menu.

I was treated to a Buffalo Linktheater Wireless A & G (that’s the version with no DVD player, I think that was a US-only thing) media streamer by my wonderful girlfriend for Christmas. I’ll post a review (hopefully) in the near future, but first I need to get it set up properly. I successfully streamed some video files to it while at my parents’ house for Christmas week. I finally got round to setting it up in my own house tonight to discover a few kinks.

I have been using Windows Media Player 11 (as it’s already built in to Vista, it’s also a free download for XP) as the server to stream from. The problem is that when I tried to browse a particular folder the Linktheater seems to freeze for a while before opening it, and then showing it as empty. When I checked my PC an error message had appeared informing me that “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service has stopped working”. On clicking “search online” for more information Windows informed me that:

This problem was caused by DivX Codec. DivX Codec was created by DivX, Inc..
DivX, Inc. is aware of this problem and working as quickly as possible to make a solution available.

The Application Event Log contains an entry for each crash with Event ID 1000 and Task Category 100 and a description something along the lines of:

Faulting application wmpnetwk.exe, version 11.0.6000.6324, time stamp 0×4549b540, faulting module divxdec.ax, version 6.8.0.0, time stamp 0×47547cff, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0×0005c021, process id 0xe1c, application start time 0×01c84be4834cb5f8.

which doesn’t really help much.

Workaround

I split the folder in two, and one of the new ones worked fine. I continued like this until I had narrowed the culprit down to be one of two files. However at this stage the folders all displayed their contents fine, including the one containing only the suspects. Now they just wouldn’t play.

After a lot of moving files and much more crashing and restarting of the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service, I narrowed the culprit down to a particular video file. I’m not sure what the problem was as it had worked fine when streamed from an XP computer also using Windows Media Player 11; in fact it was watched start to finish without any problems. It may be an issue specific to Vista or the DivX 6.8 codec, either way I’m happy it’s sorted.

If anyone finds out any more about the cause of this kind of problem or a quicker solution, please do let me know. Meanwhile I hope the above helps someone. Oh and the Buffalo Linktheater Wireless A & G is available from Dabs for about £95.

Installing Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D plugin for Firefox (yes, they wrote something that works in Firefox) I was reminded of one more reason why I hate Microsoft.

You’d think with all the anti-competitive suits being filed against them they’d get over this, but apparently not.

Have a look at what’s presented to you when you install the Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D plugin.

Yes, that’s right, when you install Virtual Earth 3D, Microsoft try to take over your home page and default search engine: two completely unrelated services. If they must give us the option then fine, but they have the boxes ticked by default and that is where I believe they cross the line from opportunistic cross-selling to scummy, underhanded manipulation. Not that it’s a big surprise, they do the same thing with their Windows Live Messenger product. This is an even more blatant example of what they’re trying to do here, which is using their strength (and in the case of Messenger, dominance) in one market to try and dominate in another.

If it takes another legal case to sort this out then it should be done, but Microsoft should be fined and forced to pay legal costs. The previous controversy over their bundling of Media Player in Windows obviously hasn’t taught them anything.

I love FireFox, both as a web browser and as a web designer. I love it because it works, I love it for adhering (much better than IE ever will anyway) to web standards and I love it for the handy plugins that you can get.

I hate it though, for thrashing my CPU to 99% whenever I load some pages with flash animations in them. UnitedWebHosting which, as of this date, hosts this site (though probably not for long) is one that’ll do it. Today, I went to ZDnet UK only for a couple of Intel ads to do the same.

It seems like a bit of a joke that a company the size of Adobe (the makers of Flash: they write the plugin, not Mozilla) haven’t managed to resolve this, fairly major, bug. I’m sure they know about it, I mean different people seem to have been talking about since at least January last year.

Obviously while FireFox is hogging 99% of your CPU there’s only 1% to share among the rest of the programs you have running, so Outlook and the rest didn’t have much of a hope of doing anything at all until I killed the FireFox process in task manager. As this wasn’t the first time this had happened, I decided to go hunting for a solution - which brings me to FlashBlock (hat-tip to The Idiot).

FlashBlock uses JavaScript to replace flash animations in web pages with placeholders (an empty square with a flash logo in the middle). Don’t worry though, clicking this will run the flash animation if you really want to see something (e.g. if you visit YouTube or another site where the primary content is encoded in Flash files). In fact you can even specify a ‘white-list’ of sites in which flash content will run automatically.

I recently encountered a problem with Microsoft’s ACT (part of Visual Studio 2003) when testing a web service by emulating a browser-based client. For posterity’s sake, here’s an overview of the problem and, more importantly, the solution.

Background
Using Application Center Test (ACT) to help automate performance testing designed to compare the performance of a web service running on ASP .NET 1.1 with ASP .NET 2.0.

Problem
Originally .NET 2.0 seemed to be performing many times better than .NET 1.1, but it was soon discovered that when running .NET 2.0, ATC was receiving a lot of 302 errors on 2.0 which it wasn’t on 1.0. On further investigation the Web Service wasn’t actually making all the correct database calls and on installing HTTP Monitor, it became apparent that the login wasn’t working. When I recorded the test using Internet Explorer 7, the HTTP requests worked as expected, however when ATC repeated them it was not returning the ASP.NET_SessionID.

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Tonight I was attempting to rip a DVD to an AVI-XviD file thinking it would be easy - unfortunately not. It’s not a copy-protected DVD or anything, just a plain old DVD-R.

First I tried VirtualDub MPEG or whatever it’s called. It seemed to be either taking ages or not responding so I gave up and ended it. Next I downloaded DVDx and tried to use it to rip the files from the DVD. Still painstakingly slow (to the point I wasn’t sure it was still doing anything) and eventually gave up with a message about a CRC error. So, I decided to copy the VOB files (actually the whole TS_VIDEO directory) to hard drive and work from there.

