Posts filed under ‘Tech’

I recently had the need to install Nagios on my network, and being new to the application, was stumped by an issue I encountered when installing the “standard” Nagios plugins pack. Upon running the make command, I received the following error (among several other related errors):

make[2]: *** [check_http.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

After a bit of digging around I saw that the errors were SSL-related, and upon doing a bit of research, I found that my server was missing libssl-dev. After running apt-get install libssl-dev, the install continued on without further issue.

Today I had the displeasure of dealing with the tech support folks at Clear Wireless. Early this morning,  I was looking around in our CPEi 25150 WiMAX modem’s settings page to see if there was any way to allow incoming PPTP tunnels through.  I got distracted with something else, and when I returned I was unsurprisingly prompted to enter my login credentials again.

The surprising part was that “CLEAR123“, the password I had just used an hour earlier, no longer worked!

Fast forward to nearly 2 hours later, when I hung up on Clear technicians and told them they had lost a customer.  No one there had any idea that my modem does not have a hard reset button (really Motorola??), let alone what the default password could be.

One thing I noticed this morning was that the modem’s login page looked a bit different than before.  I had poked around on it a bit last week and was pretty sure that the “Nokia Siemens Networks” logo was a new addition.  On one hand, I figured that I just didn’t notice their logo the first time around.  With no other options however, I dug around online to see if I could find a default password for Nokia Siemens Networks branded equipment.  A cursory search turned up the default password of “nsn”, which instantly whisked me to the modem’s administration panel.  What luck!

So, for reference, if your WiMAX modem password was once “motorola”, it may now be “CLEAR123″ or even “nsn” if an update has been pushed to your equipment.

Hopefully this info saves you some time and frustration!

Yesterday ZOTAC announced the info for their latest video card that makes use of the 560 SE hardware that Nvidia pushed out last month. ZOTAC’s goal is to give gamers a taste of 1080p, without breaking their gaming budget. The 560 SE is the GF114 that Nvidia announced as having 2 SM cores disabled. I liken this to the Celeron CPU chips which come with less on-board cache due to being disabled due to bad performance. Either way, ZOTAC has found a use for the hardware, and that is a card that is still able to churn through DirectX 11 titles. Marketing director Carsten Berger explains, “1080p resolution displays and Microsoft® DirectX® 11-enabled titles are affordable and become quite popular among gamers. Our new ZOTAC® GeForce® GTX 560 SE provides an excellent value for gamers that want to get their feet wet with 1080p and DirectX® 11 gaming,”

Specifications:

•  Product Name ZOTAC® GeForce® GTX 560 SE
• GPU NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 560 SE
• Engine Clock speed 746 MHz
• Unified Shaders 288
• Shader Clock 1492 MHz
• Memory Clock speed 3828 MHz
• Memory 1GB GDDR5
• Memory interface 192-bit
• Display Outputs Dual DVI, HDMI & DisplayPort
• HDCP Yes
• Cooling With fan (dual-slot)
• DirectX^® version DirectX^® 11 with Shader Model 5.0
• Other hardware features Hardware accelerated Blu-ray 3D ready
• Software Features Hardware Video Decode Acceleration Technology, NVIDIA^® CUDA^™ technology, OpenGL^® 4.2
• Windows 7 capability Windows® 7 with DirectCompute support

No mention of pricing and availability, save for the fact that Nvidia is rumored to be setting their 560 SE cards at about $150. Oh, and it comes with a TrackMania 2 Canyon 3-Day Game Pass, but I’m unsure how enticing that is supposed to be.

Many of us clamored over the beta sign up from a few weeks ago, in fact over 1,000,000 people signed up in just the 48 hours that it was open. A thank you e-mail went out yesterday to those that did sign up, along with a video I will post below from Facebook giving us a sneak peak, you know, in case we aren’t selected for the beta. However, you can guarantee your entrance into the beta by just pre-ordering the game. That’s right, “From 10th April, players who pre-purchase the Guild Wars 2 Collector’s, Digital Deluxe or Standard Editions will receive guaranteed entry into all beta weekend events and a three-day head start prior to launch, giving them the opportunity to be among the first to secure their character and guild names. As a bonus, players who pre-purchase any edition will also receive an exclusive Hero’s Band, which will provide their characters with a variety of stat enhancements as they venture into the world of Tyria in Guild Wars 2.”

As if that were enough, you can get a ton of cool shit if you go for the collector’s edition. “The centrepiece of the Collector’s Edition is a detailed, hand-painted 25 centimetre statue of the bestial warrior Rytlock Brimstone wielding his signature flaming sword. Along with the Rytlock statue, players will receive a custom frame with five stunning Guild Wars 2 art prints from world-renowned artists, a 112-page Making of Guild Wars 2 hardback book, a Best of Guild Wars 2 Soundtrack CD by award-winning composer Jeremy Soule and five in-game items, including a Mistfire Wolf that will fight alongside players and a miniature Rytlock who will accompany them on their travels through Tyria.”

