milliAmp

I’m playing around with my blog and looking at new plugins after upgrading Wordpress

A few weeks ago I wrote an article on trying to get the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid TV Tuner working with New Zealand’s and had a mixed result. Well recently Elgato brought out EyeTV 3.0.2 which seems to fix all the problem I was experiencing with it.

• The interlaced channels now actually play properly.
• The “New Zealand” setting has the correct parameters.
• It doesn’t appear to stutter after playing back a recording after 10 minutes

My only issue now is that the signal strength isn’t particularly great and I’m suffering choppiness and dropouts every 10-20 seconds at some times of the day. By the looks, that is a lot to do with the aerial on the roof and slightly broken wall socket for the aerial. It is still very watchable but it does get frustrating after a while.

We rent the place we’re staying in at the moment and only moved in in March so I hadn’t really paid any attention to the roof, turns out, we only have a VHF/UHF combination aerial unlike 90% of the houses in the area which have a VHF aerial and a medium or fringe UHF aerial. This explains why reception of Prime is so crap.

In Hamilton, an “infill” Freeview|HD transmitter has been set up in the CBD which means that we are approximately 2.5km from it. The big problem is that the aerial isn’t pointing in that direction so we can’t really benefit. To show the difference though, the aerial is probably pointing out to Te Aroha at the moment but I can’t get a stable Freeview signal from the Te Aroha frequencies but I can on the Hamilton Infill frequencies so I have a hunch that if the aerial was facing the infill the reception would significantly improve.

Some approximate trigonometry using Google Earth and a ruler shows at least 15º rotation between the two transmitters from our location.

My next step is to investigate options of repointing the aerial or asking the landlord nicely for a UHF antenna.

☃

Just found this little gem hiding at 0×2603 in Unicode. He looks cute in Kozuka fonts, detailed in Microsoft’s East-Asian fonts, Jewish in the Hiragino font faces and retarded in ‘Arial Unicode MS’.

Unicode has so many awesome characters hidden away, I think I might make a scene up filled with them.

UPDATE: Most of the problems I’ve been having with EyeTV are resolved in EyeTV 3.0.2. I have written an update article that has more detail.

New Zealand recently launched Freeview|HD, a High-Definition free-to-air television service.
There are now two Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) services in New Zealand. The first is a satellite service which launched last year and the newest is a terrestrial High Definition service.

Last year, I bought a satellite-based Freeview box because the television reception at our flat was shocking and there was a Sky satellite dish on the roof when we moved in. Setting that up was a breeze, just plugged in the cables and it practically set itself up.

Two weeks ago, I decided to buy an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid to see whether it could handle the new terrestrial service so we could watch television is crazy resolution. The answer was a resounding “sort-of”. The software that comes with the EyeTV Hybrid and all Elgato’s products is regarded as the best native Mac PVR software, so I really wanted to give it a go.

I took it all home and plugged it into our Mac Mini. I got the software installed and then mucked around trying to figure out which cable coming from the wall was the UHF aerial. There were three cables, one I knew was the satellite as I had our old Freeview box plugged into it. It didn’t take me too long to find which of the other two it was and then it was on to try and get everything set up.

Continue reading “Freeview|HD”

I has been an awfully long time since I last posted here. Many things I could’ve written about, maybe I will in the next few weeks.

Anyway, this post is about Windows Vista. More specifically, installing Windows Vista Business (64bit) onto a Macbook Pro (Santa Rosa).

The Apple Bootcamp drivers that came with my laptop don’t support Windows Vista 64bit so I had to do some digging around to find the drivers that worked and get everything running smoothly.

This information is out there on the web but I found some of the instructions on exactly which driver to choose a little had to understand. Below is a list of the drivers I used to get Vista Business 64bit working on this Macbook Pro.

Video

Hardware: nVIDIA 8600M GT with 256MB RAM
Drivers: nVIDIA ForceWare X 167.62

Audio

Drivers: RealTek R190

Keyboard/Fan

Drivers: Input Remapper 1.0.04
NB: Screen backlight control is not supported on the nVIDIA card yet

Wireless

Drivers: Atheros v7.6.0.83

Ethernet

Drivers: Marvel Yukon v10.57.3.3

This information is mainly from two sources:
http://rumblingsfromdeveloper.blogspot.com/2007/12/macbook-pro-and-vista-64bit-x64-issues.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=149395

With these drivers I got a Windows Experience Index of 4.9
Processor: 5.2
RAM: 4.9
Desktop Graphics: 5.9
Gaming Graphics: 5.5
Primary Hard Disk: 4.9

Alright, “millions of domains” is a bit of an exageration, hundreds is more accurate. 613 to be exact. That’s how many domains one project I’ve been working on has. What makes this situation a little stranger is that all these domains point to the same hosting account. I’ll give a bit more information about the project in a bit.

