Running Firefox 3 and Firefox 4 side by side

Posted by neilhighley on March 25, 2011 None comments

The Firefox 4 javascript engine is many times faster than the current 3.6 version, so if you have any javascript heavy sites, this may be useful.

To run 3 and 4 side by side you can do the following;

1) Install 4 to a seperate folder (e.g. “C:Program Files (x86)Mozilla Firefox 4″)
2) Copy shortcut in Mozilla Firefox start menu and rename “Firefox 4″, point the shortcut target to the Firefox 4 installation and add the following to the shortcut target -profilemanager.
3) Start Firefox with the link edited in step 2, the profile manager will popup.
4) Create a Firefox 4 profile and a Firefox 3 profile.
5)Continue and start with Firefox 4, as that was the link you clicked on.
6) Repeat the same with Firefox 3, pointing the shortcut target to the default firefox folder, or reinstalling to a Firefox 3 destination.
Ensure that the -profilemanager switch is in the target;
e.g.
For Firefox 3 Shortcut : “C:Program Files (x86)Mozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe” -profilemanager
For Firefox 4 Shortcut : “C:Program Files (x86)Mozilla Firefox 4firefox.exe” -profilemanager
7) When you start firefox using these shortcuts, it will prompt you to use a particular profile.

Flash 11.0 “Molehill” released

Posted by neilhighley on February 27, 2011 None comments

At the Flash Gaming Summit today, a simultaneuous launch of Moelhill, alongside the major vendors of flash 3rd party 3d engines occured.
These included;
Away3D (http://www.away3d.com/)
Alternativa (http://alternativaplatform.com/en/alternativa3d/)

Minko
- Quake 3d on flash ( http://aerys.in/minko-quake-3 )
and rumour has it… Unity 3D (www.unity3d.com) will have a publish to flash pipeline in the works. CONFIRMED: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/02/27/unity-flash-3d-on-the-web/

Currently, Away3D has lots of demos on their site.

However, to run the demos you need to install the latest flash player incubator (FP11) from the adobe labs site at http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplatformruntimes_incubator.html

Once this is installed, head over to Away3D and either download the demoes locally via SVN or play them in your FP11 enabled browser.
Away3D are codenaming their API which hooks into the new FP11 capabilities, Broomstick.
http://not-so-stupid.com/clients/not-so-stupid/away4/duck/ (~180k Polygons)
http://infiniteturtles.co.uk/projects/away3d/broomstick/LoaderMD5Test.html ( interactive walking figure (~ 3k poly of a DOOM character)
http://infiniteturtles.co.uk/projects/away3d/broomstick/ShallowWaterDemo.html (80k poly, interactive liquid demo)

Alternativa platform has better demos, but the source isn’t available, possibly because of its commercial status;

http://alternativaplatform.com/en/showcase/

- Very impressive racing car sim demo ( http://alternativaplatform.com/en/demos/maxracer/ )

I have seen posts mentioning upwards of 300k polys on screen at once, which would easily raise flash into a whole new level of browser based entertainment.

A couple of bloggers have already posted demos;

http://www.mcfunkypants.com/

http://www.bytearray.org/?p=2810

and here is the link to the Gaming Summit and content files;

http://www.flashgamingsummit.com/

Restricting an ASDA Mobile to SMS only outgoing calls

Posted by neilhighley on September 28, 2010 None comments

Just bought my boy his first phone and heard that you could bar outgoing calls, but allow outgoing SMSs.

Sounds dandy methinks.

However, as with all tech these days, the solution is never as simple as ringing up customer services, as I found out.

So, to help those parents who want to give their kids a phone and much prefer them texting than getting phone calls, etc, here are the codes, gleaned from the fact that ASDA mobile is actually a MNVO and runs over the vodafone network.

Call barring codes / Network shortcodes for asda mobile

note: by default, your barring access code is 1919. Depending on the age of your child, you may need to change this ;)

Change barring access code:  **03**old*new*#
Bar ALL outgoing calls : *33*code#
Bar ALL Ougoing voice calls: *33*code*11#

Finally, to reset the barring (to add credit,etc): #33*code#

I hope this is helpful

HP f4580 Wireless Printer

Posted by neilhighley on September 12, 2010 None comments

My Lexmark printer finally gave up the ghost at the weekend, so I went out and bought a new HP F4580 Wireless printer from the goblins at Comet.

So far, so nice.

However, today the printer stopped working and I had to run the Network configuration utility again. Unfortunately, every time I ran the thing, it saw my network as 192.168.2.x and not 192.168.0.x. Which meant it was giving itself a non-existant IP.

No matter what I did when it was connected via USB it still went to the wrong subnet.

So, as my desktop is Cat5, I went and got a USB adaptor and disabled all my network devices on my PC apart from the wifi adapter.

Then I did a hard reset of the Wireless config on the printer by holding down Cancel (big red X) and then tapping the Wireless connection button which was currently glowing with a defiant hue of blue.

The printer found the correct network and got a IP address from the DHCP of my router.

I was taking no chances, so I went to the printers web interface, which is its IP address assigned by the setup utility, then changed the IP address of the printer from the DHCP version to a static IP in my network.

