making sense of media center/home theatre PCs

Impetus
I bought an Apple iPod Touch 32 GB over the weekend (a post is coming) and it has led me down some interesting paths. It is wonderful to be able to scroll through a good chunk of my music, video and photos easily, all in one little handheld device.

Even more impressive than its storage and playback capabilities are all the applications and connectivity options available via the App Store. The apps will really lengthen the life of both the iTouch and iPhone for years down the road.

iPod Touch Extensibility
One app that I particularly liked was Remote, which allows one to control iTunes from the iTouch/iPhone. Plus, its free!
http://www.apple.com/itunes/remote/

While surfing for applications, I also came upon the TouchPad Pro. The handy little application can be used to control a Windows Vista Media Center PC with the iPod Touch!


Unfortunately, as of this writing (08/05/2008), the TouchPad Pro is not available for the iTouch's 2.0 firmware:
http://www.touchpadpro.com/2008/04/touchpad-pro-faq.html

Finally, Mocha VNC Lite is a free app that connects you via to any VNC Server (Mac/PC/Unix) in your environment:
http://www.mochasoft.dk/iphone_vnc.htm

Sweet!

Home Theatre PC (HTPC) Possibilities
In playing around with the iTouch, I started thinking about the possibilities of having the iTouch become my remote for not just my media, but for my HDTV and Home Theatre, too. This got me very excited, as I would love to have all my music, video, recorded HD, podcasts, everything integrated in one solution, with a super easy-to-use remote via the TouchPad Pro. This is the Holy Grail of the so-called "Home Theatre PC!"

From my reading, I seem to have three choices:

• AppleTV
  
• Linux MCE (MythTV)
  
• Windows Vista Media Center
  

Here's one gentleman's comparison of Linux and Windows MCEs. Though biased, it is interesting:


Requirements
Here's what I'm thinking in terms of requirements:
-should be relatively simple to setup: oops, this rules out MythTV
-needs to play cable TV (both std/high def): oops, this rules out Apple TV
-needs to play most common media formats MP3s/MPEGs/DIVX/Quicktimes/DVDs/Blu-ray
-needs to integrate iTunes*

* Yes, you may be saying that Windows Media Center does not integrate iTunes and you'd be correct. However, thinking about how this would work, it should be a relatively minor step to switch applications from Media Center to iTunes via whatever controller or remote you'd choose to use. Also, further investigation showed me that solutions from both sides of the fence (Linux/Windows) seem to have some basic level of iTunes integration or at least being able to access the media files at the system level. More on this later.

From this short list of requirements and some reading that I've done over the past couple of days, I'd say the most likely contender is Media Center running on Windows Vista. I'm no huge Microsoft fan, but if a software's features and functionality fit the bill, then you should use it.

Here is a nice walkthrough to Windows Media Center features:


How to Connect Your TV to a Windows Media Center PC:


Finally, here's five things you didn't know you could do with Windows Media Center:


The Problem
One of the stickiest wickets in that requirements list is how best to integrate your cable SD/HDTV viewing and recording. It would also be nice if this was simple to setup. From my reading so far, it doesn't look like any PC-based home theatre/media centers are easy to setup by any means. At least computer companies are starting to address this by using a PCI card that integrates with your cable TV providers service, also known as a digital cable tuner card. A CableCard is a PCMCIA like card built into new-generation televisions and PCs that allows digital cable reception without a set-top cable box. Here is a nice primer on CableCards:


Here is some basic information about cable TV tuners via HP forum:
http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1218736765934+28353475&threadId=1137182

This was a very informative read about the regulatory background of the CableCard:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/archive/2007/12/07/1385290.aspx

And Chris also has a good FAQ on the CableCard. Be aware that in its current form, CableCard does not allow you to use On Demand or Pay Per View services. Apparently, this is because those features require two-way communication that is not present in today's CableCard solution. This is unfortunate, because it means that today, in August of 2008, we still do not have a complete Home Theatre solution. (Well, I guess I can live without ONE feature).
:)

Possible Solution: Dell XPS 420
From this article, I found that the Dell XPS 420 might be a solution that integrates a CableCard and might fit the bill.

Here's Dell's full specs:
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsdt_420?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

An excellent FAQ on the XPS 420:
Chris Lanier's blog

As a cable card is only distributed to consumers if they purchase an entire new system, the unfortunate thing is that the CableCard solution locks individuals into buying a preassembled machine versus building their own. But given some evidence from intrepid individuals like Keith Combs, this might not be all bad. Here is his very informative blog entry:
http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2007/12/15/dell-xps-420-first-impressions.aspx

Also, his six month checkup is a nice follow through:
http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2008/05/08/dell-xps-420-six-month-report.aspx

Another solution: HP m9300t
Another solution is from HP, the HP m9300t Series

Here is a page on HPs site devoted to more general information about the HP m9200 line of products.

Decisions, decisions
Before purchasing any solution, I plan on building out a Vista box, just to see how far I can get, without the cable tv tuner part.

Let you know how I do in a follow-up post,
Cacasodo

Update 8/9/2008
Vista Ultimate install and first impressions

Update 8/8/2008
Digital Tuners
I happen to be perusing blog articles about people who have built their own media centers and I see this Hauppauge digital tuner card has come up a number of times. The FAQ page has some good info on it.
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_hvr1800.html
For more basic information on what TV Tuners can and cannot do, take a look at this post from AVS forum/Overclockers.net:
http://www.overclock.net/htpc/294427-hauppauge-wintv-hvr-1600-a.html

Update 8/15/2008
Vista View Saber card, Media Center and TV Pack install
http://www.techanswerguy.com/2008/08/vista-view-saber-da-1n1-i-tuner-and.html

Update 9/15/2008
Viewing YouTube Within VMC
http://www.techanswerguy.com/2008/09/install-and-review-of-yougle-for-vmc.html

best windows shortcut chart

This chart showing Windows keyboard shortcuts is so good it merits its own post:
http://www.scribd.com
Awesome list of windows shortcuts!
'sodo

Verisign Class 1 CA Individual Subscriber cert expires

Yesterday, 5/14/2008, we were rudely awakened to errors in our SSL checkout process. Basically, the dialog box that informs a person browsing the website that a problem has occurred showed up. Investigating our IIS 5.0 web servers, we found that none of the SSL certificates had expired. Digging deeper, we then looked at the certificate store on the machine. In the certificate store, we found that the Intermediate Certificate called Verisign Class 1 CA Individual Subscriber certificate had expired. Yuck!


