Andrew Fore

So I just finished Prince of Persia on my PS3.  I decided that I would go and purchase the $9.99 Prince of Persia: Epilogue DLC from the PSN (PlayStation Network) store so that I could have some more PoP game time.

Turns out that I can’t purchase anything using my Bank of America debit card, because Sony’s billing and account system is seriously messed up.

First I tried just entering in my account information in the PSN store interface as a direct purchase.  I put in the card information and billing information.  I get an error back that says “Credit card is invalid. Check your entries.”  Thinking that I may have punched something in wrong when relying on my memory, I go get the physical card and verify that all the data was correct.  Hit continue.  Same error.

I then tried to just enter the billing information into the account management thinking that maybe that would work.  Same error.

I tried logging into my PSN account over the web on my laptop and entering the information there.  Same error.

Having now exhausted all the possible avenues for entering in my information, I search the Google to find out if others have had this problem and what the fix might or might not be.  Turns out there have been numerous people with the same problem.

The first thread I listed had the most information.  They were discussing the possible values necessary in the address fields, etc.  I checked all my information.  Here’s what you need to double-check:

1. Make sure your console has been activated using the System Activation item in the dashboard
2. Make sure that if your billing address is a post office box that you are not adding in punctuation
3. Make sure that your zip code is matching exactly with the bank records, especially if your bank uses an address verification system
4. Make sure that your phone number, if listed, matches the bank records

The problem is that I checked all of this and none of it helped.  So I called the Sony Computer Entertainment America support number (800-345-7669) and waded through the menu system to get a support representative.  I have to give kudos to the support representative, because she was very calm and nice, and she didn’t even have a problem with the fact that I had already checked everything that she had on her checklist for me to check.

Unfortunately, she said “Sometimes the PO Box addresses just don’t work.  The only suggestion I can make is that you use a different credit card or go buy a PlayStation Network Card.”  She was very sorry that it wasn’t working, but there was nothing she could do to help.

I am not blaming the support folks, but that kind of answer is really pretty unacceptable.  I use my BoA card online, in stores, and over the phone all the time with no problems at all.  To make matters worse, when I logged in to my BoA account over the web I had a $1 pending transaction for each of my attempts to connect my card to the PSN store.  The customer service representative did assure me that they would drop off since a complete account transaction had never occured.

This is unexcusable.  Why even bother creating an online store for your game console if it doesn’t reliably work to purchase things?  Someone at Sony really needs to get this ironed out.

In my process of tranferring my DVD collection to a digital media server I discovered that the Apple TV software is smarter than I thought.

I have been ripping my DVD collection using Handbrake on my Mac and transferring them to a Windows box which is shared out via my internal only network to the Apple TV using iTunes.  I use the built-in Apple TV profile to do this.  The profile sets the frame rate option on the encoder to be “Same As Source”.  It turns out that if your rip has a final fps (frames per second) that is greater than 30 then the resulting movie will not be available in the list of Shared Movies on the Apple TV.

Who is She?
by Gabriel Rosenstock

Who is this goddess of yours? Who is she?

‘Pure fantasy, I wager.’

‘Is she not clear to you?’
‘No, she is not.’

‘Clearer than day is she
‘ clearer than night …’

‘Day in night is she
‘ night in day …’

Music
by Walter de la Mare

When music sounds, gone is the earth I know, And all her lovely things even lovelier grow; Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees

Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies.

When music sounds, out of the water rise Naiads whose beauty dims my waking eyes, Rapt in strange dreams burns each enchanted face,

With solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place.

When music sounds, all that I was I am Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came; And from Time’s woods break into distant song

The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along.

ref. url: Music by Walter de la Mare

Google Maps has a cool shot of an SR-71 Blackbird on the deck of the USS Intrepid at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City.

Today is the birthday of Lord Byron, an English poet born in 1788 in Scotland. He was born George Gordon Noel.

His first success was the poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage written in 1812, which is based around his journeys from England to the eastern Mediterranean.

Check out today’s daily poem for another of his more recognizable poems, She Walks in Beauty.

This particular poem is one of my favorites, and it was featured in the television series Beauty and the Beast that ran on the CBS network in the US from 1987 until 1990. The first season of this show has recently been released on DVD.

She Walks in Beauty
by Lord Byron

She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellow’d to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impair’d the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress, Or softly lightens o’er her face; Where thoughts serenely sweet express

How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow, So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow, But tell of days in goodness spent, A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent!

ref. url: She Walks in Beauty

Hear it being read by Bill Berkson

Those of you out there who are running an installation of SCT Luminis 3 may have noticed that the browser check always comes up warning you that the browser is unsupported when using Firefox 2, even though all the features seem to be completely supported.

This is due to the fact that the browsercheck javascript does not know about the new agent string that was introduced with Firefox 2. Generally a new release, or service pack to Luminis fixes this for newer browsers.

In order to change this you will need to alter a couple of files in you Luminis install.

The two files that need to be altered are:

1. webapps/luminis/js/clientsniffer.js
2. /webapps/luminis/WEB-INF/templates/portal/browserchk.thtml

clientsniffer.js

In this file you will need to alter the conditional of the big if-statement that follows the assignment for the variable is_nav5.

