Archive for category Internet
ApocBot — I feel I owe everyone an update!
Posted by eric in C# Programming, Gaming, Internet on December 10, 2009
Well, it seems my little post on my MTGO trading bot as generated some interest, so I felt I should at least give an update on the status.
- Basic Trade functionality is completed
- Trade x for y (i.e. 4 Uncommons for 1 Rare)
- Buy/Sell x for x (i.e. 6 Rares for 1 Ticket or 1 Ticket for 6 Rares)
- Smart Bot functionality is 70% Completed
Currently ApocBot is able to correctly identify cards that are selected during a trade and quote the stored price for the cards. So far, so good!
Want some more info? 
Upgrading my HTPC — It’s Alive!
Posted by eric in Hardware, Internet, Miscellaneous, Multimedia, Reviews on August 24, 2009
A couple months ago I posted a blog entry about my plans to upgrade my Home Theater PC (HTPC) using the new Zotac IONITX
Intel Atom based motherboard. As a point of reference, I’m upgrading my HTPC from an underpowered, but pretty sweet at the time VIA EPIA-M 600M. My reason for using the 6000 at the time was I wanted a fanless setup to the HTPC would be as silent as possible.
The case I’ve been using is a Morex 3677B case, which is fairly small but still allows enough room for a 2.5″ Hard Drive and a Slim Laptop CD/DVD drive.
A couple gotchas I ran into while upgrading from the VIA board to the new Intel Atom based board:
Apple releases fix for wireless latency issue caused by 10.5.8 update!
Has wireless latency gotten you down? Have your internet porn habits been impacted since you updated your Macbook or Macbook Pro to 10.5.8?
ME TOO AND IT WAS DRIVING ME UP THE FUCKING WALL!
After I updated my 15-inch Macbook Pro to 10.5.8 I noticed right away that my wireless performance was in the crapper. Ping times to Google jumped up to an AVERAGE of 300ms, sometimes as high at 1,500ms! Any other wireless device in the house? 40-50ms! So it was obvious, after pulling my hair out thinking it was an issue with my Airport Extreme base stations or Verizon FIOS.
Luckily my friend Joe (who has been suffering the same issue), pointed me towards a link on Apple Support that not only admits that the 10.5.8 update breaks “some” Intel based laptops, but they also released a fix! What was their fix?
It basically rolls back your wireless drivers to 10.5.7!
http://support.apple.com/downloads/AirPort_Client_Update_for_MacBook_and_MacBook_Pro
I hope this helps out anyone else who thought they were losing their mind! 
Cheers!
Time Warner Cable — Have They Gone Mental?
Posted by eric in Internet, Miscellaneous, Opinion on April 7, 2009
I’m sure you’ve seen it in the news lately, lord knows I have seen it on every technology related website and blog across the internet. Time Warner Cable has announced a monthly bandwidth cap on their Road Runner Cable Internet service. Time Warner is touting that the 40GB plan should be enough for a majority of users and barely anyone should incur overages.
What are they not telling you? That the 40GB plan is $54.90! The comparable in price plan they’re offering to customers who currently subscribe to Road Runner standard for $29.95/mo? A paltry 5GB! That’s right! Time Warner Cable is going to be charging home users almost THIRTY DOLLARS per month for a pathetically small 5GB of data transfer. Don’t think the marketing genius stops there! In addition to these new ridiculous bandwidth caps, they’re going to be charging you $1 per gigabyte over!
Pimping out my hosting provider again.. to those who need one! :)
A friend of mine called today saying he was looking for a Hosting Provider that’d let him host his setup for Microsoft SeaDragon (or DeepZoom, whichever you call it). Basically he needed to host a large amount of pictures and not have to worry about hosting disk space or monthly transfer amounts.
Of course I pointed him over to my posting provider, InMotionHosting! Why? Because their cheap $6.95/mo hosting account has UNLIMITED transfer and UNLIMITED storage! So of course it fit his needs perfectly and I think anyone would be insane not to jump at a hosting offer like this at such a cheap rate.
I mean seriously, these are the features for their ‘low end’ business account:
- Unlimited Storage Space
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- Up to 7 domains on the account
- Free Nightly Backups of all your data
- Two MYSQL Databases (which are also of unlimited size)
All for only $6.95/mo! Seriously! I know, shameless plug but it’s seriousliy rediculous what you recieve for the price.
Use the link below and check them out!
Cheers!
Your Netflix client been crashing on your TiVo?
