Miscellaneous Knowledge

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!

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.

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.

I recently formatted and reinstalled my computer. My Steam folder was over 100GB, a lot of games. Rather than making a backup copy of the Steam folder I decided to use the inbuilt steam backup. Big mistake.

The backup operation took a couple of hours, when making a simple zip wouldn’t have taken nearly as long. Once this was complete, I copied it to an external hard drive and did my format/reinstall. I installed steam and then began the backup operation. It took 18 hours to “complete”, or not. It seems it didn’t restore anything, simply recreating the Game Cache Files with no content. Excellent.

I re-ran it again with just a single game and it worked. It looks like i’m going to have to restore them one by one, not a short operation. Add to the fact there is no “uncheck all” option, and each time I uncheck one it takes ages to actually uncheck it while it recalcuates totals. Even so, some crash.

So i’ve given up, i’ve now got the prospect of downloading it all again on my pitiful 2meg connection. At least I have a 330GB offpeak allowance from my ISP…

I reccomend against using the Steam Backup option. Just ZIP or RAR your entire steam folder. Much quicker, much simpler and it WORKS.

During the last week, it seems the AC adapter for my Vostro 1500 Laptop that I purchased 7 months ago has developed a fault meaning that the AC adapter is not detected by the laptop. It still charges and powers the laptop fine however on every boot it makes a very loud beep and requires you to strike F1 to ignore the warning. In addition, the performance of the laptop is reduced to a minimun.

After looking around, it seems the AC adaptor contains a proprietary 1-wire device that transmits a serial number to the laptop. This is meant to prevent you from using 3rd Party adapters, only using Dell’s own adapters. However, the chip and communications are very prone to breakage, which is what seems to have happened in my case. This is not an isolated incident.

Thankfully, it’s still in warranty. A replacement is arriving tomorrow. Congratulations to dell on getting a replacement to me quickly, but I am disappointed that they have made the laptops only compatible with their own power adapters by use of the proprietary 1-wire device inside the power adapter.

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Owned. I’ve left BT over their illegal privacy invading Phorm system. I will not have my privacy invaded to increase the bonuses of overpaid BT executives and shareholders – I suggest others do the same.

Recently, I got myself a new laptop. After much searching around, I decided on a Dell Vostro 1500. Considering the price and specifications, it seemed like a good buy, and positive reviews outweighed negative ones. For a grand total of £609 delivered I got:

• Processor: Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz
• 3GB Ram (1x 2GB, 1x 1GB. Reports operation in dual channel!)
• nVidia GeForce 8600M GT 256MB
• 250GB SATA Drive
• Wifi
• Bluetooth
• 15 inch screen with resolution 1680×1050
• Vista Business

A pretty beefy laptop in my opinion. It’s essential for me to have a beefy laptop; I do more than just websurf. My laptop goes almost everywhere with me and I like to play 3D games. Hence the graphics card. Having had it for just a few days, I’ve not had much of a chance to test it out much, but it seems to me like a pretty impressive laptop.

Gaming Performance

I tried a couple of games (Poral, TF2 etc), maxed out the settings (except AA) and ran them. Outstanding performance, little if any lag.

Input

The keyboard is excellent, really gives a feeling that the key has been pressed, as they go quite deep. They do make some sound, but that’s not a problem for me, when touch-typing having a sound help confirm that you did actually press the key. The touchpad is fairly standard, well integrated into the unit and has the usual scrollbars you’d expect. The Left/Right mouse buttons, like the keyboard, go deep and make a sound.

Screen

Having this resolution of screen on such a small screen is absolutely amazing. The picture is so clear and high quality, it puts to shame every other monitor I’ve seen. The screen itself has a higher resolution than Low HD (which most ‘HD Ready’ TVs are, and they are anything up to 40 inches remember). The text is a little small, but that doesn’t affect me and even if it was a problem, I’d just turn up the DPI. In fact, it’s probably better for someone with poor vision to get this screen and crank up the DPI than a lower resolution one since the characters are much clearer. The brightness isn’t as bright as I hoped, so you can only really use it in direct sunlight or shade, otherwise you see all the dust on the screen.

Sound

Usually, sound isn’t something important on laptops, you either have headphones or plug into a proper speaker set. Laptop speakers are notoriously tinny and horrible. However, as long as you have the laptop on a flat surface such as a desk, the speakers on this laptop reproduce the sound pretty well. Any other surfaces though, and you just get normal laptop sound. Audio lovers will wish of course to plug into the Hifi System or use their headphones. The quality of the sound that was produced really did surprise me.

