The Blog of Steve

Well with the end of semester it was time to move on to the latest offering from Microsoft.

With that, it was also time to have a crack at moving onto x64, as the issue (drivers) which prevented me from doing so several years ago on Vista should have now been mostly resolved.

The process was (mostly) very smooth and I am enjoying the OS.

There were a few issues that I did think warranted a mention.

HP HS2300 HDSPA modem. (Sierra MC8775)

The process was as follows:

• Download and the latest driver from HP (Found Here)

• Download the latest driver from Lenovo (Found Here)

• Download and install 7-Zip (found here)

• Install the driver from HP. This driver will not itself but means that once the base USB device from Lenovo is installed, all of the ports and device should be assigned the correct HP driver, making it easy to update them.

• Open the Lenovo driver  with 7-zip and runMC87xx.msi. Once installed, first replace the HP driver for the “USB device” with the one from Lenovo, the other devices should now be discovered, but not actually work. (You will need to manually select the “Sierra Wireless MC8775 Device” driver after pointing Windows to C:\Program Files (x86)\Sierra Wireless\MC8755\AC\Drivers\WinVista\64bit)  The task then it to update each of the newly discovered devices to use the lenovo driver as opposed to the HP driver. (each will need its corresponding driver manually selected from the above location)
• After this, you simply need to install the Wireless Watcher application (Found Here) and you are on your way.

Note on the updated patched driver (2.1.6.0) (Found here).

I also dabbled with an updated version of the driver.  To make it work without hanging, I found that it was necessary to apply to each of the devices with the 2.1.6.0 device, with the USB device LAST. (updating the composite device caused a Blue Screen of Death on swumx12.sys and then BSOD on boot whenever the bluetooth was switched on)

While this driver is newer, the catch is that it unsigned. This is an issue for x64 installations of Win7 for which there is no simple and elegant option for perminantly disabling driver signing enforcement. (Testing mode is an option but I would rather avoid that) One solution does exist which doesn’t depend on Windows itself (so is unlikely to get disabled in the future), Ready Driver Plus (found here) which is basically a macro that will automatically select to disable driver signing on every boot…. Though this can all be avoided by simply sticking with the older, but signed driver.

Dell 355 Bluetooth Module

The latest driver for the Dell 370 Bluetooth module works a treat as an updated driver for the Dell 355. (no modifications required)

Link to driver from Dell

Logitech Webcam

The Vista x64 driver (found here) can be used (though installation itself will fail) by selecting the x64 driver from the directory that the Dell package extracts too before installation.

The topic of mapping has caught my interest recently. Eighteen months ago I had investigated what options were available for offline GPS on my Nokia N95 and found that the offering were very limited. Furthermore, the free coverage of Brisbane on things like Openstreetmap was quite limited.

It would seem however that things have changed significantly since then. We-Travel, a Java based application now provides and options, when used in conjunction with OSM data to have free offline GPS nav on compatible phones. While it isn’t particularly mature, it looks very hopeful. (especially given my three year nokia maps navigation licence will last until next July)

Secondly, it would seem that the quality of the data available through the Open Street Map has improved dramatically. This gave me a bit of motivation to do some mapping around my area but I was quite impressed at how this has progressed since I last looked at it.

I experimented around a bit with making use of this openstreetmap data and created a basic openlayers example which resides at maps.burningsilicon.net which was a bit of fun.

In addition to this, Atlas generation for We-Travel required downloading a large number of OpenStreetMap tiles. Not wanting to do suck bulk downloads from OSM (for a number of reasons) I decided to try generating my own tiles.

The result of this is that through making use of some helpful guides (listed below) and a pre-build VMware Ubuntu Server appliance, I put together a pre-built Virtual Machine which can be used to do your own Mapnik rendering of OSM tiles.

