Doug’s Blog

I was in Best Buy the other day browsing some wi-fi access points and came across the WRT54G2 which seemed to suit my purposes. On the back of the box I encountered this interesting piece of marketing material:

Now seriously, what the hell? They’re using a fading scale to indicate the uses? So I suppose “Multiple Computers” is vaguely recommended? And “Streaming Music” seems to be slightly recommended? I suppose the usage icon on the far right is downright not recommended, but can’t we just get an honest do or don’t from the usage guide?

And then the marketing team seems to have their own rating system which is not explained anywhere and is completely unhelpful. Ok, so “High Performance” is rated N++! Are you kidding me? What the hell is a “N”, and what does a plus sign indicate? What would “N–” mean?

The back of the box should be a case study in a marketing class on what not to do!

A quick tech tip… there are actually TWO WRT54G2 models floating around on shelves. DO NOT buy the one that has this silly thing on the back of the box, it actually has less onboard memory than the other model. But they both cost the same.

I was running into ALL kinds of problems with WMP on Vista (64, but I hear 32 is bad also) where it was not ripping my CDs into MP3s, getting errors when trying to even play my CDs, and generally confusing the hell out of me. It was NOT a codec problem, everything was normal on my system. In fact, it would play about 30 seconds of a song and then throw an error.

But I just upgraded to Windows 7, and now my WMP is working fine!

So now I have Microsoft’s new tagline for their advertisements they are plastering all over hell and back: “Windows 7: You can play music now!”

Quick tip on getting sshd to accept authorized connections on Fedora 11… I did all the main things but still had problems, those things are:

1. check permissions on your .ssh directory and authorized_keys file

2. make sure /etc/ssh/sshd_config allows authorized_key connections, although this is almost always on by default

And still no luck; it turns out I had to upgrade my key from RSA to DSA!

So, use “ssh-keygen -r dsa” and use the key it provides, that did the trick for me.

I have some old ReplayTV’s in use in my home setup, and sometimes they act up on me. The usual thing is they no longer are able to tune into the cable signal (”no video signal” errors).

Here are the steps I need to take to fix them:

1) Press the power button to turn the unit off.
2) Disconnect the RF coax cable from the back of the unit.
3) Unplug the unit’s power cord from the wall.
4) Reconnect the RF coax cable to the back of the unit.
5) Wait at least one minute.
6) Plug the unit’s power cord back in and allow it to boot up.
7) Enjoy flawless ReplayTV operation.

I’m configuring a new desktop setup for myself, using dual Nvidia 9600 GSO cards so I can hook up 3-4 monitors. I’ve been using Fedora more than other distros, so I wanted to stick with it for now (although I was tempted, after running into this issue, to jump to Ubuntu).

I had problems getting the DVD bootup to go into graphical mode, it kept showing an error that it couldn’t start X, and would continue with text mode. Of course, this is less than ideal since the text mode doesn’t have all the nice install options (not sure why) so I needed to figure it out.

The easy solution was to remove one of the cards and try again! This did the trick, and now I have Fed11 nicely running on the one card powering two monitors. Another thing to note is that I had to install Nvidia’s linux drivers. Also note, that if you run “yum update” after installing those drivers, you will need to re-install them one more time since yum will overwrite their functions.

My next step is to plug in the 2nd card and see if it is recognized properly and I can get 3 monitors going in independent configurations…

[Update] I added the second card after the fact, and now have 3 monitors hooked up nicely with no problems!

OK, here’s an odd one I encountered on one of my older servers running Apache2 and PHP 5.2.5

I had php scripts failing and generating “500″ errors on the browser because they were running too long, or sometimes because a large file was being uploaded. I spent time playing with php.ini variables, only to find out that PHP wasn’t processing some of them!

Using phpinfo(), I noticed that the vars were not being set via php.ini, which I had set properly when it was compiled, ala:

'./configure --with-apxs2=/opt/apache2/bin/apxs --with-mysql=/opt/mysql --with-zlib --with-config-file-path=/etc/php.ini --with-curl=/usr/lib64 --with-pear=/usr/share/pear --libdir=lib64 --with-pdo-mysql --with-gettext --enable-bcmath --with-oci8=instantclient,/home/instantclient10_1' '--enable-sigchild --with-pdo-oci=instantclient,/home/instantclient10_1,10.1.0.5'

I didn’t want to risk affecting the system by re-installing PHP, so instead I found the workaround was to create a .htaccess file that contained:

php_value upload_max_filesize 8M
php_value max_execution_time 600


and this did the trick! So hopefully that helps anyone who is running this version of php and encountered this problem.

Well, I’m in the process of configuring a new Vista Ultimate system on an Intel 64-bit cpu.

One of the first problems I had was I wanted to get the google screensaver working. I downloaded Picassa and that includes the screensaver app, but I was not seeing it as an option on my windows control panel screensaver section!

Turns out you need to:

Go to C:\Windows\SysWOW64 folder, copy the file
GPhoto.scr and paste it in to the C:\Windows\System32 folder.

Now it works great! Now if only google will adapt it to allow arrow controls to go back/forward through the photos.

One more note… if you using windows media player to play music, you’ll need to go into tools->options and check the “allow screensaver during playback” box to have the screensaver work when music is playing.

I’ve been using ontok’s API for geocoding for a few years now, and all of a sudden my routines were getting errors! It turns out their domain expired!

I’m not sure why they let that happen, I’m hoping they just didn’t pay attention and it will be back up soon. Maybe I should just call Sourabh!

Domain Name: ONTOK.COM
Created on: 20-May-05
Expires on: 20-May-09
Last Updated on: 20-May-08

Administrative Contact:
niyogi, sourabh  niyogi@mit.edu
humdaq, inc.
55 Grove St
Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
United States
6177641078      Fax –