Google loves to try and lead the way, but they actually piss me off sometimes, recently they reduced the PR of a popular site we run to 0 and won’t tell us why it was dropped so dramatically making it impossible to correct any issues to reinstate the high page rank.

Anyway that’s sour grapes.

If Google can deliver what they promise it will mean an end to webpages crashing whilst running some java script and forcing you to restart your whole browser because nothing works. Well the pages might still crash but the browser shouldn’t.

If you interested in learning more about Googles new browser you can visit their comic book presentation:

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

Googe Chrome is open source so anyone can develop for it, and for themselves which is very cool.

Will it just be yet another browser on the market?

I’m not sure, I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see how it preforms and what it actually does feature wise.

NOTE: This beta version has two serious bugs which could leave your computer vulnerable!

Last week or maybe the week before (my mind forgets me sometimes), my computer just wouldn’t boot, or it would start and then just cut the power so I opened her up to operate. I then realised the computer had not been cleaned inside for about 2 years which was preventing the CPU fan from turning, yuk it was disgusting but this was surely the reason for it cutting off to save the CPU and mother board right………………….

I cleaned her out and it booted first time, all was well my baby was fixed again or so I thought. About two days later it does the same again and again, this was a sure sign my PSU (Power Supply Unit) was on it’s last legs, I’d not opened that up to clean the days before but now  I opened it up in hope of saving it with some radical cleansing but alas it did no good.

I kept forcing it to boot whilst I made back ups, pushing it to it’s limits but now my PSU rest in peace has gone to computer heaven, I just hope in my haste I didn’t crash the Hard Drives to, althought my PSU could do with the company, it’s just not the HD’s time, there twins and still young.

A friend whom works for a computer company was sending me a new PSU out, however he got a little busy and now I won’t get it until the weekend, but for the last week or two I’ve taken a self taught crash course in Linux which is on my other machines. As I think I mentioned in another blog on here, I’d used Linux before in fact the websites of SJB are on Linux servers (now Centos) but I’d only ever learned to do something as and when I needed it or I asked the server admins to take care of it, can’t do that here though so I learned the hard way and it’s been rather fun albeit time consuming.

If you considering dropping Microslow Windbloze and have no experience of Linux then try Ubuntu, it has to be the most user friendly I’ve tried. They also allow you download an ISO which when you stick on a CD and then pop into a windows machine allows you to run Ubuntu without installing it, so you can try it before installing it which is really cool.

Hopefully I’ll be back on-line properly soon. I know I’ll be moving my main system from Windows to Ubuntu soon so that will be more fun.

If you rely on Microsoft for some programs then you needn’t worry, there are two programs one emulates a Windows environment and the other allows you to install a windows partition and run it from Ubuntu like it’s just another program which is amazing.

1). Wine - http://www.winehq.org - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

2). Qemu - http://bellard.org/qemu - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU

3). Virtual Box - http://www.virtualbox.org

Anyway, yeah I was saying….. I should have my new PSU soon, lol.

Ok a little over dramatic, it never quite got to the bin but it was close on a few occasions. Ubuntu is an opensource Operating System which is basically a Linux Variant. An OS (Operating System) you will most likely be familiar with is Microslow Winbloze XP or Vista

I spent perhaps 18 to maybe 20 hours trying to figure out why my adaptor would not work, once I found a nifty feature it took 2 minutes to get it going. I went through various Ubuntu support forums to find what I needed.

I’d played with Ubuntu a fair few times but always hit the same issue of the wireless adaptor not working, this time I was set on making it work so I downloaded the latest copy which is currently Ubuntu 8.04.1 desktop from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download and installed it.

I was hitting the same issue and just couldn’t get it to work, everything kept pointing to something call Ndiwrapper which basically allows you install windows drivers on a Linux box. I’m familiar with commands after using SSH on my managed servers so it made it a little easier for me to understand, but I still couldn’t get everything to work. I downloaded the Ndiswrapper but couldn’t get it installed to start with.

I looked for tutorials and found the following:

HOWTO: WUSB54GS V1 And V2

I still had trouble even after reading this, not sure where I was going wrong.

After the many hours, I was about ready to give up again but thought I’d have a play with Ubuntu first. I went into Add/Remove Applications and found some real cool stuff, free games and more. I then used the search box and searched for ‘Wireless’. I couldn’t believe it an option came up ‘Windows Wireless Drivers’ and it was the ndiswrapper so I installed it (you’ll need a hard-wired connection).

The ndiswrapper was now working with a nice GUI (Graphical User Interface) which made it real easy to add drivers, but it wasn’t recognising any drivers I had, so I plodded off back to that tutorial again and found the following:

My guess is that you’ll come back to this tutorial wondering what went wrong, right? Ndiswrapper reports “invalid driver”, right? Well, if I’m wrong, skip the rest of this step.

The last command says that the drivers are invalid. That’s because it didn’t install the sys files! We need to do this manually. Run these commands in the same terminal:

If you have a WUSB54GS device, run this:

sudo cp usb8023.sys rndismp.sys /etc/ndiswrapper/wusb54gs/

If you have a WUSB54GSv2 device, run this:

sudo cp usb8023.sys rndismp.sys /etc/ndiswrapper/wusb54gsv2/

Now run this command:

ndiswrapper -l

Now if you new to linux all together you might be wondering what’s happening here, so I’ll break it down

sudo - Super User DO - Basically says “oi run this as admin/super user” and it will request your password to before running the command

cp -  This ones just saying copy

The next bit looks first at the file/folder and copies it to then to the location after the space:

usb8023.sys rndismp.sys /etc/ndiswrapper/wusb54gsv2/

Is the same as:

/copy/file.sys to /etc/location

Now you will need to navigate to the folder or use the correct path for the files within your command.

cd /folder/name - will move you between folders.

