Posts filed under 'Computers'
I recently upgraded my WordPress platform (like 12h ago) and it required a slight higher version of MySQL than the previous database was created in. The web administration console let me create a new MySQL 5 db easily enough but then I hit a snag. I could not import the old data in the new database. The myPHPadmin page for the database would time out all the time. Thinking that it was a traffic issue I decided to try it late at night, but that did not work either.
A call to the 1and1 support center (which is open 24/7) and a fifteen seconds wait at a queue, I get this amazing tech guy who is friendly, cooperative, listens to me and promptly offers solutions. He was not condescending or “obviously” following a standard “blonde-secretary” script, but seamlessly moved on to the relevant info as we were tackling each issue. He uploaded a script in my website (after requesting my permission – technicality but highly appreciated), instructed me on how to edit if for my particular needs, as well as to how to edit the database export to work with it. I run the script and all worked out beautifully.
This whole process was 33 minutes, with some large chunks of time being wasted to uploading a 33MB database file and the script running, during which time he never exhibited any sign of impatience, frustration or pause due to lack of knowledge.
Why am I writing this? Because good tech support is hard to find, and when I find it I need to comment it and applaud it. That’s all.
August 7th, 2010
Many people have decided that WoW economy is worth investigating. So far so good, in itself this statement is fine, people will keep busy with whatever they like. However please don’t confuse WoW economy with real life economy. That just doesn’t make sense.
WoW economy doesn’t have taxes, expenditures for workers, lobbies, rents for office spaces, supply lines to consider and plan for, lawyers or courts etc. In WoW a person can make money simply by going out and killing things or picking flowers or mining rocks that pop out of the ground. Closest real life equivalents would be the livestock farmers, agricultural farmers and “gold-rush” miners. Each of those has expenditures from day zero, in that he needs food to live (basest of expenditure) to many others.
A WoW player needs nothing to survive and he has to spend nothing (outside of a periodic repair bill to his equipment) to play the game. This basic difference is so important that it already breaks the comparison.
However, there is a lesson to be learned. No WoW player has had his equipment removed because he failed to pay his loan. No WoW player was ever in debt. No WoW player bought anything without paying full value right then and there. If only the real economy would be like that…
May 27th, 2010
There is a very weird thing going on right now in Greece. A blog is attacked on two fronts for doing what newspapers should be doing; informing people.
Troktiko is a blog that enjoys vast popularity among Greeks everywhere, being the fifth most popular site after Google, Facebook, YouTube and Blogger.
This blog has no advertising nor does it ever wish to. It regularly posts opinions of its visitors and does not shrug at facing off against anyone, from politicians, to taxi drivers, to simple people that appropriate parts of public streets outside their home to facilitate their parking needs.
One of the fronts comes from a high profile journalist in Greece who filed a suit against them for slander. The Greek court this case went to decided to summarily shut the blog down, but the administrators managed to bring it back up as this ruling was illegal; no chance was given to the owners of the blog for rebuttal or explanations and when the admins took action to point that out, there was nothing left to do but put the site back online.
This points out the need for a response in whatever one feels that is wrong. Had the admins not responded or acted on the premise that “a court told us to shut it down so we can do nothing” the blog would not exist any more.
On a personal note, I don’t know if a blog, or any publication or indeed a person, has a right to just characterise someone with an term that is neither supported by or describes a wrongful action he committed but simply is a term of derision. I would hope not, and in that I find troktiko in fault. However, the court’s ruling was reached summarily and without due process and as such it is illegal.
On the other front, it is reputed that there is a football scandal brewing right now for which the owners of the blog have evidence. They claim that Google itself has notified them that the posting of this material will result in the blog being shut down. Currently, posts in the blog say that they will ignore such “warnings” and they will post it soon, not succumbing to intimidation tactics.
May 27th, 2010
LCD monitors are everywhere these days. Almost everyone is using one at home, in the office or at their home studio. However not many people, aside from professional artists, know much about LCD technology and how to get the best possible image. For instance, what use for a good picture quality might a general office worker need other than a clear screen with good brightness and contrast? They need to be able to read the text on the screen without undue eye strain and LCDs offer that in spades, even the very worse of them.
However, unlike professional artists, computer geeks like myself want a good overall image from their LCD monitors since their use is more about text legibility. Photos, video, games, all these are vastly more enjoyable with a good overall image quality and many of us try to get it. There are many ways to do it, some free (special image collections to tune the monitor), some inexpensive (like the Spyder 3 in all its versions – google link for it) or downright expensive.