For Windows 2000
We called Verisign and confirmed that the expired certificate was affecting our site. Verisign was able to give us a link to download the latest certificate:
https://knowledge.verisign.com/support/digital-id-support/index?page=content&id=SO6052



We followed the install and verfication instructions to install the cert on each server in the farm. After making those changes, I verified in Firefox that the SSL dialog box no longer appeared. Thank God!

For Windows 2003
Win2K3 was slightly different. We actually needed to make the certificate appear in our Intermediate Certificate list:


This was accomplished by downloading the latest intermediate cert that works with your chosen level of SSL certification from here:
https://knowledge.verisign.com/support/ssl-certificates-support/index?page=content&id=AR657

For us, we use Non-EV Premium SSL certificates. So we used that link from the main page. Once we installed them by following the directions on the linked page,
http://www.verisign.com/support/verisign-intermediate-ca/secure-site-pro-intermediate/index.html, we saw the intermediate cert appear (date of 10/24/2011) in the proper certificate store:


Finally, a reset of IIS was needed. Yuk!

Afterword
The one thing I do not have clarity on is exactly what certificates does a typical web server running ASP and ASP.net need to run correctly. I know that there is a hierarchy of certs:
1) Root certificates
2) Root cert signs Intermediate
3) Intermediate signs Personal (www.mysite.com)

We had a similar problem back a couple of years ago and I had been too busy to research the question then. I will try to research it and give an update to this page.

Good luck, folks!
'sodo

Ubuntu 7.10 install in VMware Server gotcha

Trying to install Ubuntu 7.10 in VMware Server 1.04, I came upon a lot of these messages as Ubuntu was trying to install itself into the virtual machine's hard drive:
sd 2:0:15:6 rejecting I/O to offline device

Background
A caveat to installing most Linux distributions within VMware Server for XP is that you need to set the SCSI driver to Lsilogic in the configuration file for the virtual machine. The config file will be a file with the extension ".vmx" in the VM's directory. For example, the config file for my Ubuntu install was "Other.vmx"

Solution
Here is the line you need to add to your .vmx file:
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"

My entire .vmx file ended up looking like this:
config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "4"
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
memsize = "1024"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.fileName = "Other.vmdk"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"
floppy0.fileName = "A:"
Ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
displayName = "Ubuntu 7.10"
guestOS = "other"
priority.grabbed = "normal"
priority.ungrabbed = "normal"
ide0:0.redo = ""
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
uuid.location = "56 4d 32 f1 73 c7 b5 15-26 b3 bf 4b eb 77 4f c6"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 32 f1 73 c7 b5 15-26 b3 bf 4b eb 77 4f c6"
ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:77:4f:c6"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"
numvcpus = "2"


Of course, the line you add may differ if you have more than one SCSI device. Once the line is added, you'll need to restart your virtual machine for the change to take effect.

Good luck!
sodo

black screen/no video in VLC

I noticed a problem in VLC on XP the other day. While watching a music video, I starting getting sound but no video. I thought it was some sort of display problem, but then tried QuickTime and found I could watch the video in QuickTime. Just to see if it would help, I logged off and back on. Still giving the same problem. I didn't change any settings, so I thought it was a hardware problem. So I shutdown the box and turned it back. Same problem. Argh.

I then realized that it must be some issue with VLC itself, so I started digging through the Settings menu; specifically, Preferences. Looking in Preferences -> Audio with "Advanced options" checked, I saw that "Audio desynchronization compensation" had reset to -10000000! Woah! How did that happen? I reset this value to 0 (zero) and played back my original video. Voila! The video played perfectly.

I don't know what key combination or bug I may have triggered, but that is a wacky one. Hope this helps someone in similar distress.

'sodo

authenticated FTP through browser

I always forget the syntax for accessing a password protected FTP site through a web browser

If you know the username and password of the FTP site, you should be able to access the FTP site through your web browser. You need to construct a URL with the following syntax:
ftp://username:password@ftp.ftpsite.com/

For example:
ftp://cacasodo:mypassword@ftp.techanswerguy.com/

Make sure if you are accessing via a proxy server, that FTP is configured in your proxy settings.

'sodo

recording video off Motorola 6412

I had been wanting to copy some unencrypted shows off of my Comcast cable box, a Motorola DCT-6412, for quite some time. By "unencrypted", I mean your basic cable. This does not include premium channels like HBO, SHO or MAX. Also, you won't be able to grab pay-per-view content.

I finally got around to trying this out last week by using my MacBookPro and a standard 6-pin male-to-male firewire cable. GXW on http://www.macosxhints.com/ has provided some excellent instructions for doing this.

Requirements
OS X10.4.9 or above
Apple's FireWire SDK (downloadable from Apple's Developer website)
VLC (Video Lan player for Mac) or MPEG Streamclip for playback

Steps
1) connect Mac to Motorola
2) verify physical connectivity via System Profiler
3) connect and verify firewire connection with AVC Browser
4) replay show and grab stream with Virtual DVHS

You'll need Apple's firewire SDK in order to do this. Create a free Apple ADC Online account from here:
http://developer.apple.com/products/

Evaluation
Once I got the SDK installed and verified my connectivity as above (see GXW's fine article for the details), I was able to successfully pull content off of my Motorola 6412 HD cable tuner. However, the way it works is that you have to capture live content as it is playing or replay a stored recording in order to capture it to your Mac. In other words, this method does not allow you to access the hard drive in the STB to get at the stored recordings directly. Therefore, it will take some time if you have a bunch of shows stored in order to replay and capture them to a file.

