Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
So, as most of you haven’t noticed, since no one really reads this thing… I lost my server over a week ago. Now I’ve finally gotten everything back and setup on a virtual machine, thanks to my friend Adam. Even though I was a wee bit (heh) behind on payments, he was still a good enough friend to hook me up with something that works for both of us. So now I can post all of my ramblings again that you probably won’t even read. 
Nothing real exciting has gone on lately… I’ve caught a cold, that’s really it. I guess on another side note, I have been working on somewhat of a new exciting project. It’s a custom gallery I’ve built for myself. As it is currently it doesn’t really do much, but I have been working on the admin side of things to get everything going the way I think it should. Right now it adheres to a current directory layout parsing images and spitting out thumbnails. While I was developing, I figured… hey, why not do movies too? So I did… it also makes thumbnails for all kinds of movie files. I even added embeded HTML to allow for playing the videos, though I prefer the FLV method.
I’m not really sure when I’ll have a good preview available… I just kinda work on it when I’m bored. Anyway, I don’t have much to say besides that, so I’ll let you all get on with not reading this. Will post again soon, I hope.
Tags: Life, Site
Well, I’m sitting here today trying to think of new subjects to do a new tutorial. A few ideas are coming to mind, but if there’s anthing that anyone would like to see, please let me know. It’ll probably be a few weeks before I have anything ready, but I’d like to start on something!
Tags: Programming, Tutorial
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. 
Tags: Gentoo, Linux, VMWare Player
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.
Tags: Computers
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!
Tags: PHP, ZDE, Zend Studio Neon
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!
Tags: Dynamic Includes, PHP, Programming, Tutorial
Hey all. I just thought I’d take a few minutes to write a post. I know, it’s been a while again, but I’ve been pretty busy as of lately. I’m currently reading a new book, working on php-oop.net and working full time. This week I’ve also come down with a bad cold. Yesterday before getting off work I started to feel pretty crappy, so I went and layed down after work. Wound up falling asleep around 7 last night and didn’t make it back out of bed until 8:30 this morning. So far it’s just a head cold, but my whole body aches and I’ve got a slight fever. Nothing I can’t deal with though.. start popping the cold pills and I’ll be ok. Right now I just feel groggy because my whole head is clogged up.
On the programming side of things, I have been working on php-oop.net. Not much has been done recently, except I got my friend kuja to help me out with a new design. I don’t have it active on the dev site yet, but I plan on doing so as soon as we iorn out a few things with the design. Just take note that the dev site might not always work as it’s updated from SVN and could break. However, it’s given me new motivation to actually want to work on the backend of the site now. Currently, there’s only some basic user stuff implemented, which leaves a lot to be desired. At least it shows a base system that’s somewhat functional. The SiTech backend that runs the site also needs work too, so I’m sort of maintaining both projects at once.
As far as progress with SimpleIRC, I haven’t really touched it in a couple weeks. I’ve kept myself busy with other things. I really need to get back to SimpleIRC though as everyday miniE is showing more and more issues that I don’t want to take the time to fix since I am writing a new bot. Things with my new server are going smoothly. I’ve since setup a lot of new stuff like SSL, virtual e-mail addresses, and a Call of Duty game server. I admit, I don’t have a lot of time to play Call of Duty, but that’s my own fault. It’s at least nice to have a server up and running.
Well, that’s all for now. I’ll update later this week (or weekend) when I’m feeling better.
Tags: PHP, SimpleIRC, SiTech
Today I was writing some code for a website I’m building and came across a problem when trying to set the include path. When I was using set_include_path() and ini_set() to set the include_path, both functions would return false. It took me some time and a bit of help from Davey to finally figure out what was going on.
In my Apache configuration I was using php_admin_value to set an include_path for one of my virtual hosts. If you’re not familiar with php_admin_value, you can see the manual page here. By using php_admin_value in the httpd.conf (or a vhost), you’re there by telling PHP to force that setting and disallow anything else to change it, meaning PHP scripts or even .htaccess files. That was fine, except what I didn’t realize, is that for some reason PHP sees that setting and disallows it to be changed in any other virtual host or PHP script running under Apache. I can only speculate that this behavior is a bug and not intended. I would assume for that value to only affect the virtual host it was declared in, but instead, I spent 30 minutes debugging my code wondering why my calls to set_include_path() were returning false.
Let me just clarify for a second, the virtual host I had php_admin_value on was called, lets say foo.example.com and the code I was working on, that was returning false, was in the virtual host for bar.example.com. So, as soon as I realized that was the only place I was using php_admin_value at was foo.example.com, I changed it to php_value and restarted Apache with the new configuration. Instantly the code on bar.example.com began working as expected and setting my new include_path value. I’m not sure if this is default expected behavior, but it’s not what I expected at all. I will be filing a bug report to verify this though.
Well, that was my fun for the evening. I just wanted everyone to be aware of the effects php_admin_value and php_admin_flag have on your Apache configuration. If anyone has any different results or findings, please let me know!
Tags: PHP, Programming
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