It was then I realised the problem wasn’t with the aforementioned programs but with Vista itself. There were two 1 GB VOB files and the first of these refused to be copied. Vista was throwing up an error which advised me it “Cannot read from the source file or disk”. Bugger. Thinking it might be a problem with either Vista or the DVD drive I tried it in my trusty laptop (still running Windows XP Pro). It worked!

So how do I know Vista’s the problem? Well I tried to copy the file over my network back to the Vista PC and got a similar looking error dialogue, this time saying “Network Error: There is a problem accessing \\laptop\directory. Make sure you are connected to the network and try again.”

By this stage I gave up and just downloaded DVDx to my laptop, which I was able to use to copy the video to an Xvid AVI file.  Nice work Micro$oft.  Now all I have to do is successfully convert it to NTSC format and I’m flying - unfortunately that’s as much fun as pulling teeth, and much more painful.

Immediately after I upgraded (using Fantastico) from Wordpress 2.1.x to 2.2.1 I noticed the Dashboard in the admin was giving me problems. I was getting 404 pages displaying in the middle of the page (even though the source code was fine and there actually aren’t any iframes there). I’ll get to the solution in a minute (so read on) but first I want to tell my story (just because I can).

Initially I thought this was because there had been a problem writing some of the files so I downloaded a clean copy of wordpress and uploaded the files manually over FTP. This didn’t help. Having eliminated browser problems by testing in IE as well as FireFox, I noticed that the page seemed to be loading fine and these 404s were appearing after the page loaded. Guessing Javascript I disabled this feature and tried again. It worked!

It was about this time that I stumbled across some information in the Wordpress support forums pointing to a AJAX issue. It seems to be something to do with displaying the dynamic information like notices from Wordpress (and incoming links?) and, more specifically, with the Content-type HTTP header being returned having a newly-added character encoding field.

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I’m graduating on Wednesday and have been looking about town (Belfast) for somewhere to have a meal afterwards to celebrate with the family. I’ve been round a few places (Yum looks like the favourite at the moment) and now Bourbon has been suggested. “Good idea!” I thought. I’ll just check their menu on their web site.

Unfortunately that’s easier said than done. It’s all fine until you hit the back button to go back from the Set Menu to the A la Carte one. You see the site is a wholesale abuse of Flash and it reminded me of an 8 year old article called Flash is Evil. The article may be getting on a bit, but every word’s as true now as it was then.

Flash has it’s uses and designing entire web sites (particularly web site navigation) is not one of them.

I recently noticed that my CPU fan on my Acer Aspire 5002 WLMi notebook was running at full speed much more than it normally should and the system itself was running more slowly than usual. When I opened task manager I was finding a process called Monitor.exe was hogging anything up to 99% of the CPU. I terminated the process and that solved everything - usually until I rebooted.

But what to stop this happening again? It turns out that monitor.exe was related to Acer eRecovery - a tool that helps recover your laptop from a major crash. However after a bit of googling I found out that it needs the D: partition that comes with the laptop (apparently it needs to be in FAT32 as well, but I don’t think this is true because mine had been NTFS for months and I hadn’t noticed any problems).

The problem seemingly arises because I recently reformatted the D partition into a few ext3 and other partitions for installing Linux (Ubuntu to be precise). Since Windows can’t read Linux filesystems, eRecovery can no longer find the D: partition which it, for some reason, seems to need.

Simple solution? Well I disabled Monitor.exe using Start -> Run -> msconfig and disabling Monitor.exe, which was listed at the bottom of the list under the Startup tab.

Inspired by Tech Chick (aka Gabrielle Atticus), I’ve decided to start listing some interesting if well-hidden sites on the internet so this will be the first in a series of nerd. links.

This one resolves a long-standing issue with Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client, ie the way it forwards messages.  Whereas Outlook, Outlook Express etc. forward some headers (to, from, subject, date etc) all you ever get in Thunderbird is “Sendername said:”.  It’s pretty pathetic really, especially the fact that there’s no date.

Luckily someone has made an add-on with the descriptive but not exactly ‘roll-off-the-tongue’ name “Change quote and reply format” to fix this problem. Now the quote header is much more useful:

—- Original message —–
From: sender@provider.com
To: recipient@provider.com
Subject: something
Date: 01/01/2005

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be listed at Mozilla’s plugin site, so I only stumbled on it after googling a bit and reading a few forum pages.  The home page (linked above) isn’t very well designed, but there’s a more user-friendly description of the plugin at The Extensions Mirror.

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Following my earlier rant about the trial that is installing Vista with a Netgear wireless card, I thought I’d offer an update on that story.

Firstly, my new Linksys (WMP54G v4.1) wireless card is working fine. Thanks Amazon.

Secondly, I updated the Windows Experience Index score just now. Still the same graphics card in the machine, so I don’t know how but suddenly my desktop graphics rating jumped from showing 2.1 to 4.1, pretty sweet! On viewing the details I also noticed that the graphics card apparently has 334MB of system memory available on top of the 256MB of dedicated RAM. I don’t know if this was the case before or not so can’t say if that influenced the change in score.

Anyway, this brings my overall Windows Experience Index up from 2.1 to 3.0, now based on the Gaming Graphics score (WEI bases your overall experience rating on the lowest score it finds). My system now looks like:

Processor (AMD Athlon 2800+): 3.4
RAM (1.5GB @ 266MHz): 3.7
Graphics (256MB eForce 6200): 4.1
Gaming Graphics: 3.0
Primary Hard Disk (Seagate 120GB 7200rpm): 4.4

Now if anyone can tell me of a Protowall/PeerGuardian substitute that works with Vista I’ll be sorted.