Miscellaneous Knowledge

I recently bought an Asus Xonar DX as I was getting fed up of the interference on my onboard sound card. However, as I use headphones I often need to use the soundcard’s functions to boost the bass a bit if I want to hear it. While most applications would go via the Xonar control panel and boost the bass, ffdshow would bypass it and not boost the bass. Hence, any movies I played where distinctly lacking bass.

To solve this, simply set Audio Channel to something other than “2 Channels” on the main section of the control panel. Don’t worry, the Xonar card automatically handles downmixing back to 2 channels (or whatever your Analogue Out is set as) for the actual output. This is simply the interface it presents to programs such as ffdshow. Now, ffdshow should go via the Xonar control panel and apply all the effects you’ve set, such as bass boosting.

Ever felt like trying out the KDE desktop interface, but didn’t fancy downloading Kubuntu and installing from scratch? Good news! You can easily install KDE from your current Gnome-based Ubuntu install and it’s dead simple.

Open up Synaptic Package Manager and search for “kubuntu” in the quick search, in the list of results select kubuntu-desktop and then click apply. Synaptic will then download and install all the files for KDE.

However, how do you switch to KDE from Gnome once it’s installed? Simply log out and then click your username as usual, at the bottom of your screen click Session and select KDE and then log in as normal. This time, instead of Gnome you’ll get the KDE desktop interface. If you want to switch back to Gnome just log out and select Gnome under session.

Now you can try out a new desktop interface without going through a lot of hassle.

Recently, my phone has been complaining that it is out of memory, and hence disables automatic retreival of email amongst other things. Try as I might, I just couldn’t free up any extra space – I install programs to the memory card and keep all of my files on there. I couldn’t see anything on the phone I could delete.

However, all it seems all messages (Text and Email) are stored on the phone’s main memory, for someone who has a lot of emails and never deletes text this amounts to a surprising amount of data.

Thankfully, it’s possible to move the messages from the phone on to the memory card. Simply go Menu > Communication > Messaging > Options > Settings > Other and set “Memory in use” to Memory Card. You’ll then be asked if you want to copy over the messages, select Yes and your messages will be copied to your memory card and all future messages will be stored there. Doing this freed up a whopping 55MB of space on the phone memory!

A few months back, I picked up a new phone and contact. Before this, I used a SE k800i on Orange PAYG. While this worked fine for calls and texts (albeit in low volume) internet was a no go. Therefore, when I saw 3′s offer of a free phone with 1GB (“unlimited”) internet for £20/mo, I snapped it up straight away – despite all the horror stories you hear about 3.

The first phone I received was faulty, it wouldn’t charge. I took it back to the 3 shop the next day and got a replacement there and then with out any problems, good customer service there. Living in London, I get a good signal pretty much everywhere except at home. Everywhere else i’ve been has given me a medium or strong signal. While mildly annoying at times, I often use the WLAN instead of 3G at home instead.

Having not traveled outside of London since getting the phone, i’ve not had a chance to see what coverage is like. However, judging by the recently released maps from Ofcom, 3 has the best 3G coverage of any network. I’ll update this after my holiday in Mid-July where I will be on the canals of North Wales.

Recently, I also got £30 of credit on my bill for referring my Dad, which was very welcome!

As for the phone itself, i’ve got to admit I am very impressed – it does everything I want. It syncs my contacts, calendar, email etc with my Exchange server, the inbuilt web browser is fast and renders pages well, the music player is standard but good enough. In addition to this, there are many other applications (There are so many applications for the Symbian platform). The only prolonged issue I had with the phone was occasional lockups. The phone came with the first ever software revision, however since it was 3-branded I was unable to upgrade to the latest version. A simple change of the product code however meant that I was able to upgrade the phone to the latest software which gave a noticeable speed boost to the phone, increased battery life, removed 3 branding and also enabled the SIP client. Using the SIP client I am now able to have a second internet phone number on the phone which is extremely useful. However, while it works over 3G it uses the radio continually (even when the phone isn’t in use) and will drain battery life fast, operating over WLAN there are no issues.

Overall, i’m extremely pleased with the both the operator and phone, i’ll be sure to update this if it changes.

I run several Left 4 Dead servers which I play on regularly, these are all public servers with unrestricted access. Unlike previous Valve games, Left 4 Dead includes a built in vote kick system, which is sensible since due to the server sizes, it’s unlikely you will have an admin player playing, hence the voting system is used for removing any troublemakers.

However, it is frequently abused, players will randomly votekick another player without warning because they want a friend to come on, without even asking. In many cases, they’ve even votekicked me, the owner and admin.

While they soon realise this is a huge mistake on their behalf (as they become permanently banned from all my servers), it is somewhat annoying to have your gameplay interruped by a votekick.