The VM is only a single core implementation but I found that running several instances of it on multi-core computers around my house worked really well. While not quite as fast as running installing it directly on the PC, the performance is more than acceptable for rendering reasonably sized areas. The other massive advantage of using this virtual machine was that I could make use of several computers sit unused throughout most of the day at my home, without the slow process of having to installing and configuring the software or interfering with the existing setup in any way. The installation was quick and simple with each VM beings assigned to render a separate set of tiles, with the results of all of them being combined together at the end…  (I was testing with rendering parts of Australia down to an 18 zoom) After doing this, I can definitely appreciate the reasoning behind the Tiles@Home project for the OSM. (see below for notes on the VM)

Resources:

http://www.openstreetmap.org

http://www.we-travel.co.cc

The pre-built virtual machine for rendering openstreetmap tiles canbe found below

http://maps.burningsilicon.net/resources/ubuntu-server-Mapnik.7z (approx 1.1gb download)

===Notes for the VM===

2009 – Stephen Rothery

==================================
Prebuilt server to generate Map Tiles
==================================
This VMware image has been configured as per the guide found at:

http://weait.com/content/build-your-own-openstreetmap-server
http://weait.com/content/make-your-first-map

All of the tools are installed and working as well as world_boundaries downloaded and installed. (hence the large size of the image)

All that should be required is to download and load the OSM data that you want and set any bounding boxes in the genereate_tiles.py file. (You can likely get an extract for your country from cloudmade)

By default, tiles will be generated in the /home/notroot/mapnik/tiles folder, these can then be placed on any web server, allowing it to serve tiles. (through openlayers or similar)

This has been tested using Vmware player and found to work fine for generating tiles for Australia.

==================================
Networking on the Virtual Machine
==================================

An issue can occur in Linux on VMware regarding networking, arising from the fact that ever time a virtual machine is copied, VMware will assign it’s network card a new MAC address. (a good idea to avoid conflicts)

This can make it such that the eth0 interface may look like it has dissapeared and networking will no longer function.

To fix this, I found that simply deleting this file and rebooting the Virtual Machine is sufficient, this can be done with.

sudo rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

followed by a reboot.

==================================
Using Osmosis
==================================

While Osmosis is installed in the home directory of this VM, Java has not been installed as I was unsure about whether it would cause issues redistributing this image.

Download java with sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

==================================
Generating a Map
==================================
To generate a map you need to follow several steps, mostly from the 2nd part of the guide found at:

http://weait.com/content/make-your-first-map

Specifically the following steps:
1) Download the OSM data required
2) If you only want a section of the OSM data, Apply bounding box to osm file.
3) Import the data with osm2pgsql
4) Edit generate_tiles.py for the area and zoom that you want
5) Execute the commands to generate your tiles (all of them are needed every time)
source set-mapnik-env
./customize-mapnik-map >$MAPNIK_MAP_FILE
./generate_tiles.py

The problem:

Spending money on extra capacity with Google (for use with Picasa) and, at the same time spending a few bucks a month on web hosting with Hostgator. There was plenty of spare place for all my photos as well as quite a bit more. I also decided that it would be good to have FTP access to upload/download new photos as opposed to being tied to Picasa.

This aside though I do quite like the functionality that Picasa gives me like an email drop box, given that this makes it really easy to upload photos from my phone or make a public gallery for a youth camp that participants can all email their photos to. Basically what I am after is a solution that will let me make use of my existing web hosting to have a PHP powered method to upload photos.

Software Used

Zenphoto (though this should work with any gallery software which will autorefresh albums based on the content of directories, many which allow FTP uploads will do this in some way)

Wordpress

Wordpress Plugins:

Postie

Auto Delete Posts

The Process:

Anyway after searching around and trying out a few different galleries, I settled with Zenphoto. It had a clean interface, did everything that I was after without being excessively complicated. The only thing it didn’t do was accept uploads via email. Gallery 2 did claim to do this through the use of a community built plugin and upon installing this and testing it out I could not get it to work and it has not been updated in over two years. It seemed that few other galleries offered the feature of an email dropbox either so I decided to pick a gallery platform that I liked and then gain the dropbox functionality through another program.

