Dave and I came up with this creative public shaming today at lunch. Full credit to Dave for the actual work.
This is what happens when you don’t pay your hosting bill for several months. I’m sick of your excuses. 🙂
Dave and I came up with this creative public shaming today at lunch. Full credit to Dave for the actual work.
This is what happens when you don’t pay your hosting bill for several months. I’m sick of your excuses. 🙂
I picked up my copy of BioShock at EBGames in Conestoga Mall this evening, and even after having played the demo, the experience was no less dulled. I’m taking my time through the first round of the game, because the artwork and plotline is really something to be appreciated.
And the sound. What an experience. The creepy, ambient noise is fully enjoyed with the volume maxed out.
Definite recommendation for an Xbox 360 purchase, right here. I’ve heard the PC version’s good… but the 360 version, on a widescreen HDTV with a 5.1 system, is absolutely incredible.
It’s been about 20 days since I was last able to crank out a post for the site – I’ve started a few entries but haven’t been able to finish anything of substance.
Work has primarily been what’s on my mind. I’ve finished – or at least stabilized – a large custom application for my job, which has new heights of reliability and performance compared to something like SharePoint Server and Project Server 2007.
For reference, and for any of you tasked with implementing a Windows 2003 Server / IIS / SharePoint / Project Server installation should read the available documents and get some good books first. Then, plan to install it at least five times before you get the hang of it. Here are just a few things that could, or did, go wrong during my test implementation:
Don’t get me wrong – SharePoint, when installed and running properly, is a really neat collaboration tool that supports wikis, discussion boards, and all other manner of accountable content. When adding the Project Web Access component, though, strap yourself in and prepare for a wild adventure of babysitting installation processes.
In personal news, I’m still running the RC1 build of Windows Home Server, which is actually a remarkably long time for me to run any particular OS. I’ve heard rumblings of possible releases, and I would like to move to the RTM version, but so far none of my sources have been forthcoming. One thing I’d like the ability to do is dedicate a larger partition size to my System drive, which was locked at 20GB when I installed the operating system. After a few installations, my Program Files directory looks like it needs to be relocated.
For the record, don’t attempt to install Steam to your D:\shares storage pool. You’ll get miscellaneous errors and it’s just not worth the hassle.
Hardware news? I recently bumped up to a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 4GB RAM for my main box, and added a Tuniq Tower 120 for cooling. The heatsink, besides being comparable with the “fins of death” passively cooling a Compaq Celeron 333 I once owned, is quite the nice addition and is currently allowing a 3GHz overclock with no issues. I still might need to tweak things a bit, but this guide at Anandtech was quite helpful getting the initial settings configured. As it stands, WinRAR absolutely flies when cranking out archives.
I think the biggest problem in my setup right now is the speed of disk access; Windows Home Server runs a drive rebalancing service in the background and often it seems like it’s kicking in at the least convenient moment. There’s an appreciable difference going from a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda drive to a 10K RPM Western Digital Raptor. I’d like to see what running two Raptors in a RAID-0 configuration adds, but the drives are expensive enough that it’s not an idle experiment worth performing.
Edit: fixed some poor grammar.
ArsTechnica writes that Remote Desktop for Mac 2.0 beta has finally been released. It’s now a Universal Binary, which means that it runs natively on Intel OS X systems, while consuming less RAM and picking up speed. Apparently this version will expire in March 2008, which means we’ll have to see another update before then.
I’ll be trying this first thing tonight, as my client of choice for a while now has been CoRD which supports “tabbed” sessions for multiple connections.
Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to achieve the proverbial “holy grail” of display resolutions with my Sony KF-42E200A television. These series of TV’s also go by the series name E2000; the A in E200A indicates the Canadian model of this set. They use LCD rear projection technology, and are nearly deprecated in favour of people wanting thinner LCD panel or plasma TV’s. I, however, enjoy the more accurate colour reproduction, wealth of inputs and inexpensive nature of this particular 42″ set. It also has a replaceable lamp in the event that it dies.
