Title says it all, never thought I would but there’s just a few things about Linux that get on my nerves, namely a fair few of my hardware devices and software etc. don’t work as well as I’d like them to, or work at all, so I shall post once everything is running smooth under Windows. Just need to download a few files and it’s bye-bye Ubuntu for now.
After having been MIA for a month, OpenDesigns.org are back on the Open Source design scene. Everything’s still the same and everyone’s still there; so why not head on back if you’re a current member or join if you’re not? They have an active forum which you can post asking for help or critique on just about anything (or just post about whatever you want, really. Just keep it in the rules). You can submit your XHTML/CSS designs where the whole world can download them and you can gain some sort of satisfaction you’ve helped someone out there in cyberspace. Why not go check it out?
They say you have to spend money to make money. That’s exactly how it works at Big Web Links Bid Directory. It is a new web directory which has just started out. Unlike others such as DMOZ, you receive more then just one link. Many people may think it’s just another web directory, same old story. That’s wrong. With Big Web Links you pay a small amount and not only do you receive two direct links on the category page, plus your own dedicated page, but you can also appear on the front page (Top 10) or Top 20 links in the directory by contributing money, which makes it possible to gain 4 links. All links are SEF, permanent and there are no recurring fees at all. This is great link value and can help anyone looking to boost traffic or moving into SEO.
This post has been sponsored by PayPerPost
You might not have ever thought about it but every time you look at a web page that page has been served to you by a computer somewhere.
This serving is not all that complicated and the average desktop could probably do it.
In fact by downloading a copy of Apache you can have a go at running a web server on your own computer. If you are reasonably confident with configuring your router and firewall you could even consider hosting your blog from it provided you have the right connection for the traffic you may receive.
Personally I like to have my blog in a powerful server in a data centre with all sorts of expensive back ups but with a little jiggery-pokery there is no reason why you couldn’t serve it from home.
But all that aside let’s just look at setting up a webserver to play with.
I shall assume generally that you have Windows XP and a basic grasp of the things I am typing about. If this is not the case then you might want to ask questions. That’s cool too.
So grab yourself a copy of the Apache Server for Windows.
Actually it is nowhere near that simple. You must choose between three versions (1.4, 2.0 or 2.2) but I’ll save you some time and let you know that 2.x is the developmental line and while 2.0 and 2.2 do not play the same both should be fine for a little play. You will also be fine with 1.4 especially if you want to let the outside world in.
Your best bet is to grab this little package: wampserver. WAMP stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Without much fuss you should be able to run a whole host of programs. You will find you have Apache 2.2 with this package so I’m guessing at has come on a bit since I last tested it.
Install it if you wish or pretend you have and read on.
Once in place you should have a folder inside of which is your http root folder. Anything inside this can be navigated to via a webbrowser. Open up your favourite browser and punch localhost into the address and have a look.
(If you actually bother to install a WAMP package the help file is a bit more impressive than that last paragraph).
Now you can look at HTML pages all you like.
Isn’t that cool.
What do you mean you could do that anyway?
Actually it’s true. Looking at a HTML document in a browser is no big deal - any fool can do it.
It’s what else you can do that starts to get cool.
If you have already installed the WAMP package you have the ability to run over 4,000 packages Listed Here and if you fancy grabbing PERL for your PC then you get access to another 4K of packages here and you can interface with some C libraries you happen to have written (you never know).
The same is true for python (sometimes used to script webpages) or C/C++/C# which you can run as CGI too. So if you want to go a litle OTT and play with everything but Ruby try this where I understand you can download for free or buy a regular copy.
While we are going silly you can also try PostgreSQL as the second most popular free database system.
Suddenly you can try out every last (free) CMS and Blog package on the planet. Expect to pay an arm and a leg to have a web host give you all that which while seemingly strange due to the fact I’m telling you that it’s all free I’d bet you spend a day grabbing it all and a few hours every month grabbing updates. You see, even with free software people’s time is still expensive.
Personally, for example, I run just LAMP with MediaWiki on a personal intranet (webserver over my local area network of two PCs and a laptop). This allows the family to keep track of common notes.
For those that are wondering the PC running the webserver had 256MB of RAM, 2800+ Sempron and a 40GB HDD. Not exactly top end stuff these days.
It is good safe fun and the perfect environment to learn to write basic web scripts in. That’s where I do most of my work these days - yes my test server is the same PC that I write my business letters on and do the accounts with.
As I said earlier it’s not that complicated.
Any comments, tips, suggestions or cries for help can be posted in the comments or emailed to me.
Written by Lord Matt as a guest article.