I hope this saves someone losing hair and sleep, lol. If it helps at all, then please just drop me a comment, it’s always nice to know that I can help others

My Ubuntu install is now successfully working with a Linksys Wireless SpeedBooster WUSB54GS

The following is a compressed archive containing the Linksys WUSB54GS drivers for both version 1 and version2

ndiswrapper files

If you need the actual ndiswrapper because you can’t see it in your install:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper

I then often find I’ve got the website on-line, dedicated hours, days, weeks and sometimes even months only to receive no communication from the third party. They’d disappear just about the time they were due to actually do some work.

Because of that I’ve got some domain names that could really do with being used so perhaps if your reading this with an interest running a paranormal website or you’ve already got a group and the domain would help then get in touch with me through our support website @

http://support.sjbowers.co.uk

These are some of the domains:

Yorkshire Paranormal:

http://yorkshireparanormal.net

http://yorkshireparanormal.com

http://yorkshireparanormal.co.uk

Northern Paranormal:

http://www.northernparanormal.com

http://www.northernparanormal.co.uk

Ghost Experiences:

http://ghostexperiences.net

http://ghostexperiences.com

http://ghostexperiences.co.uk

Haunted Locations:

http://hauntedlocation.net

http://hauntedlocation.com

http://hauntedlocation.co.uk

There are other domains also but this is a start, perhaps you’d be interested in running your club at one of these domains, or you’d be interested in a joint project.

Haunted Locations:

As you will see there are already two websites on this domain, one is hidden behind a template and is in fact wiki which was going to be a place for people to document historical information, ghost stories, location photos and the other website was going to be a directory of public domain contact details for locations

Ghost Experience:

The original owner of the domain wanted to run a commercial project but backed out.

I was then going to use it as video hosting website similar to that of Google, Youtube but for all things paranormal.

Northern Paranormal and Yorkshire Paranormal were originally for start-up paranormal groups that ended up not paying for the domains or using the website

Get in contact if your interested in some form of partnership or you wish to run your own website.

mysqldump -hlocalhost -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD <DATABASE

I was getting the following error:

mysqldump: Got error: 1105: File ‘./Database-Names/table_comments.MYD’ not found (Errcode: 24) when using LOCK TABLES

I couldn’t find a work around at first and most search results kept coming back to a bug in MySQL, which advised to make changes to the memory allowance, in this case that wasn’t an option.

I then came across http://www.webhostingtalk.com where a user by the name of SROHost mentioned that using:

–lock-tables=false

should fix the problem, well it did and for that I’m really grateful. As usual I tend to blog this stuff on my site, it serves to keep a personal record for me and to potentially help someone else in need.

mysqldump –lock-tables=false -hlocalhost -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD <DATABASE

Note: This happening with a WordPress database.

Anyway I was trying to set a crontab and cPanel has this cool feature to set them up, but it kept displaying:

/usr/bin/crontab permissions are wrong. Please set to 4755

If you tried to set up a crontab in ssh you’d get a permission denied message.

To fix this you need root access to your server, log in and enter the following:

chmod 4755 /usr/bin/crontab

This will change the permissions for you.

If you don’t have root access then you will need to contact your service providers and ask them

I installed FireFox 3 and it was driving me nuts, there seemed to be no back button to go back several pages at once. So at first I was clicking and clicking until I was on the verge of going back to an older FireFox version. I did a quick google search after figuring out I couldn’t be the only one annoyed at this, it was then that I found anders website.

These snap shots are also taken from Anders website:

As you see in Firefox there is only one drop down next to the back and forward buttons, which implied to me that you could only go forward.

However as pointed out by Anders, this drop down allows you to back and forwards. It shows you which point you are at with the black dot next to the one your currently veiwing:

Personally I think this should be between the back and next buttons, but now I know it’s there I’m happy.

There are still a couple of other annoyances though, but on a whole I’m now happier with FireFox 3.

So once again, thanks Anders.

Think about OO. it’s really nothing more than a set of classes that contain variables and functions working together as one, I know it’s a little more intricate than that, but basically that’s what it is. It’s OO code that can truely bring your scripts to life allow you to compete with other major languages available in a more level playing field.

May the OO be with you!!

I’m very impressed with it too, this is the first Nintendo console I’ve owned since the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System), in fact I still have the original NES and SNES some where in the loft.

My arm is aching though playing the Wii Sports, I don’t think it’s seen so much action in a while.

With the Wii we also bought Mario Kart, I just couldn’t put it down, the last time I play Mario Kart (original version) was so many years ago, in fact that was possibly one of the last computer games my father bought me and we both played together on.

Thanks Nintendo for the excellent game play, getting me off my arse to do some excercise and most of all the vivid memories of old school games and playing with my father.

Right I’m off to Wii now.

SVN

http://tortoisesvn.net/

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

CVS:

http://www.tortoisecvs.org/