HD911.com » Online

Godaddy “Support”

Shannon Carver — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:41:02 +0000

Recently, I was trying to consolidate all our domains in one handy (and I use that term lightly) portal at GoDaddy for the company account, to make it easy to purchase, renew, register new domains for SEO/Marketing and world domination purposes. One thing we also needed was an SSL ceritificate, so I purchased the most expensive one they had, the Premium SSL with EV. The EV being a (relatively) useless green bar accross the address bar in the user’s browser to give extra customer comfort in the strength of your encryption and show them you spent more money on it, and sometimes it costs substantially more.

What I didn’t realise when purchasing this certificate was that to activate it you need to reside within the United States, and in their defence it states that clearly on the front page as you go to purchase the item. Upon not being able to activate the certificate, one of my colleagues sent the support team at GoDaddy a message asking how this situation was going to be resolved, and how we could go about activating the certificate.

What followed was rather funny:

Thank you for contacting online support. Unfortunately, our Premium SSL Certificates can only be issued to business based within the United States of Japan. If your business is located within another ocuntry, you will not be able to use the certificate. You will need to cancel the certificates and reply to this message so that we may refund the purchase.

LinkFu #1… or should I say LinkSpew?

Shannon Carver — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:58:27 +0000

I have a list of random web links that are worth seeing, even if only once, they’ll now be referred to as Link-Fu, the ancient art of locating precious links in the sceptic tank that is the inter-webs.

The first comes from a wonderful and obviously successful wedding and bridal business in Florida called Yvette’s Bridal Forum (http://yvettesbridalformal.com/).

Yvette’s Bridal Forum http://yvettesbridalformal.com/

It can be described in one of two ways:

the most repulsive site ever created; or
the best surviving example of an early to mid 90s

The worst thing is, a quick flick back through everyones favorite web time machine, show’s that it only started going downhill in 2007, before that it was at least slightly tasteful, progressing (yes, it got worse, and worse) to what I can only classify today as web vomit.

Looking at the source reveals even more of the madness too (yahoo sitebuilder… space aliens?!?!?)

Yvette’s

None the less, it’s a worthy addition to LinkFu, and should be probably be saved in its current state to show our children and generations ahead, the wonders of yesteryear.

*** More recently, this behaviour has been seen repeated in the wild on myspace pages of the masses. ech.

Update: Apparently viewing the site in Internet explorer yields even more delights, with wonderful music and even better animation

TweetDeck

Shannon Carver — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:00:18 +0000

I shouted my disgust a while ago about the Twitter app called TweetDeck, “an overengineered brainf*** that could have only been created by a flex developer“, I said. Soon after this, I gave it another go (oddly enough), and after getting over the complicated mix of buttons and muddled interface I decided I liked it.

Since then, I’ve been running it on all my machines, on linux, Windows and the Macbook. Quite frankly, I love it, although I’m not sure whether the iPhone client would work very well, especially not with multi-lists and complicated layout, though I could be wrong (and have been before, obviously).

Recently however, I wiped my Ubuntu laptop recently, and after a fresh clean install and subsequent install of the right libraries, Adobe Flash, Air and finally TweetDeck, I was greeted with this:

Uh oh…

Unfortunately, most of the search results pointed back to Windows issues with an incorrect link back to the user’s home directory (thus, TweetDeck not being able to find the data), but obviously this wasn’t a huge help in the situation.

Running TweetDeck from a console gave the answer away pretty quickly: “libgnome-keyring.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”. After making sure I had libgnome-keyring and libgnome-keyring-dev installed, which it was (installed by default, the keyring is used everywhere), I remembered having an issue with installed libraries and Flash on a 64 bit install previously, a problem which is fixed by installing 32bit libraries for the apps that need them.

A quick Google search, (which resulted any many more relevant results this time), a quick fix, and I was back up and running happily seconds later.

The Deck

Better Blogging Through.. Twitter?