After dual-booting Windows and Ubuntu a couple of weeks ago and getting a successful install running well, I decided to install Wine and see what performance of Windows programs was like under linux. Surely enough, the install runs great and I manage to install Steam and download a couple of games and begin playing. I then decide I wish to go back into Windows and finish up a couple of things only to find that my Windows install is non-bootable. What it turns out has happened is Wine has installed itself onto C:\ (when I specifically told it H:\) and nuked my whole Windows install. So naturally, I’ve lost all my data that was on my Windows NTFS partition. Being my lazy self, I decided to stick with Ubuntu and save myself the hassle of reinstalling Windows and all the software and drivers. I got all my hardware working under Ubuntu (printers, keyboard/mouse, webcam, microphone etc.) which was great.
So all was going smoothly until I wanted to resize a couple of partitions as I had no intention of keeping the Ubuntu partition (and Ubuntu along with it, of course) installed, so I only gave it 15gig of space or so. I opened up gparted (Gnome Partition Editor) and selected the partitions to be resized and set them to resize, all went to plan. I then reboot into Ubuntu, only to find GRUB (the boot loader) is spitting errors at me like it’s just eaten something rather vile. I decide to see if I can fix the error to no avail, so I decided to do a clean install of Ubuntu. So once more, I open up gparted, erase my partitions and boot into the Ubuntu Live CD which also acts as an installer. The install goes well with a few slight hiccups. I reconfigure all my hardware, my internet connection etc and decide to install my graphics drivers for my nVidia card using software called envy. I downloaded the .deb package and GDebi tells me I need to install missing dependencies (one being build-essential). Now everybody knows that one things leads to another, and it’s no different in this situation. I downloaded the debian package for build-essential and it has a dependency, libc6. libc6 needs libc6-devel. libc6-devel needs glibc. At this point I’m asking myself ‘Why the hell must everything be coded in C and require all these damn packages which should come standard with Ubuntu anyway?’. I went ahead with the install of libc6, until the install dies and spits me some error saying it needs another dependency, glibc. Glibc was available from gnu.org and needed to be compiled. So I download the gz archive (~16mb) and extract, change directory into the directory I extracted it in and tried to run ./configure. It tells me that the configuration must be done outside of the base directory. I had no idea as to which files to copy into a new directory to compile the damn thing, so I was stuck with a whole lotta broken dependencies and things nagging me to install updates. I then try to rectify the situation by using apt-get, but I need libc6 to use apt-get. I then try to change directory, I need libc6 to use the ‘cd’ command. It turns out libc6 is required for almost every damn command! And ironically, it turns out that GDebi wouldn’t install libc6 because it was already installed. So why is it giving me errors if it’s already installed? I didn’t want to try to fix it or find out, so once more, format and clean install.
So, 2 fresh installs of Ubuntu later, here I am writing this post after configuring everything yet again. Why bother? you may ask. The simple answer is: Screw going back to Windows and installing everything. Ubuntu certainly kicks Windows’ ass in installation times and everything else for that matter even if it does require more configuration depending on your setup.
Long Live Linux!
Au revoir.
Microsoft have actually conceded and called their OneCare AV software ‘less than stellar’.
Well recently I’ve joined the Twitter crew (check out my profile here). I’ve also been messing with the Blobsy code. Blobsy is an open source framework for an MSN bot. It simply is a script written in PHP that can run from a shell and waits for your command. Of course you have to delve into the more complicated things like Switchboard and Notification Server things but it’s all fairly easy once you get the hang of it like everything else is. I have coded a simple 5 or so lines of PHP that will allow me to post to Twitter using my Blobsy bot. It uses cURL and simple posts to Twitter and either gives me a success message or an error message (don’t you hate those?). Drop me a comment if you want the source code.
If you’re a hardcore CS fan or just happened to have played the game since the recent compulsory update to the Steam client, you will have noticed the ingame ads on the scoreboard and in maps such as de_dust2 and de_aztec. So what’s the big deal? It’s just the usual story: Company has popular game. Company wants to make more money. Company places ads in popular game. Company makes revenue. Unfortunately, these ads make the game look ugly and annoy those people who want to simply play the game. The ads can be viewed at CS-Nation via these links.
So the question is raised: how do you remove these damn advertisements? Well, after doing a little bit of googling, I stumbled upon a .rar archive on Rapidshare. The archive simply contains copies of the game files before the Steam compulsory update. It is legal as of now (March 2007) so I have hosted the .rar archive here for you to combat corporate gain and take back your gaming experience.
