Category: Geek Stuff

Bittorrent is a great technology for downloading large files, especially video files. It’s so good, in fact, that many ISPs estimate that between 50% and 90% of all their traffic is data being shared by Bittorrent. But Bittorrent isn’t perfect. In fact, there are two distinct disadvantages to using Bittorrent to get your video files.

The first has to do with Bittorrent technology itself. When a user wants to share a file, he uses his Bittorrent client to create a .TORRENT file based on what he wants to share. He then uploads that torrent file to a tracker, a server on the Internet that keeps track of the IP addresses of people sharing the file. People then connect to the tracker and download the torrent file to their own computers. They then load the file in their own Bittorrent client, which connects to the tracker and starts downloading pieces of the file. As soon as a few pieces are downloaded, the downloader also begins sharing his pieces with other people downloading the file (collectively known as the swarm). Although this is what makes Bittorrent so fast, it also creates two problems: a) you can accidentally connect to a computer owned by the Media Police, and get busted for sharing illicit files; and b) according to Bittorrent etiquette, you’re supposed to upload as much as you download. This means that a 350MB download of a TV show actually costs you 700MB in bandwidth. As a one-off, that’s not that big of a deal. But if you’re downloading 10 shows a week, it really adds up: 7GB worth of bandwidth to download 3.5GB worth of shows!

The second problem with Bittorrent has to do with most people’s Internet connections. Most broadband connections in the United States are asynchronous, which means that you download and upload at different speeds. This usually means that you can download things quickly, but upload them at a much slower speed. On my own home Internet connection, I can download data at around 7Mbps (or around 125 old-fashioned 56k modems), but I can only upload at 368kbps (or around six 56k modems). So I am able to download an hour long TV show in around 10 minutes, but it will take 10 hours to upload as much as I download. This creates a problem with private Bittorrent sites that require you to maintain a download:upload ratio of 1.0 or higher. You download a file, and while your home Internet connection is uploading at a pokey 368kbps, other downloaders with much faster upload speeds are sharing at 1.5Mbps or higher. Those folks rapidly share the file to the rest of the crowd, leaving you with a ratio of .036 on the file… which eventually causes you to get banned from the tracker for maintaining a ratio of less than 1.0. The sad thing is that even if you turn off all other torrents (and even other programs that use upstream bandwidth), the people with fast upload speeds will always win.

Continue reading “An alternative to Bittorrent”

Microsoft, in all its blessed wisdom, decided to keep Windows wallpapers in the system directory. This can lead to stability and\or security issues (“I was trying to install a wallpaper of my kids at the lake, and I saw this folder called SYSTEM32 taking up a bunch of space, so I tried to delete it, and now my computer won’t boot!”). It can also make disk images needlessly large: because Windows does such a crappy job of using JPG images as wallpaper, I keep around 125MB of wallpapers in my own WINDOWS folder, along with a 300MB archive file of wallpapers not currently in use.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could change the location that Windows looks in when you right-click on the desktop and choose Properties > Desktop? Well you can! Just fire up Regedit and go to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion

Look for a string called WallPaperDir. The value will probably be at the default location – %SystemRoot%\Web\Wallpaper. Simply change this to whatever directory you want to use (perhaps F:\Wallpaper) and close Regedit. No reboot is needed – the next time you open the applet, Windows will look in the directory of your choosing!

Just when I thought I had fixed my problem with Firefox, another one rears its ugly head!

I have a client that wants a Flash-based slideshow on their home page, so I downloaded and installed the demo of Adobe’s Flash CS4 to create it. The only problem was that Flash upgraded the web browser plug-ins on my system from Flash 9 to Flash 10 without telling me. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Flash 10 breaks the “image upload tool” in WordPress (read all about it here), so upgrading to 10 is a no-go. And, as it turns out, Flash 10 (the program, not the plug-in) is way overkill for the simple slideshow thing I want to do, so I uninstalled Flash, then the Flash plug-ins, and rebooted my computer.

