Thursday, December 9, 2010

iTunes download slow

Trying to download a movie or song and iTunes says it'll take 9hours on your 24mbps connection?
Check your DNS server, if it's google (8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4), try changing it back to your ISP DNS, flush your cache, and restart iTunes. I did, and it solved my download problem instantly.

The problem seems to be with the way DNS resolvers return hosts when using a CDN(Content distribution network, like Akamai). iTunes uses a CDN to serve data from closer sources to you, but when using the Google DNS, the Google DNS may return a different CDN host for the iTunes data, then your local ISP (who may even cache the iTunes data). So the returned CDN host from Google could be anywhere in the world.

Google is aware of the issue, but there isn't much they can do about it at the moment since it's a limitation in the DNS protocol.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Windows 7 Update Issues

Upgraded my Windows Vista 64bit to Windows 7 64bit. Went perfectly except that some updates wouldn't install properly and kept throwing error 800B0100.

I tried the solution by Microsoft, didn't help. In the end I deleted the contents of "C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download" and ran the update again and Success! updates installed properly.

Friday, October 1, 2010

ffmpeg compiling and v4l

If you are compiling ffmpeg and want to disable v4l and v4l2 from building use:


--disable-muxer=v4l --disable-demuxer=v4l --disable-indev=v4l2 --disable-indev=v4l

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Scanner not working under Vista/Windows 7?

Recently I had cause to want to scan something with my old trusty CanoScan FB630U on my installation of Vista 64bit.

Turns out Canon haven't produced drivers for it, so it seemed I was out of luck.

A quick Google search turned up VueScan, which did actually work. However, I wasn't willing to spend the $40 price tag to get rid of the demo watermark.

I was thinking I would have to take it into work where we use Windows XP, which I know has drivers for this scanner.. but then I remembered I had VirtualBox with Ubuntu 10.04 installed in it.

I plugged in my scanner, told Windows to ignore the device and not to install drivers. Then I loaded up VirtualBox, went to the USB settings and added the scanner to the list of usb filters.

Loaded up the virtual machine, and instantly Ubuntu had detected the scanner and allowed me to use it to get my images into GIMP.

Another successful open source solution to corporate obsolescence.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Large address aware and games

Recently there was a huge outcry about how a recent patch to World of Warcraft caused it to use more than 2GB of address space when the maximum settings were used which led to a crash. One patch later, it was fixed.

One of the most common responses from the community was to ask Blizzard to enable the Large Address Aware flag to enable World of Warcraft to use more than 2GB of memory. Blizzard said no.

But, I was interested.. How many games have that flag enabled? 
I wrote a quick little program that parsed my games directory and came up with a list.

  • Armed Assault 2
  • Borderlands
  • Modern Warfare 2
  • Dawn of War 2
  • Farcry 2 Server
  • GTA4
  • Mass Effect 2
  • Stalker: Clear Sky
  • Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
  • X3 Terran Conflict
  • Eve Online
  • Civ4 Beyond the Sword
  • Guild Wars
  • Sacred 2
  • The Witcher
  • Forged Alliance
  • Rainbow Six Vegas 2
  • Never Winter Nights 2

Friday, July 2, 2010

Firefox update problem

Tried to update Firefox and now it won't start and displays a very unhelpful error about XULRunner and versions that looks something like this?


XulRunner
Error: Platform version '1.9.2.3' is not compatible with
minVersion >= 1.9.2.4
maxVersion <= 1.9.2.4


1. Goto your installation directory for Firefox, probably something like C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
2. Open the file "application.ini" file in something like notepad
3. Find the text MinVersion=1.9.2.4 and change the 4 to a 3 and save it.
4. Now Firefox will be able to run though it might complain about updates. Don't let it do an automatic update (it'll fail)
5. When you can, download and install the latest version of firefox from the Mozilla website

Cause:
From what i can tell, the Firefox.exe was the 1.9.2.3 version(as checked by right clicking and viewing version properties), but the application.ini (required for XULRunner) file specified it needed to be 1.9.2.4. Don't know why firefox.exe didn't update with the rest (maybe it was in use at the time?)

The latest version(3.6.6) is 1.9.2.6.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Eclipse RCP application Bundle org.eclipse.ui errors!

Trying to do the Eclipse RCP tutorial and getting compile errors when doing Chapter 3 - Create your first RCP application?

Errors you might be getting:
- Type AbstractUIPlugin cannot be resolved to a type
- Bundle org.eclipse.ui cannot be resolved
- Compile errors

Try this:

1. Click on Window->Preferences
2. Expand Plug-In Development on the tree
3. Click Target Platform
4. Make sure "Running Platform" is active, if it's not, tick it, and click reload, then try to build your project again.