Posts filed under 'Internet'
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
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
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
First of all, I love Netlimiter. It is just what I need in the two-user-one-connection house environment I live in and until they integrate a bandwidth limiting capability in home routers, I will keep on using it.
However it has one VERY weird side-effect. While it is running it blocks GPGnet from connecting. For those that don’t know, GPGnet is the multiplayer platform for Supreme commander, much like Battlenet is for Starcraft/WarIII.
As soon as I terminated it though, GPGnet would connect happily every time. Just a hint for all those who get the “1: Core 1 Cannot Connect to GPGnet” message and might be running Netlimiter…
P.S. some people have said that you need to uninstall Netlimiter for GPGnet to work, that is NOT true, I repeat, NOT true! Just right click on its icon and click on Exit.
May 30th, 2007
My internet is back! Tuesday noon I got a phone call to my cell confirming that the line was fixed (although I saw that it was fixed when I woke up, but it was nice of them to call me). However I did not understand what the problem was, something about static packets on my line that were cleared!
I’m having a hard time believing that as it was explained. From what I know there can be no stuck packets on a line. So I’m guessing that they cannot explain it to me as clearly, even though I asked.
I finally thought that I was going to have a nice day when I got home, but at 2130 the Power Supply Unit gave out! It was so sudden that I didn’t know if it was the PSU that had died or it was a forced shutdown to prevent some damage to another part of the system. For the next 3 hours I tried to power up the PC but to no avail, so it was most probable that the PSU had been fried! Talk about bad luck…
So today, bright and early I walked in my local PCWorld branch (no laughing, I was desperate and there is no other PC vendor within walking distance) and got myself a Jeantech Storm 700W PSU. There was some debate with the technicians there whether it would support my two-molex X1950Pro AGP card which needed 20A on the 12V rail since only one of its rails gives adequate amperage (12V2 gives 25A while the other two give 16A and 17A). I was assured though that if I plugged it in and it didn’t work I could bring it back within 7 days.
When I got home I was a little baffled over which modular cable was being assigned to the 12V2 rail, the manual said nothing, so I just plugged it on the middle of the three available. Thankfully it worked and my VGA works great. Weird note: Jeantech’s description of the PSU on their site gives different amperages for the 12V rails and only shows two of them… I’m going to trust the box which shows all three rails.
Finally, it is always cool to be able to see just how many Watts your PC is eating, right now it is munching on 104W 
March 14th, 2007
In today’s Internet, the community tools are just too many. Forums for all your games, account login pages for your various memberships, mailbox and ISP passwords, FTP login info… so many things to keep secure.
The best thing for everyone to do really is to use the maximum allowed number of characters in the password box AND to use different password for every different login dialog. Yeah, right! Who can remember all that?
Well, your computer can! It’s been some time since I had looked for a good password manager, last time I did I was disappointed. But today I found an OPEN-SOURCE password manager (I’ll explain later why that is important) that works almost transparently. Don’t even fear the almost part, because that is only when you setup a new account/password, after that it is completely transparent.
It is named KeyPass and it uses the latest and highest complexity encryption methods to keep your passwords safe. One of my favorite features is the fact that it does not need an installation, so that allowed me to have it running of my USB flash drive and so I can just carry this with me wherever I go and my passwords will always follow me.
Furthermore, the program can generate totally random passwords for you which you can then use for your accounts. It has a very fancy way of doing that by combining user selected charsets (that means, do you want only numbers, numbers and letters, numbers letters and symbols, etc.) and random mouse movement (translating the way YOU move the mouse into some kind of code that mixes the password characters) to generate an encrypted password of high complexity.
After you make your account and you want to login, all you have to do is click on the Username textbox and click the special key combo (normally Control+Alt+A) and it will fill out the username and password and log you in! Can’t get any simpler than that!
And in case someone steals my USB flash drive it is calculated that the time it would take for all the PCs in the world to crack the database is much longer than the time it would take our Sun to die…
P.S. The fact that KeyPass is OPEN SOURCE means that everyone can see exactly what it does. This DOES NOT mean that it becomes easier to crack your database, but it does mean that everyone can see that it is secure, does not contain any spyware/malware and does not contain any backdoors. It also means that if an error exists, it becomes much faster and easier to detect and fix. Finally, if that doesn’t make much sense, it means that it is free!
December 26th, 2006
I found the answer I was looking for (was there ever any doubt?... OK, I can see there was...)
Here is the code that would NOT work:
HTML:
-
-
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Gp0HyxQv97Q">
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</param>
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<param name="wmode" value="transparent">
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</param>
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<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Gp0HyxQv97Q" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350">
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</embed>
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</object>
and here is the code that DOES work:
HTML:
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<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Gp0HyxQv97Q">
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</param>
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<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Gp0HyxQv97Q" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350">
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</embed>
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</object>
So the answer is simple, just remove that transparency parameters and it should work! I hope more people find this usefull...
P.S. I'd like to thank Amit of Canned !! - my Atropine for creating iG:Syntax Hiliter that shows the code in plain text and in color formating. Great job!
December 21st, 2006
I love how some thing work... Take for instance this article.
Verisign has sole control over the .com suffix, so anyone who wants to use one, must pay Verisign for it. You cannot go anywhere else for it.
Further down this article there is this passage:
Price rises are limited to 7% in any year and six months notice must be given of any proposed increase.
Ok… six months notice… to do what… exactly…?
…
You can not go to another company, and you can not say I disagree. So what exactly is the point of the six month notice?
“Hey, FYI, in about six months you will pay more… ok? Good…”
That’s it! Like I said, I love those kinds of things
December 4th, 2006
And this time it is MS momentum. IE7 is causing a whole lot of problems, so much so that MS has even build an IE7 download blocker! But what is funnier, is that people that say something about it, like this article, are immediately being told off.
Now here is the interesting part: the comments supporting IE7 in this particular article are 100% right; this was a company and its IT director should have been on top of things. He is supposed to know, and have known about problems and fixes for IE7, not to mention the download blocker, instead of a memo (how much of an executive did this guy think himself of to send a memo instead of actually working on the IT infrastructure by blocking the “update”?).
But they are also 100% wrong. IE7 might be an improvement, but it is nor READY yet, and for IE to launch it on their update service before it is ready is… what is the word… is there a word for it?
This is the momentum of “I know that and I will use that” and never bothering with checking what else is available. I have denounced IE for a few months now and I’m happier for it. Were it not for the new MSN that as part of its installation required the IE7 to be installed, I wouldn’t even have IE7. After that I also had a few problems, which resolved themselves after about a week of me fiddling about with settings and finally making IE7 not do anything. It doesn’t detect for connections, it doesn’t bar anything, it doesn’t remember anything, and I don’t use it either. But all my other programs work now.
December 4th, 2006
Well not here… When I decided to let the comments be free, I knew that I would be inviting a lot of spam, but I was hopping that it would not be a problem… silly me…
So far I have received 452 spam comments. The cool part is that none of it actually made it past my little spam filter, namely Akismet! Thanks a million Akismet for keeping this blog open to everyone.
Interestingly, my e-mail has been getting a lot of spam and I wonder how can a simple spam engine on a blog be more efficient than the professional spam filter I have installed for e-mails (I won’t say its name). I never had to setup any special things for Akismet, just the initial setup procedure and it has caught some amazingly smart worded spam!
More interestingly, all the spam started when I talked about Spam Wars in this blog… it’s like the spammers want to punish me or something… (this is the part where we laugh…)
December 3rd, 2006