influenced dot net

If you’ve got a Medion MD40734 laptop and are having trouble getting Windows XP SP2 to function (garbled/frozen screen on bootup, even safemode won’t work) then this is for you..

You can get Windows working if you boot with your XP CD and go to the recovery console.. then type:

disable uagp35
exit

Now windows will boot but your display will be extremely slugish

• Download SIS AGP driver v1.17 (my mirror) (not newer!)
• Install the driver you just downloaded
• Reboot
• Download NVIDIA driver (my mirror)
• Install the driver you just downloaded
• Reboot

That should sort it out for you

The digg auto refreshing AJAXy queue/spy have been updated, they are now much more functional and aesthetically pleasing

A couple of bugfixes thanks to input from Stu and Darren

Fixes:

• MSN Messenger output didn’t work when an ID3 wasn’t present
• Part of MySQL command wasn’t escaped properly when ID3 wasn’t present

Download here: gen_announce_v0_3_1_71.exe

Here’s a list of my favourite extensions (in installed order):

• DOM Inspector This is actually bundled with Firefox itself - very useful for pulling a page apart and understanding its underlying structure
• Adblock Blocks annoying ads! Combined with Pierceive Filterset.G, it stops most ads
• View Rendered Source Chart This one is useful when you’re debugging scripts which modify the document structure.. it lets you view the page as it exists in memory (with sexy colours to boot!)
• IE View I still use IE view on my work machine, IE tab is also good.. I think you know what they do
• Nightly Tester Tools I’ve had this installed for a while as I usually run the latest builds of Firefox and extensions usually lag a few builds behind.. this forces them to be compatible
• Live HTTP Headers This extension lets you see what headers are being sent/recieved from the webserver you’re connecting to.. useful debugging tool
• Tabbrowser Preferences Extra prefs for tabbed browsing
• Web Developer Lots of useful functions on this toolbar, too many to list! A must have for any web developer
• User Agent Switcher I don’t use this much.. sometimes it’s useful for reading forums content when the forums only allow useragents of robots to view them without registration e.g. GoogleBot
• Javascript Debugger Currently disabled as it’s not been updated for a while.. was useful for stepping through javascripts and inspecting variables
• Favicon Picker My bookmarks toolbar uses only icons with no textual descriptions.. Therefore I can’t have any generic icons.. this lets me pick icons for sites which don’t have a favicon.ico
• Google Toolbar for Firefox I hate Firefox’s built in search box, Google Toolbar is a must-have
• Scrapbook Save pages or parts of pages for later review.. I used to use this a lot but Furl Toolbar has come into play more recently
• SnagIt Firefox Extension Capture whole pages, this extension automatically scrolls them to grab the whole thing
• Greasemonkey User scripts! Modify pages to suit you - e.g. Delete button for Gmail
• Furl Tools My Firefox 1.5 Fixed version Bookmark a page and save a snapshot of it so that even if the site goes down you’ll still have access to the original content of that page
• del.icio.us Social bookmarking, superb
• SessionSaver .2 Ever been knee deep in pages? 30 pages open around some random subject? 10 tabs per window, 3 windows? Need to shutdown or reboot? Save a snapshot of your session and reload it later! Also saves snapshots on the even of crash and reloads them at first restart
• Chrome Cleaner Clean out the cruft left by extension install/removal, speeds up Firefox
• Xinha Here! Textbox helper, HTML formatting, etc.
• DownThemAll! Want to download lots of links on a page but can’t be bothered to do them all manually? This is the tool for the job!

I had a mail stuck in the deferred queue that was bugging me, a few google searches later resulted in the following commands in order to remove it:

mailq
postsuper -d <queueid>

As you can see, I’ve limited the articles displayed on the front page.. currently it’s set to the last 5 modified articles but it may change in the future

What this really means is that I need to get my butt in gear and create an article archive, article search and basically produce a proper design for this website

Watch this space!

I have a vds (virtual dedicated server) which runs postfix and uses saslauthd as the mechanism for SMTP Auth

I noticed that I couldn’t restart saslauthd via “/etc/init.d/saslauthd restart” for some reason.. the script would kill the PID of the parent saslauthd processes but the children would remain

It seemed that the children were locked in some state so reading the saslauthd –help output I noticed a -L option to disable accept() locking.. adding this to /etc/default/saslauthd did the trick.. flawless restarting of the daemon

Note to self: Markdown doesn’t support abbreviations

I submitted a request to Googlebot on 30th November to remove all pages relating to my /forums/ as there’s stuff still indexed/cached in Google that’s not been there for months

I noticed today that in the past couple of days the status of the request had changed to completed.. so I search google site:www.influenced.net and there’s still a lot of stuff that’s indexed under /forums/ which doesn’t exist.. so what the heck has been completed exactly?

I’m going to retry it via a rule to deny indexing the /forums/ folder in robots.txt and see what happens..

Edit: robots.txt seems to have done the trick

Deja vu here!

Unfortunately, due to me rushing the last version, I failed to spot a couple of obvious bugs.. these would have manifested themselves when the MySQL output encountered an untagged track

I’ve fixed the bugs now and released a new version

As you can see in the above screenshot - under the MySQL section, there’s an option for a backup command - this is incase gen_announce encounters an untagged track.

In such cases, %s serves as the filename of the track as in previous versions

Download here: gen_announce_v0_3_1_70.exe

Due to some requests I have added some new features to gen_announce..

The format string has now changed from the generic %s which was either “artist - title” or just the title if no tag existed

You can now insert variables of the form %var% where the variable is an ID3 meta data variable..

Here’s a basic list of the variables from ID3v1.1:

• album
• artist
• title
• year
• track
• comment
• genre

So you’ll need to at least replace %s in the configuration with %artist% - %title% if you wanted to maintain the output which previous versions gave

If the variable isn’t recognized or if that meta data doesn’t exist in the ID3 tags (or equivalent tag) of the song, then the output will be null where that variable would’ve been

Download here: gen_announce_v0_3_1_69.exe