I had used Wordpress before and also made use of it’s ability to accept posts via email. By default Wordpress does not handle attachments in posts via email but a plugin called Postie greatly expands this functionality to give the desired functionality with images. (and movies too) Wordpress also allows you to change the folder in which it’s uploads are stored so I now had all the pieces of functionality that I required and it was just a matter of putting them all together.

Before we get into this I will admit that this is not the most efficient way to go about a getting the functionality of a dropbox. The thing is that I believe that the benefits of using a polished, flexible and regularly updated piece of software and plugins, as found in Wordpress is well worth it, especially considering how trivially easy it is to set these all up. (no code hacking  required at all)

Anyway, now for the process.

Firstly you will want to create an email account that you will use for your dropbox. You will want to pick an email address which is fairly random and that will not be published to avoid getting your dropbox spammed. The emails will be deleted when retrieved via POP so you should most definately NOT try this with your existing active email account or you may delete all your mail.

Once you have done this you can go about installing Zenphoto. Again this a quick and easy process and you can find all the required documentation on their website.

After this is done you can then install Wordpress, again check their site for documentation. It doesn’t matter where on your server you install it, no-one should ever see it, you just need to make sure that both your gallery and Wordpress blog are installed on the same filesystem, you can’t make this work if the sites are with two seperate hosting providers or on two different servers. You will also have to setup Postie and you may want to test that it works before moving on to the next steps, again Postie is easy to use and well documented as far as Wordpress plugins go.

Once the Wordpress blog has been installed, log in as the administrator and change a few settings.

After installing the Wordpress blog we can go into the “Miscellaneous” settings in Wordpress and change the upload path for our images. What this folder is will depend on where you have installed your gallery software but basically I am pointing it to the album root directory for my install of Zenphoto. (as above) You will need to include the full path to your files as seen on the server, not the web page, and you can find these details easily from your hosting account page. I also just wanted a single album with all the stuff for my dropbox in it so I unchecked the option to break up the files based on the month/year.

Wordpress also has the useful feature of resizing files automatically as you upload them to create smaller thumbnails. The issue here is that we don’t actually want this as they are not required, will clutter up the album and ultimately waste space. To prevent Wordpress from making these files we just set all the max sizes for all the thumbnails to zero. (as above)

Another thing that needs to be considered is that every time an email is submitted, a post will be published in your unused blog. After time these could really start to pile up. To avoid this you can get a plugin “Auto Delete Posts” which will delete posts after they are a certain age old. The reality is that once the images are uploaded and moved into the uploaded content directory in wordpress, we don’t need the posts anymore anyway.

Security Measure for Zenphoto

In order to prevent anyone from directly linking to files in your albums (both public AND private) you need to create a .htaccess file with the following code into your “albums” folder within your Zenphoto install. This will break the playback of movie files in your galleries but it really depends on your requirements.

<Files *>

Order Deny,Allow

Deny from all

Allow from 127.0.0.1

</Files>

And that is it!

So there you go, if you have done all of these things you will have yourself a brand new email dropbox to go with your online gallery. You are free to edit the album that will appear in Zenphoto to put passwords on it, etc and do whatever you like.

The bonus over something like Picasa is that, depending on your hosting plan you may have stacks more space and you can now control all of the steps in the process and can tailor them to suit your requirements.

Known Limitations

• Lack of ability to add image captions via email (The subject and body of the email will be placed in the post, not in the image itself and will therefore not make it into the gallery)
• How quickly the images appear in your dropbox after being emailed will depend on how frequently you have postie checking your mail server. (you should note that since people are not visiting this actual wordpress blog, cronless postie plugin will not work, you will need to use cron or have an iframe on another page which will trigger postie to check the email)
• The size of the emails that can be handled will depend on your hosting situation. Testing this on my Hostgator share webhosting allows emails of up to about 5mb to be processed. This is not ideal but is sufficient for how I use the dropbox, as bulk uploads of large images should be done via FTP or something anyway.

A while ago I set out to modify my car sound system to give it a line in as well as give me the ability to bluetooth to connect my phone. I have been using it for some time and been really happy with the results so thought I would share what I had done and discovered for if anyone else was seeking to do the same thing.