There is one feature of this project which required a bit of extra thinking and that was having a single-sign-on from any of the domains. The feature would need to allow a user to login from one of the 600 domains and still be logged in if they accessed the site from another. The problem doesn’t get complicated until you add in that the idea was to not have the address in the address bar be a single site but stay at the domain the user typed in and that frame-based “masking” was out due to IE6 SP2 (might have been IE7) by default, blocks third-party cookies - which is what the login cookies would have been if using frame-based “masking”.

My solution to the problem probably isn’t the most elegant but it does the job for now.

When a user enters one of the domains, if there isn’t an authentication cookie in their browser for that domain, a redirect is performed. The user is sent briefly to a central domain which checks if the user is logged in on the central domain and if they are, send back the session_id in the URL. Now, because all these domains ultimately lead to one hosting account on a single server, the session_id sent back works perfectly and allows them to log in. At this point, the system also attaches a cookie to the current domain in case they come back to this one, another redirect won’t be required.

When a user goes to one of the domains but isn’t logged in, they are of course briefly sent to the central domain which comes back saying they aren’t logged in there either and the login page is shown. One filled in the login form is posted back to the central domain which authenicates the details and redirects the user back to the domain they typed in, along with the new session_id. This now means the authentication cookie is set on the central domain and it will now be set on the domain they typed in.

In the past I’ve read hundreds of articles about the failings, “features” and related idiosyncrasies of Internet Explorer but until last week I hadn’t heard of this one. When we tested the site in Internet Explorer we found that every page would load correctly and then, right at the last second, change to the standard 404 error page saying that the page could not be found. If the user had turned off the “friendly” error pages in Internet Explorer the site performed fine.

I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t too sure where to start.

After thinking for a while, I checked the headers being sent by the server, they were all fine and dandy. Next I started ripping code haphazardly from the page until the quirk didn’t exhibit itself any more. Turned out that the whole problem was located in the stylesheet. To confirm this, I emptied the stylesheet and reloaded the page, it was fine.

After chopping back and chopping back and then slowly adding back in, I discovered that our designer had used the csshover.htc behaviour file to allow :hover on all elements in Internet Explorer 6. He has used this before successfully many, many times so I knew that something else was amiss.

Anyway, 5 minutes later I discovered that is was being referenced incorrectly from the stylesheet, the URL was given relative to the main page^[1]. The 404 was being generated when the onload event fired for the page when it couldn’t find the .htc to include.

Moral of the story, check your damn code people. A missing forward slash in a stylesheet turned into a 45-minute debugging session.

Another one to chalk up as to why Internet Explorer should die.

^[1] For whatever reason, I think IE was looking for the behaviour in the folder relative to the CSS (which is correct), not finding it and then looking relative to the document it was included from. I say this because the front page didn’t give the 404 whereas every other page did.

If you are a mid-eighties child and haven’t already got your tickets to the Transformers Movie, do it now. I went and watched it tonight at the new Chartwell theatre. It is incredible, made it so much cooler remembering everything from the cartoon in my childhood.

Also, amazingly we managed to get it 5 days before USA, awesome.

Steve Jobs has issued a Hot News article detailing Apple’s stance on DRM and it’s future. I’m going to go so far as to say he has laid down a challenge in full public view to the big 4 Music Distribution Companies. However I can see that his account serves only to appease the public’s wrath due to Apple not licensing it’s FairPlay DRM technology to other companies, I can’t see the big wigs in the music world even reading the article, let alone uttering more than a chuckle.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

This is the obligatory blog entry warning that I have upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 and to ask anyone who finds something that used to be working, now broken, to comment here.

I might make an AJaX Askimet spam counter plugin (if I can’t find one already done) for my sidebar. It’s amazing how much spam attempts to hit my blog. Is there a conspiracy going on. Does askimet make up spam to make it look like it’s stopping a lot more spam than is actually getting submitted?

Statistics time:

• I installed Askimet on October 11, 2006.
• Since then it has stopped 7,884 spam comments.
• That averages to 68 spam comments a day.
• 925 of those were in the last 15 days.
• The average over the last 15 days is then 62 spam a day.
• It is currently letting through less than 1% of that into my moderation queue.
• Because of my moderation settings, a total of 0 have made it to my blog.

I should really just turn on compulsory registration or try referer checking as well as Askimet but this is fun so I’ll leave like this for a while longer.

EDIT: After watching the access logs (using tail -f access_log | grep wp-comments-post.php) I have found a couple of interesting things. The first is that all the spam that is trying to hit my blog does in fact have a valid referer and a valid User-Agent. The referer is that of various posts in my blog and the User-Agent happens to all be "Opera/9.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)". These requests are either spoofed IP packets or are from a bot-net as the IPs are all over the show.

Just for fun, I’ve done a little .htaccess file hacking which now “403 Access Denied”’s them based on various information I’ve discovered from the access_log, I just want to see if I can stop the spam even getting to Askimet.