I was good to go… or so I thought. I reinstalled Flash 9 and everything was OK for a couple of days. But then anything to do with Flash ground to a complete halt on my box. For example, a YouTube video would drop frames like crazy. Remember the early days of Internet video, when everyone had RealPlayer installed so they could watch postage stamp-size videos that often “froze up” on slow dial-up connections? That’s exactly what a YouTube video looked like on my system: the audio was fine, but the video would play fine for the first few seconds, then freeze up, then slow down to about 1 frame every 5 seconds, then freeze, then continue on slowly again.

Another example: the audio player on this very site. If you click this link, you’ll be taken to a “SONGS I LOVE” post, which contains a small audio player embedded inside. If you click on the “play” button, the player should smoothly expand to reveal a progress bar for the song. On my system, clicking that button in Firefox would cause the bar to move to the right a few pixels and freeze, then move a few move pixels and freeze and so on, until the player finally opened all the way (the audio would sound just fine, however). If I opened the same post in Internet Explorer or Safari on this very same system, the player would expand smoothly as expected – only Firefox had a problem.

Continue reading “Fixing Poor Flash Video Performance in Firefox”

I’ve been using WordPress for around 18 months now, and I really like it. Unlike old-school “manual” solutions like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, the WordPress platform makes it easy for me to simply publish the stories and information I want to get out.

I’ve toyed with several WordPress themes during this time. I’ve downloaded and played with them late at night when few people go to my site. I’ve even liked a few well enough that I’ve used them for a few days here and there. But the fact of the matter is that I’ve never found a theme I like more than Kubrick, the default WordPress theme. It’s simple and elegant, and unlike many third-party themes, everything in it “just works”.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I’ve stuck with the original kubrickheader.jpg file. By default, Kubrick uses a boring blue box at the top the screen. Early on I replaced it with the cover of Madonna’s Ray of Light album. After a while, I changed it to a picture of Ian Curtis. And just in the past few days I changed it again to an awesome picture of Don Draper (from a Mad Men wallpaper I found on AMC’s site).

You can easily make your own Kubrick header files. All you need is Adobe Photoshop and a copy of the default kubrickheader.jpg file. Although I could easily type up a quick list of instructions, I think it just might be easier to show you. Here is a link to my very first screencast. I’ve never made one before (at least, not in the past 10 years), so please be gentle:

http://www.jimcofer.com/personal/screencasts/kubrick/kubrick.htm

When wireless networking (Wi-Fi) was introduced to consumers in the late 90s, it included a security feature called Wired Equivalent Privacy, or WEP. There was, however, a fundamental flaw in WEP that allowed hackers to easily hack wireless networks. So if you secure your wireless router with the WEP protocol (even today, several years later), a hacker can break into your wireless network in less than 2 minutes using only a modern laptop and some freely available software… and start downloading illegal music, warez or kiddie porn.

WEP was so bad, in fact, that a new protocol, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) was quickly rolled out. WPA is much more secure than WEP. In fact, many thought that WPA would last as long as current 802.11b and 802.11g hardware. Sadly, this didn’t happen. A couple of researchers have found a hack that renders WPA almost as pointless as WEP.

Sort of. The hack actually affects the Temporary Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) that’s used with WPA. And here’s the good news: most routers will let you switch between WAP-TKIP and WAP-AES encryption. So to make your home network secure again, just log in to your router and change the encryption settings from TKIP to AES and you should be aces. Even better: this hack was only just announced this week, so if you can’t get around to changing your settings for a few days… you should be OK.

Read more about the “AES workaround” here.

I bet you didn’t know that Microsoft still sold Windows 3.11. Or at least they did, up until November 1, 2008.