I have never bought a calibrator for myself but I have over the years used many image collections to fine-tune the display. However I have recently come across an online collection that surpasses everything I have EVER seen.
Point your browsers to The Lagom LCD monitor test pages and be amazed at all that it can do for your LCD monitor. After having completed its tests I am amazed at how much better my display has become. Also don’t be afraid to fiddle with values that you think are wrong, for instance I have been using a 80 contrast, 55 brightness, 0 gamma for a very long time now, but after using this website I have gone to a 55 contrast, 60 brightness, -50 gamma. Simply amazing.
One case of warning; those tests will also point out some severe limitations of the LCD technology used in MANY monitors these days, specifically the inability of the TN monitors to provide uniform colour across the monitor. It is the price to pay for cheaper but faster TN technology over the pricier but slower IPS.
May 23rd, 2010
Like so many before me, I wanted to add more drives in the WHS system. So far I have been using the XFX Revo64 in JBOD mode, however I have recently started doubting this small but powerful card- for one, RAID eats up at your drives MTBF as it tries to check HDD stability over a set interval, it also check the drives while in JBOD and finally it just reported two drives as failed which upon moving them to my main system and checked with manufacturer diagnostic tool proved to be 100% healthy.
Hence I have decided to go for an extremely plain SATA controller in the form of a SI3114 controller providing 4 SATA ports. In my naiveté I believed that since this is a very simple piece of kit it would be a simple matter to install and extend my SATA drive capacity. The hubris…
The problems I encountered were in the following order:
1) Card needs drivers, drivers in the CD were not compatible, none of them, tried them all.
2) Downloaded drivers from a generic driver site that had served me well. They did not work.
3) Tried to find the Silicon Image drivers from the company’s site. I could not find them for one minute of looking so I gave up.
From that point on I tried other things, looked for a new system to house my WHS with a focus on multiple SATA ports in the MB, found some promising options too. However my budget was not up to par on this purchase, so I tucked it away for later. Meanwhile, I started checking the “failed” disks on my main system and found them healthy.
A little frustration always helps to make one more determined. So I went back to the SI3114 controller and started doing all kinds of things that made no sense until by luck I found a post that described where the drivers are downloaded from the Silicon Image website.
You see, the support page has a huge area devoted to different areas of interest and on the very bottom there is one little drop box to pick a product. I missed that, mea culpa.
With the drivers being so many I started checking online for other SI3114 users, most offering systems working with the non-raid driver. Got that, installed it and it worked… until the next reboot that is. System froze at a prompt that said Press CTRL + S or F4 to enter the RAID utility. More research online and I saw this was a common problem amongst users of this card. In fact, most people that recommended the use of the non raid drivers were also faced with this problem, however I had missed that this driver NEEDS the presence of a non raid bios.
So I ask, why is a little simple card trying to play in the RAID playpen while lacking the proper tools to do so? Software raid is so ineffective and such a resource hog, especially as we are moving in the area of parity RAID settings and multiple disks. It’s like a 10 year old driving a rig, sure it’s doable but only at very low speeds to keep it safe.
In any case, my card had a raid bios installed and that caused it to freeze the system. Why it froze is something I don’t know and seemingly no one else knows. On to flashing the bios with a non raid one. SI website has multiple bios,for the non raid one we need the IDE BIOS. Next we need the flashing utility, thankfully there is windows flash utility on the same page, first one. Downloaded that too, and run it. No joy. The command would run but it would return nothing as if it could not continue but with no troubleshooting message or error message or exit variable. SI suggested in a how to flash bios document that if one forces install of the non raid driver (link specifically for the WHS compatible driver list – I used the SiI3114 non-RAID 32-bit Windows Driver which by the way IS the correct driver and ended up using) and connects it to a drive, then in the properties of the controller device a tab would appear labelled Flash Bios that could do the work. Tried that too, about 6 times, uninstalling and hot swapping the drive and going back and forth between the raid and non raid driver. The result was disappointing as it would not allow the flashing of the bios without a restart and a restart would throw an error and the device would not load in the OS. Already getting tired…
More research, many people have this problem and again suggest to use the FreeDOS bootable CD-ROM which means downloading the .iso, opening it, appending the flash DOS utility and the new bios, remaking the .iso and burning it to a CD-ROM.