Hint: Don't fast-forward or reverse while recording a saved program to your Mac's hard drive. This will screw up the audio and video synchronization of the destination file.

I was able to pull both regular (SD) format and HD format content off the Motorola. HD shows are recorded to MPEG-TS (transport stream) format. Also, I just realized I didn't try recording content off of the analog channels, I only recorded shows off of the digital channels. So I can't speak to that.

Once I get a workflow in place, it will be nice to have my favorite movies and shows as files to stream from a media server. Yeehoo!

enjoy!
TAG

understanding CSS using Firebug

Understanding CSS is not trivial stuff. But the Firebug plugin (http://www.getfirebug.com) for Firefox can help. Here's a video I produced that shows how to inspect your CSS with Firebug. The context is understanding Blogger templates:


Also depicted in the video are cross-hairs from the Orca screen magnifier, an application for disabled people that is installed with the Fedora 7 distribution. I used the cross-hairs because the mouse cursor disappears when I capture the video with Cinelerra.

cheers,
techanswerguy

command line email in Cygwin

As mailx is not part of the Cygwin distribution, you don't have that many choices if you want to send an email from a shell script. In this regard, Jeremy Reed has kindly provided a nice substitute script that can help us out:
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2005-02/msg00635.html

If you have Cygwin installed, you'll need to do the following things:
1) install ssmtp
2) configure ssmtp with ssmtp-config
3) install Jeremy's mailx shell programs

There are a couple of gotchas with step 2 above.
1) make sure you have the directory /etc/ssmtp created
- for some reason, the ssmtp-config program doesn't create it
2) make sure you define a fully qualified hostname
- if not, you'll get the following error
$ /usr/bin/mailx -s "test" cacasododom@gmail.com < test.txt
3) make sure that you have a symbolic link created for /usr/sbin/sendmail that links to /usr/sbin/ssmtp and that /usr/sbin is in your PATH. Otherwise, you'll get this error:
$ mailx.sh -s "test" joe.user@yahoo.com < test.txt

That's it.

I preferred to use Jeremy's program over nail, because it gives me the same arguments as mailx did.

Thanks Jeremy!
TAG

Site Overlay in Analytics is lame

We can only look a gift horse in the mouth so often. So when Google stumbles with a small feature in the free toolsets that they provide us, we shouldn't yell at them.

Case in point: the Site Overlay feature in Google Analytics.

Site Overlay *should* be very cool, giving us a visual representation of the traffic to our websites by overlaying the percentage of traffic directly on the page itself. For my site, it looks something like this:


Notice all those 0%'s? Unfortunately, Site Overlay only works with static pages. It chokes on dynamic content, CSS, javascript links, redirects and almost any recent technology used to power a website. Here is the company line from a rep I emailed regarding what Site Overlay can and cannot do:

Thank you for your email. I understand you are concerned about zero datain your Site Overlay reports. Please note that the site overlay report uses cURL to request a web page, and displays clicks on standard links that are embedded on that page. Its functionality is currently limited to static pages with unique links to content located elsewhere on the website.

The site overlay is not currently able to work with Javascript links, CSS content, Flash navigation, downloadable files, outbound links, frames, or automatic redirects.

In the above cases, it's common to see missing overlay bars, or bars with zero content. If there are multiple links on a page that all point to the same place, Analytics will total the clicks to on all those links and display the total number for each overlay bar on each of those common links.

If you have a filter that changes your Request URI, the Site Overlay report may display 0 in your report.

Oh well. If Google updates this feature to allow for the use of dynamic content, I'll let you know.
Cacasodo

understanding CSS using Firebug

Blogger templates are dense with Cascading Style Sheets and can pretty difficult to understand if you need to edit them. I didn't really understand them until I picked one apart using Firebug (http://www.getfirebug.com), the developer's plugin to Firefox. I have to tell you, Firebug really kicks ass and makes understand the CSS of any HTML page very clear. Enjoy the video!
'sodo

upgrading Cygwin: dos2unix

I recently converted from a very old version of Cygwin Beta 20 (circa 1999) to the latest 1.5.25-7 version of the Cygwin DLL. I noticed when I tried to execute some of my existing scripts that had executed under the old beta version, I now would receive a lot of these errors:
./script.sh: line 40: $'\r': command not found
or
./script.sh: line 5: syntax error near unexpected token `$'do\r''

Looks to me like the command interpreter on the new version of Cygwin is a lot more picky than the old one. Specifically, Cygwin is choking on the carriage returns that Windows XP Notepad inserts at the end of each line of the file. Yuk.

I wondered if this was something configurable with an environment variable (http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-env.html), so I first tried setting the CYGWIN environment variable to nobinmode (http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-cygwinenv.html). Unfortunately, this change had no effect. I did find a bit of background here:
http://cygwin.com/faq/faq-nochunks.html#faq.api.cr-lf

I had a bit more success using one of the nice little utilities Cygwin has called "dos2unix". Dos2Unix strips out any carriage return or line feed characters in text files and automatically saves the file. The command is simple:
dos2unix [filename]

where [filename] is the name of the file you wish to convert. Dos2Unix has no man page, so don't bother looking for it.

Unfortunately, I had quite a few scripts in various directories, so I just went through each directory and typed:
dos2unix *.sh

I could have written a script to interate through the directories, but there were only about fifteen, so I got lazy and just ran the command manually. After running the command, I was able to execute the scripts without error.