Vista

Yes, I could have got XP on it but I caved into Vista, after all, this laptop should be powerful enough to run it and in fact, Vista isn’t that bad at all. I’ve used it occasionally, with mixed results, but with SP1 I cannot fault it much. Everything works perfectly, for a change!

Wifi

The Wifi used is the Intel 3495ABG chip. So if you still have an 802.11A network for some reason (I’ve never known anyone who has one) you’ll be fine. The performance it outstanding, I get an excellent signal almost everywhere, and the throughput seems good too. In addition, the WiFi switch has a 3rd mode, the Wifi Catcher; this will quickly scan all the networks and show their signal strengths in a dialog box. Not too useful unless you want to quickly see what networks are around.

LAN

The LAN connection is somewhat disappointing. It is only a 100mbit connection compared to the 1000mbit LAN card in my previous laptop. Not too much of a disappointment, but Dell could have easily put in a faster LAN card for not that much more!

Bluetooth

I chose to have the Bluetooth module installed, mainly for communication with my phone. Yes, I could use the USB cable etc but for working with other people’s phones etc, having the cable isn’t always an option. Plus it was only £15 extra.

Battery

I haven’t had a chance to test the full capabilities of the battery yet, but it seems to last around 3 hours going by the estimates. One interesting feature is a button on the bottom of the battery which lights up 5 LEDs, depending on the charge of the battery. Useful if you have multiple batteries and don’t want to plug each one in to find the charge.

Power Adaptor

The power adaptor is dell’s standard one, with the large white tipped connection to the laptop. The power brick itself comes with a strap, which is useful for keeping the cord tidy when carrying it around. A lot better than stuffing the cord into a bag and having to spend ages untangling it next time it’s taken out. Update 10th October 2008: The adapter has broken.

Media Buttons

On the front of the laptop are several ‘Media Keys’ for Play / Pause / Next / Previous / Volume etc. Very useful and they light up when you press them. Would be nice if they where lit all the time in AC mode.

Size

The Vostro is fairly thick and heavy, but considering the power of it (and hence the cooling requirements) I’m not surprised. Weight is not a huge problem for me, I have a laptop backpack as opposed to a shoulder bag so it distributes the weight more evenly (I highly recommend these to everyone). The size is that of a normal 15″ inch laptop, just a little thicker, which is not a problem! I don’t see why people are obsessed with having a laptop as thin as possible, it doesn’t really matter that much!

Well, that is it. My review. Overall, I’m very pleased with this laptop. Hopefully it will stand the test of time. If you’ve got any questions about it, ask me!

Update: Here are a few (rather bad) pictures.

Update: Couple of Weeks Later

Now that i’ve had this laptop a bit longer, it’s time for an update!

I eventually wiped the laptop of Vista and put XP on, with Service Pack 3. This included wiping all of Dell’s partitions including the MediaDirect one. I never use recovery partitions, nor media direct so no loss there and I’ve regained around 30 GB of disk space. XP runs a lot faster too, gaming performance has improve. There was nothing especially wrong with Vista, apart from the fact that it slowed down the computer a bit. The only thing I miss from Vista is seamless off-line files sync, but I can cope without that and would rather have the performance boost any day.

The laptop has performed flawlessly though, there was a slight issue with getting bluetooth working. To use it, the drivers had to be installed. However, it could only be installed if it was switched on, but switching on requires the drivers! Hence, you can’t use bluetooth. However, I came across a file on Dell’s FTP that enabled it, I can’t remember what it was but a Google search will probably find it.

So was it worth it? Yes, completely. However, it seems now that Dell have stopped putting Graphics Cards in the Vostro 1500. I don’t care if you don’t game – you have to have a graphics card! Therefore, I recommend the 1700, which is identical but is 17″, less portable but just as powerful and roughly the same price as my 1500 was.

Update 2: A friend of mine has recently got the 1710. He left it in my care to upgrade it to XP and i’ve got to say, it’s a great laptop. Only slightly bigger than my 1500 but i’d still be ok with carrying it around, plus you’ve got the bigger 1920×1200 screen and full keyboard. It’s also somewhat thinner. The 1710 is now my reccomended vostro for purchase!