pluzzi.com

November 16, 2008

Its been a while since I posted.  And even longer since I posted something about audio.  But more and more, I get people asking me about what sites I used to get my music from.  Personally, I dont trust peer to peer sharing sites like the old Napster, or Morpheus, or LimeWire.  Instead, whatever I dont already have on CD, or get from friends and peers - I actually purchase.  But not from the iTunes store at a buck a piece.  I use the following two sites … (its down to one now, as mp3sugar.com seems dead and gone)  :

• www.gomusic.ru (a derivative of www.mp3search.ru)

So for me, I use those, and get all I want.  They have album purchase discounts, and at year end holidays they have great discounts too.

Another site I just learned about that is very slick, is www.theradio.com - which lets you search by keyword for any artist or any song.  It brings up a matching list, and you click on the one that makes the closest match - and it starts playing, just like that !

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October 26, 2008

Wrapping up an old project today, I shutdown my Twiki server, since I have settled on DekiWiki instead.  “There can only be one” … even though there are still two.

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September 28, 2008

Retired SmoothFW today, along with the MAIN-BG wireless SSID.   No longer using either of these, so the firewall was powered down and retired, and the wrt54g that was serving the MAIN-BG network was added onto one of the others that still remains.

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September 7, 2008

Updated my “jigl” wrapper scripts, which are what I use to create my photo albums online.  Its a pure linux based “hands free” approach, which runs from cron and never needs maintenance.  It uses the free jigl perl script that I downloaded many many years ago.   The way it works for me, is that my users just secure copy their pictures up to their websites, and cron runs every hour to look for new pictures/folders/etc - and just create new slides from them.  Im still using version 1.1 of jigl, but its now up to 2.0 at this point.  Anyway, my wrapper script update now recurses through subdirectories, because I have one user that is no longer “flat” in their directory structure … so it now handles subdirectories.   Note that its actually not “jigl” thats updated though - its my wrapper scripts that loop through the pictures directories, and then in turn place the call to jigl.  I do it this way isntead of using jigl’s “recurse” option because of the way I name the slide indexes - and due to some of the options I use, which can vary from folder to folder, or directory to directory.  FYI - the jigl wrapper script info is here.

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August 29, 2008

While working on other things today, received an alert that my Suse 10 box had suddenly reached sustained peak cpu usage.  I logged in, checked “top” and some other things,  confirmed that the Compaq/HP utilities had run amok.   So I ran the “/etc/init.d/hpasm restart” command, and within moments, things were normalized again.

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August 27, 2008

While not really a technical issue, its something worth posting.  I found three great sites for doing phone number lookups for annoying callers.  I’ve been getting alot of “out of area” numbers calling and not leaving messages.  So the first site is called “800 notes” and the second site is called “who calls me” and the third/final one is “who called” - and all are pretty useful - so Im posting for all to use.

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August 14, 2008

While not much help for all of you, its just a note for myself that today is when I finally put a NAT/forwarding rule in my network to allow my DNS to work at the same address as all my remote clients.  Historically mine had always been a different address here, than all those clients.  Today I finally configured a rule so that when I go to the same address my clients use, it works here too.  So it makes it alot easier now to move the laptops between sites, and I no longer have to change the tcp/ip settings each time to make it work.  I should have done this years ago …

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August 13, 2008

Updated my SmoothWall Express 3.0 firewall today.  I previously had the first udpate added, but have been having problems getting update2 for the last 8 weeks or so.  Today, saw that update 3 was out now too - and STILL having trouble.  Found two good posts about how to deal with it here and here .  So in the end, I downloaded them manually from the download site for update2 and update3 (which were *tough* to find) and am instead using the upload method shown in the posts.  Doing that was much better.

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August 11, 2008

Anyone ever hear of a camera shop called TechonDigital ?  They are one of those clown operations that advertise the lowest price, but wont actually sell to you unless you submit to buying additional products from them at highly overpriced amounts.  Its such a scam - which is in fact why they wont automatically process your web orders until you contact them, listen to their ever confrontational and annoying sales people, and then argue your way off the phone.  So if you are in the market for any electronics - cameras or otherwise - I  highly encourage you to avoid this place and give your business to a trustworthy, reputable place of business like NewEgg or many of the other 5 star places.

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August 8, 2008

So I finally updated my backup Internet connection line.  Primarily I use the cable service, on a commercial account.  But sometimes it goes out on me, and while I can get credit for the downtime, its the service that I want.  As a result, I had setup a DSL line as a backup about 2 years ago.  Since my firewall is a linux box and not an appliance, I have control to do what I need on it.  So I have written 2 perl scripts that continually check if my primary account is up or not - if yes, it sets that as the preferred route - but if its down, it uses the DSL as the preferred route.  That way, its always up and I dont have to do anything to make it work.  So I had the lowest DSL option - 768k/128k line - and was paying $19.99 per month.   Since I still dont have FIOS available in my area yet, when I called about my options today, they told me I can upgrade to 3M/1.5M for $29.99 per month, and get the first three months for my current price.  So if you ask me, thats a no brainer.  So I can finally say that my backup line is just about as good as my primary line, and there is no more speed suffering when it goes down.  And I didnt have to do anything other than pickup the phone.

