The installation started properly with no issues from within Windows Vista, then the PC required a restart, so restarted and the installation continued.

A message then came up during installation that “a required driver could not be found”.  This could be a problem, once the error had been closed, the window on screen said that all changes made would be reverted to how they were.  So my thoughts here were that it would restart back to Windows Vista like it was before with a heap of temporary installation files on the C drive.

On restarting, Windows failed to boot.  The error message was a simple “BOOTMGR cannot be found” (something like that can’t remember it off by heart).

So I took the 7 DVD out and put the Vista DVD in to do a repair, although I am sure the 7 DVD would of been able to do it.

Upon booting up using the Vista DVD I selected the repair option at which stage it prompted me that there was a problem with the installation.  Well I knew that, so I decided to try it and pressed the Repair and restart button and let it load up from the hard drive. After the restart the same message appeared.

So I booted back to the Vista DVD and selected repair again.  This time I wasn’t asked if I wanted to repair automatically.  I then chose the repair start up errors option (the one at the top).  After this had completed (took around 10 seconds), I restarted and left it to it’s own devices.  This time the computer went past the error message and I was greeted with Windows 7.  It had installed properly despite the error, although in all likeliness that is what caused the BOOTMGR problem.

Windows 7 finished configuring itself and eventually asked me for a username and password.  I thought this was a bit strange as it should of pulled out my previous accounts, but carried on with the instructions anyway.

Long story short, Windows 7 installed, but without any of the applications installed or documents.

But the application files and documents were present but had been moved in to other folders.  I can only assume that the files would of been moved back in to the main folders rather than the newly created folders if the installation had completed successfully.

Graphics drivers were already installed as was the network drivers. The only drivers that weren’t installed were the X-Fi drivers from Creative.  So I went to their website and downloaded their latest drivers for Vista.

On attempting installation I was greeted with a message saying that the OS was incompatible with the drivers and that I would need to upgrade my OS. Obviously a bad search within the drivers installer, so I set the installer to run in compatibility mode for Windows Vista. This time the installation proceeded without a problem.

I deleted the old application files which weren’t needed any more and was able to back up all the documents back to the rightful place.

Here is a list of what I was aiming for:

1. Be able to play backed up DVD, Blu-ray & HDDVD videos in either .avi, .mkv (H.264) or WMV
2. Central bit of software to cover everything
3. Able to play off network shares
4. Be able to play back Blu-ray and HDDVD easily

For my software I am using the following:

• Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate Edition
• MediaPortal v1.0 (with TVSeries 2.0 plugin and Monochrome 2.2 skin)
• iMon 7.2

I did try using Ubuntu over Vista but found that Blu-ray support was a bit limited in the way you basically had to manually dump each film on to the harddrive stripping out the DRM.

So I ended up using Vista which has been very reliable. I have turned off Aero to give a small performance increase in playing 1080p MKV files and have disabled UAC for the obvious reason; it’s annoying.

Although the integrated Windows Media Centre that comes with Windows Vista is good, it can be a bit of a chore to get set up correctly to play any video format. So I am using MediaPortal which is a free bit of software which is simply fantastic.

I followed this guide from ProjectHTPC on setting up MediaPortal which is an easy to understand guide and tells you exactly what you need to know.

I then followed this guide on getting the Monochrome skin on Media Portal and getting the sound through to my sound system playing proper DTS. Following on from that guide, I came across a plugin for MediaPortal called TVSeries. It’s fantasic. I followed this guide and have all my TV series on my computer set up with fan art, which has now given me an excuse to get all my box sets on to the harddrive to have them as easy to access as possible.

Media Portal plays off network shares which has ticked off number 3 and allows me to continue on my search to get a NAS set up with a lot of storage to store all my DVDs etc on.

The only problem I still have to overcome is getting Blu-ray and HDDVD to play through MediaPortal properly, which should be OK once I get around to getting PowerDVD 7 or hacking PowerDVD 8 which removed any trace of HDDVD.

iMon has been a pain though, my case came with a CD with it on which I have now misplaced while moving house and have found myself downloading the latest version off the SoundGraph website extremely slowly.

My first thoughts, were that, that was very wrong from Yahoo. So I tried it on another PC with Chrome and had been set up to use OpenDNS as the ISP’s DNS kept going down and having problems.