Nice!
Cacasodo

tag cloud for Blogger blog labels

Phydeaux3 has posted some very easy-to-follow instructions on how to create a tag cloud for labels on your Blogger blog:
http://phy3blog.googlepages.com/Beta-Blogger-Label-Cloud.html

A tag cloud looks like this:


You can see a working implementation of a label cloud here:
http://crazedmuleproductions.blogspot.com

The one thing that Phydeaux doesn't provide is an overview of the steps necessary in order to create the tag cloud. Here is the overview:

1. Back up your blog template
2. Add the label cloud stylesheet to your blog template (before the end skin tag)
   
3. Add javascript variables for the cloud to your template before the end HEAD tag
4. Replace the template code for your existing Label widget with the custom Label Cloud code

Finally, Phydeaux adds some troubleshooting tips as well as some hints for editing the label cloud text sizes and colors:
http://phy3blog.googlepages.com/Beta-Blogger-Label-Cloud.html

Nice job, Phydeaux!!
'sodo

ps - If you're new to Blogger, I've posted a number of videos here that you may find useful:
/2007/10/introduction-to-blogger-video-tutorial.html

cygwin cron on Win2K/XP

Well, setting up Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) cron on Win2K Server and my XP workstation is a complete bitch. Simply put, my scripts would not start properly. I used the latest version of the Cygwin DLL, v.1.5.25-7.

Why?
In a nutshell, my problems came down to three issues:
1) cron would only work as my local domain account
-lots of good information here: http://www.andrewlouie.com/wordpress/?page_id=88
-and a little bit of info here: http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-switch
2) cron needed to be installed using "smbntsec" privileges for my SSH-based scripts to work
3) finally, c:\cygwin\bin needed to be the last entry in my PATH enviroment variable

Installation Steps Added 3/1/2008
Most of the following information comes from these gentlemens' fine posts:
-http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-switch
-http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~kscully/CygwinSSHD_W2K3.html

The overview is that you'll have to do quite a bit to get cron under cygwin running properly. Please refer to the two docs above, but here is the short list of steps:
1) decide on a user that cron will run under
- we have a domain account used for scheduled tasks, so I used that
2) add the user to /etc/passwd
- setup a proper home directory in /etc/passwd
- if you do not have a proper home directory, you'll see "Can't cd to $HOME" errors from the output of cronevents.exe
- copy valid .bashrc/.bash_profile files to your users' home directory
3) under Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Local Security Policy -> Local Policies -> User Rights Assignment -> tweak your Win2K/XP Local Security Policy settings to add the chosen user to
- (Adjust Memory Quotas for a Process) Increase Quotas
- Create a Token Object
- Log on As A Service
- Replace Process Level Token
4) create a crontab for your user
- crontab -e
5) verify that the permissions on the command(s) to be cron'd will allow the user you've chosen to execute the command(s)
6) run cron-config to enable the cron daemon
- you may get execute and write errors related to permissions on /var, /var/run, /var/log, /usr/sbin/sendmail, /usr/bin/cronlog. I took the easy route and fixed them with:
chmod 766 [file or directory]
or
chmod 755 [file or directory]

Also, make sure the user that you will be using to execute cron jobs is setup in /etc/passwd.

6) once the cron daemon is running, validate that your script is running properly by looking at cronevents.exe and $HOME/cron.log
- if you have not applied the Local Policy settings correctly, you may see the "can't switch user context" error in the log output
- at one point, I received this error:
C:\cygwin\usr\sbin\cron.exe: *** fatal error - could not load user32, Win32 error 1114

I resolved this by moving my user from the "guest" group to the "Administrators" group in /etc/passwd. Of course, you may not want to do this based on your security needs.

troubleshooting
I learned a few things along the way:
1) after installing the cron package into Cygwin, you want to use cron-config to setup cron
2) after enabling your cron, cronevents.exe is a good thing
3) occasionally, $HOME/cron.log provides some useful info
4) the CYGWIN environment variable can be a nasty beast:
http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-cygwinenv.html
5) the HOME environment variable must be set properly:
http://blog.spikesource.com/crontab.htm suggests running "env" in your cron out to a file to find differences between your user environment and the cron environment. Good idea!
6) don't forget your scripting basics:
/2007/07/why-doesnt-my-shell-script-run-under.html
7) documentation can help:
C:\cygwin\usr\share\doc\Cygwin\cron-4.1-6.README

Detail
1) after you install the cron packages from the CygWin setup program, make sure to use "cron-config" to add or remove the cron daemon as an NT service, and perform configuration of cron.

I needed to run the service as myself, with the security tweaks described in both these places:
-http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-switch
-http://www.andrewlouie.com/wordpress/?page_id=88

Here's a sample of the installer dialog:
$ cron-config
Cron is already installed as a service under account DOMAIN\USER.
Do you want to remove or reinstall it? (yes/no) yes
OK. The cron service was removed.

Do you want to install the cron daemon as a service? (yes/no) yes
Enter the value of CYGWIN for the daemon: [ntsec smbntsec] smbntsec

The service can run either as yourself or under a privileged account.
Running as yourself allows better access to network drives,
but does not allow to run the crontab of other users.
Do you want to the cron daemon to run as yourself? (yes/no) yes

Please enter the password for user 'SODO':
Reenter:
Running cron_diagnose ...
... no problem found.

Do you want to start the cron daemon as a service now? (yes/no) yes
OK. The cron daemon is now running.

In case of problem, examine the log file for cron,
/var/log/cron.log, and the Windows event log (using /usr/bin/cronevents)
for information about the problem cron is having.

Examine also any cron.log file in the HOME directory
(or the file specified in MAILTO) and cron related files in /tmp.

If you cannot fix the problem, then report it to cygwin@cygwin.com.
Please run the script /usr/bin/cronbug and ATTACH its output
(the file cronbug.txt) to your e-mail.

Occasionally, cron-config may bark at you for permissions errors on /etc/group and /etc/passwd. Fix them and then re-run cron-config.