Meanwhile, sit back and wait for the announcement that you did or did not get into the beta, view the video below from developer Colin Johanson. Basically he is letting you down early, just like many, many women in our lives.

Of course, you can always pre-order or whatever, but keep an eye on www.GuildWars2.com.

If you had read the earlier article I posted, you would have know that last Sunday, the 29th, there was an online record attempt to have the most players online in a first person shooter. I myself was sick and woke up only few minutes too late to join in, but I think I would have had to been ready to click the button to join for hours as MuchDifferent filled all their slots fairly quickly, only shy of 1000 players during the duration, but well past the amount needed for a record. The CEO Christian Lönnholm had this to say, “It was amazing. We did not imagine the amount of interest that this game would generate, so the system went down shortly after we had reached the peak of 999 players. Within minutes we were able to adjust it, and the battle continued for about two hours more. Almost until the end we were averaging around 980 players at any given moment. It was a blast! Obviously, this would not have been possible without the players, so I’d like to send a special warm and loving ‘thank you’ to them! Thank you for bringing such creativity to both the battlefield and to the chat. You had me laughing, giggling and spilling coffee throughout the event!” It just goes to show that I missed out on a great event, but I look forward to seeing who picks up and uses their server technology in future games. They say it can be used in any game engine, but I wonder if any console developers would ever plan to use it. Here’s hoping!

While I agree that spreading the word about SOPA and PIPA is a great idea, I definitely do not agree with a complete blackout of the most widely used reference site. If I were running Wikipedia, I would have made it so users would have to click a button to continue to their information. Wikipedia itself has said that this is not a total blackout, as they are still making the site completely accessible to mobile users. Of course, who wants to look up that information on a tiny screen? (Unless you have a tablet of some sort.) Sort of changing information in Firefox to access the mobile version, I stumbled across a much easier way. I found it on a Dropbox users page and the site is HERE. However, here is the jist of it. Wikipedia is just using some CSS to cover the page you need. With a little javascript, that CSS can be blocked. So you just drag the javascript link on the DropBox site into your booklet or bookmarks on Firefox, and when you get to the wiki with a SOPA/PIPA blackout, just click it and it takes care of the hard work for you!
Enjoy, but do not forget the dreadful, evil thing that is hanging over our heads.

So it came to pass that I had to do another G450 install on a Windows 7 machine, and when I went to Matrox’s web site, I still did not see drivers listed specifically for Windows 7. I did do some digging however, and found that this non-WHQL driver package works perfectly. It was listed as supporting “Windows Server 2003 x64, Windows XP x64, Windows Vista x64, Windows Server 2008 x64″. If it supports Server Win2k8 R2, it should also support Windows 7.

As luck would have it, the install went smoothly and I have a pair of the cards working in a brand new Core i5 machine as I type this.




Good luck!

The Sangean HDR-1 is a HD tabletop radio which supports digital radio & hybrid signals and RDS functions on FM stations. Other features include dual alarm, IR remote control, multicast capability and Program Associated Data service. Overall, a pretty nice unit. But certain productions runs of this radio had a problem. The radio would quit powering up for no apparent reason. Lets see why.

Read the rest of this entry »

I came across an odd problem just the other day that caused the visual editor to go haywire on a brand new WordPress installation.

Whenever I tried to write a post, the visual editor would load, but then the buttons would disappear. On top of that, none of the text I typed would show up either. A “select all” showed that my text did in fact exist, but it was displayed as white text on the visual editor’s white background. Stranger still, the HTML editor worked just fine.

I tried working through all sorts of solutions offered up online including a reinstall of WordPress, troubleshooting plugins, and even checking file permissions on the wp-includes and wp-admin directories.

None of these solutions worked, but as I dug through the blog’s admin pages, I saw something strange. As you can see in the picture below (click to enlarge), the WordPress and Site Address fields both show a colon appended to the URL. The problem is a strange result of how WordPress was installed as well as how the web host has configured our account. Removing the colons fixed the problem immediately, and will likely remedy your issues as well.

As a final note, this fix works on WordPress 3.2.1 but should apply to any past or future releases of the software.

• Go ahead and hit: Alt + F2

• Type: update-manager -d
• Perform any additional required updates before install
• Enter your password, agree to upgrade and such

I did all that, then waited for 45 minutes -  now it is say Error: Forbidden 403, WHAT THE HELL?!

It’s terminal time my friends.

• type: sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
• click replace in the search menu
• Replacehttp://us.archive.ubuntu.comwith

  ftp://us.archive.ubuntu.com
  

• Restart your upgrade. Don’t worry no time was lost since it kept all the downloads even though it reverted the installation. Ubuntu so smart.

Have fun and remember.