Have a look at the project page over at BurningSilicon

Well I finally decided that Dot Net Nuke may not have been the best patform for what I was seeking to do and that the previous hosting provider I had was not really the best value for what I wanted either.

I have now moved everything over to Hostgator while switching my CMS to Joomla and blogs to Wordpress.

Ultimately these platforms seem much more flexible and a better long term solution than DNN.

Long time, no posts. Been quite busy with end of uni semmester &amp; etc, plus been postin a bit on facebook.

Anyway…

Given that TPG have recently enabled ADSL2+ in our local exchange, we decided that it would be a good idea to make the move away from Netspace. Basically we will be getting double the speed and a similar quota for about half the price.

Anyway, we have for some time now been making use of VoIP for all of our phone calls (resulting in quite a considerable saving) through the use of a Linksys SPA 3102 ATA.

Upon reading the fine print for TPG it seemes that in order to make use of their &quot;VoIP&quot; plans, one must purchase their pre-configured VoIP ATA.. What a scam. Furthermore, upon registering on their site for &quot;Softphone Voip&quot;, it seems that they don’t actually give out the settings for manually configuring you own VoIP gear. What a pain. I then decided to install the soft phone anyway and just have a look at what settings it came preconfigured with. The problem is that TPG are actually trying to be sneaky and their softphone is actually a standalone executable with which you just shove the username and password and then go. No configuration avaliable or user editable…

Furthermore none of the settings that I found on sites like Whirlpool gave me any success.

Anyway, after jumping on our router and having a look at all of the outgoing traffic, I found the following settings.

Proxy Server Address: gphone1.tpg.com.au
Use Outbound Proxy set to No
UserID: User Id given in sign up email (Same as per the instructions for setting up the TPG softphone.)
Pasword: Normal TPG User Account password

And finally, upon testing these on our ATA they worked fine.

While the solution of sharing a common BSSID between two AP's was working nicely for the Wii, the more I thought about it the less of an ideal solution it seems to be.

The issue that would be arising would be that during handover, there would be all manner of problems each AP having a different PMK, but the computer not actually being aware that it is talking to a different device, causing the actual process of the handover to take longer than it should due to the reauth that needs to take place.

That said, the issue of the Wii not working was still present, so I decided to have another look at it.

Upon further inspection it seems that the Wii was having issues connecting to my Edimax-7206 Access point, no matter what the other access point was doing. One setting however seemed to let the Wii connect quite happily.

In its configuration the Edimax access point (like most) allows the user to select either 802.11G only or B and G (for compatibility). Given that all of the the devices that run on our network are G, I had naturally set this to be G only. Upon setting it to B+G however I found that the Wii decided that it would connect.

How strange…

Anyway, it now works (with one AP on G only and the other on G+B) with both Access Points running on a seperate BSSID again and on different channels.

Happy days.

Hmm, long time with few posts. Have been getting stuck into facebook a bit.

That said, I have found something odd in configuration of our Nintendo Wii that may be of assistance to some.

But first, a bit of background information:

At home, we have a wired network with a number of devices hanging off it. In addition to this we have also had wireless that I used with my laptop and my mobile phone around the house. The complication arose when we added another three devices onto the network, it was basically observed that there was a decrease in performance (as expected) of performance. There was also the issue that coverage was weak at points. To address this, I set up a 2nd wireless access point with the same SSID and security details on a seperate channel (ie: 6 channels away from the existing one)

It seemed for a while that devices would happily roam between them and select whichever had the strongest signal and connect, increasing the capacity of the network.

The following problem arose however.

It seemed that, for reasons unknown, the Nintendo Wii would no longer connect to the network. It would work fine when the 2nd (new) AP was disabled but would also not connect to the 2nd AP. Basically, it would seem that Nintendo have elected to make the wireless profiles use a specific BSSID (ie: not just SSID) and that it did not like having a 2nd BSSID using the SSID that it was configured to use.