Posted by eric in Internet, Miscellaneous, Multimedia, Reviews on December 9, 2008
I was excited as probably many of you that Netflix had finally come to TiVo! I was tired of Amazon UnBox and although it was super cool that I could get Netflix on my 360 it’s far more conventient that I have it on my TiVo
Well, the other night my wife was watching a movie through Netflix on the TiVo and about four times it just quit out to the main TiVo menu. What the frick?
I told my wife to give the XBox 360 a try and see how it handles. Well turns out that the 360 had a hiccup too, but you know what it was? A buffer underrun! That’s right! My internet connection for whatever reason couldn’t keep up with the Netflix stream and it ran out of data. Of course the XBox client was smart enough to realize this, displayed a message and buffered some before streaming again.
My TiVo client? Crashed out. Talk about two code bases not up to par with one another. 
So if you’re having the same issues, odds are your network connection (for whatever reason) is not keeping up with the Netflix stream and it’s just crashing out to the main menu of TiVo.
My suggested work around for the time being is try watching it on your XBox 360 if you have the option. Otherwise, you might want to contact your cable provider or stop torrenting all that norwegian snow porn
Cheers!
Netflix comes to the XBox and TiVo!
Posted by eric in Internet, Multimedia, Opinion, Reviews on November 20, 2008
Welcome to the Revolution!
This week Microsoft rolled out Netflix instant streaming support with the new XBox 360 Dashboard (which they’re calling the “New Xbox Experience”) while TiVo is also rolling out Netflix support this week in their latest beta firmware update.
Netflix streaming allows people who subscribe to the (currently) $8.99 subscription to stream UNLIMITED movies available for Instant Online viewing to their XBox or TiVo for no extra cost on top of their monthly subscription. To sweeten the deal, Netflix also offers up to 300 movies in ‘HD’ quality at no extra charge.
So, let’s review the score. HD-DVD has gone the way of Beta Max and although both Apple and Amazon have offered rental and purchasing of movies electronically but are still bound to their respective platforms (Apple being iPhone/Pod and Amazon being TiVo) including the PC. I’ve yet to see either party partner with another distribution outlet which is expected from Apple but almost a shock with Amazon.
When I think about it though, Netflix is an obvious answer to the question of what company would be the first to provide movies to Microsoft for online streaming. Netflix partnered with Microsoft in the first place to provide online instant viewing of movies through Microsofts (at the time, new) Silverlight technology, which is a competitor to Flash (which popular video sites like YouTube use).
So now you have a company with an already established shipping and distribution system setup for physical media (both DVD and Blu-Ray) and has partnered with two ‘direct to TV’ companies who have in total over 30 million set top boxes already installed in homes across the WORD! Could this be the coming of the revolution?
I certainly hope so!
About six months back I finally decided to just sell my entire DVD collection. I personally was just done with physical media. I was tired of moving them, dusting them, having them take up space and never really sitting down to watch them. I mean really, I owned a little over 200 movies and sat down AT MOST one time a month to watch one. It got so bad that some of the movies were still in their original shrink wrap packaging. The industry had hooked me on the idea that I needed to COLLECT movies and I had come to the realization that it’s seriously a stupid hobby.
I became a personal flag barer for electronic distribution starting with the ability of renting a movie from Amazon unbox for only $.99 (when they’re on sale) but even then I’d have to wait about 30 minutes for the movie to buffer enough for me to be able to watch it the entire way through without having to pause and let it buffer some more.
Enter Netflix. Not only does it let me INSTANTLY begin watching a movie by detecting my connection speed and ability to download data at real time, but I can also ‘shop’ online for more movies to watch while not at home using Netflix.com. This means I can think of a movie while at work or on the go, queue it up and watch it instantly when I get home.
The bonus? This is all covered under my $8.99 Netflix account that I already had. Oh sure, there are more costs involved, but let’s break that down (and to keep it fair, I’ll break down as if I’m starting with NOTHING):
- Netflix: $8.99/mo ($107/year)
- XBox 360: $199 for Arcade Edition ($199/year, first year)
- XBox Live Gold Account: $7.99/mo ($49.99/year)
- Digital Cable: $39 for 10mbit down/1mbit up (in my area) ($480/year)
So even including your monthly Cable bill, you’re only looking at a monthly average cost of only $70 or only $29 pr month if you don’t include your monthly cable internet bill! FOR UNLIMITED INSTANT MOVIE VIEWING!
That’s pretty amazing to me! I hope more people hop on this bandwagon and we begin the revolution! Down with physical media!
I’ll step off my soapbox now
Cheers!
Good News Everyone!
Posted by eric in Internet, Miscellaneous, Reviews on September 15, 2008
I finally got off my butt and purchased an actual web hosting account!
I felt bad that I kept mooching off my friends bandwidth and had to keep asking them for help in setting up my services and whatnot. This way is going to be much better!