Shannon Carver — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:58:31 +0000

Unfortunately, it just seems easier to write a 140 character message to the world on Twitter than come up with content for HD911. Is that what the world is being reduced to, mindless drivel presented in a sea of SMS-sized messages with http://bit.ly shortened URL’s, @author & #hash tags and a language / communication method (‘u‘, ‘r‘, ‘b4‘, ‘l8r‘) stereotypical only of nasty illiterate teenagers of Generation Z, the internet generation (call it what you will)..

But what can I say, I’m just as bad as the rest of them (apart from the teenspeak that is, eccch….)

Wireless (802.11x) Congestion Issues

Shannon Carver — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:13:37 +0000

I don’t particularly like wireless, it’s slow at the best of times (when compared to cabled ethernet) and can occasionally be downright unreliable. On the other hand, it’s a great money saver especially when living in rented or temporary accomodation and is essential when using a laptop/phone on the couch, outside on the toilet etc. My biggest problem with it recently though is complete wireless spectrum congestion in my new area (Balham, UK).

We’ve lived in a few built up areas around London already, some far more so than Balham, but i’ve never seen so many AP’s in the one residential area before, my scan’s show between 10 – 50 different networks at various times throughout the day.

A ‘lean’ site survey, it’s usually 3-4x as many

Most of the time, my router appears to work perfectly, then suddenly (as much as a couple of times a day), the network connection stops responding and I need to go and change the channel. A ping of the router looks like this:

shannon@vostro:~$ ping 192.168.1.1
PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=945.41 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1401.52 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=2788.41 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=4342.34 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=6309.23 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=10345.58 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=13424.52 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=16435.42 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=17334.73 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=18223.47 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=20994.43 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=22534.4 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=13 ttl=64 time=24998.25 ms

With this many AP’s in the area, short of installing a faraday cage in the external walls of the house, I may be forced to use the 5.8Ghz 802.11a band which doesn’t work with a lot of devices such as my old laptop, phones, printer, etc.

GTAIV – worth the £1000 upgrade?

Shannon Carver — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:53:39 +0000

I’m not a game by any means, and in any year I’d play only a handful of new titles. Most of the time if I bother to sit down and play a game it’ll be an old favourite like Counterstrike Source or Quake III, but occasionally a game comes along that will hold my attention for many, many hours of joyful life-stealing pleasure. To name a few:

Civilisation 2
Final Fantasy VII & VIII
Transport Tycoon Deluxe and more recently OpenTTD
All of the Grant Theft Auto series, but most recently GTA: San Andreas

On December 3rd, Grand Theft Auto IV came out for the PeeCee, and having refrained from trying it on the Playstation3 or Xbox 360 I gleefully got my hands on a copy and waited out the almost 40 minute install. I should have known pre-install that there wasn’t a hope in hell it was going to play nicely on the laptop, especially not at a great quality/resolution. After all, it more than meets the requirement for the minimum required system (from Rockstar Site), and meets most of the requirement for recommended system (the video card is the big let down here).

I can play at the amazing resolution of 800×600 with all higher graphic settings disabled due to low specification of system. I have to wonder who came up with the idea of limiting the quality settings for lower spec cards, it should be the users choice to wind up the settings and make the game unplayable if they so wish.

Back to the game, as you’d probably guess, the performance on my system leaves a lot to be desired but is still playable, and even explosions don’t seem to slow it down too far, but I’m always left wanting more, especially seeing some of the screenshots of people running it at 1920×1200 on monster machines.

I’m left wondering though, is it worth me spending +£1000 on a desktop machine that can play this correctly or giving up and going back to minesweeper. I’m not sure i could warrant the price given that this is probably the one title I’ll acutally play this year (as well as in 2009), but considering I got months and months of play out of GTA:SA who knows. It’s an investment in time I guess, and heck, I’d have spent a lot more having fun on booze in the process.

The game itself is fantastic though, I can forsee in the next few years having a map of London (or New York, or perhaps Tehran) with every building, feature, person manipulatable , almost like a GTA in that corny old VR world of the 80′s that everyone was dreaming about. I could get coffee in the store I go to every morning at work and then go to work on the office front door with a baseball bat, just for the point of it…

Then I’d escape down the tube to my batcave, or home maybe.

