One step forward another step back.

Scenario

You have zipped files available for download from your site, blog, CMS etc.  When you test the download process our in IE you get an error:

The Compressed (zipped) Folder is invalid or corrupted.

However, when you test the download with Firefox or Chrome all works fine. You may even be able to open the file via 7zip or Winrar. However, normal people (non-geeks) will not be able to enjoy your amazing zipped files. This can be especially irritating if you are trying to sell downloadable files via Magento or similar. The problem is probably related to the way in which you have told apache to gzip your site. Check to make sure that you (or your software package) have not applied the following in either .htaccess or httpd.conf

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

This essentially tells apache to compress all files being sent to the browser. Fine unless you have already compressed a file. This double compression clearly damages the files in transit leading to the problem above. I have yet to figure out why FF or chrome seem to compensate for this. Either way you need to be more specific in how you tell apache to compress what.

Something like this should be used

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript application/x-javascript
#AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-php

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:pdf|doc)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:avi|mov|mp3|mp4|rm)$ no-gzip dont-vary

The top block explicitly tell the server what type of files to compress. The middle block targets the browsers. The final block will exclude php generated media formats which again do not need to compressed twice.

MAKE MY BLOG POST TO TWITTER

hmm. 1st it was “who the hell would want to use twitter” then it was like “make my facebook page talk to twitter” now its “make my wordpress blog talk to twitter”. The facebook talking to twitter was a bit of a pain but I figured wordpress would be a doddle. I used the built in plugin search / install tool to try about 5 different twitter integrators and none of them would work. Alex King who produces the most popular plug in Twitter Tools was starting to lose his cool so it is clearly a problem with some esoteric combination of servers and twitter.

Eventually at the bottom of the plugin search page is WP to Twitter by Joe Dolson. Finally!! This worked a treat 1st time around, supports bit.ly and a few other shortening services and is very easy to use. Is these words are true there should be a link flying its way over to twitter right now pointing back to this page

tar -zxvf file.tar.gz

or

tar -zxvf filename.tgz

I don’t know about anyone else but 99% of the time when faced with a compressed tar file I want to extract it to its own folder and view the progress of the decompression. So why it is that every time you seek the answer to this question do most linux support sites feel the need to explain over 1500 words every single possible switch and variant of the tar command coupled with the historical development and legacy options of the command. WE DON’T CARE.

Short answer:

in a linux terminal enter

ssh user@remote.com

Long answer:

Arghh!

Digging into the linux world as a traditional windows user can be hit and miss. When working through IT puzzles I have always figured that if I can think of the need then someone somewhere will have figured away to do it and all I need to do is to figure how to ask Google the right question.

With linux things are slightly different. It is almost as if there is some unwritten linux user constitution that says that when explaining the solution to a problem they will only give the vaguest clues and insinuations. It is as if actually spelling out in plain English the answer to a problem would be ‘too easy’. Heck, I am surprised that some of the answers are not in anagrams just to make things hard.

After trying various google searches the answer was eventually half way down the second page.

In Windows the usual way to ssh into a server is via Putty and this is probably the cause of the frustration. In putty you give the remote domain you want to connect to and when the connection is made you are asked for a user name and password. IT MAKES SENSE!!. On a linux box (ubuntu trying to connect to CentOS in my case) it assumes you want to connect the remote computer using the username you are currently logged in as. Why? I mean what are the changes of two computers expecting the same username?

As with many linux problem-answer combos the answer is easy.. once you know how. Part of the reason I stated this blog was to stick info like this somewhere so the next time I forger I know where to look and help others who are in the same situation. As always if you find somthing useful check out the sponsors

This tablet PC is attached to the plasma screen in the lounge and is generally used to stream video from the main PC in the study. I abandoned ubuntu 9.x as I could not get the spdif out to work and suse refused to automatically connect to the windows 7 network share and recently stopped plaing back 720p video in a smooth manner. So this was the ideal time to test out 10.04.

The installation went a dream. I downloaded the iso and booted off it. The installation found suse and offered to run them both side by side, As I really could not be bothered to reinstall suse again if this did not work I opted to have both.

