Moved from SubText to WordPress

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Paul Farrow

Well subtext has fallen out of favour and no one is really updating the software side of it any more. WordPress seems to be the latest fashionable blog software out there at the moment.

So I exported my subtext blog to blogml then used this very nice blog article to import it into wordpress. I did what the chap says but didnt really have any problems at all. The only thing I had a problem with was that the categories didnt keep their names, so just had to rename the categories once it was in wordpress format.

Antec Fusion Remote HTPC Case – Audio Control Doesnt Work

Posted on April 19, 2009 by Paul Farrow

Just upgraded my media center case to an Antec Fusion Remote. Now its a very well made case and has 120mm fans in them with variable speed control which is why it took my fancy. It has full size slots as well as my older case could only take half height cards which is always a problem finding them. I bought the silver one, disappointment here is that only the front is silver the rest of the case is black which is fine if you stack your machine with a silver av receiver that is silver as you wont see the rest of the case but if your like me that has them side by side its a little annoying that they didnt choose to do the whole case in silver but I guess its all because of cost and to be honest its way cheaper than say a zalman htpc case so I guess thats why.

I run an asus p5e-hdmi micro-atx board in it. It isnt one of the latest micro atx media boards because i have had it hanging around at the house for nearly a year now. I then push the audio out via coaxial to a sony av receiver running a 5.1 tanoy speakers.

The only problem I had with it was that the remote and variable control on the front of the case didnt adjust the sound / audio. Having researched the Antec support area, they suggested upgrading the latest driver software for the vfd (lcd panel) and your motherboard. Both of which still didnt make it work.

Then I saw that on the Asus support site that there was a realtek driver for the audio. I then replaced the microsoft standard driver for the audio with the Realtek one and bazaaam it all works.

The only outstanding problem I have is that Microsoft Media Center doesnt control the audio when playing a dvd, but I have had this problem on my older media center so think Media Center cant control it as the ouput just seems to off load it out the coaxial audio cable to my av receiver.

The results are outstanding just need to upgrade my lcd tv to a full HD (1080p) one now rather than a HD-Ready (720p) but that will have to wait.

Front USB Ports not working on my Shuttle running Vista x64 Ultimate

Posted on March 15, 2009 by Paul Farrow

After taking the Cypress update my front usb ports stopped working. How did I fix it well if you go to the device manager (right click the computer icon in file explorer, click properties then click device manager [left hand side]) under Universal Serial Bus Controllers (right at the bottom) there is a device shown now called HX2LP kit (3.03.0000.2) I believe this is what causes the problem so I just uninstalled mine and rebooted.

After the reboot I get a generic USB hub appear and the front ports on my shuttle SD37P2 are now working.

Also when I run windows update again I dont see that update any more.

Getting Rsyncd, Vista and Backuppc to work

Posted on May 26, 2008 by Paul Farrow

Recently upgraded to vista and for the life of me couldnt get the vista to work with rsyncd running from cygwin. Would always stop with a code 12 error and not alot else. I just run rsyncd or rsync with the daemon option as I dont belive the cwrsync works as a service yet on vista.

Now in the backuppc config options for rsyncd and rsync there is a hard link option I just removed that and it seems to work not sure why vista cant deal with that option but if you remove it, everything works as it did before on windows 2000 / XP.

DBDesigner4, Windows and MYSQL 5

Posted on September 3, 2007 by Paul Farrow

Ok thought I would have a look at DBDesigner4 as MyWorkbench seems to be taking a long time to get into beta. DBDesigner4 looks a great product but couldnt get it to connect to mysql 5 then realised that it the designer was designed for version 3 mysql and lots of the old mysql products need to read the myql.user table for id’s etc.

Tried the old trick of using the OLD_PASSWORD function and seems to work what you need to do is this….

1. Open the mysql command prompt.

2. SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = OLD_PASSWORD('rootpassword');

UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = OLD_PASSWORD('rootpassword') WHERE Host = 'localhost' AND User = 'root';

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

all in one line – hit return.