QNAP TS-409 Pro

Shannon Carver — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:54:48 +0000

Two months ago, I wrote about the Icybox NAS-4220B Network storage unit, my first choice in the search for a set it, and forget it storage and home server solution, and if anyone’s used an Icybox before I have no doubt they’d be at least as dissappointed as I was in my few months of battle with it. I won’t get into it again, no one likes a whinger but it was so flawed but writing everything to 1,000,000 floppy disks would probably have been a quicker, easier and more reliable solution.

Recently an oppurtunity came up to buy another NAS unit, the QNAP TS-409 Pro, from a friend at work for a good price, so after quick thought and some research (more than I had done for the Icybox!), I snapped it up. And after a month of use, I havent regretted it. It’s a four drive SOHO (prosumer, maybe) backup solution which currently has 4x 500GB drives in a RAID5 configuration.

The best things:

Gigabit network connectivity (realworld gigabit, this time (20 – 40MB/s, much better than the 5 – 10MB/s from the Icybox)
4x SATA Bays capable of RAID0, 1, 5, 6 and JBOD configs
Inbuilt media, iTunes, music streaming server
Torrent/HTTP queue downloader
NSLU2 support with iPKG management (basic linux OS with Debian like package installer).
FTP/Samba/NFS/HTTP file access
support for USB drives/keys and one touch/scheduled backup of core files, either from the unit itself or from locations around the local network.
and a whole bunch of other features like web server, database, time server etc etc.

I’m especially interested in the IPKG manager and NSLU2 based linux console as it really closes the gap between useless (or limited use) network device, and fully configurable server or computer, and I’ve got a bunch of scheduled tasks UnRAR’ing downloads, backing up photos and documents, rebuilding/exporting the music collection and downloading new album artwork and doing other system and network diagnostic tasks. Infinitely useful!

Nothings perfect though, and it can’t all be good, in the case of the QNAP, its loud as hell and building the initial RAID array took a fair few hours but that’s to be expected, and under the circumstances, I think I can let it pass.

Last.fm

Shannon Carver — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:41:22 +0000

I’ve never really been interested in the whole social networking scene, especially not for anything other than communication. But due to recent boredom with my music collection (mostly after running out of songs on my iPod on a daily basis), I’ve taken to listening to Last.fm recently.

It’s great so far, and is turning out to be a welcome change to being mid way through a 2 hour mix as I’m currently used to, and I can listen to a whole range of music I wouldn’t usually get to.

I’m still wondering what the point of the social networking side to this is though, so I can compare my music taste with someone named jeebee34 halfway accross the world and realise my music compatitibility with him/her is only 12%? What does this prove, that I should start listening to Madonna or Justin Timberlake to boost this rating with my new found online friend?

Last.fm makes use of the concept of scrobbling, which is where whatever you’re currently listening to is submitted up to the last.fm server for everyone to see, and scrutinise. This doesn’t just work for when you’re listening to last.fm radio itself but through any popular media player (such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, amarok, Exaile, etc), or through any number of music devices, such as an iPod or my Nokia N95. You’ve go to wonder though, what do they do with all those stored music preferences? Could it be used to tailor a bunch of music adverts to our inboxes around Christmas time, or perhaps used in court to prove that we’d listened to a bunch of Metallica music, far more than one person could possibly own?

All that aside though, I’ve been quite impressed at how well it can map music choices to a chosen genre or tag, and searching by tags or artists return results you’d expect (mostly, anyway). A friend searched for music like Daft Punk the other day and was blessed with the sweet soothing sounds of koRn, so I’m not sure what went wrong there.

Favourite Tags so far:

dnb
progressive trance
psytrance (see a trend happening here?)

So if you’re a last.fm’er, jump on, look at my profile and add me

Ranting again, the cold hard speed of IcyBox

Shannon Carver — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:57:41 +0000

As many of you know, I bitch frequently, and today is no exception. I’m not just bitching about slow transfer speeds from a restricted device which should be capable of far more (yes, the N95), I’m over that now, as there a bigger demon in its midst. One that defies all logic completely, to which I can find no possible explanation, apart from shit-ness by the manufacturer in question.

