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Popcorn Hour A-110
Posted 10:55:15 AM on Thu, 18th December 2008 by Dj-ZoRt! Image #1

I just received my Popcorn Hour A-110! So far I have been very impressed. It cost just under AU$400 including registered and insured shipping courtesy of the nice people at Media Players & More, and Australian online store based in Queensland who specialize in media players.

You can read other reviews (ones that are actually comprehensive, unlike this) at places like MacRecon who gave it a 9/10 and Cnet UK who gave it a 9.1/10.

I wont labor the features which are listed elsewhere. Except to say that this little unit is a Linux based "Networked Media Tank", which uses hardware decoders to play various forms of media from network, optional internal hard disk or usb media (be it usb stick, usb hard disk or even usb dvd/cd).

Video outputs available are composite, s-video, component and hdmi 1.3a upto 1080p (including audio through hdmi), Audio outputs are stereo, digital optical and hdmi audio. The device can decode DTS and AC3 back to pcm or can pass straight out to a receiver - like your big surround sound stereo.

Multimedia formats worth mentioning are AVI with XVID/DIVX video, mp3 audio or ac3 audio. My main motivating factor is its support of h264 MKV with DTS or AC3 audio. It supports a plethora of formats which include FLAC audio. Nice. For an exhaustive list, click any other review.

Physical media formats include USB drives and also USB cd/dvd players. The remote includes all buttons needed to attach a USB dvd/cd and have full DVD functionality. Not what I bought it for but neat nonetheless. And iso images are treated just like a dvd and use the same menu buttons. Internal hard drive is any SATA disk. It will format to linux native, so you will be boned if you try and take it out to use on Windows etc.  Why you would actually do so seems strange. Surely you would want to leave it in your A/V cabinet, using the various network methods available to copy files on and off

Network connectivity is via built in 10/100 ethernet, there is no wireless however wireless usb is supported (but i have no idea which devices, its linux based so ones that work in linux?). Wireless is not a feature I wanted so I'm happy that wireless is excluded . Some reviewers are concerned that the the wired ethernet should be Gigabit. Such an upgrade seems pointless to me as a 1080p h264 file is only around 6meg/sec, which is only around half 100mbit speed.

The A-110 can play straight from SMB and NFS! It can also play from UPNP. With an internal hard drive it can also share its media via smb, nfs, upnp, http and ftp. Madness! With an internal disk it can download from bittorrent and usenet on to the local disk (control via http and on-tv). Streaming off the internet is supported, including youtube and googlevideo, however I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

Menus are sharp, neat, professional looking and responsive. I don't like that you must decide the media file type before browsing, yick, very draconian.

Running a firmware update was quick and came straight off the net after plugging in the A-110's ethernet. Other players I have had required burning to CD and 30+mins of time to finish. I dont know if other upgrade methods are supported if for some reason direct download isnt a good option for you.

The included HDMI cable seems very high quality. I don't feel any compelling need to replace it (unlike the miserable HDMI cable you get with Blu-Ray players) however I don't have anything to test it and quantify my claims!

Good things so far

Some gotchas (ie bad things)
 Unknowns
 Things I would like to see added
So far im very impressed. price (under 400), size (smaller than a mini dvd player) and features (plays full hd mkv perfectly with hdmi out) having already exceeded my expectations. If you have a flat screen tv on its normal stand, you can sit it in the space between the table (surface) its sitting on and the tv without problems, its really thin.

Well worth buying over a Media PC or even XBMC.

(There are a lot of others using the same internals (which are from Sayabac apparently), all have very similar features, but have different form factors, different USB positioning, some have coax digital out and one even has SD card slot - there is lots of details here)
Popcorn Hour A-110

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What webserver are Australian ISP's using?
Posted 3:22:02 PM on Sun, 7th December 2008 by Dj-ZoRt! Image #20

For no real reason except personal curiosity I did a fairly unscientific survey of the top 20 isps according to whirlpool (top based on http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/ which indicates this list is the top 20 based on provider disclosure of whirlpool membership, so clearly no the actual customer numbers). In any case I just needed a list of 'top' australian ISPs to survey.

My method was to simply put the main url into http://uptime.netcraft.com.au and then record it.

In a few cases servers have been moved behind load balancers (which were F5's in all cases), so I have assumed that the OS is still the same as in the entry before the move. Also some providers have changed platforms, so I have collected the most recent.