However, it’s buyer beware for this TV when attempting to use the system as a home theatre PC; because the E2000 series has deprecated a VGA port in place of two HDMI inputs, you have to be wary of what resolution you decide to send it. The TV is “smart” enough to detect common PC resolutions (800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864) and tries to adapt them to the screen size, but also detects common HDTV resolutions (720x480p, 1280x720p, 1920x1080i.) When a HDTV resolution is detected, the TV automatically “overscans” the content:
This is perfectly acceptable for DVD and game console content, because all of those devices compensate for overscanning when outputting video. However, when it comes to PC usage, your desktop often gets cut off, making it fairly difficult to see certain icons and controls. You do have several options: changing the resolution or resizing the desktop within your ATI Catalyst Control Center / nVidia Desktop Manager. For my 8500GT, I can’t use PowerStrip or similar programs to force a custom resolution because the driver support’s not there.
In any event, what I’ve found so far is that setting the resolution to 1152×648 (I’m using a DVI to HDMI cable) will give a 1:1 pixel mapping resolution, with a slight amount of black borders around the edges. Then, using the nVidia control panel, I changed the resolution to 1280×720 and selected “do not resize my desktop” in the HDTV settings panel. Afterwards, I switched the desktop back to 1152×648 for standard PC usage.
When configuring Windows Media Center, I chose a 720p resolution, which automatically compensates for the overscan issue and uses the nVidia 1280×720 settings.
Reference links that may assist in your efforts are at AVSForum:
Sony E2000 Settings/Tweak Thread
The Official Sony E2000 series Thread
Setting up PowerStrip to yield 1:1 Pixel Mapping on Sony A10 LCD RPTV
In an effort to be regular with my content – considering this week has not been kind to my posting schedule – I’ll continue with “Random Links of Interest Friday”. Here’s what I’ve stumbled across this week:
It’s “System Administration Saturday”, which is my new informal term for all the maintenance and hijinks required to maintain a stable home network and computing environment each week. I have a significantly overcomplicated LAN, but it’s necessary to maintain the concept of “access from anywhere” that I enjoy being able to use.
Along with the usual maintenance required during the week, one of the things I figure I should do is maintain a real-life changelog of what goes on so that I know what might’ve recently been changed. Today’s can be summarized as:
Along with these changes, I’ve compiled a list of several potential new upgrades that would be “nice to have” items whenever I get a bit of spare cash:
Item | Timeframe/Rationale |
---|---|
Additional 500GB SATA2 drive | When space in server is below 200GB free |
5-port gigabit Ethernet switch | One month; improve HD video streaming performance |
24″ + widescreen monitor | Eventually or when 21″ CRT dies |
Download server replacement: needs PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet | End of year; will likely be repurposed media center PC |
Edit: Fixed table formatting to be less… wide.
I don’t really have much in the way of new or interesting music to recommend to people. Phil‘s Thursday posts of random greatness pretty much have that covered, and my iTunes library contains quite a number of bands that are distinctly on the side of “emo“, “screamo” or “god why do you have that.” Sure, there’s the occasional excellent band like Ill Scarlett, and a reasonable selection of popular music (Top 40 radio promo albums), but frankly I’m more on the consumer end of things rather than the trendsetter.
In lieu of providing MP3 filezzzz, then, I figured I’d provide some interesting links that have shown up in my browser history this week.
Any links you’ve run into this week that are interesting, useful or amusing?
Let’s say you have a shared web hosting account on a random cheap provider, and the only way to access the MySQL server is to either connect from an SSH command line or use phpMyAdmin. While both of these options are okay, in some circumstances it’s not exactly wise to have a phpMyAdmin installation publically accessible, as it lends itself to repeated bruteforce attacks and is subject to server configuration changes. I know on my personal server, there have often been times that I’ve inadvertently left a myAdmin installation wide open for anyone to monkey with the database.
I also enjoy using an application called SQLyog, which is a Windows GUI tool for managing MySQL databases. The Community Edition of the application has proven to be more than sufficient for my random projects, and I highly suggest anyone doing database work on Windows take a look at the application.