Thankfully, due to the power of SourceMod, someone has written a plugin that obeys the admin immunity system built into sourcemod – normally used to prevent lower-level admins from abusing higher-level admins. By default, all players have an immunity of 0, as a “Full Admin” I have given myself an immunity of 100. Hence, when anyone tries to votekick me, the vote instantly fails. Not only this, it shows me who it is, for all votes.

By default, the plugin only grants full admins veto ability and displays who is votekicking who. I recommend you edit the /left4dead/cfg/sourcemod/sm_plugin_votemanager2.cfg file as follows; (if it does not exist, create it)

l4d_vote_kick_immunity 1
l4d_vote_log 1

This will turn on the admin immunity system and also log all votekick attempts to the SourceMod log.

Players beware, never kick the admin.

Today, I received the following email from Google regarding their checkout service, which allows businesses like my own to receive credit card payments into our bank accounts:

Hello,

We’re writing to let you know that on 5 May 2009, Google Checkout’s transaction processing fees will be changing. We will be transitioning from our 1.5% plus £0.15 per transaction rate to a new tiered fee structure, where the rates will vary depending on the amount of your monthly sales processed through Checkout. The rate you will be charged beginning on 5 May 2009 will be based on your sales processed through Checkout during the month of April 2009. Each month thereafter, we’ll continue to use the prior month’s sales volume to determine your transaction processing rate. For more details about the new rates, please visit https://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html?hl=en&gl=GB

We will also be discontinuing the AdWords free transaction processing promotion on 5 May 2009. Any AdWords transaction processing credits accrued during April 2009 will be applied towards transactions that occur on 1-4 May 2009.

Fees are the same for all payment types (Visa, MasterCard, UK Visa Electron, UK Maestro, Solo) and there are still no monthly, setup, or gateway fees. For cross-border transactions, there will be an additional 1% fee assessed per transaction. To learn more about Google Checkout fees, please visit https://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html?hl=en&gl=GB

So in short, the fees that Google are charging small sellers like myself who don’t process more than £1,500 in sales with them per month have gone from 1.5% + 15p to 3.4% + 20p, which is exactly the same as PayPal charges. To add insult to injury, they are also withdrawing the AdWords free credit (for every £1 you spent on adwords, £10 worth of transactions where processed free) and they are adding an extra 1% for any cross-border transactions. As we do a lot of sales outside the UK, this makes Google Checkout even more expensive.

Many users are in outrage at the change, and this will most likely cost them dearly. The only winners here are the large companies processing over £55,000 a month with Google Checkout. I am voting with my wallet, and will now no longer suggest Google Checkout as our preferred payment option.

So if you’re looking for a payment solution now, I highly reccomend PayPal, lower fees, telephone support and much better brand recognition.

For the past two years, my main desktop which is designed for high performance gaming (and occasionally, work) has had hard drives running in a RAID0 array. A RAID0 array takes two hard drives and combines them to form one larger drive, it also splits the data evenly across them

RAID0 Data Striping

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RAID_0.svg

However, by using RAID0 with two drives you automatically double the chance of failure. In a simple RAID0 array, failure of one drive leaves you with exactly half your data, pieces A2, A4, A6 and A8 in the diagram. You’ve got half the data, but it’s not usable in any shape or form (imagine reading a book with every other page missing).

Now after two years, one drive has finally failed – without warning. No smart errors, nothing. For a few days before, I had been receiving I/O related bluescreens however and I should have taken this chance to backup the entire drive.

Thankfully, most of my data is stored on a local storage server, running FreeNAS. The drives in here are thankfully RAID1 – where the data is equal on both disks so if one drive fails you have an identical set of data on the second. Therefore, the only thing i’ve really lost is installed programs, easy to replace.

I’ve now ordered a new single drive (750GB Western Digital Caviar Black). I’m done with RAID0!

The Network Time Protocol is, as the name implies, a standard for syncronising time across networks. This is extremely useful as it allows all computer clocks to be syncronised to a common, correct time rather than being “around” a certain time. It’s especially useful on servers, where co-ordinating events or tracing failures needs precision and accuracy.

So how can you sync your computer with a NTP time server? It’s actually quite simple;

• Windows – Windows XP and higher already sync out of the box to time.windows.com, however time.windows.com may be very far from you and hence there is a delay in the time making it less accurate. If you want to change the server, double click the clock (XP, on Vista double click and select “Change Time and Date Settings”), then click the Internet time tab, enter the server (XP, on Vista click Change Settings) and click Update Now to sync.
• Linux – Use the command ntpdate followed by the NTP server you want to sync with

So, how do you go about choosing a better NTP source for windows and a source for linux? Enter the NTP Pool.