Here goes, remember that the numeric position is based on the above premise, not customer or revenue sizes.

#1 Internode Apache/FreeBSD
#2 iiNet Apache/Debian
#3 TPG Internet Apache/Linux
#4 OptusNet Apache/Redhat
#5 Telstra BigPond IIS/Windows
#6 Exetel Apache/Debian
#7 Netspace Apache/Solaris
#8 Westnet IIS/Windows
#9 aaNet Apache/Debian
#10 Adam Internet Apache/FreeBSD
#11 AAPT IIS/Windows
#12 Amnet IIS/Windows
#13 3 Apache/Unix
#14 Virgin Broadband IIS/Windows
#15 iPrimus IIS/Windows
#16 Comcen Internet Apache/FreeBSD
#17 People Telecom Apache/Debian
#18 Spin Internet Apache/FreeBSD
#19 Dodo IIS/Windows
#20 Vodafone Apache-Coyote (Tomcat)

What surprised me is that FreeBSD showed up so many times (4/20 = 20%) and that Redhat was only present once. IIS accounts for (7/20) 35%. Debian comes in at 20% also (4/20). Solaris appears just once (although netspace does use solaris, but netspace strangely isnt on the list).

Apache accounts for (13/20) 65% of the total.

What I wanted to know, which I found from this little survey, is that the open source platform of choice is either Debian or FreeBSD.

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Cisco Broadband Access Centre for Cable = Rubbish
Posted 10:23:45 PM on Tue, 28th October 2008 by Dj-ZoRt! Image #3

Recently some bone head at my work decided that it would be a good idea to migrate from our existing ISC DHCPD + LDAP provisioning system to Ciscos Broadband Access Centre for Cable.

This is my warning to anyone considering forking out good money for it.

Whats my advise then? Dont.

Its pure and utter garbage. Ive found better software in abandoned projects on sourceforge.net, and fortunately then dont charge you!

Whats wrong with it?

There are a number of glaring issues which have meant i have spent weeks making massive massive hacks to get things to work right.

So why on earth anyone would want to buy it is beyond me. You can do much more with ISC-DHCP and LDAP, going home each night not hating your job. As for support? Call the cisco hotline and they have never even heard of the product before.

Your going to have to attach bacc to your user db anyway, so why not just hook ISC straight to it rather than having to copying users in and out of BACC from sql or ldap (etc).

There are even companies you can pay to support your ISC if the massive wealth of information on websites, newsgroups and forums, plus in paper books isnt enough.

BACC wont give you peace of mind, it will just give you a clunky cable provisioning system.

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Bug in Max OS X Leopard installer for iMac G4
Posted 8:59:59 AM on Tue, 5th August 2008 by Dj-ZoRt! Image #4

I found that the MacOSX installer will fail if the iMac G4 sleep functions kick in. For some reason the installer doesn't disable any of the power saver functions for the screen, hard disk etc so when (i assume) the hard disk or cd/dvd-rom (not sure which) powers down the installer will fail with an big orange error saying installation component not found.

My wife and I took our first DVD back as we thought it must be faulty. However after seeing the same error again, we watched carefully (rather than just walking away for long waits in the installer) we noticed that the failure varyied as to when it occurred i suggested that my wife sit there and hit ctrl ever minute or so throughout the 90 odd minute install (as ctrl has no impact on the installer, but will wake this system. this is an old unix best practise). So with a novel in hand she diligently tapped ctrl throughout the installer. It then worked nicely.

In my defense the upgrade of OS was to allow her new iPod nano to work. Panther was perfectly suitable for all other purposes, even if a few new apps were starting to not support it, it worked fine for browsing, watching files and dvd, and up until the new iPod nano - for syncing ipods.

As the install would start upgrading the system then fail, I was unable to get back into 10.3 to turn off power saver features. So the machine was basically a brick without sitting there tapping on the keyboard for an hour and half.

Good news is that despite the numerous upgrade failures, when things finally did install properly we didnt lose anything. All the user data and installed apps from 10.3 were where they should be and the upgrade is as you would expect. Ie everything is the same when you log in except the version is now newer and there are more bells and whistles.

