It would start the main menu, but then fail when I tried to go further, complaining that the graphics card couldn’t handle pixel shaders ( a feature found in advanced graphics cards – which mine supposedly does. ) and I did my usual Google search looking for what other people may be trying or having problems with, and hopefully what they may have found that worked…

The best potential hit was on the RealFlight forum itself…. Which sort of made sense, if anyone has had experience with that sort of problem, I’ll probably find them there… and I actually found someone who was actually trying to get it to run in Wine ( another type of Windows emulator for Linux .) He was having problems getting the software to find the controller. I responded to him that I had installed RealFlight on my Virtualbox and it looked like it saw the controller ( it actually insisted that it be plugged in before continuing ) but that I ran into a pixel shader problem and thought that perhaps we were getting close because the main menu worked on my machine, but when I tried to go further the shader problem popped up. I asked if anyone had any experience with this issue and what they might recommend…

There were several others who mentioned that yeah, they tried too, but couldn’t get it to work and one or two who mentioned basically “give up” it’s a Windows program and it is only ever going to work on a Windows program… I mentioned that we may be starting to get close… and it was like I had pushed a button…

To minimize everything down to it’s sorry bottom line it was a case of whatever I said – I was wrong, because whatever the other person said – he was right. It went from being what I hoped would be a fun, fruitful and interesting discussion – to a negative response to whatever I said including all sorts of  “been there, done that, dont work” type comments from the other end. No real information on what was tried and what happened, just a straight out – “wont work because it wont”

It reminded me a lot about some of the other great blogs and forums that are out there ( ZDNet, PCMag, CNet, etc ) where ideas are raised and hopefully discussed, and questions are posed looking for answers, all of  which inevitably melts into a Linux/Windows/Mac sucks because Mac/Windows/Linux is the only thing that ever works right and will always be the best and “I’m right, you’re wrong”….

We have at our finger-tips one of the most powerful communications tools that man has ever created!

But… more and more it looks like humanity is devolving beyond kindergarten kids with no manners… petty little experts in their own minds who think the world needs to hear over and over and over again why they are right, and you are wrong….

What a waste….

Those “virtuous” organizations responsible for the protection of all the “stuff’ ( sorry I’m trying to be kind here ) coming out of Hollywood and of course all the CD makers are actively leveraging and possibly succeeding in getting the British Parliament to pass an altogether immoral law there to shut down a households ( note I did not say individuals ) access to the Internet because someone copied what the powers may be consider ‘copyrightten material’ and that would even mean if it was their neighbour who piggy-backed on their unencrypted wireless access. So much for free wireless in Britain me-thinks….

What really makes the whole thing quite ridiculous is that both police forces and those super sneaky spook forces have pleaded with the government to NOT implement such a policy as it will then make their job a whole lot worse  ( and quite  possibly impossible ) than what it was before – catching the ‘real’ bad guys…. as this will pretty well guarantee that everyone will eventually move to encrypted addressing and messaging and who knows what else in the future….

I came across a really smart article today on this subject posted on the Times of London website – www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6896049.ece which I think lays the whole thing out quite nicely and points out both the extreme danger of implementing this sort of process AND the folly of it.

The article was written by Cory Doctorow who has found that by publishing his own works online for free, it generates interest and sales for his hard copies as well. I really don’t understand why the media moguls of the world ( mainly focusing on the US of course ) don’t do the same thing, or better yet, DO IT BETTTER!

Instead, when they “sort of embrace” the Internet they still screw it up… Case in point, many US networks are now allowing their reruns of hit shows to be viewed online. This is really important for those people who may have missed a key episode in an ongoing story etc and I think it’s great. Unfortunately, for what ever reason they have restricted access to the denizens of the US – which is great for them… but anyone else outside of the US  gets a wonderful message saying essentially “…sorry you don’t count”  This of course led to other companies who did a brisk business hiding ( for a fee ) peoples addresses and making them appear so that they could view that long lost episode…. which guess what….. has now led these brilliant media moguls to now take these nefarious businesses to court in order to get them to cease and desist from allowing non Americans from viewing these shows…. www.pcauthority.com.au/News/159360,picking-the-perfect-home-entertainment-box-hulu-blocks-international-access-via-witopia.aspx

I think Cory nailed it on the head….  these media moguls really are dinosaurs, who are trying to keep us in the dark ages.  I am actually kind of surprised that they let HD TV’s get into the market place…. obviously the lure of making $$$ out of selling over-priced blue-ray disks blinded them from the fact that I really don’t want to see most of these actors in all their “made up” glory….. some of them look quite scary in large screen high def!

