BiggieStylin

Recently I was trying to watch a DVD on my laptop. I’m running compiz-fusion with my ati-drivers, and had a problem with the video showing up. I kept getting a blank screen with a few frames showing up once in a while. I fixed this issue in vlc by setting my video output to x11. I use Gnome for my desktop, and by default, it uses totem as its media player. I tried everything I could think of to find a way to change the backend settings for totem which uses gstreamer.

Finally, after some google searching, I found the solution. gstreamer comes with a configuration tool to change the audio and video settings. It’s called gstreamer-properties who would have thought? After running this I changed the video settings to use X11 for gstreamer as well, opened up totem and the DVD played fine! Just thought I’d share this little tidbit.

Recently I just converted my desktop back to linux, and of course, I’m using Gentoo. I’ve still got Windows so I can dual boot, but there’s just times when it isn’t practical to dual boot… so I’ve come up with another solution. I’ve installed VMWare Player and created a virtual machine to install Windows XP onto.

Once I got VMWare Player installed, I ran into a few issues. My first issue was that it was unable to find a specific symbol… this was in relation to recompiling dev-cpp/gtkmm with the use flag “accessibility”. Once that is rebuilt you also need to rebuild x11-libs/libsexy, dev-cpp/libsexymm and x11-libs/libview. Once those are rebuilt, the error about the missing symbol went away, then it was on to a whole new error message.

The next error message seems to come only when dbus is enabled

process 29624: Attempt to remove filter function 0x7f481078f444 user data 0x7a5490, but no such filter has been added
D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace

Now I searched far and wide for this, and the only solution I found for a while was just to disable dbus completely. I didn’t want to do this because I’ve got a few programs that are using dbus. After searching more, I found something else. Finally, a Gentoo Bug that tells me what’s wrong! It appears by the bug report that if you have dbus running, you must also have hald running. Once I started up hald, vmplayer has worked perfectly.

Hopefully this will help someone and save them from pulling their hair out unlike I did.

Well, lately I’ve been having a lot of problems with my cable company. I’ve been on the phone with them several times due to constant disconnects, slow speeds, and other miscellanious problems. Aparently the story I’ve gotten from them is that their lines are too full, and the traffic is causing lots of slowdowns. Recently though, I’ve found that this might not at all be the case. After doing some reasearch a few days ago due to noticing my lag spike constantly, I have found some very compelling evidence that my ISP is doing some traffic capping.

I was searching around and actually found this nice big post about Avenue. Now, within that post I have found the following post about their TOS http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19766570-Re-Other-Charter-sold-local-franchise-to-Avenue-Broadband. This post seems to describe what is a bandwidth cap that they put on their customers. While this isn’t compelling enough to prove that they put a cap on people, I also found this post http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20175452-. Now, this seems to show that they ARE capping users. How dumb is this?

I never really noticed a cap until recently. Over the past week or more, I have been getting very slow speeds for my downloads. At first I thought it was something else, but then I noticed it more and more, then happened to come across these posts, and finally everything added up! I’ve been capped! I pay around $70 for 10Mbit internet access… this seems really pricey if I’m going to get a cap put on me after 3GB of downloads. I almost go through this in a few days due to working from home. After getting all this information and now realizing what’s going on, I’m outraged. I can’t belive I’m paying so much for so little! I have plans to call them and confront them, so I’ll post again about how that goes. I’m also looking into other internet service providers, as I can’t have this type of service when I work from home. I also refuse to pay more money just so I can get more transfers, just to be capped again.

So, in conclusion, I just wanted to put it out there for anyone in the service area of Avenue Broadband. I think everyone should be aware of this, even though they’re trying to hide it.  It really pisses me off to see this happening and them not being very open about it. I think it’s very pricey for the amount I’m paying to have this cap.. anyway, I’ll post again when I get done talking with them.

UPDATE - 6-18-2008
Well, after a couple weeks, I’ve spoken to them, I’ve had a technition out here, and I’m still very upset. I can’t confirm or deny a cap on the internet speed. I called and spoke with two people who said my account was capped, however, both refered me to the local office because that’s where they do the capping at. So, once I called up there and spoke with them, they told me that they do not put caps on accounts anymore. Since that day I haven’t seemed to be under a cap, however I’m not getting my 10Mbit service. As I mentioned, I had a tech come out and check things out. He found a few problems with my line going to my cable modem and ran a whole new line for it. Since that, I have only been disconnected once, which was Monday (the 16th), and I was out for a good 6+ hours. So, I’m still very unhappy with my service, and I plan on getting DSL as soon as my credit card activates.

Since I got my new Linksys WRT54G router, I’ve had a bit of a problem playing Call of Duty online. I could join games and play all I wanted, however, when my girlfriend wanted to play too, it would disconnect both of us from the games. I searched and tried different things, also upgraded the firmware, all to no avail. I finally solved the issue by setting up a port trigger for the port the game uses.