Also, I thought I’d pimp out the name of my web host because so far I’ve been super pleased with the service. The company is InMotion Hosting and what totally sold me on them was that they offered a hosting package with freakin unlimited bandwidth and storage for only $8.95/mo! This was dirt, dirt cheap compared to other hosts. Check them out if you’re looking for some sweet affordable web hosting.
I also Google-Fu’d for a bit and found a grip of positive reviews! So here’s hoping!
Cheers!
Does your Juniper VPN client keep disconnecting after you connect?
Posted by eric in General Software, Hardware, Internet, Networking on April 18, 2008
I had this issue a while back while working from home using my company laptop. Our company utilizes the Juniper VPN client software and up until recently it had been working just fine! One day while working remote my VPN connection kept closing with the error:
“The Network Connect session terminated. Do you want to reconnect? (nc.windows.app.23711).”
I did some Googling and I came across this support manual from Juniper which discusses the error codes/messages returned by the VPN client software and what could be causing the issue. Error code 23711 Juniper describes the problem as:
“The Network Connect client disconnected from the secure gateway because the
client’s routing table was altered.”
I thought to myself, “What the hell could be changing my routing table?” At first I suspected it might have been a VPN tunneling issue with my Apple Airport Extreme but that known issue has been fixed since early 2007. The issue obviously was being caused by something on my company laptop.
I tried different media (wired vs. wireless) and also updated and rolled back different network drivers to no avail. Another long Google search put me upon this blog entry at kevinluck.com where he states:
After a bit of googling I found out that there were complaints about the early betas of CS3 and the Bonjour service that they installed affecting networking. And this is what was causing my problem. If you press Ctrl-Alt-Del and look at your processes then you will find a “mDNSResponder.exe” service running after installing Flash CS3. Ending this process allows you to connect through Network Connect.
Presto! Stopping that Process and eventually uninstalling the Bonjour application from my computer fixed my VPN disconnection problem! A big THANK YOU to kevinluck.com for being a great resource and I hope that this blog entry helps others trouble shoot the same issue I had with our Juniper VPN client!
Lord knows I was ready to pull my hair out
Internet Censorship — It’s All or Nothing
Posted by eric in Internet, Miscellaneous, Opinion on March 24, 2008
There’s been several articles on sites like slashdot.org and CNN discussing attempts by companies to stop the spread of illegal downloads be it movies, music, pirated software or illegal pornography. The most recent of these was Comcast blocking BitTorrent on their cable internet network (link to story), while other providers such as Usenet services are fighting the same battle. I think it’s only fair to divide the censorship crowd into two groups, Service Providers and Content Providers.
Service Providers are companies such as Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner, AT&T and other companies that provide internet access to users via their network. I feel that these companies are in a better legal position on censorship because they can claim that the use of specific services, such as BitTorrent, are overloading their network or violating their Terms of Service. Albeit not fair to the users that these services be blocked because some third party software vendors do use BitTorrent to distribute their applications in order to save on their bandwidth cost such as Wizards Of The Cost do with their Magic: The Gathering Online game installer. But what I think the users aren’t seeing is that even legal methods of using BitTorrent aren’t as fair as they’d seem because now Wizards of the Coast isn’t footing the bandwidth bill for distribution of their software, the Service Providers are. So as far as outright blocking of a specific protocol, Service Providers are legally within their rights.
Content Providers such as Usenet Services, Torrent Sites, File Sharing Services such as LimeWire or Morpheus on the other hand face a harder moral and legal delimma. They can’t pick and choose to censor a single area of content without opening the door for legal action from others. A perfect example is if a service decides to target and censor illegal pornography while turning a blind eye to movies, music and pirated software on their networks. It’s obvious they have the ability to stop distribution of specific content, so now what they’ve done is say indirectly that they’re OK with some illegal content on their network, just not that content which they find morally wrong.
A few months ago I canceled an account with a Usenet provider because they didn’t stop the proliferation of illegal pornography into legitimate newsgroups. So what I did as a consumer is put this Usenet provider in a tough position of censoring their content at a risk of alienating their customers and putting their business at risk or accept that albeit the content their distributing is morally wrong and in some cases illegal, that they can’t pick and choose which illegal content they’re OK with. How my provider got around this issue was their policy on the data was strictly “hands off” and allowed users to report posts that violated the terms of service and then those posts would be specifically removed.
So what’s to be done? Do we allow Service Providers to block entire protocols only because a community of users have taken to distributing illegal content with it? Can content providers still be legally immune to distributing illegal content because they’re not responsible for the data on their network?
I’m curious to hear people’s feedback on this issue.
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