Archive for October 2013

Installing & Using Rsync on Windows

Posted on October 20, 2013 by

10-21-2013 Update:  Corrected a few errors in the write-up and fixed the template configuration files.

Introduction

I remotely manage the computers & networks for various family members (parents, siblings, and grandparents).  To this end, I currently have router-to-router VPN links consistently established between home networks at five distinct geographic locations.  (These links are maintained using OpenVPN running on my OpenWrt-based gateway routers.)

As administrator of this geographically-diverse home network, I need to consistently back up my family’s data in case disaster strikes.  While there are many reputable cloud-backup solutions available, I prefer to trust my own skills to manage and protect my (and my family’s) data.

As we all know, a key backup strategy is to have off-site backups.  Fortunately, because my VPN spans multiple geographic locations, the off-site backup problem is easy – provided I can periodically synchronize files between computers at different locations.  Unfortunately, my VPN links are limited to approximately 300 KB/s due to the limited uplink bandwidth.  For me, this is where rsync comes in.

What is Rsync?

Rsync is a tool for *NIX.  From the rsync man page, “rsync … [is] … a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool.” For me, attractive capabilities of rsync include:

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5 comments Posted in Miscellaneous IT

Debugging and Patching Star Trek Armada I – Part 1 of 3

Posted on October 14, 2013 by

Making Armada Work On Modern Systems
(a.k.a. A Partial Guide to Ollydbg)

Being a professional in the Computer Science field, I don’t have that much time for video games anymore. As a result, when I choose to play games, I typically prefer to take a trip down memory lane and play something from my childhood. One of my favorite games is Star Trek Armada I. Unfortunately, Star Trek Armada I is rather poorly written (from a reliability standpoint) and generally doesn’t play very well (if at all) on most modern Windows systems. I could switch over to Star Trek Armada II, but I much prefer the original game for various design reasons.

Fortunately, modern IT professionals (and amateurs, in my case) are armed with a swath of debugging and reverse engineering tools, with which we can correct some of Star Trek Armada’s shortcomings. So, without further ado, let’s get started!

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6 comments Posted in Game Development, Miscellaneous IT, Reverse Engineering

Windows VB Script for Batch WMA to MP3 Conversion

Posted on October 6, 2013 by

A few months back, I was attempting to load my music collection on my iPhone for the first time and was encountering issues.  My situation:

  1. I was running iTunes in a Virtual Machine to avoid all the crapware that iTunes installs.
  2. My music library was a combination (about half and half) of WMA and MP3 files.
  3. My music library was well organized in a folder hierarchy.
  4. The iTunes converter was giving me grief upon importing my music library.  (I seem to recall that due to the use of virtual machine snapshots, iTunes kept getting confused and re-converting certain WMA files that had already been converted by it; furthermore, due to the virtualization, conversion of my music library was taking forever!)

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just find a tool to batch-convert my entire music library to MP3 format, which is compatible with iTunes.”  My plan was to run this once on the host and then import the entire (converted) folder into iTunes on the VM.

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6 comments Posted in Miscellaneous IT