I had tried before to setup a port trigger, but kept getting errors about the ports being the same. I don’t know what I did different the last time I tried it, but it seems to have worked. I just set the application name to “CoD” and set all four port fields to 28690, which is the default port for Call of Duty.

This should work for CoD, CoD2, and possibly CoD4 (but I’m unsure since I haven’t looked at the ports for it.) I checked the “Enable” checkbox and then clicked the “Save Settings” button. Once the router saved the settings and redirected me back to the page, I was then able to join a game, and have my girlfriends computer do the same.

Well, now that Zend has released Zend Studio Neon, I’ve taken the time to download it and give it a try. I have to say, they’ve done a pretty decent job with it. The feature set is very robust and integration with the Zend debugger is very nice. It uses PDT plus some extras to provide excellent PHP IDE support. It’s got all the good stuff of Zend Studio and Eclipse combined in one. Out of the problems I noticed in the beta’s, most have been fixed, but there’s still a few lingering.

One issue is mainly an issue with Eclipse itself, there’s no way to convert spaces to tabs or vice-versa. There’s also no way to make it trim spaces on the end of lines. This is a feature that Zend Studio has had itself in previous versions. An easy fix to this is a plugin made by Andrei Loskutov called AnyEdit. It’s made for Eclipse itself, but since Zend Studio Neon is Eclipse, it installs easily using the directions provided on the page.

Another issue, which was really the show stopper for me, is that the building of the workspace will sometimes “freeze”. I say “freeze” because Neon continues to respond, however, you can no longer save any files, close the workspace, or close Neon itself. I must note that I only experianced this issue twice within the few weeks that I used it. It’s annoying enough of an issue that I don’t care to deal with it. Both times I had the problem was when I went to save a file and it wouldn’t save, therefore loosing the work I had just completed. I have noticed that sometimes it does take a while for the project to build the workspace, but I gave it plenty of time to continue each time and it did not make any progress.

Other than those two problems, Zend Studio Neon is a very solid PHP IDE. I haven’t gotten around to testing every little feature, but I enjoyed working with it and would reccomend it with caution. Be aware that there are still issues that I’m sure Zend is working on solving, but for the most part it’s a very stable editor. Happy PHPing!

Hey all. Just wanted to update everyone on what’s going on. I’m finally all moved and settled in to the new place. It was hard moving everything, I think the only thing that didn’t survive the move was my back but everyone is alright, so that’s what matters. Kelsey and I have our own place that we’ve got settled in to for now. Most of our stuff is in storage… but now the hard part about that is going through everything.

I had a bit of a problem with internet, but got that resolved as quickly as possible, though it did cost me a hotel stay. Right now my main issue is that everything is very slow with internet, but it was that way before the move. Apparently my cable company doesn’t want to fix a problem that’s been looming for months, and now it’s so saturated that I can’t hardly SSH anywhere without a 2-5 second lag. I’m planning to get DSL, but I’m not sure how soon that will be.

Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know the latest. I also wanted to tell everyone thanks for the support during this hard time. I just hope everything keeps going good for us all.

Just wanted to update everyone on the latest. I’ve found a temporary place to live until I can get things sorted out enough to find a more permenant home. Right now I’m back in the apartment and have the power on, though I have no running water since the water lines ran through the basement of the house. I’ll most likely be moving this Saturday/Sunday… but I don’t know how that’s going to effect internet and such. I’m hoping I can get all that hooked up by then. I’ll update again once I’m all moved.

I don’t even know where to begin with this post. I’m really just posting to let everyone know that I might not be online a whole lot of the next few days. As some of you know, I live in an apartment above my girlfriend’s parent’s house. Well, last night around 3:30am there was a fire in the basement… everyone got out okay, but the house is devistated. It only burnt the basment and a little of the room above the basement, but everything in the house itself was destroyed by smoke. My apartment just got a little smoke in it, but everything is ok up there. I feel so bad for my g/f’s family because they basically lost everything.

Right now I’m staying in a hotel for a couple nights until I can get power hooked back up to the apartment. From there I’ve got to get in and get all of my stuff packed up, and then find a new place to live. The g/f’s family has already got a couple things lined up for them as they’re getting a lot of help, which is good. I don’t know how long it will take to get power back, or even if I will be able to. So my connectivity will be very on/off for the next few days at least. I’ll keep everyone updated as to what’s going on… I just ask for prayers and thoughts as we go through this challenging time. Thanks.

I’ve started on a new series of tutorials that I plan on writing over the next few weeks. They’re pretty simple subjects, but I feel they need to be out there! The series is titled “What you should know about: X“. My first subject in the series is Dynamic Includes. This is based on my previous tutorial that is here, but is completely rewritten.

I’ll start working on a new tutorial when I get the chance. As the tutorial says in the conclusion, it will be about input filtering to prevent injection attacks on your site. I hope someone who reads these will learn something they can put to use! If you notice any problems or errors, please just let me know. Happy reading!

Hey all, just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!! I hope everyone stays safe and warm. Eat a bunch of food too! haha. Happy Holidays!!