Event Log Errors
If I ran the cron daemon under the SYSTEM user context, I got the following Application Event log error:
The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( /usr/sbin/cron ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: /usr/sbin/cron: PID 5300: (CRON) error (can't cd to HOME).

After a proper install, I still see a running set of Information Alerts in the Application logs. These don't seem to hurt, as my jobs still runs:
The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( /usr/sbin/cron ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: /usr/sbin/cron: PID 5016: (SODO) CMD (/scheduledtasks/scripts/load.sh ).

2) Setup your cron using "crontab -e". This puts you into the edit window of the text editor that you installed with Cygwin.

Once a cron is setup, view the output of cronevents.exe to see what cron jobs executed:
$ cronevents.exe tail
2008/01/31 16:53:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 5992: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/load.sh >> /scripts/load.txt )
2008/01/31 16:53:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 6652: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connScript.sh >> /scripts/conn.txt)
2008/01/31 16:54:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 8132: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/load.sh >> /scripts/load.txt )
2008/01/31 16:54:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 4708: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connScript.sh >> /scripts/conn.txt)
2008/01/31 16:55:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 8164: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connDiff.sh)
2008/01/31 16:55:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 3372: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connAlert.sh )
2008/01/31 16:55:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 4460: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/load.sh >> /scripts/load.txt )
2008/01/31 16:55:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 7976: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connScript.sh >> /scripts/conn.txt)
2008/01/31 16:56:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 6424: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/load.sh >> /scripts/load.txt )
2008/01/31 16:56:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 2676: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connScript.sh >> /scripts/conn.txt)

3) Viewing the cron logs are important! The cron.log is place in $HOME/cron.log:
$ cat /cygdrive/h/cron.logThis file was written by the /usr/bin/cronlog script on 20080131_165003
From: root (Cron Daemon)To: SODOSubject: Cron SODO@SODO02 /scripts/connDiff.sh
X-Cron-Env: ALLUSERSPROFILE=C:\Documents and Settings\All Users
X-Cron-Env: COMMONPROGRAMFILES=C:\Program Files\Common Files
X-Cron-Env: COMPUTERNAME=SODO02X-Cron-Env: COMSPEC=C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe
X-Cron-Env: CYGWIN=smbntsecX-Cron-Env: NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS=4
X-Cron-Env: OS=Windows_NTX-Cron-Env: PATH=/cygdrive/c/Program Files/PHP/:/cygdrive/c/oracle9i/bin:/cygdrive/c/oracle9i/jre/1.4.2/bin/client:/cygdrive/c/oracle9i/jre/1.4.2/bin:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Oracle/jre/1.1.8/bin:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/TeaLeaf:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Python25:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/QuickTime/QTSystem/:"C:/Program Files/Symantec/Norton Ghost 2003/":/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Common Files/Adaptec Shared/System:/usr/bin:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/SSH Communications Security/SSH Secure Shell:/bin
X-Cron-Env: PATHEXT=.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH
X-Cron-Env: PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE=x86
X-Cron-Env: PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER=x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 3, GenuineIntel
X-Cron-Env: PROCESSOR_LEVEL=15X-Cron-Env: PROCESSOR_REVISION=0403
X-Cron-Env: PROGRAMFILES=C:\Program FilesX-Cron-Env: SYSTEMDRIVE=C:
X-Cron-Env: SYSTEMROOT=C:\WINDOWS
X-Cron-Env: TMP=/cygdrive/c/DOCUME~1/SODO/LOCALS~1/Temp
X-Cron-Env: TEMP=/cygdrive/c/DOCUME~1/SODO/LOCALS~1/Temp
X-Cron-Env: WINDIR=C:\WINDOWSX-Cron-Env: SHELL=/bin/sh
X-Cron-Env: HOME=//SAN/Users$/SODO
X-Cron-Env: LOGNAME=SODO

4) My scripts do such things as SSH into other boxes and grab HTTP connection counts. The scripts only ran using the CYGWIN environment variable set to smbntsec.

5) the HOME environment variable must be set properly: http://blog.spikesource.com/crontab.htm suggests running "env" in your cron out to a file to find differences between your user environment and the cron environment. Good idea!

6) don't forget your scripting basics:
/2007/07/why-doesnt-my-shell-script-run-under.html

7) documentation can help:
C:\cygwin\usr\share\doc\Cygwin\cron-4.1-6.README

Or whatever the latest version happens to be..

Mail That Cron Sends

Change the email that cron sends error messages to:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-crontab-change-mailto-settings/
or
run cron-config
or
Add/edit the "From:" address in /etc/ssmtp.conf

Hope these tips help!
sodo

couldn't set file permissions in Cygwin

Here's a little tidbit that might help someone. I was configuring my public and private keys to allow secure SSH communications between my workstation and a server (see /2007/08/eliminating-need-to-enter-your-password.html for more details). The workstation is an XP box running Cygwin and the server is a Linux variant. When I went to test ssh, I got the following error in Cygwin from the XP box that denied access to the private key:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Permissions 0644 for '/cygdrive/h/.ssh/id_rsa' are too open.
It is recommended that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.
bad permissions: ignore key: /cygdrive/h/.ssh/id_rsa
Password:

Woops. I guess that's my fault. Looking at the file permissions, I see that id_rsa perms are too loose:
bash-2.02$ ls -l id_rsa
-rw-r--r-- 1 28235 everyone 1675 Jan 30 15:33 id_rsa

I issued the following chmod command:
bash-2.02$ chmod 600 id_rsa
bash-2.02$ ls -l id_rsa
-rw-r--r-- 1 28235 everyone 1675 Jan 30 15:33 id_rsa

But the permissions stayed the same. What gives? Why aren't the permissions changing?