Now everything is fine. I unplugged the USB wifi adapter and went back to the CAT5

I write this post specifically because, as per, the HP site had no indication of what to do apart from changing my whole network to the incorrect subnet which the printer fubar’d on.

I hope this post helps someone somewhere get printing without going too mental.

WordPress red square on Windows IIS/FastCGI install

Posted by neilhighley on June 22, 2010 None comments

Just a quick note about a problem I just had with my wordpress site.

It seemed that no images would upload anymore and it transpired that it was a permissions problem.

I created a new folder in the root of my blog called wp-uploads, copied the files from wp-content/uploads into that folder, then set the upload folder in the dashboard(Settings>media) to “wp-uploads”.

Now my images are working again, see.

1and1 Dynamic Cloud Server using CentOS

Posted by neilhighley on May 24, 2010 None comments

Just got myself a linux server for the handy price of 50 pounds a month. It runs on 1and1′s new cloud and can be dynamically expanded to up to 8 virtual processors and 800GB space.

I have had to brush up on the old linux skills, but it has plesk and SSH, so I went about installing Webmin, which makes administrating linux less like stabbing a pen in your arm.

So, having used PUTTY (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) to log into the server I proceeded to install a pre-req, once I updated yum;

yum upgrade -y
yum -y install perl-Net-SSLeay

Which is the Perl SSL drivers which Webmin uses for its web interface.
Then, I installed webmin in earnest.

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin-1.510-1.noarch.rpm

rpm -i webmin-1.510-1.noarch.rpm

This takes me back to my first forays into linux back in the redhat days at the turn of the last century!

After a wee while, all you need to do is open up the 10000 port in your firewall and you have lots of webmin goodness.

Bye bye plesk.

Gmote server and linux

Posted by neilhighley on May 8, 2010 None comments

I’ve had a Linux PC under my TV for the best part of Two years now (There used to be an X-box running XBMC but it wasn’t powerful enough to play HD videos, so I dumped it.) and I’ve always had problems getting wireless peripherals to work. Therefore my only option was to trail a 5m USB cable to my sofa, which caused all manner of grief.

That was until I got a brand spanky HTC Desire, which is a touchscreen mobile phone.There are several applications (see what I did there) for the HTC phone which all “remote” control of PCs and basically they work by having a listening application sitting on your PC that is waiting for communication through a particular UDP port, then relaying the commands it recieves to the desktop and moving the mouse cursor and sending keystrokes to the PC.

The Phone has a bit of software installed which sends keystrokes and movement data to the server application on your PC.

Simples.

So I first tried remoteDroid which seems to be the defacto for remote control using a android phone.

Unfortunately, after installing the application on my linux box it gave itself an IP address of 127.0.1.1 which, understandably, my router didn’t like (and as ever, I couldn’t see how I could force remotedroid to change it otherwise). So, I in stalled gmote, which is an open source effort that runs on a java console on the PC and gave itself a sensible address that my router had no issues with. It worked a charm and soon had visions of ditching my USB cable deathtrap and just using my android phone to control the linux box.

This means forcing gmote to run on start up. and removing the login box for the linux machine. the latter part was easy, simply going to the Kubuntu start menu then through Applications>System>System Settings, then selecting System in the left hand side menu then Login Manager and setting up auto login.

Getting Gmote to autostart involves creating an init.d script in linux.
Init.d stands for “Initialise Daemon”. A Daemon is a self running computer program that usually does something not connected with user input, like serving webpages, or running a firewall. I think the Daemon reference comes from a branch of philosophy that expresses our awareness as a pantheon of daeomns living in our souls (but don’t quote me on that). Hence, a computer daemon is something that keeps the computer ticking…I digress.

Creating a daemon service means creating a BASH script. BASH is a shell language which enables access to programs and boot processes.

I copied my Gmote Server files to the shared part of linux systems, /usr/share and created a shell script to stay in init.d.

#!/bin/bash
cd /usr/share/gmote/GmoteServerLinux2.0.0
. /usr/share/gmote/GmoteServerLinux2.0.0/GmoteServer.sh

To edit the script you need to start KATE and Dolphin in sudo mode, from a terminal window.

WordPress Error “WordPress database error Out of range “

Posted by neilhighley on March 13, 2010 None comments

Well this error recently happened today and infuriatingly prevented uploading images. According to this guys explanation its the old chestnut of the development teams not talking to eachother meaning that a database schema was changed that affected a part of code which now broke because of it.

Anyway, the fix is;

ALTER TABLE wp_posts CHANGE post_parent post_parent BIGINT;

And his full post is at;

http://ardentdev.com/fix-for-wordpress-xmlrpc-500-internal-server-error/

5 ways to enhance User experience

Posted by neilhighley on March 13, 2010 None comments

..or at least make them think that they’re having a good time..
http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

Demographics of Social Media

Posted by neilhighley on March 12, 2010 None comments

Here is a great chart showing how the population of social media sites (facebook, friendster, et al.) is made up.

demographic-of-social-networking-2009