Here is a small bit of that article that Cory wrote in the Times ( which I have taken from Cory’s website in order to hopefully avoid any copyright guards out there…. )

Even more radical is the Mandelson proposal to disconnect entire families from the internet if a single member — or a neighbour who uses their internet connection — is accused, without proof, of violating copyright. Leave aside the fundamental injustice of collective punishment, a practice so abhorrent that it is outlawed in the Geneva Convention; think instead of the utter disproportionality of this.

The internet is an integral part of our children’s education; it’s critical to our employment; it’s how we stay in touch with distant relatives. It’s how we engage with government. It’s the single wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. It isn’t just a conduit for getting a few naughty free movies, it is the circulatory system of the information age.

Read the full article on the Times Website -  “Denying physics won’t  save the video stars” you won’t be disappointed….

So step number one was the acquisition of a pumpkin…. which my lovely wife diligently delivered to me with the words “you carve it”….

I’ve never been one for the ghoulishness or glammer of Halloween, I just like seeing all the kids and watching them have fun…. so in my mind I thought a goofy face was best, and not being the best of artists, I thought I would see what I could find for free… This lead of course to my #1 resource Google, and searching the web for pumpkin face templates and this lead me to the writing of this article ( and for those of you who were wondering…. it’s not that I don’t have things to write about …. I just can’t find the time to put it down!!!! )

Google gave me all sorts of what appeared to be great hits, unfortunately even though I had stated +FREE in the search query, many still offered their creations at a price. Which of course I wasn’t willing to pay…. but what stunned me more than anything else…. were the number of entrapment sites and dangerous sites that I stumbled across. It was beyond scarey…

There was no way to tell, save from actually clicking on the google search item that there was any problem with them, it was only after, when my anti-malware software kicked in, that I realized that I had actually stepped on a web based land-mine and even then I stepped a couple times onto a web page that had nothing to do with the searched item (and was actually a redirection from the original/old/hijacked web-site ) and was attacked by either a scanning attempt or similar type of hack.

Thankfully running on a Linux system gave me a little bit longer immunity to bail out of those sites before damage was done ( once they start actively looking for Linux we could all be in trouble….) Suffice to say I reported those that I actually “stepped on” to Google’s own malicious website reporting page www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/ so that hopefully others may be saved from those sites that I found.

What has stunned me is that OVER ONE THIRD of the sites that I found were dangerous sites - ONE THIRD!!

This is beyond scarey, at this rate we may all be relegated back to gated web portals like AOL or Compuseve. The tricksters are out in force this Halloween, and they are on the web looking for your blood…. If I can get snuck up on like that, how can the average computer user stand a chance!?

The Internet is often referred to as “The Wild West”, and unfortunately that is quickly what it is becomming…. we need some Marshalls out there now… many of them and hopefully a Texas Ranger or two will arrive in a nick of time….. otherwise I’m not sure what the future will hold for us…

Here is the “Treat” part of my entry today…. I did manage to find a few decent Pumpkin Face templates/pattern web-sites that are safe (so far at least ) to visit, here they are here:

• www.bellaonline.com/articles/art4783.asp – This is actually a blog with a variety of sites both free and pay for
• ca.dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Holidays_and_Observances/Halloween/Jack_O__Lanterns/Carving_Tips_and_Templates – A large listing of  pay and free sites
• carveapumpkin.bhg.com/carveapumpkin – Belongs to Better Homes and Gardens, and you can design your own pumpkin online ( registration required though )
• www.spookmaster.com – Mainly commercial (ya gotta pay for em) but it has a few freebies to tempt you
• www.ehow.com/halloween/templates.html – All free templates, and monograms as well

Hope you find what you are looking for on one of the web-sites above… Like I said it’s a pretty scarey world out there right now, so be safe, keep your spam checker, virus scanner and malware checker up-to-date and if you do step on something that wasn’t very nice I hope you get out of it without damage and are able to report it to google…..

Happy Halloween…

The short story was, I didn’t pay my bills on time…. and if that were the only reason I wouldn’t be writing this… so…

The rest of the story is my service provider ( the company that actually sells me server space for my, and other websites that I maintain ) locked me out of all my websites, because I hadn’t paid. Unfortunately, I never received any notice of any renewals due, or pending lockouts.

I’ve had an ongoing “discussion” ( albeit it seems one way ) with my provider regarding the fact that NONE of their notification emails ever get to me. I check my spam filters carefully and trust me if they had fallen in the cess-pool I would have found it, but they don’t. They just “kind of” disappear…

They seem to have an aura about them that, they know what they are doing, and obviously “I” don’t ergo, it’s my fault and I have to fix it…. or the customer is always guilty… finito.