There are quite a few “Stratum 1″ NTP servers, which get their time directly from cesium clocks or GPS satelits, these are the most accurate sources of time available. However, if we all synced with a stratum 1 server, they would quickly be overloaded. Most people don’t need that kind of precision, so enter “Stratum 2″ servers. Stratum 2 servers NTP sync with “Stratum 1″ servers, so while they are not as exact as they are, they are only different by a few milliseconds – hadrly a problem. Hence, you should sync with a “Stratum 2″ server. But how do you find one? The NTP pool is a pool, a collection of NTP servers intended for the masses to sync with. Either use 0.pool.ntp.org as your NTP sync source, or if you want extra accuracy select your continent, then country from the right to get a server closer to you. Now you can enjoy accurate time!

However, the demands upon the NTP pool grow daily, but not it’s supply of pooled servers. If you have a server with some spare bandwidth and a static ip address that is available 24/7, donate a server to the pool. You can adjust the amount of NTP traffic you get by setting your bandwidth in the control panel, even home users can participate as long as they meet the requirements!

OpenTTD, as it’s name implies, is an open-source remake of 1995 game Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Back when I had my first computer, TTD was one of my favourite games. So what was Transport Tycoon all about? Basically, you have to build a transport network, using Trains, Planes, Trucks, Buses, Boats etc and earn as much money as possible, sounds simple but when you start building huge networks, all that can go out of the window!

OpenTTD has taken the original game, made for DOS and hence incompatible with 2000, XP and so on and re-written it completely in C. However, it dosen’t stop there – as it’s open source many enhancements have been made which hugely enhance the game experience. For example, trains are the major network tool, able to carry large amounts of cargo at high speeds. However, with large networks and large numbers of trains comes problems – signalling, platforming and so on. The original TTD only allowed for a maximun of 4 platforms at a station – hardly a huge amount when dealing with large towns or industry, signals where very basic and had little logic, no custom graphics could be added and so on.

One thing I always found lacking, even in OpenTTD however was passenger destinations – passengers would just turn up at stations and you could deliver them absolutely anywhere, giving you no incentive to link up every town. This is in stark constrast to the real world (I presume!) where people have all different destinations, and may need to take several modes of transport to reach their final destination. Again however, the open source nature of OpenTTD trumphs again – a Passengers & Cargo destinations version of OpenTTD is in developement, and once complete will be merged into the main version of the game. This adds another dimension to the game, ensuring that certain key routes are not overloaded which can often be an interesting problem to solve.

If you’re looking for an interesting game, which runs on pretty much anything and will keep you entertained and thinking then go give OpenTTD a try. The only restriction is that you will require the graphics from the original TTD, which can’t be distributed for legal reasons, however they are easily found with a bit of searching.

On my cPanel server, I noticed that users where being given the incorrect FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name, e.g example.com) for mail.root as the SSL address for the mail server. This is odd, since there is no where to actually configure the SSL host address. After a bit of poking around, it seems it sets the address based upon the address of your SSL cert. In my case, I was using a Wildcard SSL certificate from CACert (free SSL certificates). However, as the certificate was a wildcard certificate, it had no idea what the actual FQDN you wanted was! After purchasing a cheap RapidSSL cert for £10 and installing it, the SSL Host FQDN displayed correctly for users. Plus they won’t get any certificate warnings any more!

I somehow broke the default WordPress theme, so I decided to install a new one rather than fix it. Enjoy!

SuPHP is an option during compiling PHP to run all scripts under the owner of the folder. Traditionally on shared hosting accounts, PHP scripts are run as “nobody” to prevent them from causing havoc with the system. However, this still leaves a few vulnerabilities where a PHP script from one user might be able to access other user’s files. By running the script as the owner, the Linux user permissions system is correctly invoked – users can only edit and effect their own files.

However, having recently recompiled PHP and Apache on cPanel to enable suexec support, I came across a problem where pages would give an internal server error (Error 500). This was caused by one of the following;

• php_flag in .htaccess
• php_value in .htaccess
• Permissions on PHP scripts not set to 644
• Permissions on public_html folder not set to 771

Due to the nature of suexec, php_flag and php_value will not work! Instead you need to set suPHP_ConfigPath in your htaccess to the path where your own php.ini can be found (Note, this is just the path to php.ini, not the full location of php.ini).

suexec will also not execute any scripts with insecure permissions, such as 777. Set all PHP scripts to 644.

Once you’ve taken into account these issues, your PHP should be running in a more secure fashion. Under cPanel/WHM you can enable suphp by going to the EasyApache option which will recompile PHP and Apache – this is not a task to be taken lightly ensure you know what you are doing before, during and after using EasyApache to recompile PHP and Apache. If after recompiling you encounter errors caused by the above you can temporarily set the PHP handler to dao on cPanel instead of suphp.