3. Try dbdesigner4 again and you should now be able to connect.

Vista, Palm Treo 750v and Windows Mobile Center 6.1

Posted on July 23, 2007 by Paul Farrow

Since upgrading to Vista have had a few problems syncing my Palm Treo 750v with the mobile center. Read lots of places that upgrading to Mobile Center 6.1 helped well I dont think thats really the problem, the problem seems to be that the (or at least mine) Treo seems to have a mind of its own and gets stuck doing things ie. the bluetooth sometimes doesnt connect as the mobile is busy this seems to be the same with the syncing one minute it syncs the other it doesnt.

I normally find that once I have soft rebooted (taken battery out) the mobile it works fine whether it be mobile sync center 6.1 or 6.0

I run Vista 64 bit here as well for the record, just waiting for Birdie Sync to be compatible with vista 64bit then all will be good as I tend to run a mixture of windows and linux, prefer not to use outlook and use thunderbird instead as it has better support for IMAP.

Napster Media Center Plugin on Vista

Posted on June 17, 2007 by Paul Farrow

Since upgrading from xp windows media center to vista home premium I have been unable to get Napster to work using its media center plugin the one that allows you to download and listen to music through the media center with the tv remote. The normal napster application works fine but not the plugin. It was provided free with windows xp media center edition but it doesnt appear to be there in vista meda center.

Looking on the internet it looks like this is the case that microsoft are not providing it free with media center probably because they have their own music download site now.

So thought I would ring Napster to see what thay had to say about it, hoping they were going tell me not to worry as they would be releasing it soon. I hoped this because I believe it was rather good and used it rather a lot.

Ringing Napster you are prompted with an automated message about which OS do you run press 1 for XP press 2 for Vista etc etc. So pressed the appropriate number for vista and the phone got answered by a nice chap with an american accent guess he was in america – lol. I explain my predicament and he is unsure what I am on about as he has no experience of XP media center, when I pressed him about a similar version for Vista he admitted to me that he hadnt even seen vista now what the hell is he doing on the end of a line where you have to press buttons to appropriate support staff when they havent even seen the basics like operating system.

Ah well, I immediately cancelled my subscription. If any one has any news about the media center plugin for vista I would be grateful not to mention restarting my subscription to Napster as I really did like it.

Trouble with that Pesky Mouse

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Paul Farrow

Not This Mouse

Vista, A Microsoft Wireless Mouse And Intellipoint

Ok since I installed Vista Ultimate about 2 months ago my microsoft wireless optical mouse 2 and keyboard has behaved strangely. I run dual screens and when clicking from one screen to the other it would sometimes have to be a four or five times double click before it recongised that I wanted to change focus.

After much trawling and swearing found this knowlegebase article – 321122 from microsoft.

After I did the above it seemed to cure the majority of my problems although I must say its still a little twitchy sometimes but mostly it is fixed.

Visual Studio 2005, Pushok and CVS on Vista / Linux

Posted on June 10, 2007 by Paul Farrow

Ok I previously blogged how to get visual studio 2003 talking to cvs using putty and pushok. This is an update to that, which can be found previous to this entry.

Pre-cursor to this is that you have putty working with your linux / unix machine and that you can open a session using ssh without using a password.

I downloaded the version 1.3 of the cvsscc from pushok, I believe thats the one for unix as they have split their programs from unix and windows cvs since I last bought software from them.

I then opened visual studio 2005 and clicked open from source control which presents you with a cvsroot options dialog in the cvsroot just type :ext:paulfarrow@cvs_server:/500gb1/cvsdata now ext depicts the protocol and the pushok program knows to use putty which you should already have set up and running in the tray with your certificates etc (not covered in this blog entry) and then the userid @ the putty saved session, you can see mine is called cvs_server and then the path for the root here mine is /500gb1/cvsdata.

then once you have put that in click check and it should authenticate against the linux server. You should then be able to clicke elipse next ot cvs module and it will give you a list of directories / modules in your cvs server.

Glad I got that going took me a little while, my next quest is to upgrade to svn and try the pushok plugin for that, will keep you all informed on how it goes.

ah forgot to mention one thing you need an environment variable to point to plink.exe which comes with putty that is CVS_RSH just set that to where plink resides in my case thats CVS_RSH=c:\ssh\plink.exe then pushok knows to use that for the ext protocol.

Environment Variables in Vista – Where are they ???