To anyone getting “An internal error occurred.” (3200) while installing iOS 5.0, Apple’s servers are swamped, and failing half the requests.

[Source, TheNextWeb, iOS 5 Error 3200 or “internal error” update issues? Apple’s servers are getting slammed.]

Word in the Ether is that you must update iTunes before updating your iPhone, iPod, or iPad to iOS5! If you are experiencing this error, I personally would try updating iTunes and try syncing again before doing any of these steps. I personally have not tried anything in this post.

xiphone.org has been hammered and is over its resource limit so I’m reprinting their instructions here.

Unfortunately, GRUB2 detects both operating systems but fails to boot to Vista, ergo, a crazy path of chkdsk and recovery console nonsense that eventually led to GRUB2 not even coming up. So, after 4 weeks or so, I decided this post will chronicle the recovery moving forward.

Sunday, 1:10pm: Grub fails to load. The last repair of Ubuntu says it couldn’t load a boot manager and one will have to be installed manually. fdisk claims "partition[s] do not end on cylinder boundary” but supposedly this doesn’t matter. GParted has been used to resize Ubuntu partition to end on cylinder boundary but Vista partition could not be resized at this time. GParted reports 3 bad sectors on the Vista partition. Running chkdsk again but it looks like I may have to blow away the partition and start again. Fortunately I have a backup on a good drive.

Update Saturday, August 27: My friend has grown irritated at the length of time this has taken. I have grown frustrated at the near pointless hours upon hours put into this machine. However, I have had several near successes. I feel like we are right at the finish line and giving up. I have reformatted the 1500GB hard drive and reinstalled Ubuntu 11.04. I’ve checked the firmware on the hard drive to confirm it is the latest. I’ve checked the motherboard bios to confirm it is the latest. I’m now using GParted to resize Ubuntu so that I can do the final copy of the Windows data so that even if I cannot get the machine to boot to windows, my friend will be able to read his data.

I’m currently looking at the Aoyue 937+ Digital Soldering Station and the Aoyue 968 SMD Digital Hot Air Rework Station. Suggestions? Feedback?

If you have the next killer iPhone app idea that could make you millions, I’ll happily build the app for you in exchange for a MacBook Pro and an iPhone (say, $5000).

Workgroup is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions.

The list of server for this workgroup is not currently available.

And from Linux (Places->Network->Windows Network):

Unable to mount location

Failed to retrieve share list from server

It’s conceivable that the Windows 2000 server was acting as a domain controller but the LAN is setup on workgroups not domains. Let’s assume the source of this problem is the now semi-retired Windows 2000 server. My home router is a D-LINK DIR-615. So the challenge is to get either the router or the Linux box to fill whatever role the Windows 2000 server used to perform to make my network browseable. Please note that if I refer to the machines specifically, I can still work with files from that machine. So \\mickymouse\familypics would still allow the family pictures to be seen all over the house. The problem is the same for printer sharing. I cannot browse to a shared printer but if I know the \\machinename\sharename I can setup a remote machine to print to the shared printer.

I still work with people who have clients that need things done. Effectively I build web applications for businesses but I usually go through a middle (wo)man. In the past this middle person has been a venture capitalist trying to launch his clients with the greatest of success. It has been other developers with too much on their plates. Most often, designers/artists that need functionality programmed into the website. Imagine you had a bookstore and wanted to sell your books online. I’d be the person who writes the shopping system that allows your customers to browse books online, add them to a shopping cart, and make the purchase online. The part of a website like that which most people never see is the inventory control part. That’s where the employees log in to add or remove books from the system. It’s just a big a project as the front end where the shoppers go but instead of thousands of people seeing it, 2, 3 or 10 people use it. Of course, you cannot sell books online without a tracking system for shipping so I would write the code that generates shipping labels, ties into UPS or Fedex or the post office, and tracks the packages. Then if your bookstore decided that it wanted to manage it’s human resources through the web with a punchcard system for managing when employees clocked in and clocked out, scheduling of employees, and payroll (tying the system into Quickbooks), I’d write that. Next if you decided the punchcard system wasn’t efficient enough and you wanted the employees to wear RFID id badges and used those for clocking in and clocking out, I’d write that.