Our iMac G4 is 1ghz with 768mb ram and Leopard seems to run just as well as Panther. There are a few effects that are slower and surprisingly some that are faster. For the skeptical windows user, you cant boast that sort of experience when upgrading windows ever. Although i will admit that moving from NT4 to Windows 2000 was actually the first time that upgrading windows seemed to make life better.

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Perl Modules the Debian Way
Posted 1:19:31 PM on Fri, 13th June 2008 by Dj-ZoRt! Image #9

For some strange reason I had never previously needed to install a perl module in debian. Its baffling, considering I am staunchly Debian in the face or the Fedora and Ubuntu hoards, and similarly i am a Perl-is-best system administrator who finds php, java, ruby and even python to be unnecessary uses of my hard disks sectors.

So with that rant out of the way. Here is how to install perl modules the Debain way :) keep in mind this command will make a .deb file in the current directory

So firstly (only need to do this once), install dh-make-perl with...

apt-get install dh-make-perl

Then for each module, just run

dh-make-perl --build --cpan Module::Name

the --notest option may help you if you are lazy like me and just assume things will work right

then you will want to install the .deb package with dpkg -i etc

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Call of Duty 4 Linux Server
Posted 11:59:17 AM on Wed, 23rd April 2008 by Dj-ZoRt! Image #17

This is a very quick howto on installing Call of Duty 4 (COD4) dedicated server for Linux. This uses the native linux port. It should also work fine for FreeBSD (as cod4 works perfectly in freebsd's linux emulation)

Note

I have also stripped out unneeded files to minimize size (by default its over 6gig). I am not using punkbuster, infact im also removing it completely. You can use punkbuster, but you will need to work that out for yourself (doing so will may mean you cant trim the install to bare essentials).


You will need...

The cds/dvd are available from wherever they are being sold. Find the link for cod4 linux binaries on your most convenient mirror

Prepare the game data files

Mount the cd/dvd to a convenient location, i will use /mnt/

Go to the directory you want to install in (keep in mind you will need about 7 gigs of space initially). Perhaps /opt/games/ or /usr/local/games/. FreeBSD users may be inclined to have the files live inside /emul/linux/ with the rest of the linux environment.

Create the COD4 server directory, and copy the game files then make them writable by the owner. You will need to repeat the copying line for each CD.

mkdir cod4-linux-server
cd $_
cp -R /mnt/Setup/Data/ ./
chmod -R g+w *
Remove Junk we dont need

Now remove the junk we dont need and save over 1gig of space (this isnt in the README file, but we dont need windows files unless we want to use punkbuster)

rm *bmp *exe *dll *ico
rm -rf main/video/
cd ..

You may also be able to remove the Mods and Miles directories, but they are under 1meg so its not all the worthwhile.

Install the Linuxy bits

Now install the COD4 binaries (do this last so that updated files in the package override the cd files) and remove the punk buster installer.

wget
tar jxvf
cd cod4-linux-server
rm pbsetup.run

Look how small it is!

dean@optimus:~/cod4-linux-server$ du -h
2.8G ./main
456K ./miles
696K ./Mods/ModWarfare
696K ./Mods
2.3G ./zone/english
2.3G ./zone
5.1G .


Configuration Files

Look elsewhere for this step.

Run your server!

Now do all the configuration files and then run the binary (you might want to run this in screen).

./cod4_lnxded

Caveats

1. I have read that COD4 needs its game files and subdirectories in lower case. If there are just a few, you can rename them yourself with the mv command. Otherwise you can use a fancy script such as this one, which will rename everything in and under the current directory to lowercase.

#!/usr/bin/perl

@files = `find .`;
shift @files;
foreach $file (@files) {
$file =~ s/\n//;
system('mv',$file,lc($file)) if ($file =~ /[A-Z]/g);
}

2. COD4 will fail to run if ~/.callofduty4/pb doesnt exist, even if punkbuster isnt used. This may cause problems with a very restricted user. You can probably fake cod4 by running it with $HOME overridden. Ie

HOME=/opt/games/cod4-linux-server ./cod4_lnxded

You shouldn't use export HOME=/blah/blah as this will wreck up your session.

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Foam Party
Posted 9:11:02 PM on Sat, 1st March 2008 by BaRRaCUDa!!! Image #16

Ok so last Thursday's uni bar night was the most fun ever. The students association organised for the people at the foam party company to run an event, we had an awesome DJ and a giant foam cannon.