All of this to make a card work… also I don’t know how to edit .iso files and don’t care as there is also no CD-ROM drive in my WHS anymore (removed it after the initial install – cables in there are already tidied up and I don’t wanna…)
At least this motherboard is USB bootable, and I already have a stick that boots to DOS, put in it the DOS flashing util, the bios and take it to the WHS… which does not boot from it. Seems that my USB flash drive was recognized as a USB HDD and hence the boot order menu didn’t consider it a USB device but an HDD (confused yet?). So when I set up only USB boot devices (USB-Floppy, USB-Zip, USB-CDROM) it ignored the flash drive… Looking why and checking EVERY option in the BIOS as a good paranoid system troubleshooter does, found the Flash drive listed under the HDDs recognized in the boot HDD order. Popped it in first position and finally worked. DOS environment, flash worked bios updated WHS recognized the device and popped the right driver and the HDD was recognized and added to the pool.
That’s 6 hours of troubleshooting and frustration because the manufacturer wanted a RAID bios on a card that is ill-equipped to do proper raid. Congrats and thank you for this adventure.
May 21st, 2010
Seems like someone else thought as I did about MMO betas and it was Massively.com
They have asked MMO developers the same questions about betas and there are some interesting points to read in this Q&A. I will not express an opinion as I have already done so, for one, and the views of each developer is plainly laid out. Just go read it and see for yourself.
December 1st, 2009
I recently bought a new flash drive and as I was researching for speed and price, I came across something rather odd.
At first I saw the Corsair Fast Voyager 8GB flash drive. Costs £17.23 and is rather fast at 32.7MB/s average read and 20.3MB average write according to this test.
Next I saw the Corsair Flash Voyager GT 128 128GB flash drive. It was more about curiosity to see this massive drive. The site also had a review on it. This drive costs £310.47. Quite a lot, but more surprisingly, not all that faster, with 31MB/s read and 23MB/s write.
So speed-wise, the drives are the same, so how about size-wise? For the 8GB drive you get 475.45MB per pound, while for the 128GB you get 422.17MB per pound. Not that big of a difference, but still more than 10% worse.
But here comes the real blow. In the review, the 128GB flash drive is pitted against the Corsair X128, a solid state drive with eSATA connection. Costs £321.97 and averages 94.2MB/s and 91.9MB/s for read and write respectively. Look at this page again and do the math.
Here is a table to digest these numbers.
Now tell my which is the most worthless buy…
November 29th, 2009
It has been noted that this router has a problem with the setup of the Remote Access feature of WHS. It plays nice with the UPnP protocol and the WHS reports as having setup the router successfully, but it turns out that there is a problem and the (name).homeserver.com is not accessible, pointing instead to your router admin page.
The reason for it is that the router will not forward the 443 port required and reserves it for its own use, hence when the https connection is established it just points to the router.
There are two ways to deal with it. One, you force the router to release port 443 and all is well, and two, translate any port you wish to 443 for the server. Solution one is described here but I dont like it. It means forcing your router to do something it doesnt want to which one never knows what it can cause, and the proccess itself is not so easy and requires a certain knowledge that not everyone has.
The second option, however is far simpler and easy. All one need to do is forward other ports and some have even suggested to point the one above it (i.e. instead of 443, forward 444). Now here are two points that need to be made.
1. This solution does work. As the router does not restrict other ports except 443, forwarding any port you want to the server with a trigger for 443 will work.
2. This can cause major problem if you are not a little careful. As I said, some suggested using port 444 to handle the server. Port 444, however, is quite common, used in pagers all over the world and could trouble you.
For this reason, I would suggest that you go here and find a port that is not showing. Then use this to call your server and have your router catch that port and forward it to the server with a 443 translation.
Here is how (in pictures). Enter your router and go to the port forwarding page. Put a name for the scheme and create a blank one.
Type in the ports and hit Add after each one. Make sure that the protocol is set to TCP, not any or UDP.
After you reach this point, click on Assign a game or application to a local network device.
This final image is what you should end up with.
The address I am using for my WHS is of my own choosing, simply because I have a certain addressing scheme in my head (router at the end of the subnet, then servers, with printers at the start and everything else starting from 64 onward – for a standard 255.255.255.0 subnet). You will of course replace that with the address of your own WHS.
Now all you have to do is let people know that the proper address for them to log in to your site is:
https://(name).homeserver.com:395/remote
and that is all.
November 28th, 2009
It seems that Microsoft is inaccurate in how you can get a WHS key for 120 day. In this page it tells you that you can either stick with the 30days evaluation or join Microsoft Connect to get a 120 days key. However that is not the case. After joining I tried to get one, but the site was not giving me one. In the troubleshooting section I read about many other users that were having the same problem and it turns out that what you have to do is download a different WHS version AFTER you join the MS Connect program.
While WHS seems to be working great, having it work for 120 days would provide a better understanding of its features, many of which are set on a monthly basis, which is something people in the program have pointed out. However, till this time there is no official response as to the misleading suggestion that you get a key after joining (which is not true; you get a new .iso to burn) or as to why the feature to get a key even exists in the site.
