bear. In spite of trying various ‘fixes’ with guidance from Microsoft, I ultimately had to ‘upgrade’ (not reinstall) Windows using the original Windows Vista disk. This process takes much longer than a typical install – so long in fact that at one stage I thought the system had frozen and that I’d have to do a complete reinstall. Fortunately ‘upgrade’ eventually completed the various tasks and all original data, other installed software and setting were preserved, so ‘upgrading’ was the better option – for me at least.

I hope this helps. Good luck.

This is actually the solution that has worked for most people that encountered this error and is in fact the current solution provided by Microsoft Support. What you do is stick in your original Vista DVD, perform what you would do with new install, and when the option comes up to for Upgrade or Advance/Custom, select Upgrade. I’m not exactly sure what it means to Upgrade when I already have Vista Ultimate installed, but what the heck, I just followed directions. They note that it does take several hours to complete. Of course that depends on how fast your machine is.

Anyway, I’m already somewhat pissed. What the heck is this error and why am I repairing my Vista install when I haven’t done anything to it in the past month. But worse of all, half way through the repair, it says my system isn’t compatible to install this version of Vista and tells me to run the compatibility tool. It then reboots and restores the previous configuration. I tried this like 3x, each time waiting an hour or so before it hits this error.

I finally gave up with this Upgrade solution.

– MY SOLUTION –

An idea hit me. Since the last successful Windows Update was on December 5th, 2007, what if I try doing a System Restore to the last point before that date. I hate doing System Restores as it smudges up tons of settings and breaks applications you’ve installed after that date. Anyway, I do a System Restore to November 30th, 2007 and behold, Windows Update suddenly works again! I had to reinstall WebGuide and a couple other apps, but this error needs to be better documented.

Update: David has provide an extra solution for people who have installed Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120%. Apparently there was a problematic file (sptd.sys – Scsi Pass Through Direct) that causes Windows Upgrade to fail. I’m guessing the file is what allows you to have virtual cd/dvd drives. The solution was to delete the problematic file, upgrade Daemon Tools, or uninstall it altogether. You can read more about the solution in his comments.

Update #2: Patrick provided a very interesting tool to try:

When Googleing for answers I found out that many people had this problem and that it was not easy to fix. But one guy (jhaysITQ) found a Microsoft tool called “System Update Readiness Tool” that fixed 3 systems for him. I tried it and TADA, it worked for me too!

I hope it helps some of you people too!

Check out his original post here: 80070490 Vista Windows Update Failing

Tool info and download here (about 70 – 75 MB): System Update Readiness Tool

January 3, 2008January 3, 2008

Welcome to the NHK!

So I finished watching Welcome to the NHK recently and it was just PURE AWESOME!

Based on the covers, if you think the anime is porn or hentai, you’ll be highly disappointed. That’s what I thought at first, but it wasn’t until Tera told me that Welcome to the NHK and Mushi-shi were the best 2 animes of 2007, that got me interested. Mushi-shi is another awesome anime which I haven’t had time to post my review yet. Looking around, it appears that Welcome to the NHK is about a NEET (not in education, employment or training) who is a hermit that hides in his apartment all day long. Somewhere down the line, he has come to the conclusion that there’s an organization called N.H.K. (basically the TV station’s name) that has a conspiracy to create hermits/NEETs and has sworn to take it down.

That was my assumption of the anime before I began watching it and boy was the anime SO MUCH MORE!

I’m going to take a step back and give you a little introduction that CrimsonAngel told me over my vacation. By the way, he got me this really cute deer (Japanese shrine charm), which I originally thought was a reindeer:

Back to CrimsonAngel, he’s currently doing his Masters in Japan and he did an essay on Otakus/Hikikomoris. Today, most Americans think otakus are people into anime, while other some people whole know a bit more assumes that otakus are hobbyists. However did you know the phrase お宅 (otaku) originally was a term used to mean you (honorific), your house, your home, your family? Later on, since the term could mean your home/house, it began to refer to people who would stay home all the time. His story continues with some serial killer loose in Japan and proclaimed himself to be an otaku. Even though the serial killer was caught, the term otaku had a very bad connotation associated to it and it wasn’t until recently when it became popular again. Nowadays, オタク (otaku) can refer to geeks, nerds, enthusiasts, basically someone who is very into something, and are most likely introverts or at least not very sociable.