Now there isn’t a computer person alive before the time of the Geek Squad who didn’t say, "wow! I need to create a business repairing people’s computers." The Geek Squad was not an original idea. I know I had the vision of teams of nerds running to people’s homes fixing computers. I did it for awhile. I know I have friends who had the same vision. But Best Buy had the resources that we lacked to launch. Tthere is not profit in repairing computers. Computers have become disposable. What holds value is data. If people would move their work primarily to The Cloud or create and understand a backup system that removed the dependence upon a particular machine, then instead of paying a geek to repair your computer, you could just buy a new one! The Geek Squad doesn’t make money on repairs. It makes money on upsales. When you get a repair and they sell you an Antivirus program or a new hard drive or another memory stick then they make money.

I do fix computers for friends and family. I charge a flat rate of $135 which is less than what you will pay the Geek Squad. I don’t know if it is true but I’ve read that the Geek Squad will also put in a limited number of hours and then declare that the computer needs reformatting. I won’t do that. Usually I put 5 hours into a machine plus I run some diagnostic software overnight and dust out the computer. It’s a nice thing to do on a weekend. My effort amounts to substantially less than I charge hourly for programming but there is a good karma to making sure someone’s computer is functioning correctly.

However, sometimes I get bitten. I took in a friend’s laptop because it was hanging/locking up. I was thinking some malware had a hold of it. A week later the computer is still with me and starting to get in the way of my real work and my friend is becoming frustrated. It may have some defective hardware but the diagnostics I have run have not found any physical problems. It might be a driver problem but downloading the latest drivers from the manufacturer’s website didn’t help. This is a Dell Inspiron 1525 running Vista with service pack 1. Any attempt to install service pack 2 takes an hour to install and at the very end of the process, the installer announces "failed" and reverts back to sp1. Right now I’m sitting on a BSOD:

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

If this is the first time you’ve seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

Check to make sure any new hardware or software is properly installed. If this is a new installation, ask your hardware or sofware manufacturer for any Windows updates you might need.

If problems continue, disable or remove any newly installed hardware or sofware. Disable BIOS memory options such as caching or shadowing. If you need to use Safe Mode to remove components, restart your computer, press F8 to select Advanced Startup Options, and then select Safe Mode.

Technical information:
*** STOP: 0x0000000A (0×00000018, 0×00000002, 0×00000000, 0x81C590FC)

This screams bad hardware or a bad driver. However, I’ve read that this goes away by installing service pack 2. That would be the thing that installs 100% then reverts back to service pack 1. Oh the irony!

Update: Fail. The dreaded 89%. I have access to the data. Nothing is really lost. I’m just faced with reinstalling Windows and a enormous number of applications.

1. Ran chkdsk and the drive is fine.
2. Confirm that the drive is set to master. Confirmed.

We interrupt this process to play croquet because the 4 year old could not have asked in a nicer way.

The grass is too high for croquet except where there is no grass and the hill is too steep there. The mosquitoes are too numerous. The air is too hot. Children back inside and I’m back to troubleshooting.

1. Last Known Good Configuration. No luck. I feel a reinstallation of Windows in my future.
2. Booting to the Ultimate Boot CD and cleaning up files on hard disk to create more space. Cleared prefetch, deleted all temporary files, removed some unnecessary directories. Increased free space on hard disk from 1.16 gb to 3.14 gb. Ran automatic tools for RegCleaner 4.3. Removing 2939 invalid registry entries some which have been hanging out since January 1, 2003. Here’s hoping that Clonezilla backup of the hard drive is valid.
3. Registry cleaner choked. Re-running.
4. Registry Cleaner choked again. Booting to Windows CD for repair.
5. The repair prompts "The file ‘GAGP30KX.SYS’ on (Unknown) is needed." Looking for this on the SP2 disc. Looking like I’ve got some screwed up video drivers. VGA mode could have probably helped.

This worked. The machine is going again but somewhere in the process I think I messed some files up. Rather than spend any more time working on this, I am going to restore from the Clonezilla image and try again but I believe I’ll wait until my new hard drive comes in.

I finally squirreled away enough from my budget to purchase a new 500 gb (p)ATA hard drive. (Being honest with myself this was less about budget and more about martyrdom. I buy things for the kids before myself.) Additionally, Newegg had a great special on a USB external drive. Since I vowed to free myself from being bound to a single computer, I jumped on the special with plans to install a bootable OS such as Ubuntu and keep my entire development environment on the USB drive. As such, I should be able to work anywhere on just about any machine with enough memory.