Although almost no one uses it as a desktop operating system these days, Windows 3.11 was a popular choice for “embedded computers” – that is, computers dedicated to single tasks like cash registers and information kiosks. Because it was so easy to program for, and so reliable when configured as an embedded OS, there are still millions of computers out there still running Windows 3.11. Computers that control alarm systems. Computers that control sprinkler systems. Computers that control heating and air conditioning systems. Computers that control industrial machines (I know of at least one company in Charlotte that uses a Windows 3.11 computer to control a machine that cuts sheet metal). And until very recently, Windows 3.11 powered the in-flight entertainment systems of Virgin and Qantas airlines.

Released in May 1990, Windows 3.11 required a minimum of a 10MHz processor, 640KB RAM, seven megabytes of hard drive space, and a graphics card that supported CCA, EGA or VGA graphics. Contrast this with Windows Vista, which requires a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, 20GB of hard drive space, and a graphics card with at least 32MB of memory and you can see why a company making thousands of cash registers might go with 3.11 over Vista or even XP Embedded.

So long, sweet prince! We’ll miss you and your Hot Dog Stand theme!

If you’re like me, your friends and family use different Instant messaging (IM) networks. Most of my Atlanta friends, for example, use MSN Messenger, while most of my Charlotte friends use AIM. My best friend from high school uses Yahoo! Messenger, and I have a business need to use a Jabber client.

For years, “all-in-one” chat programs like Trillian and Pidgin have allowed you to use multiple IM networks at once. I have been (and still am) a huge fan of Pidgin, a lightweight app that lets me keep in touch with everyone and not have have to run six different chat programs simultaneously. But that loyalty is wavering in the face of a new client: Digsby.

Digsby allows you to connect to the AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Jabber Networks. Nothing new there, really. But Digsby also allows you to receive notifications from social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. So when someone posts something on your Facebook wall or MySpace profile, a small pop-up will appear, telling you who did what. You can even hover your mouse over the social networking icon and get a summary of what’s going on, so there’s no need for you to launch a web browser just to see what’s going on with Facebook or MySpace. Digsby also supports email notifications from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL mail, as well as any POP or IMAP account, so it’s got you covered there, too.

Digsby has been around for almost a year now, so it’s not really “new”. What is new is that newer versions of the app are much better behaved than earlier ones, which tended to be resource hogs. After being scared off of it by reports that it used up to 200MB of RAM, I’ve finally given it a shot… and I like it! One thing I especially like about it over Pidgin: it keeps like log files in the “My Documents” folder instead of hidden away like Pidgin does; this makes for easy backups with Mozy.

Ever since upgrading to Firefox 3.0 back in June of this year, I’ve had a bizarre problem with the browser. On around 10% of the sites I’d visit, the headline would be gibberish, as if the page had been encoded incorrectly. Here’s an example:

As you can see from the screencap, only the headline was affected. The rest of the text looked fine. Interestingly, if I highlighted the “gibberish text” and right-clicked on it, the proper text would displayed in the context menu (i.e. “Search Google for…”).

I troubleshot the issue as thoroughly as I could. I played with the character encodings and I made sure that the server was passing the page as TEXT/HTML and not TEXT/PLAIN. I disabled my Kaspersky Antivirus on the off chance that it was somehow messing with Firefox. I loaded up the page in Firefox’s “safe mode”. I tried creating a new Firefox profile. I tried completely uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox (including deleting any leftover files and folders, in addition to checking the “Remove my Firefox personal data and customizations” option). But nothing seemed to work.

Thankfully, a kind soul over at MozillaZine’s Firefox Support forums pointed me in the direction of my installed fonts. Some program I used installed a copy of the Helvetica font, and that was rendering the page all screwy. Once I opened the Fonts folder in Windows Explorer and moved HELV.TTF to the desktop, the page immediately began rendering correctly. Hooray!

I hadn’t thought about fonts, since only Firefox was displaying this behavior. Internet Explorer, Safari and Google Chrome all worked without complaint on my system, and the font didn’t present a problem in Firefox 2.x.

So if you have an issue where only one part of your Firefox pages are wonky… look to the fonts!