Blog Random

If you have an internet connection and have tried the obvious (firewalls, restarting the computer, etc) and you still can’t stream songs from napster it may be that your Windows Media Player settings have decided to randomly change.

I had to phone up Napster support in the end, having tried everything else, and although they are also helpful and friendly, hopefully this will save someone else some time.

Steps to take:

1. Close down Napster (including the icon in the start bar by the clock).
2. Open up Windows Media Player (assuming WMP 11).
3. Go to Tools > Options
4. On the Player tab, check that ‘Connect to the Internet (overrides other commands)’ is ticked
5. Go to the Network tab, check that RTSP/UDP is unticked.
6. If you have the same problem I did, there won’t be anything in the ‘Streaming proxy settings’ box.
7. Close Window Media Player
8. Open up ‘My Computer’
9. Go to Tools > Folder options
10. Click on the view tab
11. Select ‘Show hidden files and folders’
12. Untick ‘Hide protected operating system files’
13. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Your Username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows Media\11.0
14. Delete the file WMSDKNS.xml
15. Open up Windows Media Player and check you now have ‘Streaming proxy settings’ on the network tab of options.
16. Close down WMP.
17. Open up Napster
18. Start streaming again!

If that doesn’t work, give Napster support a call. They’re pretty good, better than most support companies I deal with.

It may seem obvious to most, in fact, its obvious to me… but, don’t leave a magnet resting on your laptop (above the hard drive) while you go to lunch!

I came back from lunch today and the guys in the office were looking at me worriedly. I asked why and they went on to explain that while I was away my laptop began to make loud clicking noises. They soon realised it was the magnet and moved it away but it seems all too late.

Why did I put a magnet on my laptop? I have a couple of those twizzly gadget magnets and I was fiddling with them while I tested out the paypal sandbox (see next post). I decided to go get some lunch and without thinking just popped them on my desk/laptop. Same thing? No.

Plus I hadn’t backed up my photos in a month (all work related stuff gets backed up anyway) so lost all my pictures of Rome and the trip through France. Bummer!

Over the last few days I’ve had thousands of requests from a small number of IP addresses. My bandwidth usage had doubled and when I logged on to find out why, I was dissapointed to find it wasn’t a huge surge in new visitors! :p

I’ve since blocked the IP’s in question but, is this common? The main culprit was 78.108.81.41 but not a lot comes up in a search on google for it. The IP resolves to a russian website that looks like it could be a web host or a portal, nothing that looks suspect anyway! Very strange.

At the office we recently upgraded out phone system to use sip phones and chose some linksys SPA-941’s. I was looking for a way to display the caller ID of an incoming call on our computers and potentially the office display screen.

Ideally I wanted something that would connect on the SIP protocol and although there is probably something out there I haven’t had time to find it yet. As a quick (and slightly cumbersome) solution I rewrote a perl script I found here in to PHP.

It’s basically a class that connects to a linksys/sipura phone configuration page at a specified IP and reads the status out of the HTML, also grabbing the callers name and number. You’ll have to adapt it as necessary to poll the phone every x seconds. I’ve included an example file on how to use the class; at the moment the script will just print out the caller ID but you can do whatever you want with it, some examples could be:

• store it in a database for call records
• send the information to growl (mac only) to pop-up a message on the desktop
• integrate the script in to your intranet

If anybody knows of a better way to get the caller ID from these phones, or by using a SIP client on a PC, please let me know!

Download the script here: php-linksys-status.zip

P.S. You’ll need curl (probably already installed) and PHP5 for this to work.

In an attempt to speed up my imap access I moved old emails in to folders based on year. This speed up process majorly backfired when imap/mdir decided to make 7 copies of each email in the same folder. I ended up with 27,000 emails in my 2006 folder!

With my mailbox quota full I needed a quick solution… and couldn’t find one! Thunderbird has a plugin that will search for and delete duplicate messages but it runs over imap which crippled the server trying to handle all the requests.

Using Google I stumbled across this solution for finding and deleting duplicate messages using reformail but after getting reformail installed I found it to be very slow and the number of messages to delete didn’t add up so I had to abandon this approach.

In the end I decided to write my own PHP script that would cycle through the specific mail directory, search for duplicate messages based on the Message-Id (or a checksum of the email if not available) and then delete the unnecessary, duplicate emails. It worked a treat, and went through the 27,000 emails in less than 5 minutes! If anybody wants the code, its below!

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It has been a while since a post, I was hoping I wouldn’t slip in to a bad routine. Thanks for the comments so far, especially for the rb-internal-links plugin, can’t believe so many people are using it! Need to find a way to push it out there to more people if I can.

Back on topic, I’ve just installed release candidate 1 of the new version of wordpress. Matt mentioned on his blog that it would be a big one and it certainly is! From what I can tell the admin panel has been majorly revamped, both design wise and code wise. Logging in after the upgrade I had a few doubts but the new administration panel is impressively better (I liked the old one anyway). So far no major issues in upgrading from 2.4.x but I can see that I need to fix up the internal links plugin as the button has disappeared from the wysiwyg editor.

If the PSU on you’re powermac g5 has gone, or you think it may have, you aren’t the only one (see macintouch forums). When I was reading around on the subject I read the failure rate is around 11%, I can’t remember the exact figure but hopefully I’ll find it again later. Luckily Apple did acknowledge the problem and has extended the warranty on the power supply, which you can claim here: Power Mac G5 Repair Extension Program for Power Supply Issues

A relatively new customer phoned us up last week in a panic, claiming his server (the powermac) had stopped working and wouldn’t even switch on. We’d recently set-up a remote backup solution for him and installed an extra internal hard drive in the powermac for local backup. I’m guessing the extra load of the hard drive took it over the edge. Needless to say he needed the server back up asap.

Phoning around we found one supplier with a spare powermac psu in stock. None of the local apple stores did and most companies sounded confused, as if I was asking a silly question. We ended up paying £150-£200 for the psu, a little on the expensive side but desperate times call for desperate measures.

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The coolest (practical) gadget I’ve come across in the last few days is this wireless SD card that you can use to automatically sync pictures from your digital camera to your PC.

The brilliant thing about this card is that it will work in current hardware without having to update anything. The wifi adapter and firmware are built in to the SD card allowing it to connect to wireless networks when your camera is on to sync photos to your computer and straight on to photo sharing sites.

My digital camera happens to require a special cable to connect it to the pc (why not just use standard connectors!!) so this would save a load of time and the need for carrying around a cable or a card reader. Only problem is at this moment in time I can’t find anyone selling them.

Switching on my Clix at the gym the other evening I was greeted by the error “To play this track you must sync your device to your PC“. A gym session feels a lot longer with only music channels to listen to!

I was sure I’d synchronised my device with Napster recently but to be sure I tried again and even transferred some new songs across to see if that helped but still, the same error for every napster song. I tried a firmware update but was on the latest version and so I decided a format was my only option and should sort out everything - wrong!
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