Download The File - 828kb, includes readme
Here’s what a certain individual had to say about this patch in regards to a VAC Ban:
“The only ‘modified’ file is iga.dat, where i made a 1-character hex edit. This file could not actually be used for any cheating purposes, and since it’s such a new addition to CS, there are no cheats which make use of it for any exploitable purposes and VAC therefore doesn’t check it.
As for the rest of the files, they’re all resfiles (effectively a skin/gui - you’re not banned for that.) and client content from the last working version. VAC really shouldn’t detect VALVE’s own (albeit old) content as cheats. Besides, many users may have steam set to not update their games, and play with the old content in any case. VALVE won’t ban them for such a scenario. They bought the game, and therefore can choose whether or not they wish to keep it updated or not.
In essence, this patch simply ‘forces’ CS to use content from before the update, which is perfectly legal, since you bought the game and can choose whether or not to update it.
I will not be held responsible for any damage done to your computer or your Steam Account through using this patch, or anything you may do with the patch as I am not the creator of the patch. You are free to redistribute the patch. I am only posting this for your educational use.
Shame on Valve for stooping to EA’s level.
There was a post on Digg with a rar archive containing files not exactly the same as the provided rar archive in this post which has been reported on Digg as not working through user comments
My conclusion: gg valve.
If you liked this post, Digg it!
#1 As if we didn’t see this coming. Today there was an update to the Half Life 1 engine (which includes Counter-Strike 1.6) which is described in Valve News here. The update simply says: “Fixed loading outdated client dlls”. If you downloaded the patch, you will see it contained a patched client.dll. I just launched my CS client and what do you know? The stupid fucking ads are back. The ad is no longer on the top of the scoreboard although the game has loaded a new client.dll so the spacing of the text in the scoreboard is configured for the new ‘crap’ scoreboard which is wider, so you can no longer see your deaths or ping, only your kills. Looks like this ones going to be an uphill battle with Valve, so until someone comes up with a new method you’re going to need to bear with the ads. I’ll keep you posted if I find an update.
#2 For now you can removed the ingame ads using the cvar gl_polyoffset -999. It will remove all the advertising decals from the affected maps, but you will have to deal with the ads on the scoreboard and the crap scoreboard width. For now thats the best option available.
#3 If you’re too lazy to scroll a few lines, all updates by fragtion to his patch will be posted at this link: cs.rin.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?t=44349 when they become available.
While reading Paul O’Flaherty’s Blog, his post on a post on Electric Escape that you may have already seen on Slashdot almost had me changing my pants. You’d think that script kiddies couldn’t get any more moronic than the usual scenario: A 13 year old kid saying he’s going to DDoS you. You’re shivering be shivering with terror. Well go and read the post and see that you’re not alone.
Heads up to all you Wordpress users. Wordpress 2.1.2 was released today. I already know what you’re thinking: ‘I only just upgraded to Wordpress 2.1.1! What is with these stupid Wordpress developers and their sporadic software releases?’
So put your thoughts aside for a moment, because this release is very important to users who may be running vulnerable installs of 2.1.1. If you know someone who is using 2.1.1, or you are yourself, I strongly advise you to visit the Wordpress Download page and get the latest 2.1.2 release.
Now let’s bring those thoughts back. Why are the Wordpress developers so sporadic in releasing WP? To find out, visit the Wordpress Development Blog for the full scoop.
Here’s a nice list of Webmaster Resources that has been compiled. Leave me a comment if you found this handy or somewhat useful.
If you feel I’ve missed a category or you think a link is worthy of being on there, drop me a comment. Also, please report any broken / bad links via the comments.
Anywho, on with the list..
If you like it, Digg It!
www.dreamhost.com/
www.dotster.com/
www.datacities.com
www.dot5hosting.com/
www.midphase.com/
www.startlogic.com/
www.globat.com/
www.ipowerweb.com/
www.hostrocket.com/
www.bizhosting.com/
www.hostway.co.uk/
www.hostsave.com/
www.apollohosting.com/
www.webmasters.com
www.your-site.com/
www.f2g.net/ (15Mb)
www.united.net.kg/ (15Mb)
hosting.free2code.net/ ( 50Mb - community member)
www.cometstream.net/ (50Mb - banner exchange)
www.brinkster.com/
www.hostultra.com/
www.web1000.com/
www.coolfreepages.com
www.dap.ro (100 MB MySQL & PHP No ADS)
www.uw.hu (MySQL & PHP support and also NO ADS)
www.250free.com
www.godaddy.com (10$)
www.registerfly.com (Comes with free 25mb hosting)
www.register.com
Continue reading ‘Compiled List Of Mostly Free Webmaster Resources’