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July 31, 2008

Found a great site that I had not previously known about, to create the virtual machines for use in VMWare Player. The site is called Easy VMX and its a very slick web interface that allows the creation of these files. Then the free VMWare Player will just run it like it was built normally in any other VMWare product. Of course now all the VMWare software is free, one way or another, even down to ESXi now, but this is still useful/good information to know about.

Also added a bunch of great new Firefox 3.0 add-on’s today :

• Domain Details — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2166
• Extended Statusbar — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1433
• Favicon Picker 3 — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7849
• Fission — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1951
• gui:config — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5523
• Print/Print Preview — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1778
• Vimperator — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4891
• ErrorZilla Mod — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3336
• DNS Cache — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5914
• DNSStuff Toolbar — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/827
• FireShot — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5648
• GA? - Is Google Analytics Installed — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5631
• Header Spy — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4276
• HttpFox — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6647
• Live HTTP Headers — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829

Thats it

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July 28, 2008

After much pain with Firefox lately, I think I have found the issue with why it keeps crashing.  As near as I can tell, its related to the new AVG8’s “Link Scanner” feature.  When I disabled that feature in AVG8 the browser stopped crashing.

When I installed AVG8, I chose not to use the  security toolbar, but the link checking feature was turned on.  This link scanning seems to try and protect us against going to bad sites.  You can really see it at work when you go to something like google or yahoo, beacuse next to each link is a rating from AVG.  But for me, it was crashing when going to linksys’s support site, or replying to a mail in YahooMail, or things like that - VERY annoying.  Disabling this AVG feature has helped with Firefox versions 2.0.0.15, 2.0.0.16, and 3.0.1 so far.  So I’m fairly confident that this was the root cause.

The feature is located in the main screen of AVG8’s main interface.  Just double click the tray icon, Right click on the Link Scanner icon, choose open, uncheck the “Enable AVG Search Shield” and any other boxes there, and save the changes.   Right click on the Link Scanner icon once again, and this time choose “Ignore Component State”, which will prevent the tray icon from showing error status for this.

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July 16, 2008

Posted new page in my wiki about how I set up my PC view of my Tivo’s Now Playing lists.  This will definitely need to be updated/tuned at some point, but the data is out there for now.

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July 9, 2008

Anyone who’s ever seen my Windows desktop, has seen how many browser windows I have open, and how many tabs in each.  On average, there are 3-4 windows, with 12-15 tabs in each.  Easily over 30 open sessions at any given time - many of which auto refresh.  Its sort of like a command console.  However, the  last few tabs of the 3rd window, or all of the 4th window if required - are filled with things I have to search/find, and are not in my bookmarks or other pre-recorded places.   Well recently, my Firefox 2.0.0.14 was crashing when I went to www.linksys.com and viewed their forums or download pages.  Evertime it tried to re-open, it would crash again.  I tried manually editing the sessionstore.js and sessionstore.bak files, but with the sheer volume of data in that file (120k +), it was just too daunting.  Thats when I stumbled on this little nugget of pure genius !  Simply pasting the contents of my sessionsstore.js in the proper spot in that code snippet, and saving on my local drive as “sessionstore.html” was all it took.  I opened that up, and it tabled out, VERY NICELY, each browser window and browser tab I had, and all the session history for each tab.  I was able to successfully recover my shopping carts for my truck shocks, my troubleshooting sessions, and all the wiki sites I was at.  The big thing was though - I use Flock now - screw Firefox crashing on me.  Im not saying I dont like Firefox, I use it almost everywhere else without issue - but on this PC, its just not cutting it, but Flock is.  ANd thats even after the Firefox 3.0 upgrade.   Could be issue with my release, plus the AVG8.0, plus the ZoneAlarm Im using … who knows.  But Flock works, and Im moving on.

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July 6, 2008

Original post from July 2 was removed, and recreated today.  Also setup option that I dont allow anonymous comments anymore.  Im tired of dealing with the spammers.  So here’s the original July 2 posting :

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Going absolutely crazy lately, trying to boot knoppix on my daily driver, athlonxp workstation. Its running XP, SP1, and works great for most things. Its got a ton of stuff on it, so I need to preserve it all. Problem is, few years back when I installed it, I setup the C:\ drive as FAT32 to allow me to do repairs if needed. At that time, I had gone through alot of repairs using Knoppix to boot and fix issues - and NTFS writeability wasnt yet present. So the safe bet was FAT32. However, I need to upgrade to SP2 on this box, so that I can load AVG8.0 but there isnt enough free space on the drive. And I cant compress, because its FAT32, not NTFS and that feature isnt present in FAT32. So before I do the FAT32->NTFS conversion, I want to have a backup copy of the C:\ partition - otherwise I risk losing everything.

