Voipcheap.com, excellent voipbuster clone

Ever heard about voipbuster? It was one of the gimicky free VOIp service. They finally stopped free calls around US and so I ended up with their sister site voipcheap.com. Setup is pretty simple.
Just add your user name and password under PAP2 adaptor. Set the SIP server as sip.voipcheap.com and thats it.

Tired of Activation? Just use a floppy

Create the Activation Status Floppy Diskette
Navigate to %systemroot%\system32 folder.
Copy the wpa.dbl and wpa.bak files to the floppy diskette.
Reinstall Windows XP
Reinstall XP in the normal manner. After the install is completed and the XP Out Of Box Experience (OOBE) appears where you'd normally activate the product, decline to activate and let the installation complete.
Activate the XP Reinstallation
Restart the computer and use the F8 key to bring up the Advanced Boot Options menu.
Select Minimal Safe Mode using Up and Down Arrow Keys and press Enter.
Navigate to %systemroot%\system32 folder.
Rename the existing wpa.dbl and wpa.bak files.
Using the floppy diskette, copy the previously backed up wpa.dbl and wpa.bak files to the %systemroot%\system32 folder.
Reboot the computer
Here we go!

Nikon CoolScan II (LS 20) under Windows XP

It's sad that Nikon no longer supports their early breed of film scanners, such as Coolscan LS-20. However, that seems good for me as I got a LS-20 off ebay for less than 30 bucks. Amazing, they used to cost more than 500 bucks sometime ago.
Installation was not straightforward for these old dog. I have to install SCSI adaptor card and ASPI layer from Adaptec. Shut down the computer, connected my LS-20 and powered on. Windows started up smoothly with the initial hang of SCSI card's booting messages. Now, XP SP2 can see the scanner but Nikon (oh moron!) did not provide a driver to go with XP for LS-20. So I have to resort to VueScan, the standalone masterpiece programe that access the scanner from some native level.
Here is a copy of my 3 pass scan from LS-20. Original was taken on a Elitechrome. I had to cut down exposure from the original scan, to minimize teh appearence of grain/noise and adjusted the level/curve in PS.

IE7 pre beta release

Microsoft released the pre beta version of IE7. Not to mention, it is full of bugs. Like as of now I can not see what I am typing in my blog! Cool huh!
Well, I was just trying to edit my post and all of a sudden the fonts actually become viscible. Apart from these small glitches it facing hecuva lot of trouble with bitstream player. I don't know when website admins will update their pages to make them compatible with IE7.

I love snow; actually not.

East coast is acting weird these days. When I gone to bed yesterday night, it was fairly clear all around outside. And today morning, when I woke up at 6 it was almost a whitewash outside. I immediately picked up the phone and call my office. Hurray!! we will be open from 11am. Sweet. Bitter thing is, it will not be easy to get to office at 11 either since it is still snowing with a mix of rain. Now that is the worst thing since the rain will freeze up at night and make out live horrible tomorrow morning. Anyway, its time for me to read the news and sip in my glass of coffee.

How do you get scammed by A/V retailer?

The answer is easy, ask them a dumb question, that you need a coaxial cable? Circuitcity guy will be happy enough to throw you a $20 cable for your digical adventure. Basically a coaxial output contains RAW audio data from a source an dthat has to be decoded via DA decoder to get audible sound. Now what I found, is plain and simple, any RCA cable will just do fine as a coaxial cable, period. Shame on me, I did not know that before and spend $$ to buy a so called digital co-axial cable.

deleted the jocker's pic.

Party time.

Changing face of party. Lighting by 420ex in slave mode and LED flashlight.

Sony is feeling the heat amid winter chill

It's been a while that Sony BMG was busted for their sniffing technology impregneted in some of the best selling music CDs. It was first made to the public almost a month ago and since then the company was slammed over and over again by privacy consious user groups. The evil program, called rootkit is well known for its evasive behaviour. There is not many means to detect it from windows environment other than a few programs like chkrootkit. More on rootkit can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit . As part of my Dell laptop, rootkit came preinstalled in my PC as a security feature an dthankfully enough it was documented in the manual.
Even more funnier fact is Sony's use of Open Source technology to implement DRM. Researchers found at least 5 functionalities in Sony's rootkit technology, already a part of LAME, an OpenSource product (ref:- http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5960222.html). It will be interesting to see how Sony is going to defend the rising lawsuits in several different states in future. At the same time, it will be a good lesson for music industry who are typically getting an upperhand in tracking down and closing P2P softwares like Napstar and Kazaa.

Healthy Weight:- here is the standard.

How much do you think reasonable? Check out the title link. Sad or funny? Stupidity? or negligence? Whatever.

Toilet

I was at Chicago last October to meet my lincolnian friends. Went to Devon as it is a must do for Indians visiting the windy city. Unfortunately, I had to go to restroom and I found something quite amazing. "lota" in US! Look at the right bottom part of the photo, next to poo station. Not to mention it was quite filthy, probably my second worst toilet experience here, just next to a rural gas station in Nebraska.

Things moving so slow today

Yaw! today is the first day after marathon vacation of last week. So far, th eday is quite slow. Quite a few folks at work still at vacation. Jeff is not around. Superwomen Marianna is there, but she is kinda quite today. It's a good day for me though. Got some 2gm of a target compound, which was actually teh result of 2 weeks effort. Gee! orgchem sux at times.

Rupa at work