Once installed I enabled to restricted drivers, run the updater, rebooted a few times and then set about seeing if was going to do what I needed.

Connecting to windows share. This was flawless. Entered the required details and it created a one click access to the movie folder on my windows 7 machines. Perfect. This was something that suse never did let me do.

Play 702p avi / mkv files. I double clicked on the 1st file and the software manager popped up. It infomed me that it needed some codecs and do I want to get them. I agreed and a few seconds later my video was playing.

Next the sound! This has previously caused me no end of grief in both ubunto 9.x and Suse. I eventually got it working in Suse after faffing around with command line settings. This time I went straight to the hardware > sound dialogue switched from analogue to digital and my home cinema kicked in straight away.

All the keyboard f key settings work including brightness and volume and even more surprising.. this is a tablet PC. I took the stylus out and tested it.. perfect.

I switched the plasma over to the PC channel and already the image was on screen without any additional settings required. In less than half an hour I had a free operating system up and running and doing everything I needed it to do.

I am quite frankly shocked. The new look and feel that Ubuntu has is very nice.. way better than the sickly brown-yellow look of years gone by. More importantly it was able to detect a range of quite obscure hardware and make it work. For FREE. Astounding (as a Gruffalo once said).

This is the 1st time I have installed any Linux distro and have not had to touch a console or command line. Well done Canonical. If you have not tried Ubunto for a while give it a go, If you are a windows user download wubi.. it will leave your windows installation untouched.

Oh and don’t forget that Steam is coming to the Linux world soon. If only I could play all my games on Ubuntu I could be tempted to make a complete switch.. OK photoshop too.. oh wait what about.. hmmm

Intel q9550 2.8 @ 3.4ghz

Asus Rampage Forumula x48 mobo

8 gig corsair DDR2 Ram

Power Color 4870×2

In a antec gaming 900 case with enough fans to power a hover craft.

All was well in the world of my baby for the 1st 18 months of life till I started to place Battlefield Bad Company 2.  For the 1st time it crashed in a game! It has never done this before.  I am running Windows 7 x 64 and this is a dream system.  Even after 18 months it feels as good as the day we bought it despite 2 changes in OS and a constant stream of experimental beta apps.  Windows 7 is awesome :)

And now.. it crashes!! it even turns the monitor off when it feels like it! Like many people I blamed BFBC2.. it does have a few bugs after all. However, things just got worse and even in 2d use things were starting to fall apart.

I assumed for a while that I had installed on piece of broken software too many but the problem got worse. The fan was getting louder and louder and the time till monitor turning off was getting shorter and shorter.  You could still remote into the system so it had to be a graphics card problem.

I could get it to stay on longer by pointing a 120 mm fan at the back-end of the card which made me start to suspect an overheating issue.  A quick google reveals that these cards have a rack of diagnostic LEDS.  These mean:

• D14 (R753) 6 Pin power unplugged
• D13 (R724) 8 Pin power unplugged
• D15 (R819) Overheating (Thermal issue)
• D5 (R323) GPU-1 (Master) No power
• D7 (R570) GPU-2 (Slave) No power

On closer inspection I found them for the 1st time and could see the middle one was on when the monitor turned off!! Over heating it is then. This makes sense as when I 1st got this card it was too hot to touch the back plate… now I could.  It was time to dig out the screw drivers.. it did not take long to spot the problem…

4870x2 : Dust Trap

Yes after 18 months of owning this baby an entire wall of dust had blocked the heatsink.. this is the stupidest design I have ever seen with a blatant fail point. no air was reaching the 2 giant heat sinks…

here is the thing attacked with a screw driver..

4870x2 stripped down

This is clearly a stupid system.. no wonder the bloody fan has to sound like a hair dryer to get any air to the 2nd heatsink

time for a cunning plan…

time to dich these..

4870x2 plastic shroud and fan

and run off the Maplins for a couple of new 80mm fans and some zip ties.. MacGyver it all together for this..

4870x2 replacement fans

I now have a super cool 4870×2 that runs soooo quiet even at full tilt..

I can recommend this to anyone who

a) has a dusty room and
b) has lots of space in their case.

c) is sick to death of the high pitched hurricane that these cards normally produce.