Long story short, after MANY MANY repeated attempts at booting knoppix, it just kept hanging on the “looking for Knoppix on /dev/hdc” line, and never progressed. Older releases (like 3.2) would fail with the message about cant find filesystem - but newer ones (like 5.3.1) just hang on the /dev/hdc line. I tried DSL, Puppy, Knoppix, and others - and all did the same thing. I tried booting USB, but my BIOS doesnt support it. I tried command line parameters in all combinations of : nodma, noagp, noapic, nolapic, acpi=off, pci=bios, pnpbios=off, all-generic-ide, irqpoll, vga, and others. None of them worked. What finally got me booted, was unplugging my second DVD writer. I have 2 of them in this machine. Im not using cable select, and have master/slave jumpered properly, but it just wouldnt work with both drives. So unplugged one, booted from the other, backed up my drive, and am finally moving on …

So after doing all that, many posts online recommended defrag before convert. So I went to do my defrag, and found that I didnt have enough free space - I had 7% free, but it wants 15% free. Then the cleanup began, on a drive that I had already cleaned up as much as I could. Biggest gains were by moving the “c:\windows\driver cache”, “c:\windows\help”, c:\windows\system32\dllcache” folders over to a hold area, and running the info found here and here, notably the “sfc /PURGECACHE” and “sfc /CACHESIZE=10″ to limit to 10Mb going forward (instead of 300Mb+). That gave me enough room (more than 15% - actually 19%) to run my defrag, and then the convert (convert.exe c: /fs:ntfs). The defrag took about an hour, the convert about 10 minutes. All good at that point.

Then was able to successully upgrade to SP2, add AVG8, and get the bb client tuned appropriately. So finally, I can do web browsing, file downloads, and safe Internet work again.

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July 1, 2008

Had a few issues while trying to add AVG8.0 to a laptop. its an older laptop, had XP (no SP’s on it) and was working fine. However, upgrade from AVG7 to AVG8 requires SP2 to be installed. Doing that caused me issue with ZoneAlarm, which was an older release. So had to uninstall that also. Finally got SP2 on, AVG8 on, ZoneAlarm upgraded - and thats when the basement water cam started going whacky. Its an iCatch VI camera, and worked fine on non-SP XP. But after SP2, its pure black screen, and takes 100% cpu.  Wasnt sure, so upgraded EasyWebCam software from 3.4.0 to 3.6.5, but still didnt help.  Solution turned out to be upgrading drivers to the ones found on this page. That got it mostly good - but then the picture was PURE green. Had to launch the video properties widget and tune it so that it used “outdoor” settings. Some other contrast/hue/brightness/color tweaks got me “mostly good” again. Actually , quality is even better than before now, so its good to be done with that. Took about 8 hours start to finish to get this crap working … all so that I can see if my basement ever tries to flood on me again ….

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June 29, 2008

Had a problem with  a “stuck keyboard” on my DL380 vmware server today.  Actually, there’s been a faint beeping sound coming from the server room for 2 days now, and I finally traced it to something on that host, but didnt know what.  After trying to connect into it, and finding about 15 help screens up,  I brought up a command prompt, and letters just kept typing like crazy.  So I determined that the beeping was the stuck keys.  So I had to power it down, because just unplugging the keyboard wouldnt stop the beeping.  So I brought down the three wiki engines, and the roundcube mail application and bounced it.

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June 25, 2008

Decided to start messing with OpenFiler so I could develop my own “affordable” redundant NAS. I have 2 of the Lacie 1Tb EtherDisk devices (which you can read about in other posts here), and wanted to add those plus some of my other storage into a unified, usable, format.   Details available on the wiki.

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June 18, 2008

Having problems with the Lacie 1Tb NAS again. This time it was with permissions. Since I have 2 usernames I use regularly, call them “user-a” and “user-aa”, and I had “user-aa” already created, it wouldnt let me create the “user-a” and kept telling me it was already present. I can only assume its doing something like a grep internally, and not properly looking for words, but instead searching for substrings - or should I say accepting substrings. So what I had to do was to remove “user-aa”, then add “user-a” FIRST, then re-add “user-aa”. That seemed to work. Not sure if it will create problems later or not, but we’ll surely find out. Also disabled all Apple file sharing services while updating the permissions.

Also had to replace a bad video card in my vmware-dev box, which is just a whitebox pc.  It kept hanging at the boot screen after the windows logo disappears and the login box should appear.  Replacing the card resolved that issue.

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June 2, 2008

Well, my Fedora8 instance hung again.  I had to hard reset the virtual machine to get it going.  I guess this is repeat enough to warrant looking into VMServer upgrade, Fedora upgrade, upgrade of virtual tools, or replacement for Fedora Core 8 … we’ll see.

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