The dance floor was absolute chaos as large numbers of uni students in varying states of intoxication all smushed together to get as close to the foam cannon as they could,  combined with the fact that everyone was drenched and slippery with whatever chemical the foam was made from. Despite the crush it was actually very easy to get into the middle because everyone was drunk and slippery so you could just slide through the crowd.

All in all it was a fantastic night, i got home at 2amish, i wish i could have stayed longer but an early friday class beckoned. Hopefully there will be one again!!!

if someone is looking at organising an awesome night for a birthday or some such think then have a look at http://foamparty.com.au

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Hamachi on AMD64 GNU/Linux... easy!
Posted 1:23:09 PM on Fri, 15th February 2008 by Dj-ZoRt! Image #20

There is a lot of people out there annoyed that hamachi 'wont run' on GNU/linux for AMD64. Likely this is mainly because hamachi is game oriented and Linux gamers often lack really indepth linux skills. Maybe, maybe not. But either way here is how to get it to run on your AMD64 system - regardless of your distribution (i personally run Debian, i have also made this work on OpenSUSE as well... it will work on any distribution.

So lets start by downloading hamachi (this link may need updating)

[dean@cache dean]# su
.. etc ..
[root@cache dean]# cd /tmp/
[root@cache tmp]# wget http://files.hamachi.cc/linux/hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx.tar.gz
... file downloads ...
[root@cache tmp]# tar zxvf hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx.tar.gz
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/Makefile
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/LICENSE
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/README
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/LICENSE.tuncfg
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/LICENSE.openssh
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/LICENSE.openssl
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/hamachi
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/tuncfg/
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/tuncfg/Makefile
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/tuncfg/tuncfg.c
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/tuncfg/tuncfg
hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/CHANGES
[root@cache tmp]# cd hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx
 
So we have downloaded and extracted the hamachi tar.gz file into /tmp/
Then we move on to other things.

The 'tuncfg' portion of hamachi will compile without any issues. The actual 'hamachi' binary file is a binary, but its encrypted and compressed with 'upx'. So to make it work, we just need to extract it. Easy!

At this stage, some distributions may actually run the binary. CentOS seems to do so out of the box. So try it like so...

[root@cache hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx]# arch
x86_64
[root@cache hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx]# ./hamachi
Cannot find configuration directory /root/.hamachi. Have you run 'hamachi-init' ?
[root@cache hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx]#

Otherwise we will just need to uncompress it with 'upx'. Once again, the link below may break. So check out upx.sf.net for the real file.
Your dist will likely have a proper package, but i will just use the tar.gz so we can delete it later with the hamachi install files.

[root@cache hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx]# wget http://upx.sourceforge.net/download/upx-3.02-amd64_linux.tar.bz2
.. the file downloads ...
[root@cache hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx]# tar jxvf upx-3.02-amd64_linux.tar.bz2
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/BUGS
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/COPYING
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/LICENSE
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/NEWS
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/README
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/README.1ST
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/THANKS
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/TODO
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/upx
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/upx.1
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/upx.doc
upx-3.02-amd64_linux/upx.html
[root@cache hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx]# mv upx-3.02-amd64_linux/upx ./
[root@cache hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx]#


So we extract and move upx, its still in the hamachi directory so it will wipe easily later. Im not proposing you avoid your package system! Just that for a once off usage you may as well go this way. Extract as so...

[root@cache hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx]# ./upx -d hamachi
                       Ultimate Packer for eXecutables
  Copyright (C) 1996,1997,1998,1999,2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007
UPX 3.02        Markus Oberhumer, Laszlo Molnar & John Reiser   Dec 16th 2007

        File size         Ratio      Format      Name
   --------------------   ------   -----------   -----------
    830676 <-    331144   39.86%    linux/386    hamachi

Unpacked 1 file.
[root@cache hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx]# ldd ./hamachi
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x4f7e4000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xf7fe2000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x4f59a000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x4f57d000)
[root@cache hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx]#


So now the hamachi binary is ready to go. Observe that ldd now knows whats what with the binary, previously ldd would give you ' not a dynamic executable'.

Now, do all the usual hamachi steps! (make, make install, hamachi-init etc. See the README file that comes with hamachi). gHamachi and init scripts are out there. So go find them if you like!