Using some details from this article, with an updated version of PuTTY, here’s how I go about configuring my local system to connect to a remote MySQL server:
Start PuTTY:
Define your connection settings and save them:
Navigate to the Connection / SSH / Tunnels view, and provide the following settings:
Source Port: 3306
Destination: localhost:3306
(This assumes you don’t have a MySQL server running on your local machine. If you do, change localhost:3306 to localhost:freeport where freeport is the number of a free port on your workstation.)
Click the Add button, then save your connection settings. In the Forwarded Ports list, you should see L3306 localhost:3306.
Open the connection and sign in to the remote system.
Start SQLyog and define a connection to localhost:3306.
Your connection will be tunnelled through SSH to the remote server transparently. Make sure that you close SQLyog before you close the PuTTY tunnel.
Let me know how this works for your development situations – even if you have direct access to the MySQL server, you should still check out SQLyog for database development if you haven’t already tried it.
It’s Monday, and I’m back from a weekend excursion to the States. While some of my esteemed associates were doing pub crawls and partaking in other local festivities, my entire family opted to head down to an outlet mall in Grove City, PA to acquire some inexpensive American merchandise. As Dave’s Canadian retailers post mentions, there is really no excuse for some of the pricing disparities between Ontario and a comparable state.
And yes, the title of this post is accurate: On most clothing, there is no state sales tax, which is otherwise 6%. When you buy a ridiculously overpriced (yet trendy) sweater from, say, Hollister – the exorbitant price on the tag is the exorbitant price on the receipt, and nothing else goes to the government.
I speak specifically about a retailer like Hollister as I had the opportunity to go into one of these stores (this is in a different mall, not the Grove City outlets) while in the States. For those unfamiliar with them, the store is constructed like a beachfront cabin:
The entire store’s construction is an overabundant exercise in target marketing to the 12-25 year old demographic. As soon as you walk on to the “deck”, there are two sides to the store – one for guys, one for girls. There’s also an immediate assault of their in-house scents, as well as overly obnoxious “surfer dude”-style music. If you’ve heard any pop/rock from Warped Tour – basically any new music produced by RIAA labels that isn’t screamo – that’s about what you’d hear. From memory – I heard songs from Halifax, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, and some group with a surfer-style remix of “Message in a Bottle”.
From a technical perspective, the music is customer-controllable by a touchscreen beside the cash register area, which would make an interesting programming project (think managed queues, plus audio output.) They also have the relevant CD’s for sale at the register, which is a good way to push merchandise from other categories. Hey, if you’ve heard the song in the store, why not pick up the entire album?
After nearly dropping my jaw at the prices of some of the shorts and jeans available there, I went to the clearance section (at the back of the store, obviously) and managed to pick up some decently priced items. I now own a new bathing suit, plus a few shirts that I haven’t gotten for free from software companies!
Next on the list of stores in the mall was a place called Steve & Barry’s, who specialize in incredibly inexpensive clothing, as well as hilariously inappropriate shirts. I purchased several of these items, which you will see in person over the next few weeks. Unfortunately one of the best shirts in the store wasn’t in stock at all: it was a map of the state, overlaid with an Amish buggy and a marker for the town of Intercourse. The caption on the shirt? “Intercourse, PA. Come again!”
The Grove City outlet mall is a haven for decent and cheap merchandise. The trick to the experience is shopping at stores that have “Outlet” or “Factory Store” in the title, and immediately going towards the back of the building towards the deals.
Possibly one of the best deals in the place, besides the ubiquitous clothing, was the Sony outlet store. A set of MDR-EX71SL earbuds that go for $60CDN are available, refurbished, for $19.99 US. The next model up (MDR-EX81SL) goes for $29.99 US. I’ve had the 71SL’s since last year’s trip, and the 81’s available this year are even better. I’d highly recommend these for anyone wanting a high-quality set of earbuds for their MP3 player.
Article Update, January 7, 2009
The Hollister depicted in the photo above is not the one in your mall. I guarantee it. All Hollister locations look the same in every mall; it’s part of their branding.