The other term is 引きこもり (hikikmori) which means a shut-in, a stay-at-home, or people who withdraw from society. I’ve used the term hermit as I believe that’s our slang for it. Anyway, the story is about Satou, a hermit and how he overcomes hikikomori ways (oh, did I just ruin the ending?). He was a college dropout and after he was expelled from college, he basically became a hermit, living off what his parents transfered into his bank account every month. Misaki, the main female character appears soon with the intention of helping Satou get rid of his hikikomori ways. However, you learn very little of Misaki, but you can feel that her past is very painful. At first Satou of course denies he’s a hikikomori, but the first step to fix a problem is of course accepting the fact you have a problem.

The anime has it’s light moments, poking fun at the otaku/hikikomori culture, while it does have it’s very dark and deep moments that question the purpose of life itself, why do hikikomoris fear, how people get lost in fantasy role playing games (mmorpgs), how a child’s upbringing affects their view on life, why people commit suicide and what goes through their mind, etc.

Speaking of suicide, you’ve probably heard that it’s quite common for Japanese people to jump in front of trains to commit suicide. And you’ve probably heard that Japanese trains are really packed. Imagine the train conductor taking one of those riot shields and pushing people into the train. That’s how pack it is. Anyway, when someone kills themselves in front of a train, this causes major delays and problems on an already overloaded transportation system. Imagine thousands or ten thousands of people getting delayed 30mins because of your stunt. That’s a lot of lost time. That’s a lot of lost money. The train company will then send your parents a letter saying they’re sorry for your lost and a BILL for the damage/delay you’ve caused. Just imagine that! I’m not saying it’s a bad or good system. Someone has to be held accountable for it and I don’t blame the train company for holding the parents responsible.

Anyway, back to the anime. The story goes on as Misaki tries to help Satou, but curing hikikomori isn’t an overnight thing and it takes a lot of patience and I applaud Misaki for sticking it in there. However, it’s when you learn of Misaki’s true past, where you feel a very deep sadness and why she is trying to help Satou so much. Satou of course takes Misaki for granted. One thing you have to realize that is a hikikomori lifestyle isn’t sustainable without outside support, but getting a hikikomori to adapt to society is a very difficult task. All in all, I have to say Welcome to the NHK is a very touching roller coaster ride.

January 2, 2008January 1, 2008

ukms[z] – Reflections

So I was cleaning out my downloads folder and I found an anime music video that Artemyst had shared with me awhile back and I wanted to share it with you guys.

It’s titled Reflections by ukms[z]:

(DivX/Stage6 mirror)

This AMV was first submitted to AKROSS, which I’m assuming is a Russian anime convention. It actually won quite a few awards.

The music video features scenes from Haibane Renmei and Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien. I’ve never watched Haibane Renmei, but if anyone out there recommends it (or not), please do tell. I watched Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien recently (also called Rumbling Hearts) and it was rather heart wretching to watch due to the love triangle.

Then there was the music, which was just awesome! After digging around and as some of the text suggested, the song is indeed Russian. The song is by Maksim, titled Do You Know? You can watch the music video on YouTube.

Belldandy asked if there was a version with the lyrics translated available, and searching on YouTube, I found: Reflections (HR) (Subtitled). I expected the lyrics to somewhat suck, but I was surprised. The lyrics actually matched and watching the video with the lyrics translated made me look at the video in a completely different angle.

January 2, 2008January 2, 2008

Weekly Top Posts (12/23/2007 to 12/29/2007)

Here’s this week’s top post, albeit a bit late:

How to download HD Trailers from Apple.com (Last week: #1)
4 Free Xbox Live Arcade Games (Last week: #3)
Print USPS First Class, Media Mail, Parcel Mail Postage for FREE! (Last week: #2)
Spinning Dancer (Last week: #9)
Free AutoCheck Report (Similar to Carfax) (Last week: #5)
Haloid (Last week: #4)
LeekSpin (Last week: #6)
iTunes Album Views (Last week: #10)
Era – Misere Mani (New)
Canon PSC-1000 (Last week: #8)

Previously…