Quite clearly not a one off on the AVG results. The fact that they are so similar, either AVG toolbar uses Google for the search recommendations and Yahoo for the actual search feature or some SEO sites are spamming the keywords and getting some recommended words to the top of all search engines.

Either way it is inappropriate and you wouldn’t expect this, least of all when searching for something to do with Google itself. Perhaps they better put a redirect in for mail.google.co.uk to mail.google.com.

New Features:

• Change language text within Drupal
  Within the admin screen of FPSS you can now add the language text for the slideshow within Drupal which is stored in variables. By default the module has the English text in. If you want the French text, then you will have to open up the french.php file and copy paste each item in to the form and save it.
• Change javascript location
  Within the admin screen as well as being able to turn off the javascript library and optimize the javascript you can now selected if you want the javascript to be inserted in to the footer of the page rather than the header. This is tested and works on a default Drupal installation of 5.12.

Fixes

• Optimize JS and Disable JS both work as expected now and any configuration of the 2 settings should work, although some javascript packages may conflict causing problems.
• Fixed the admin settings access, missing array item in hook_perm.

You can download the fpss for drupal module at the Google Code site and you can view the demo of the Front Page Slideshow for Drupal demo at http://drupal.jamestombs.co.uk.

If you have any problems or find any bugs please submit them on the FPSS for Drupal Issue Queue on the Google Code site. Alternatively leave a comment to this post or email at jtombs1987@gmail.com.

Please note this only affects the hatchbacks which were made before April 2008.

Closing multiple tabs

The huge flaw that is extremely irritating is no warning of closing multiple tabs.

If you have 10 tabs open and accidentally close the main window at the top right rather than the tab close button. Goodbye tabs.

You can have the sessions enabled to get it back once you open Chrome again but that isn’t very helpful if you had active downloads going when you accidentally closed the browser.

Earlier today I was download Portal: Prelude, an expansion modification for the game Portal. After download 550MB of the 775MB file, I accidentally closed Chrome forgetting that I had the download going.

IE and FF would of both stopped this from happening as they both open downloads in separate windows rather than the main browser, so if you close the main browser the downloads continue. Chrome does not.

I wasted that time and bandwidth downloading 550MB to be lost in the ether and having to download it again, because something so trivial was missed out of Chrome.

It doesn’t take a lot of common sense to know this is could be a problem, Mozilla, Microsoft and Opera all have implementations in place to stop this happening. The fact that Google took the best parts of all the other browsers in to 1 then deciding that a rather important feature wasn’t in their users best interest is worrying. How many other problems are there going to be under the surface?

Downloads

I have found that on many user initiated downloads that they just fail to start full stop on my Chrome installation at work and some downloads on my Chrome installation at home.

By clicking a download button the file will appear at the bottom of the browser and have ’starting…’ next to it but never progress past this stage. Right clicking the file and selecting Save as… works for all anchor links, but any downloads that are done through a form button are impossible to download which results in my opening up Firefox to download files.

Dictionary

You don’t seem to have the ability to add new words to the dictionary in Chrome which is rather strange. In Firefox you can and it is helpful when you type in something quite a lot and it isn’t in the dictionary, that little red line becomes annoying.

While writing this post, there are 2 words with red lines underneath them. The first is Firefox. Fair enough, it isn’t an actual word in the dictionary but still, Google do give a lot of money to the Mozilla foundation (which is in the dictionary). But the 2nd underlined word is an odd one indeed. It is Google. The company who have made the browser haven’t even put their name in the dictionary, instead suggesting that I meant to type goggle.

• Load Date Local Infile
• Select
• Delete
• Drop

Firstly I will show you how to put a tab delimited log from Windows ISA Server in to the MySQL database. With the logs that I have been working with a days worth of information has been between 500,000 and 700,000 which is around 150-200MB in size alone.

You will find that if you use the default PHP timeout settings that you will timeout with large operations such as importing such a large file in to MySQL. 

I suggest that you open a command prompt and run through the process below to import the file and see how long it takes to import. If you have previous logs, choose the biggest one so you can get a worst case scenario. 

Before we can import the data into a MySQL database we need a database and table to import the data in to. I am not going to go in to much depth for this as it is quite simple to do using PHPMyAdmin or a similar program.

For the ISA log table you can use my code that I have here:

CREATE TABLE `tbl_log1` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`ip` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`username` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`browser` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`date` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`time` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`isa` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`blank` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`proxy` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`proxyip` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`proxyport` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`num1` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`num2` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`num3` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`protocol` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`method` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`url` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`type` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`num4` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_general_ci 

Feel free to change the encoding type if you wish. 