The upgrade plan was simple. Make a backup of my workstation to the usb drive, then clone the 60 gb drive to the 500 gb drive and I’d be done. Unfortunately, the 60 gb drive came dead on arrival and had to be RMA’d. I couldn’t wait so I started the cloning process but ran into read errors. So 2 days of drive testing and using different bootable CDs with a variety of partitioning and cloning software turned into 3 days and then it happened. Everything quit working! I powered down and haven’t had the guts to return since. I could have just potentially lost a significant amount of data related to the success (if you want to call it that) of my freelancing career and the support and operation of my family. No, despite my rhetoric about the importance of backups, particularly offsite backups, I do not practice what I preach. The quantity of data I manage long outgrew my ability to create meaningful backups of every bit and byte. Instead I grab what is viewed as essential and make sure it is in a few places. For instance, I drop a couple of dollars each month to make sure Amazon has a copy of all our family photos in addition to the subset of photos that make it up to Flickr. I am not prepared to lose entire hard drives.

Next immediate plan of action: Determine damage-Test components individually. If neither drive works by itself, assume the IDE controller fried and test in another machine. If I can show the drives are both good and pass a chkdsk, then I have one more big gun of a partitioning program and an equally big gun of a cloning program that I have not tried. I expect them to be successful and this debacle to be over. Oh..but I have to watch Warehouse 13 first!

Update: My 60 gb drive has been confirmed functional with data. My current suspicion is that the primary ide controller has failed. This could be a good excuse to buy a new computer

Update: 60 gb drive okay but no longer boots. IDE controller is fine. 500 gb drive approved for RMA. Next step, clone the 60 gb drive to some backup space then tinker with the master boot record to see if I can get the drive booting again.

Apparently there’s some stigma around bloggers, particular mommy bloggers, doing product reviews. There shouldn’t be. I understand the stigma’s origins. The stigma comes from those ridiculous pay-per-post services where the participants are encouraged to write shining reviews in return for the product and/or money. They are disingenuous. The advertiser is not paying for the post. The advertiser is paying for search engine ranking. The 200 people who read that paid post, or even if it was 10,000, are not going to pay for the cost of the advertising. What pays is when someone searches for the product and the multiple paid posts have given credibility and ranking to the product in the search engines. As a matter of personal choice, I do not participate in pay-to-post programs.

Should product reviews be on a blog? Absolutely! The Internet is a reflection of the real world. In the real world, if I try a product I like, I will probably tell others about it. If a company wrongs me, I will warn others. It is only natural to extend that to the Internet. Some bloggers will even ask companies to send them products. They have the audience and clout to get this benefit. Reviews don’t have to be positive. The catch is that if you get a reputation for giving negative reviews, no one will send you their product. Mike Arrington recently accused Leo Laporte of Twit.tv of getting a pre-release Palm Pre in exchange for a glowing report and Leo took great offense.

I have products sent to me. I’ve had the best intentions of reviewing them but never have. Until someone starts BlogHim and lets us daddy blogs have cat fights over swag, I think I’ll accept products for review. Joan Goldner, a wonderful person!, sent me The Busy Body Book when my Covey planner had run out and I forgot Cathy’s birthday. I never posted a review of The Busy Body Book but it remains one of my favorite organizers despite being a Covey fanboy. I’ve been calendarless for 2009 but am just about to order a Busy Body Book. Read about it on their blog.

Yesterday’s mail

Yesterday I received two products: a bidirectional IDE to SATA or SATA to IDE Adapter and a LifeStyles premium polyisoprene Skyn "closest thing to wearing nothing" condom with Excite female stimulating gel. I’m looking forward to reviewing both of these products! The adapter I ordered from Hong Kong for $4 which included free shipping. It comes with a circuit board, power cable, and a SATA cable. I recently tried to buy a SATA cable locally, just the cable, and it was going to cost me $20 plus tax! The condom was a surprise and comes with a survey asking for feedback on the Excite female stimulating gel. I think I’ll be able to find a volunteer to help me fill out that survey (pseudo related note: We bought Watchmen last night). Now I’m off to plug a cable into something.

The Review

Here’s your quickie review: The Excite female stimulating gel product..let’s just wow! No, let’s say that twice..WOW! WOW! As for the Skyn condom, anyone with a LATEX allergy who has been horrified by a polyurethane plasticized baggy as an excuse for protection can be happy to know that your polyisoprene condom lives up to its marketing. Not only is it as comfortable and flexible as a latex condom, it truly is almost like wearing nothing.