The fix for this was fairly simply but not entirely standard.

Basically, on the 2nd AP, I cloned its wireless MAC from AP#1 so that they both shared a common BSSID. So what we not have is fairly nonstandard in that we have the same BSSID shared between two physical access points, just on different channels.

It did however make the Wii happily connect. Furthermore, none of my wireless devices have any issue roaming between the two at all (due to the break/make nature of 802.11 they will drop a few packets). Happy days.

Increased capacity and also increased coverage and noise tolerance.

Just on the side, it may also be worth knowing that my experience has been that the Wii also doesn't like it if you have your AP to use &quot;Short Preamble&quot;.

Happy days

After running the Cyberlink Codec on Vista media center to avoid a problem where I got a green screen in HDTV playback, I noticed that it doesn’t seem to handle deinterlacing very well at all.

The problem was getting quite annoying so I set about to see whether it was possible to use the ATI Avivo codec with Vista media center.

The issue had been that it had not appeared in as an option when using the &quot;Vista Media Center Decoder Utility&quot; (mentioned in the previous post).

After looking around on the net I stumbled across a tool distributed by Microsoft that could apparently resolve this issue.

It can be found HERE

Even though the tool is made to run on XP, it seemed to run fine on Vista x86.

With this tool you can then select the ATi codec as default (ignore the warnings), which then allows it to be selected from within the Vista Media Center Decoder Utility. Happy days.

Making use of this also gives the advantage of making use of the built in hardware accelerated decoding that the X1250 can provide.

Well after messing around with our Media PC for a bit, I believe that I have finally got it doing everything that I want. It is now hooked up and running with full HDMI goodness.

Some of the set up issues were:

Playback of HD content within Vista Media Center (VCE)

The first bit of wierdness that I encountered with VCE was that when viewing digital TV, standard definition channels would come through fine but for HD channels I would get nothing more than a solid green screen with audio… Upon recording some HDTV I got the same result.

I installed DNTV Live! (which comes with my TinyUSB2 receiver) and attempted to replicate the issue. The problem that I found with this was that I could not get any of the Codecs in DNTV Live to run with hardware acceleration.

After this downloaded a tool that lets you select the Codecs used by Vista for Video and Audio.

http://mediacenterexpert.blogspot.com/2006/07/vista-media-center-decoder-utility.html

Since the sound worked fine already, I left it set on the default. I did however change the Video Codec to the Cyberlink Codec that comes with DNTV Live.

Upon restarting VCE I could view HD channels without issue… Happy days..

Getting Australian EPG information in Media Center

Upon setting up VCE with the channels for my region, it became apparent that Microsoft did not have any EPG set up for VCE to use within Australia.. What a shame..

This disappointment was short lived however as I found that epgstream provides a plugin for VCE that will allow it to use free EPG services like OzTivo and free*EPG.

<strong><a href=”http://www.epgstream.net/”> http://www.epgstream.net/</a>

Installation of Webscheduler

I have been using Webscheduler on my desktop PC for some time now and it has worked fine. Because I have never really had issues with it I have not been keeping up to date with the latest release.

Upon attempting to download the latest version for the Media PC I found that this software is apparently no longer open source… What a shame..

The previous GPL versions however are still available and do the job fine.

Version 4.0.14 (the last free version of DVB Webscheduler can be found HERE

Getting the PC to wake on lan while in Standby

Just one point that I noted with this PC.

I noticed that the PC would wake on LAN (WOL) from either a powered off state or from hibernate. It would not however wake from standby.

This proved most irritating but upon inspection of the Network card (and the switch that it was connected too) as the PC went into standby, it was switching its network card off.

Once the power options of the network card were changed so that it could not be shut down to save power, it would happily WOL from Off, Standby or Hibernate.

Allow the MCE remote to be used as a mouse

Another feature that I wanted to get working was to be able to just use my MCE remote to move the mouse around if required.

I found a great little app that lets you do this which also runs happily under Vista

It can be found HERE

And just for the sake of it, a piccy of the finished product