Me and Riley just had our 1st real session playing BFBC2 for more than an hour with no crashing… and I called this games all names.. sorry for that

4870x2 work bench

However, MS are still greedy sods and it costs way to much for a house hold like ours.  So the fall back is Linux.  Last week the Tablet PC laptop started to reboot every 2 hours anouncing the end of the RC period for windows 7.  Time to find an alternative.  My default Linux dostro is Ubuntu apart from failing to install the wireless drivers this generally detects everything and works a treat (once you get rid of that god awful orange and brown).

I installed Ubuntu on this aging Asus R1F and all looked good.  Movies streamed from my main Windows 7 machines and I nearly died when for a laugh I threw the toggle switch and discovered that the bluetooth AND the WIFI worked out of the box!! This is an amazing achievement for Ubuntu. So all was well in the world till we sat down to watch the latest Supernatural…  where was the sound!!

Yes, despite everything and all appearence of working Ubuntu had failed to make the inboard Intel HD audio work.  A long, long google session revealed loads of others in the same situations and a few people who claimed to have fixed the problem but no matter what I could not get this to work.  So NEXT…

My next port of call was opensuse.  I have never touched this before so was not sure what to expect and just to keep myself on the edge I went for the KDE option which I have also never touched.. in for a penny…

Install was a breeze and all seemed to work.. (actually I have not figured out if the wireless is working yet as I cant find where it is hiding the information)

More importantly the sound was working.. Hurray.  After a quick install of VLC media player I have a viable media centre PC again with SPDIF out (needed to run alsamixer in terminal and unmute spdif by pressing m)

One thing is does not do is to stream movies from my WIndows 7 machine.  If anyone know how to fix this shout.

My media PC is a small tablet that lives tucked away under the TV.  I don’t want to touch it if I don’t have to so I needed the equivalent to the brilliant Remote Desktop Connection software in windows.  After a quick google I am informed that VNC is built in and should be a doddle to use.  I checked with YAST and it was already installed and ready to go.  So at my windows 7 machine I installed the beta of tightvnc and dialed in the connection… nothing but a black screen and a cursor.  grrr.  3 Google hours later and i have finally found the solution.  So here it is..

The answer here is taken from here where one heroic poster (plodder) finally explained what needed to be done.

Well for those of you that are still interested in solving the original problem of making VNC work (rather than resorting to NX – good though that is), I think I may have found a solution. Thanks to Kimmeridgien for indicating the direction in which to go.

It does seem that the current version of TightVNC has a problem with IPv6 and this has been mentioned in some blogs at the TightVNC site. When you attempt to VNC to a Suse 11.2 host, xinetd invokes the command as specified in the Yast / Network Services (xinetd) / vnc1 entry, which is:

/usr/bin/Xvnc -noreset -inetd -query localhost -geometry 1024×768 -depth 16

The relevant part here is ‘-query localhost’, which I gather means ‘supply an XDMCP logon screen from localhost (127.0.0.1)’, the VNC server in this case. However, the server can only determine the IP equivalent of the name ‘localhost’ by looking in the /etc/hosts file. Unfortunately there are two possibilities, one for IPv4:

127.0.0.1 localhost

and one for IPv6:

::1 localhost ipv6-localhost ipv6-loopback

and TightVNC doesn’t seem to know which one to go for. The solution is to include a unique alias on the IPv4 line and then specify that the xinetd command should use that alias instead of ‘localhost’. Thus the /etc/hosts IPv4 line is edited to become:

127.0.0.1 localhost ipv4-localhost

and the arguments for the vnc1 xineted entry are changed, via the edit facility in Yast, to become:

-noreset -inetd -query ipv4-localhost -geometry 1024×768 -depth 16

After completing these two changes, you appear to be able to use VNC to the Suse 11.2 server without rebooting it. Note that you do not have to disable IPv6 in Yast / Network Devices / Network Settings for this to work.

Hope that helps.

This is quite simple.

edit sidebar.phtml

Essentially it refers to  fact that the rent doesn’t include additional costs eg  insurance or business rates.