Apparently, Cygwin has two ways to deal with file permissions. Here's the explanation:
http://www.iu.hio.no/cfengine/docs/cfengine-NT/node24.html

The short answer, though, is that I was able to solve my problem by setting this environment variable in /Cygnus/cygwin-b20/cygnus.bat:
set CYGWIN=ntea

Once I set that environment variable in the batch script and restarted a new Cygwin shell, I was able to set the permissions correctly:
bash-2.02$ chmod 600 id_rsa
bash-2.02$ ls -l id_rsa
-rw------- 1 28235 everyone 1675 Jan 30 15:33 id_rsa

Update 2/8/2008
I also got bollucksed with id_rsa permissions if my user's NT permissions on the file were not Full Control. So watch out for that as well.

Live and learn!
sodo

using regular expressions in Oracle

I needed to select rows of data from a column where some of the records begin with a date in the form:
YYYYMMDD

The other records in the column had random text strings. For example:
N MESSAGE
- -------
1 20080124: Hello. I have written to you today to compliment you
2 I have a problem with one of the products you sell.

I thought it would be perfect to use regular expressions to pluck out only the records I needed. Luckily, Oracle now supports for regular expressions as of version 10G:
Writing Better SQL Using Regular Expressions

I needed to first create the regular expression to match the date. In simple terms, I want to match the eight-digit string.

First, here is a regular expression that matches any digit, 0-9:
[0-9]

Secondly, we can expand this match to include the entire eight digit date:
[0-9]\{8\}

The escaped braces repeat the initial match for any number eight ("8") times. I will then put a carat (^) in front of the regular expression to match the beginning of the pattern buffer. The pattern buffer in this case is the MESSAGE column in our table:
^[0-9]\{8\}

OK! So we have our regular expression. Let's put it in a SELECT statement. We will use Oracle 10Gs new regexp_like condition to perform a regular expression match:
SELECT n,message
FROM message_table
WHERE regexp_like (message, '^[0-9]\{8\}');

N MESSAGE
- -------
1 20080124: Hello. I have written to you today to compliment you

Sweet! This works.

There is a slight problem. I did notice a substantial performance penalty for using regexp_like. For a very small table (<20,000 rows), it took about a minute to return the results of the search. Eeek. A normal WHERE clause came back in less than a second.

If I have any further information regarding performance tuning using regular expressions in Oracle, I will let you know.

Here are some more complex examples

TAG

Belkin F5U503 firewire mishap

Though it may seem so, not all tasks computing are an easily digestible banquet for Cacasodo. Yes, there are high points of success, but like many the intrepid engineer, there are more failures than success. In this light will I tell you my tale of frustration.

It began with a simple goal: to optimize my video editing by installing a firewire card using the PCIX slot of my Dell SC1430. As my one and only PCI slot was used by my Sil680 RAID card, I wanted to install a firewire card in one of the two PCIX slots in the box. And of course, the card had to work under Fedora. As a precursor to the story, I will say that I have a DLink PCI firewire card and that card works without error in the box. But my purpose was to have the RAID card use the one and only PCI slot and the Belkin in one of the PCIX slots so both could live happily in the same home. Alas, I did not know the hell that awaited me in trying to make this happen.

It started as a hasty, unresearched purchase of a Belkin F5U503 firewire card. After my purchase was made, I was told by a friend to avoid the Belkin cards, as Belkin was a known OEM reseller who used substandard parts. Cold comfort that was after the fact, but I digress.

I brought the card home and installed it in the first PCIX slot of the Dell. The Belkin has three connectors that allow it to fit in either PCIX slot of my box:
http://www.staples.com/sbd/img/cat/std/s0057708_std.jpg

Here's a pic of my server's motherboard:
http://dcse.dell.com/IFR/PowerEdge/PESC1430/images/sysbrd_full.jpg

When I installed the card in the PCIX slot, here's what happened. Dmesg gives me this error:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# dmesg | grep 1394
ohci1394: fw-host0: OHCI-1394 1.1 (PCI): IRQ=[38] MMIO=[fc5ff800-fc5fffff] Max Packet=[2048] IR/IT contexts=[4/8]
ohci1394: fw-host0: Get PHY Reg timeout [0x000004c0/0x00000000/100]
ohci1394: fw-host0: Get PHY Reg timeout [0x000004c0/0x00000000/100]

I get a couple more errors in dmesg once I turn the cam on:
ieee1394: hpsb_update_config_rom() is deprecated
ieee1394: Failed to generate Configuration ROM image for host 0

lsmod reads:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# lsmod | grep 1394
ohci1394 43273 0 ieee1394 109081 1 ohci1394

lspci reads:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# lspci | grep 1394
06:06.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)

after probing for raw1394:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# modprobe raw1394
[cacasodo ogre ~]# lsmod | grep 1394
raw1394 37233 0 ohci1394 43273 0 ieee1394 109081 2 raw1394,ohci1394

I am running Fedora 7 and my kernel is the EZPlanet firewire patch kernel. I use this patched kernel because firewire is broken in Fedora 7's standard build:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# uname -r
2.6.22.9-1091.ez.fc7

I do see interrupt activity when I connect and turn on the cam:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# grep 1394 /proc/interrupts
38: 2 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi ohci1394

testlibraw gives me something:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# testlibraw
successfully got handle
current generation number: 1 1 card(s)
found nodes on bus: 0,
card name: ohci1394
using first card found: 0 nodes on bus, local ID is 0, IRM is 63

But plugreport doesn't give me anything:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# plugreport
Host Adapter 0 ==============

Adding "noacpi", "noapic" and "nolapic" to my grub.conf and rebooting didn't help.

To see if it was kernel related, I tried booting using these other distros/kernels, with the same result..the "Get PHY Reg timeout" error:
Ubuntu 6.10 -> 2.6.17-10 kernel
Knoppix -> 2.6.19 kernel
Fedora 6 -> 2.6.18-1.2798 kernel

OK. I am almost spent for the evening. But does the card even work in the PCI slot? I put the card in the PCI slot and lo and behold, the card DOES work. To reiterate, the card does work in the PCI slot, just not in either of the PCIX slots. At this point I'm thinking that the card is not getting proper power, but I'm too tired to continue on. I sleep uneasily.