Disclaimer: The paragraphs below will be boring, and slightly technical, and my contain Vendor Verdicts which whilst not directly opposing HD911′s stringent rules regarding Product/Name Defamation and the Fair-trade and Distribution Protection act of Liverpool 1983*

I bought a NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit from a relatively reputable online computer dealer in England at the end of last year after much deliberation and a little mis-directed (and now seemingly useless) research. For the money, the unit was supposed to be one of the better performers. At the time I bought two hard drives to go along with the unit, which were one of the faster drives available on the market at the time. The NAS, an ICYBOX NAS4220-B (you can see here the name of the offending company has been removed to comply with HD911′s policies), flat out refused to boot/function or do pretty much anything with the new drives.

A little time ticked by, and (stupidly) the owner and purchaser did not RMA either the drives, nor the NAS unit in time, and the store would no longer accept the products as refunds, so I used the hard drives elsewhere and shelved the obviously trusty unit for another day. Over the next few months, I tried the drives with a few different versions of the Icybox’s firmware, and even went to the extent of disabling features on the drives themselves to see if they would wotk, but still had no luck.

Fast forward to August 2008, I purchased a cheaer, lower spec harddrive to go in the unit as it could surely serve a better purpose than sitting in the cupboard gaining dust, for this aluminium monstrosity cost £100, and that could have been better spent on beer or a treatment program for the authors ever growing fascination with the game World of Warcraft, and a level 40 dwarf (sorry, little person) named El-dorf.

You must understand, by this point I had an amazingly profuse dislike for the pre-purchased NAS unit, neither it nor its manuracturer website or support forums inspired any confidence at all in a good product. But I wanted it to work, at least in half the way you’d expect a unit to function. There’s an element of pride here too, and an IT guys damaged ego over a poor purchase decision can be difficult to mend, as I usually make good, educated decisions about what a good product is and where/how to buy it.

So the new hard drive worked as it should and I was away, madly copying the collected works of self-recorded flute solos, and bad karaoke-style ABBA renditions, but noticed something astounding, transfers via built in “gigabit” network connection were going unusually slow. Just to back this up, I have a laptop hard drive that can quite happily read/write at 40-50MB/s for sustained periods, a Broadcom gigabit port that should be capable of at least this plugged into another gigabit port on the NAS. The top speed for the 15 hours of transferring was 5MB/s, not even a quarter of what I would deem reasonable, and hardware I had 12 years ago quite happily chugged away at a quicker speed than this.

I’ve done the normal thing and taken everything possible out of the equation, tested via different PC, new/different cable, through a switch, over wireless (not that I was expecting higher speeds this way mind you), and chanted sweet nothings at it, but to no avail. It seems that the manufacturer thought they’d add yet another shitty feature (to enhance the plethora of other teeth-nashing inadequacies), that being horrendous speed. In fact, I can quite happily transfer over the gigabit network to other devices at 50MB/s, and the 802.11g wireless network at 3.5MB/s.

If I was to review this product, and say something nice about it, I’d say it would stand the test of time as a door stop, and wouldn’t look out of place next to the 1960′s Parasonik tube amplifier rip-off that your parents still have sitting in the garage, it really is that cool.

Icybox NAS drives, when the only thing you have to better use your time is transferring the contents of your 12 petabyte porno collection via 360KB floppy.

Subsequently I’m saving up the money for a better unit (with supporting research) as we speak.

* Link to Legal Documentation required, consult this document for further information (#1443253)

A Birthday, of Sorts?!

Shannon Carver — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:05:39 +0000

Not particularly exciting, but HD911 is now one year old! From its humble beginnings, it’s tickled the worlds news sources on a daily basis, and been the source of much controversy from Boston to Baghdad…

Oh wait, that’s not true, or should I say ture.

However, now I’m left wondering exactly what to do with my lovechild, that which I’ve nurtured into adulthood, and has give me back so much. I’ve said it before, and I’m pretty sure I’ll say it again, I’d like to get out “talking cod-shit to strangers”, and embark on a whole new level of world domination, and i have high plans for the next 12 months.

But do I disband HD911 and let it fall by the way side into the otherwise packed scum bucket that is the internet? Or do I transition, from blog about nothing, to empire about something?

Wait and see… I know I am.