I’m having the hardest time rating photos in Media Player 11 so that I can share anything over 3 stars with my Xbox 360 through Media Sharing. I’ve spent a good amount of time using Google to find an answer and cannot find one. Does anyone have this problem? I could rate photos in Media Player 9.

Is this feature broken? It seems like I don’t have the correct media usage rights but its unclear how I fix this problem. I see

This file is missing media usage rights

When I go to the Media Usage Rights tab viewing the properties of the photo. This is frustrating me, I really don’t want to share a whole folder. Is there a solution for this?

Lets see I haven’t updated this recently and because this is my personal blog I can write about whatever I want.

I recently bought a new laptop (Gateway E155c) with Wacom which makes the tablet a dream to use. I’m considering making my next post a video with all kinds of neat drawings and diagrams. Anyway, if you are looking for a portable laptop thats direct from gateway and really cheap on ebay, this is it.

I also have a new job. It has taken over a lot of my programming time for the three projects I want to complete and a new one I want to start. The money for the bandwidth has to come from somewhere and Adsense isnt doing so well while the market resets the prices for pay-per-click after the changes they made.

Anyway I plan to have the new Cool Pictures site out in about 5 weeks, complete with a full user authenticated system and new layout.

APC or Alternative PHP Cache is an awesome add-on for any apache web server. On my own server I was able to to handle about I was able to serve well over 1 million page views on a single server more traffic just by enabling the software. Facebook recently gave a presentation on how they use APC to serve over a billion php pages per month. My server does about 3% of that and its been running since 2004 so naturally Facebook doing the same thing as me is good reinforcement that I know what I’m doing.

Installing APC

First you have to download the latest APC and then uncompress it. To compile it use these 4 lines.

/usr/bin/phpize

./configure –enable-apc –enable-apc-mmap –with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs –with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config –enable-apc-pthreadmutex

make

make install

To finish installing APC you need to edit php.ini and point it at the apc.so directory.

extension_dir = /usr/lib/php/extensions/
extension = apc.so

Configuring APC

My Server

apc.shm_segments = 1
apc.shm_size = 64
apc.stat = 1

Facebook

apc.shm_segments = 1
apc.shm_size = 648
apc.stat = 0

Other Improvements

Naturally setting up APC isn’t the only thing you can do to improve your server and your users experience. Enabling MySQL query cache is one thing you should do as it will vastly improve the number of pages your server can serve.

my.cnf with 64mb cache

query_cache_type = 1
query_cache_size = 67108864

Another thing you can do is use the Firefox plugin YSlow from Yahoo and it will show what parts of your site are slow and it will also make suggestions on what you can do to improve load times. They have a user guide thats better than anything I can write.

Beyond simple server setups you can use squid as a reverse transparent proxy to serve static content and you can learn about distributed cluster computing from Google.

My WordPress upgrade to version 2.3 was greeted by this error after running the update script:

WordPress database error: [Table 'wordpress.wp_terms' doesn't exist]

SELECT t.*, tt.*, tr.object_id FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN ('category', 'post_tag') AND tr.object_id IN (214) ORDER BY t.name ASC

The problem fixed itself after I saved an edit to a post. I suspect any change to the categories would also fix the problem.

In Windows XP creates a system restore point every 24 hours and whenever you make changes to the system. The problem I was having is that when my available disk space was shrinking the system restore points were getting more and more defragmented. This normally wouldn’t be a problem but for some reason the disk defrag says these restore points are unmovable files. Well I looked for a solution and the most obvious one is to use the disk cleanup wizard to delete the restore points. The only problem I had with this is that the wizard doesn’t delete the latest restore point. This creates a fragmented restore point that fragments the newest restore point. Basically I will always have an unmovable restore point unless I can find a way to delete every single one of them.

I found a way. In the Windows XP Control Panel go to the System Restore tab and check “Turn off System Restore on all drives” and then click OK. This will delete all the system restore points. After you have turned off system restore run the defrag utility and then enable system restore and you have a cleaned up drive.

I’ve known about this for a while but I forgot how to do it and I was getting frustrated that I couldn’t remember how to do it. Hopefully writing this out will make me remember.

It is now possible to take over a users entire screen with an unclosable window. Time to turn off java or more drastically javascript all together. I use noscript but I’ve enabled it to allow the site only the domain I’m visiting. This exploit (5 clicks to close) works in every browser I’ve tried. NoScript fixes the problem if you turn off disable the offending site. Internet explorer users will probably have a harder time with this due to market share compared to firefox.

There is also a javascript popup exploit in the wild that is modal and prevents you from closing the browser without ctrl-alt-del. Unfortantely I didn’t save an example. This combined with all the new exploits like computer finger printing with res timing as well as credential theft with XMLHTTPRequest.

Remember all the sites you could send people in 2000 to that totally fucked over their computers? They’re possibly making a come back. Firefox should hopefully be safer in a month but I wouldn’t have hopes for IE6 or IE7. It will be the bane of the internet in a few weeks when it makes its way into the wild.

The server this site is hosted on lost its hard drive last night. Complete and utter failure. I had to revert back to a weekly backup because the daily backup was corrupted. I lost 2 posts about warcraft and blizzcon, no big deal.

Edit: Restored the posts, gotta love Google Reader and RSS.

Just doing some minor changes due to insomnia. I’m still not happy with how the site looks.

I’m approaching week 4 with perfect vision since my lasik surgery. It has been fluctuating from between 20/20 and 25/20 which isn’t being helped by dryness. It’s also 107F outside with not a cloud to be seen, which doesn’t help either.

I still have dry eyes and I’ve switched from Systane to optive from Allergan. I actually like it more. I found that the Systane leaves me with blurry vision for about 5 minutes after I use it and I have to use the Systane more frequently to get the result from optive.

I’ve gotten a lot of gifts from various people close to me over the years. I’d thought I’d make a list of the most useful gifts that I’ve ever received. It kind of surprises me that none of these have much to do with my facination with technology but I guess the tried and true stuff works the best.

Husky 6-In-1 Screwdriver
I got this as a gift when I went away for college. This is the only gift I’d had to buy for someone else so they woud stop taking mine. This is probably the most used gift I’ve ever gotten. It works great with my computer and its compatible with all the stuff around the house I have to tinker with.

Hammer
A lot of things get fixed with force. This thing is great.

Clothing
I don’t have a link for this because its kind of general. 90% of the clothes I wear have been picked out for me by someone else. I know its sad but I can’t pick out things for myself. I guess I like getting stuff that has been approved for my use by someone else. If I like it and they like it then it cant be bad right?