The next day, I take fifteen minutes to call Belkin. The gentleman on the line is helpful, but when I tell him I'm running Linux, I get the cold shoulder and he dismisses me with the "we don't support the card under Linux" line. Well, if the card works fine in one slot under Linux, why shouldn't it work in the other slot?! No matter, "we don't support the card under Linux."

Argh. So here is where I dive off into the deep end to set out to prove Belkin wrong that it is a power issue and not an OS issue. I went on Belkin's support site and tried to find the voltage requirements for the card. I could not. I searched on google and not so amazingly, I find a link to the voltage requirements ON BELKIN'S OWN SITE!
http://web.belkin.com/support/kb/kb.asp?a=3742&langid=

Great search engine there, Belkin! NOT! As well, I look on Dell's site for the voltage of the PCIX slots:

• 2 64-bit/100MHz PCI-X slots 3.3V

The slots handle 3.3volts. Referring back to the Belkin KB article, it states clearly:
The F5U503 PCI requires a 5 volt PCI slot.

I knew it! Now, in order to prove Belkin wrong, I decide to get a Windows OS running on the Dell and show them that it is a POWER issue and NOT an OS related issue!

To do this, I'd install an older IDE drive in the Dell and apply an old Ghost image I had of XP. Well, the Dell doesn't have a floppy drive. So, I power down my web server, take the floppy out, install it in the Dell and reconfigure the BIOS to allow the floppy to be seen. OK. I try one of my Ghost floppies. It doesn't boot. I try a second and a third. They do not boot as well. Argh.

Wouldn't it be great if Ghost worked on a bootable CD? Unfortunately, Norton doesn't provide that option. But an enterprising person has a lovely install doc written up here:
http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/bootcdintro.html

Thank you, Nightowl! Though, it did take me a number of hours to setup the Ghost bootable disk, it was well worth the time as I now have reliable boot media for Ghost. The process itself could use a small blog entry. Nightowl did a great job, but he needs better formatting and less verbiage to make the instructions easier to follow.

Next, I used it to boot and apply a Ghost image of my XP system to that older hard drive I mentioned. But when I bootup, Ghost does not recognize the DVD disc. I try another disc that has an earlier Ghost image. Ghost also does not recognize that disc. Finally, I have a third DVD. Luckily, Ghost recognizes that disc. Unfortunately, when I go to apply the image, Ghost cannot find the IDE hard drive. What the hell? I see the drive in the BIOS, though the BIOS doesn't report back the correct size of the drive. It is the master drive on the IDE controller..what gives?

I tried a few couple configuration options:
-hard drive being slave
-hard drive cable select
-disabling the SATA drives
-changing boot sequence
-refreshing the BIOS version to the latest 1.0.4

None of these worked. Then I thought that if Ghost re-imaging didn't work, I should just install the OS itself. So, I had a bootable copy of the XP disc. I started the system with the disc in the drive, but the install process soon gave me a blue screen with a message regarding pci.sys. Looks like a lot of folks had that one:
http://www.google.com/search?q=xp+professional+install+pci.sys+blue+screen

This problem should be resolved with a disc that integrates XP with SP2 . Which of course, I don't have right now. So for expediancy's sake, I take another route: a Windows 2000 Advanced Server install. I was able to put the extra hard drive in a second machine, start the Win2K install process, but for some reason, the hard drive is not recognized properly by the BIOS. I brought the disk over to my Dell SC400 machine that runs XP. I disconnected the existing XP drive, installed the disk and got Win2K Advanced Server working without a problem. The box boots to that drive, so I know that the Master Boot Record is not corrupt. But when I move the drive back to the SC1430, it refuses to boot.

Not sure what to do at this point. I'd sure like to prove those Belkin support engineers wrong, but I can't get the "Belkin certifed" OS (in this case, Windows 2000 Advanced Server) to boot in the Dell. I assume I will have the same problem with XP SP2, but it might be worth a try.

To sum up:
-card doesn't work in PCIX slot, but I believe it is a simple voltage problem
-I'd like to prove this to Belkin, but I can't get a Windows OS to load via Ghost'ing an existing hard drive or installing a hard drive with a Windows OS on it

Update 1/6/08
Ooops..my bad. Looking in the manual for the Dell SC1430, it shows that pre-Win2003 OSs are not supported. Thereby, I am out $52 for the price I paid for the Belkin card. Just goes to show..DO YOUR RESEARCH before making a purchase of this kind.
!
A Frustrated Cacasodo

WinAmp under Wine on Fedora 7

Happy 2008, everybody!

This was a nice surprise. I wanted some visualizations with my music, rather than just the plain xmms oscilloscope, so I thought I'd try installing WinAmp under Wine, the Windows Emulator (http://www.winehq.com). I hadn't had very good experiences with Wine before and wasn't confident that my sound hardware would be recognized correctly, especially in my quirky Dell SC1430.

The Dell is a server class machine not made for consumer applications. Though I'm trying my best to convert it into a video editing monster machine. For the most part, I have succeeded in that task. But there has been a lot of bloodletting (read: time spent) in the process.

Currently, I have Fedora 7 running on the Dell. As Wine is part of this Fedora distro, installing Wine was a simple matter of doing:
[cacasodo@ogre ~]# yum install wine

Version wine-0.9.49-1.fc7 got installed from the fedora-updates repository.