A while ago, I picked up a ST4120P, a Fujitsu Tablet PC.  It’s quite dated, having a blazing fast 933Mhz Pentium 3 Mobile Processor, a maximum of 512MB RAM, integrated 802.11b wireless and so on. However, it’s still a tablet and works fine for writing notes in programs such as OneNote (or Paint, for those that can’t afford office!).

I upgraded the drive to a 120GB Segate drive, which is quieter, uses less power and has 6x the capacity of the previous one. In other words, this tablet is all ready to go.

Or not. I encountered a small problem where the screen would work perfectly in landscape mode, but if you switched to portrait, the pen would be 90 degrees out of sync. This is odd, having installed all the drivers correctly. Google wasn’t much help – one other user reported this problem and solved it by installing from SP0, and removing certain parts of the SP2 install – not something I was prepared to do. I went back to Fujitsu’s driver site and found one driver I had overlooked, the “Pen User Mode” components. I downloaded and installed these and portrait now worked perfectly. Excellent, this tablet, which cost me around£150 total after upgrades, is now ready to go. Perhaps the best bit of it is the battery life – an amazing 6hr 30min even though it’s 5 years old – this is a real world test with the tablet idle, but screen on full brightness. The only downside is that a full charge takes 24hr, but otherwise a perfect, affordable tablet.

As things tend to disappear from Fujitsu’s site, you can download the Fujitsu Stylistic ST4120P Pen User Mode Components from us. Use at your own risk of course, works for me, unlikely to break your system but in this cover-your-ass world I have to have some disclaimer just in case something goes awry and I get the blame…

Around mid december, I noticed that traffic for my Left 4 Dead Servers page dropped sharply – from 100 unique visitors a day to 5, at most.

Traffic Graph for www.l4dservers.net

Most of my traffic comes from search engine referrals, so to have a drop off like this must have something to do it Google.

Cue Google’s Webmaster Tools, a handly place for you to view all statistics about your site. On their diagnostics section I was getting a lot of “Network Unreachable” errors on the robots.txt. Basically, Google couldn’t access my site to read the robots.txt – nothing wrong with the actual robots.txt at all, it was a web server problem. After having a look around, I came across some information on diagnosing the issue, no help from Google itself on this matter of course. The information listed here indicated that certain software was blocking google for making too many requests the to the server, in a DoS attack fashion. This site is hosted on reseller hosting, however it shares the machine with a lot of other websites. In which case, Google has been accessing many sites on this server generating a high number of requests. Therefore, the software on the machine automatically blocked Google falsely beleiving that it was attacking sites on the machine.

This blog was also hosted on this reseller account, and traffic figures showed a similar decline. I’ve recently bought a dedicated cPanel server to replace the reseller and moved the blog onto there – bingo! This blog now appears back in search engine listings. If we look at Google’s Webmaster Tools, we can see the amount of pages crawled by it.

Google Crawl Statistics for Miscellaneous Knowledge

Right after moving it off the reseller hosting and onto the server, loads of pages are instantly and successfully crawled. The blog is back in the Google index.

www.l4dservers.net is still pending move to the new hosting, but I expect to see similar results once I have completed the move, just waiting on the DNS to be updated for it.

So what can you do if you experience this issue? First, read this excellent article and make sure that your lack of Google listing isn’t your fault. If you are not at fault, contact your hosting provider and point them to the article, ask them if they have any firewalls that block multiple requests such as the Googlebot. I would also highly suggest signing up to Google’s Webmaster Tools to help diagnose any problems Google has accessing your site. While they where not particually helpful in this incident, it did help to get me started on the diagnosis. Not only this, but it allows you to submit sitemaps which vastly improve your ranking and help make sure that every page is in Google’s index. Sitemaps are checked very often and any new URLs are quickly crawled helping you get any content into Google quickly.

From the more technical side, this article might be of interest. It details how ConfigServer Firewall might be a culprit in this.

I thought it was time to upgrade my Core 2 Duo E6300, which has a default clock of 1.86Ghz but has been running at a steady 2.8Ghz for the past few years. So, I put down £220 on a new Q9550, a Core 2 Quad 2.83Ghz 12MB Cache monster, based on the new 45nm process. My motherboard is a GA 965p DQ6, which has a LGA775 socket. This is electrically compatible with all LGA775 processors.

However, I foolishly assumed that a LGA775 motherboard will take all LGA775 processors. Wrong! The BIOS must also support them. I only found this out when placing the processor in the motherboard, reattaching the heatsink and trying to boot. One weakness of the GA 965P DQ6 motherboard is that it gets stuck into a reboot loop if something is wrong without any helpful error beeps at all. It’s only when I checked the CPU compatibility list that I found my error.

So, i’ve got a new motherboard on the way, Asus’s PQ5 SE. Lets hope it all goes to plan and recgonises my Intel RAID0 hard drive array.