Now for the code. To import the data we will use the Load Data Local Infile ability of MySQL. This will load a file that is locally on the machine to the MySQL database given the right parameters.

load data local infile 'C:\\logfile.log'
into table tbl_log1
fields terminated by '\t'
lines terminated by '\n'
(ip,username,browser,date,time,isa,blank,proxy,proxyip,proxyport,num1,num2,num3,protocol,method,url,type,num4)

The last line is a list of the columns in order that are in the log. The only columns we really want are username, date, time and url, although you may want ip as well if you are monitoring network activity on static IP address so you can see where most of the bandwidth is being used. If you are importing a different file then change the columns to the names of your columns in your delimited file. The names of the columns within the brackets are the names that you gave them in the table. 

For example if you have a list of usernames, passwords and emails you will want 3 columns and a last line looking like this:

(username,password,email)

The column names have to be in order. If email is the first column in the file then make it the first word within the brackets. 

The 1st line should be the same for everyone except for the location of the file. Of course using the load data local infile function the file has to be on the machine itself and can not be done through the network. Also note the 2 backward slashes, the first backslash is to espace the following backslash.

The 2nd line is the table that we are importing to, make sure you have set up a table for your data to go in to. 

The 3rd line sets the delimiter type. \t is the delimiter for tab and \r is for a space. I am unaware of what the others are so if anyone knows please let me know.

The 4th line sets the delimiter for the end of the line. In this case each line was a new row on the file in excel so this is \n for new line.

The 5th line is the list of columns that we are importing into. 

The only problem is if you are importing a large log file like I was. What I had to do was cut out all the rubbish that I didn’t need to make the databases faster for queries and the like.

First of all I deleted all the columns I didn’t need.

ALTER TABLE `tbl_log1`
DROP `ip`,
DROP `browser`,
DROP `isa`,
DROP `blank`,
DROP `proxy`,
DROP `proxyip`,
DROP `proxyport`,
DROP `num1`,
DROP `num2`,
DROP `num3`,
DROP `protocol`,
DROP `method`,
DROP `type`,
DROP `num4` 

This took out all of the columns I didn’t need and brought the size of the file down quite a bit.

The second thing was that the log I had, had a lot of anonymous results in it, roughly around a third of the rows. So I ran this little bit of code to remove all the anonymous results.

DELETE FROM tbl_log1 WHERE username like "%anonymous%" 

The problem with this is removed a lot of these results leaves a lot of overhead in the database. So you can either optimize the table after each delete query or you can run it at the end once you start searching. 

OPTIMIZE TABLE tbl_log1

This will remove the overhead on the table and will decrease the query times. 

You can now use queries to search for users internet usage or a certain websites users. You will find a lot of websites in the list, if a user typed in www.microsoft.com it wouldn’t just say www.microsoft.com in the log, it would have the url of every image that the user downloaded, every CSS file, every page….everything. 

You may also want to set up other queries to remove certain websites that you know are safe and don’t mind about such as www.microsoft.com:

DELETE FROM tbl_log1 WHERE url like "%.microsoft.%" 

To search for anyone going on the BBC website you could type the following:

SELECT username FROM tbl_log1 WHERE url like "%bbc.co.uk%" 

This will display a list of users that have been on BBC. But this will come up with multiple duplicates of the usernames due to the issue stated above. To stop this we can add the GROUP BY parameter to our query to group the usernames together so we only have a single result from each user. 

SELECT username FROM tbl_log1 WHERE url like "%bbc.co.uk%" GROUP BY username

This tutorial was originally posted on Skeletorscorpse.com

Why do all the old games seem to be more fun years and years on when the graphics have been improved so much?

Will I be wanting to play Crysis again as a classic game in 10 years time because it was a classic game of the time (well Crysis may not be the best example, but you get the idea).

I have also found myself playing SWOS (Sensible World of Soccer) 96-97.  Not the absolute rubbish remake that came out a couple of years ago.  The original was so good because it was simple and fun not because it was 3D.

My favourite Final Fantasy of all time was Final Fantasy VI which was 2D sprites.

So is the fact that games are becoming 3D that makes most games dull and boring with no fun factor (well a little fun maybe when you are killing aliens while trying to run down an icy hill in a suit with lots of fancy features) or is the fact that developers are trying to make the games look more realistic without thinking too much about the actual gameplay?