After reading a bit on the Wine FAQ, I saw that the installation of Windows programs to the Wine environment should be fairly straightforward. With that in mind, I downloaded the latest WinAmp player. I started the install by using the following command from my home directory, the directory I copied the program to:
[cacasodo@ogre ~]# wine winamp551_basic.exe

I forgot that Wine runs all the Windows applications and dialogs appeared in their own Metacity windows. Wine running WinAmp looks like this:


As I made it through the final dialog box of the installation process, I assumed the program installed correctly. Now, it was time to configure Wine using the Wine configuration program. I typed:
[cacasodo@ogre ~]# winecfg



In winecfg, I made sure that my audio drivers were selected correctly. Upon installation, Wine automatically detected that OSS, ALSA and JACK drivers were installed in my system. They were selected, so I played a test sound. The test sound was garbled and unintelligible. Ooops. I looked at the command output in the terminal window and it showed an ALSA error:
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:868:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave

I saw that my other audio applications were similarly broken, so I decided to reboot just for good measure. When the box came back up, I first played a test sound in XMMS. That worked, so I opened winecfg and the test sound played correctly! Happiness.

The real test would be to start 'er up and load an MP3 file. I started WinAmp using the following command:
wine /cacasodo/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Winamp/winamp.exe

WinAmp started up, so I dragged the default Mike Llama wave file from the WinAmp installation folder into the playlist of WinAmp. The drag and drop from Metacity to WinAmp running under Wine worked, which was nice to see. Pressing play, I was happy to hear Mike's dulcid tones..well, not so dulcid..ring out loudly through my speakers. WinAmp was working!!

My original purpose for the WinAmp installation was to have some nice visualizations to go with my music. I was very interested to see if they'd work under Wine. In WinAmp, I went to Preferences by pressing the familiar CTRL-P key combination. Indeed, this opened up a Preferences window. Wine does key combinations..cool! I selected Visualizations -> Advanced Visualization Studio and pressed Start plugin. Lo and behold, another window appeared and even better than that, a visualization started up!

The visualizations were working so well that I could expand the viz window to roughly DVD size resolution (720x480) without it slowing down. Nice! At this point, I knew that Wine must be taking advantage of my NVidia (BFG) 8500GT card. There's no way plain old X could handle those beautiful streaming colors all by itself:


Again, nice going Wine, for taking advantage of the OpenGL in my NVidia chip!

However, I will say there must be some optimization needed in Wine, as a constant flow of error messages comes through in the terminal session:
fixme:ddraw:IDirectDrawImpl_WaitForVerticalBlank (0x1b27ff0)->(1,(nil)): Stub

Aside from that, it is very nice to have an unexpected success like this install of WinAmp and its beautiful visualizations. Tally ho!

For your reference, the WineHQ site has a nice database that shows which Windows applications will work with Wine:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appbrowse.php

In particular, here is the root page describing WinAmp compatibility with Wine:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=5

Very cool.
'sodo

MacBook Pro: six month review

I've had my MacBook Pro 2.33Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo for over six months now and thought I'd give a quick review and impressions. Disclaimer: This review will be from the standpoint of a guy who uses the box mainly to connect to his corporate network, surf the web and do some occasional live video importing using iMovie HD.

Stability
It is pretty bulletproof and does not hang, until you start playing with HDV. Then things slow down or in some very rare situations, have hung the box. Thus, a restart is necessary.

Networking
Wi-Fi and hardwired ethernet setup are a breeze. At home, WiFi performance to my NetGear WGT624 is excellent and works from the first floor in my loft, through metal studded walls up to the router which is upstairs in the loft roughly twenty feet away. I have had no trouble connecting to WiFi networks in hotels or conference centers.

Connectivity
In order to logon to other boxes at my home and corp networks, I run Microshaft Terminal Services and Chicken of the VNC. This is our peak season at work, so when I am home, I will log in over Cisco VPN to my workstation at work via MS RDP and keep the connection up as long as possible. Cisco VPN has been connected for as long as fourteen days with no downtime. Microsoft RDP occasionally hangs and I will have to restart the box. Figures..the times I have had to restart a Mac is because of a Microsoft product. Finally, built in BSD Unix gives you all the Unix tools plus ssh/scp for other connectivity options.

OS Alternatives
I don't run Boot Camp; instead, I run VMware Fusion (VMware's answer to Parallels) and have XP and Fedora running in virtual machines on the MacBook. Parallels works for some people; however, I encountered problems with a kernel panic when I installed Fedora. Since we use VMware at work, I just opted to use VMware Fusion.

XP and Fedora performance in Fusion is good, but not great for things like editing video. However, at least you have the capability of running an alternate OS without fear of the virtual PC going down. VMware allows you to assign one or more processors to a VM, so that is an additional performance boost.

I know folks who do run Boot Camp without issue if you want to go down that route.

Applications

I haven't used the Mac apps other than Safari/TextEdit/Preview/IMovie HD/iTunes. But those programs seem really intuitive. Kudos to Jobs for enforcing ease of use. On certain websites. there is squirrely-ness with Safari and some form fields. I suspect this is due to those sites' coders not doing a good job of testing. For those websites, I run Firefox and that usually will get around these problems.

Battery Life
Multimedia will suck the juice out of this thing. I probably get only 1 1/2 to 2 hours of battery life if I am viewing YouTube or watching a DVD. However, if I use non-multimedia apps, I get quite a bit more usable batt time. For instance, I was able to use Microsoft Word on a plane for about 4.5 hours straight before the box died.


All in all, I am a man for all seasons: PC for noodling about or raw firepower and the Mac for "it just works"

sodo

Google Gmail shortcut keys

In Settings, enable keyboard shortcuts.

j (move to older thread; aka. Conversation)
k (move to newer thread)
o (open thread)
With thread open:
n (next email in thread)
p (previous email)
o (open/expand email (or collapse it if it currently expanded))
u (return to list view)

y (if reading Inbox, archive thread; ie. remove from Inbox)
s (star or un-star message/thread)
# (delete; ie, send to Trash)

x (select thread -- useful in thread list view, in conjunction with j & k shortcuts)
? (Help; ie. show list of keyboard shortcuts)

Link to full list of shortcuts:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=6594

Thanks to BT for the reminder!