I have played numerous linux native and windows (through wine and or cedega) using hamachi in this way. Its quite easy! Not to mention ssh over hamachi. So watch out, as hamachi will expose  your machine to the VPN network even when you are behind a ADSL/IP router with firewall facilities. Hamachi uses 5.0.0.0/8 network addresses which may also get around your local iptables rules.

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Cloverfield... Cloverboring
Posted 8:40:47 AM on Fri, 8th February 2008 by Dj-ZoRt! Image #6

My Wife and I were excited to go see Cloverfield. The trailers and pre-release marketing looked excellent. We are both Lost fans so were looking forward to something special. Whilst in NZ on the last leg of our moneymoon we found a cinema and watched it. Keep in mind that we put off seeing it to save ourselves some money before our wedding, we might have seen it in the Cook Islands but their little cinema seems to focus on family movies - so we waited for New Zealand. Well. It was rubbish. Utter, utter rubbish. Blair Witch style cinematography was way art house, but stupid. Miami Vice style would have worked just as well without the motion sickness and constant annoyance at the intentionally lowsy camera skills. The monster seemed cool, but there were only a few good solid shots to enjoy him/her and absolutely no information whatsoever on where it was from etc. I understand what the movie was trying to do. But the angle is for Dendy Cinemas not for mainstream cinemas. My recommendation? spend your time watching land before time sequels instead.

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Word from Steelseries
Posted 1:25:26 PM on Thu, 10th January 2008 by Rufnex Image #4

SteelSeries presents results of recently held Iron.Lady female tournament

Shanghai, China - January 9th, 2008 - SteelSeries, a leading manufacturer of innovative professional gaming gear presents the final standings of the world's most successful female gaming event Iron.Lady 2, an invitational Warcraft 3 tournament, held the between the 4th and 6th of January.

Iron.Lady 2 took place inside the NeoTV studios, where the event was televised off- as well as online. During the 3 days Iron.Lady 2 was held, over 90 million people were exposed to the event on over 200 Chinese websites, and was the most viewed program on Web TV throughout China.

With gaming systems provided by DELL and professional gaming gear from SteelSeries, eight professional and upcoming female gamers battled it out for the winning title. Last year's winner Zhang "Cang" Xiangling was set to defend her title as she faced Xu "Sara" Yinghua in the finals. After an exciting match, Cang was able to snatch the first prize that included a DELL XPS M1530 gaming laptop and a 12 month sponsorship from SteelSeries involving 3000 RMB per month.

The final Iron.Lady 2 standings were:

1. Zhang "Cang" Xiangling (SteelSeries sponsorship and DELL XPS M1530)

2. Xu "Sara" Yinghua (5000 RMB and DELL XPS M1330)

3. You "MoonFish" Jianying (3000 RMB)

4. Iin "sweetdream" Jia

5. Zhao "KilLah" Ming

6. Wu "Dido" Jingjing

7. An "Angel" Jia

8. Mimi "MiMi"

Besides the main tournament a vote took place among all spectators for the most popular SteelSeries Iron Lady. The winner received a DELL XPS M1530 gaming laptop and once again Cang ran with the prize as she turned out to be the crowd's darling.

For more information about the event including information about the contestants, replays from the tournament, pictures from the venue and spectator statistics please visit www.steelseries.com/ironlady.


About SteelSeries

SteelSeries is a leading manufacturer of gaming peripherals and accessories, including headsets, keyboards, mice, software and gaming surfaces. SteelSeries has been on the forefront of professional gaming gear since its inception in 2001, thanks to continued innovation and product development in cooperation with leading professional gamers. All SteelSeries products are developed in co-operation with professional gamers to ensure optimum performance and durability. SteelSeries supports the growth of competitive gaming and electronic sports through aggressive sponsoring of teams and support of communities, tournaments and LAN-events all over the world. For additional information, visit http://www.steelseries.com.

About Iron.Lady

Iron.Lady is a unique yet successfully popular gaming event held in China. Iron.Lady gathers the top female professional Warcraft 3 delegates from around Asia, in order to battle against each other for cool prizes and of course the ultimate title of "Super Iron Lady". Iron.Lady was founded in 2007 and reaches a viewer base of approximately 90 million people with 200+ websites in China alone. Iron.Lady represents and signifies the strength within these females' personalities, but also their determination and ability to compete on a professional level. The Iron.Lady tournaments are a cornerstone of competitive female electronic sports. For additional information, visit http://www.steelseries.com/ironlady.

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