Who knows, but what we do know, is the banana bomb can be extremely deadly…

There is a fix for this and is on all current Mondeo’s been made. The fix is a rubber seal going all the way round the boot.  All the water that sits at the bottom of the window now floods down the sides of the window and drops a short distance at the top of the boot and flows down the side gutters.

Unfortunately everyone who bought a Mondeo before this was fitted is in a situation where they are getting wet.  This is a design flaw and as such should be fixed free of charge by Ford.  But no.  Ford seem very reluctant to do anything about it.

The problem is the rubber seal can’t be retro fitted.  The part in question is a whole new rear windscreen.  A brick through your rear windscreen would get your a new part at your expense.

All Ford Mondeo owners should phone Ford Customer Relation Centre on 0845 841 1111.

The dealers don’t care or want to know about the problem and the Ford CRC just want to push everyone to their dealer.  Poor service from Ford especially as it was a problem on some of the hatchback Focus’ too.

The most glaring error is this:

5. Use car wax or polish to create the perfect sheen. Don’t worry if paint residue appears on the cloth – this is just a layer of ‘dead paint’

Whats the problem with this you say? Well:

1. Wax and polish are not the same.
2. Wax on a bad paint surface will not give you a perfect sheen.
3. Hand polishing will not give you a perfect sheet.
4. Paint residue on the ‘cloth’ shows that the car has no clear coat.  There is no such thing as ‘dead paint’.

The bad bit of advice is the following:

What you’ll need

• Car shampoo
• A sponge
• A bucket or hose
• A leather chamois
• Car wax or polish

Car Shampoo

Although correct a good shampoo will remove more dirt and give better lubrication for when washing to prevent the dirt from being rubbed on to the paint.

A Sponge

Unless it is a very high quality sponge, it shouldn’t touch your paintwork.  And when I say high quality I mean something that you won’t be able to get from Halfords for 99p.

The better alternative is to use a Sheepskin Mitt. The sheepskin brings dirt in side, rather than leaving the dirt on the surface of the mitt like a sponge would.

An alternative to the sheepskin mitt is a Wash ShMitt.

A bucket or hose

Take out the or first of all.  It is very helpful to have both.  Secondly, get 2 buckets with grit guards.

The two bucket method

Fill one bucket with water and no shampoo.  Fill the other with water and some shampoo.

Rinse the car with the hose, don’t use high pressure at 90degrees but a light spray at 30degrees over the whole of the car. Put on your mitt and dip in to the bucket with the shampoo, clean a section of thecar, rub the mitt on the grit guard of the water only bucket to get the dirt off the mitt.  Squeeze the mitt to get the excess water in to the water only bucket.  Follow this process emptying out the water only bucket as soon as it gets too dirty and get another fresh bucket. Once finished, rinse off again making sure to use a low pressure on the hose and a shallow angle.

A leather chamois

Leather chamois are not the best when it comes to drying your car.  A high quality drying microfibre towel is the best option.  Also when drying, don’t swipe across the car, lay the cloth out and pat dry it.

Recommended drying microfibre’s:

• Sonus Der Wunder Drying Towel
• Huge 38″ x 28″ Microfibre Drying Towel

Car wax or polish

This is wrong like I stated above. It’s good to have both, lets seperate them out.

Polish

I am going to focus on hand polishing as most people following the Auto Trader guide won’t want to buy a polisher to their car.

There are 2 types of polish, abrasive and filler.

Abrasive

Abrasive polishes actually remove paint/clearcoat when rubbed to remove scratches and swirls.

Recommended: Meguiars Scratch X, Car-Lack 68 – Hand polish kit and Sonus Hand Polish Bundle

Filler

Filler polishes fill swirls and scratches with polish to hide scratches and swirls.

Recommended: Autoglym Super Resin Polish and Bilt-Hamber Auto Balm

Wax

Putting a layer of wax on the car provides a level of protection to the car, from UV rays and bird shit.

One of the most talked about is Collinite No. 476S – Super Doublecoat Auto Wax. This wax is not only cheap but also very durable and provides a good shine.  Applied thinly using a Foam Wax Applicatorand buffed off using a microfibre towel such as Ultimate Ultra-Plush Buffing Cloth or Eurow – Shag Pile Double Density Towels.

For more information on cleaning your car visit CleanYourCar.