Well the rest of the story, and why it took so long to get back up and running is… my service provider is based out of Australia. Which I usually don’t have a problem with, it’s like dealing with a cousin and besides, the Internet is a global phenomenon and not restricted to any borders. The biggest problem was…. They only posted their toll free support number…. for Australia. Which doesn’t help me one little bit here in Canada!

Yes, their trouble ticket department worked beautifuly, even my emails that I sent about my problem got dumped into the trouble ticket bin and I had dropped off a few tickets of my own, tagged ( I might add ) at the “Critical” level… but no one responded or even bothered to comment on them ( even a “hey we’re busy but we’ll get to it soon” would have been nice…)

I even used whois  ( neat little tool that lets you actually look up an individual internet address to get further info on the company. ) I found a local Melbourne Australia phone number for the company, and called and called and called and all I ever got was a busy signal…

I even crawled the Internet looking for more contact information and found an email address for the CEO asking… are you ready for this…. “Hey, how are you doing? Got any comments for me? I found another email address of one of their marketing people who actually writes a blog supporting this company and had written an article about how important it is to be easy to get hold of your support people ( a little bizarre that – since that was exactly the problem I was having with THAT company! ) and again emails went out and nothing…. absolutely nothing came back, or changed. It was like they never existed…

In desperation, I sent a trouble ticket two days ago saying basically, “Are you still there” “Does anybody care”? And guess what?! Someone responded! I recieved an actual email and trouble ticket response from their first line of technical support saying basically. “We’re here 24/7 to help you, just give us a call….. with a different phone number….. O.M.G.!!!!

So I called, it rang, and I got someone!!! ( At this point the angel choirs broke out  in full chorus. ) They did a quick Hmmmmm let’s see and voila there it was, I didn’t pay my bill! They even walked me through my account to find the same entry ( 4 layers down ) telling me that my service had expired at the end of the month… I was informed, that I had been informed by email ( remember the beginning of this mess ) that I needed to renew…. and that I should do that to avoid such outages….. sigh.

Amazingly I have changed my contact email address with them ( the old one still works for everyone else though ) and the new one, upon testing, seems to work fine…. time will tell.

Unfortunately, once access was given, I found that all my websites were back, except my blogs… To make a long story short, somewhere in amongst this process all the blogs database passwords had been changed and it took 12hrs to get them all changed back…. with a little ” You must have changed them yourself”/”You have to watch out for hackers and keep everything up to date” comment ( remember their “customer is always guilty” stance. )

So aside from the inane lectures and guidance on how “I” have to be “more” proactive in updating, reading emails etc etc etc, my sites and back and I’m “somewhat” happy… Oh and the provider?

PlanetDomain

And if you are interested in their own article on how to better support your client  or  “How to Lose a Business On Line” here it is….. blog.planetdomain.com/2009/03/30/how-to-lose-business-online/

Looks to me like maybe they should follow their own guidance…..

A case in point seems to be the graphics drivers that are available for the common user. They really are quite minimal and as such makes it very difficult to “push” a modern graphics card to do what it does best – display amazing graphics.

I unfortunately wasn’t paying attention when I purchased my new system and got it with an ATI Radeon graphics card. Which in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, if one runs Windows, however when one is trying to run Ubuntu it becomes a pain in the butt.

I had originally wanted my next computer to have an Nvidia chipset instead of Radeon, mainly because there “appeared” to be more support for it out there. Which I admit doesn’t necessarily relate to better support, but there seems to be more of it to choose from.

So I was stuck with trying to use the driver that Ubuntu released, namely…. xorg-driver-fglrx ( try and say that one ten times fast! )

At first it seemed to work quite well, the graphics performing as I thought they probably should. But…. I rebooted the computer ( after properly shutting it down of course ) and when the computer tried to come back up, that is where the grief started…. The display was scrambled and I had not way of logging back in ( and unfortunately it had been a while since the driver had been installed – so I initially didn’t even know what had caused the problem! )

I spent a long time researching and testing, trying to find what the problem was, and then in my searching I stumbled across a little posting that was actually a bug report 367741 ( a report listing a known problem with the software ) which supposedly means someone somewhere may eventually get around to fixing whatever causes this issue.

Oh, and the solution was to completely remove and purge the software from my system… Everything ( graphics wise that is ) worked fine after that was done. For those who might want a quick answer/solution do the following:

1. reboot your system into command line mode
2. run the command “sudo apt-get remove –purge xorg.driver-fglrx”
3. and reboot

Of course I only found out this morning ( as I was about to write this article ) that another hiccup occurred that may or may not have been related to the graphics driver problem…. but that’s for another day.

Good Luck!