I would have liked to be able to test the monthly backup settings before buying it, but the platform suits me well enough and I’m fairly impressed, so I will buy it as a gift to myself during xmas.
November 28th, 2009
So I finally decided to do this thanks to, in no small part, the fact that you can download it straight from Microsoft and have 30 days of full use (or 120 if you do some other stuff mentioned there, which I intend to do shortly). But the old PC I was using as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) was a little too weak for this. However it is not too weak to become the new communications PC (running only Skype and Chrome). So begun the switch.
OLD SCHEME:
1. NAS: Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 512MB ram, Intel D865 Perl M/B, Siluro FX5600 (AGP)
2. CommsPC: AMD64 3200+, 1GB ram, MSI K9N Neo2 M/B, Sapphire Radeon X1950Pro (AGP)
NEW SCHEME:
1. WHS: Old CommsPC with the GPU from NAS as the WHS doesn’t require anything really.
2. CommsPC: Old NAS with the X1950Pro (because you never know… and it did provide me with a benefit I did not foresee at the beginning, more about that later)
Stage 1: X1950 in the Pentium machine, all well, installed Skype and Chrome, sound check in Skype, done.
Stage 2: Siluro in AMD machine.
Problem 1: Machine will not start, not even bios. The MSI m/b would throw beeps, one long two short (code for error with VGA). So I removed the Siluro thinking it was toast and pulled into active service a retired Manli FX5200. Same problem. I was getting worried and upset. I knew Siluro worked, it was working in the NAS. Tried it again, still beeped. Changed the cards many times, for no good reason really, but as a trained PC user and builder my instincts were good and one time Siluro worked. Perhaps the AGP connector is getting peculiar in its old age…
Problem 2: WHS bootable DVD would not boot. Well, not exactly, the system would find the bootable disc and it would seem to try to do it, but every time it did so, the VGA signal was getting cut off and the monitor would go to sleep since it detected no signal. This was much harder to figure out. Tried removing power consuming devices one by one till I was left with only the VGA and a hard drive. Didn’t help. Tried another DVD drive I had around, a Plextor reader (instead of the normal Phillips writer), still nothing. Many, many crazy things later I decided to go irrational. Again, for no reason, I changed the connection between VGA and Monitor from a D-Sub to a DVI. All worked fine. There goes the D-Sub connection of the card (broken or temperamental stuff start piling up).
Stage 3: Installing the WHS.
Problem 3: This was just a matter of personal preference, but when I build a system I like partitioning it. And I don’t like logical partitions all that much. So WHS complained that I did not have 65GB of space in the primary disk drive. Of course not, it was a WD 36GB Raptor. Remove that, change it with a WD 500GB disk, installation commenced.
After very few input I had to give the installation starting working and never bothered me again. After about an hour I was confronted with a bare desktop and a warning to (paraphrasing) “please logoff and work from the Connection app from your other PCs as messing around locally can really screw up stuff, thank you”. Very well, but of course, I had to check it out first.
Problem 4: No network installed. No worries, I said naively, run the Network setup wizard. It would not of course, and after the second time that the wizard simply vanished after I started it, I went to the System module in Control Panel. Ethernet card detected but not installed. This was really surprising, especially considering it had detected and installed the Siluro FX5600 perfectly. Why would a server know more about VGA cards (which can easily be substituted with a generic VGA driver since they are only needed for the initial setup as they go head-less for the remainder of their service) than NICs is beyond me. I downloaded the driver pack for the motherboard from the MSI website and put it in my USB stick. WHS saw the stick and I did an update driver for the NIC (stands for Network Interface Card, if you were wondering). WHS said there is no driver for it in the stick. Trying to calm down, I run the setup program from the stick, which specifically said that it would install the Ethernet driver. Finished fine, rebooting the system, still the driver was missing. I then thought to go to the source; searched for Realtek Gigabit drivers, found a driver pack, and that did the job. At long last.
Everything from then on was (and still is great). Pointed my PC to \\server\Software and found the installation for the WHS Connect app that allows management of the server. Too tired to do anything more, disconnected the server and put it back where the NAS was (hidden away with just power and net cable connected). Put the new Comms PC behind my TFTs and was suddenly overcome with a desire to use the ViewSonic’s vertical orientation feature. This will give me better view of documents and browsing which is now its sole purpose. The Sapphire helped immensely by using the CCC (Catalyst Control Center) to rotate the resolution and everything worked perfectly.
November 27th, 2009
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