The problem is that the if checks for the existence of a revision number of 1.8. What you need to do is add an additional check for a revision number of 1.8.1.6. So the if-statement conditional becomes:

if (is_nav5 || agt.indexOf(“rv:1.7.12″) != -1 || agt.indexOf(“rv:1.8″) != -1 || agt.indexOf(“rv:1.8.1.6″) != -1)

The next thing to do is to add an additional Firefox variable that is set to true if the major number is 2. I added this after the existing variable is_fox1_5.

var is_fox2 = (is_fox && (is_major == 2));

browserchk.thtml

In the browsercheck file you need to alter if-statement that sets the variable supported to have a true value. This if-statement should follow immediately after the one that checks for whether java is enabled in your browser.

What you need to add is an additional OR check, so that the if-statement conditional looks like the following:

if ((is_nav8) || (is_nav7) || (is_moz1_7) || (is_win && is_ie5up) || (is_win && is_ie6) || (is_saf1_3) || (is_fox1_5) || (is_fox2) || (is_win && is_fox1))

I have tested this change with Firefox 2.0.0.6 on the following browsers:

• Mac OS X 10.4.10
• Windows XP SP2
• Windows Vista
• Ubuntu 6.10

Resources

Frequently I write posts that others may find useful.  In fact I have even been cited in software manuals and on other sites across the web as a reference or a resource for information on a particular topic. Earlier today a visitor to my site alerted me to the fact that two of my posts on the Nagios system and using it with Mac OS X had been copied outright on a blog located in Belgium.

While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, wholesale plagiarism is not very flattering at all.

The website in question is the WordPress blog published by CP IT Solutions, Inc. Both posts are obvious copy/paste entries from my own blog.  Here are the details:

Copies

http://cpsolutions.be/wordpress/?p=213

http://cpsolutions.be/wordpress/?p=215

Originals

http://arfore.com/2008/10/12/starting-nrpe-via-launchd/

http://arfore.com/2008/09/25/nagios-nrpe-on-os-x-server-105/

The person in question is apparently a Microsoft Certified Professional, and also hosts a Joomla site on the same domain.

WordPress blog – http://cpsolutions.be/wordpress/

Main site – http://www.cpsolutions.be/JOOMLA/

I wonder what his clients would think if they knew that he was just copying other people’s work and putting it up as original thought?  I have sent e-mails to both the owner of CP IT Solutions as well as the ISP for his site.  Interestingly enough, for someone that provides IT consulting services they use a hosting provider rather than run their own site, as seen by the WHOIS entry below, hopefully they are going to be called on for hosting consultancy services.

WHOIS entry for cpsoltuions.be

% WHOIS cpsolutions
Domain:      cpsolutions
Status:      REGISTERED
Registered:  Wed Sep 27 2006

Licensee:
   Not shown, please visit www.dns.be for webbased whois.

Agent Technical Contacts:
   Last Name:     Kristof De Vlieger
   Company Name:  DVK Systems & Consultancy BVBA
   Language:      nl
   Street:        Luikersteenweg 547
   Location:      3800 Sint-Truiden
   Country:       BE
   Phone:         +32.11768005
   Fax:           +32.11768002
   Email:         [email protected]

Agent:
   Name:      DVK Systems & Consultancy Bvba
   Website:   www.dvkhosting.be

Nameservers:
   ns3.dvkhosting.com
   ns2.dvkhosting.com

Sure many of us use snippets and other items from our fellow IT professionals, but at the very least give credit where it is due.

Last week I posted on how to setup NRPE on Mac OS X Server.  Here is what you need to do to make it start up at system boot.

On a Linux or Solaris machine you can just include the call to the daemon in an init script like rc.local and it will be started when the OS boots.  Unfortunately, Apple has made this a little more difficult on Mac OS X with Tiger and Leopard.  The standard startup processes (cron, inetd, xinetd, etc.) have been rolled into a single process known as launchd.

Continue reading

As some visitors to arfore.com will have noticed I feature a list of recent etree.org downloads on my Listening page.  The files from etree.org are live shows recorded by dedicated fans and concert goers.  Many, if not most, of these recordings are posted in one of two lossless file formats: SHN and FLAC.

Both of these file formats are used for compressing audio files.  The reason they are used is due to the fact that they are lossless formats.  Lossless compression allows for the expansion of the of the file into an exact duplicate of the original recorded audio stream.

iTunes supports a different lossless format: Apple Lossless.  Unfortunately, iTunes does not support playback of either FLAC or SHN files.  So what is an audiophile to do?  Using two different free programs you will be able to easily convert both FLAC and SHN files to a format that iTunes can use, thus giving you the ability to take those awesome concerts with you everywhere on your iPod or iPhone.

Decoding FLAC files to Apple Lossless

Decoding FLAC files is relatively easy.  Using XLD you can simply open the FLAC file that you download (they are all legal downloads right?) and quickly convert it into one of several available formats.  xACT support the following formats:

• Input
  • (Ogg) FLAC (.flac/.ogg)
  • Monkey’s Audio (.ape)
  • Wavpack (.wv)
  • TTA (.tta)
  • Apple Lossless (.m4a) [10.4 and later]
  • AIFF, WAV, etc
• Output
  • WAVE
  • AIFF
  • Raw PCM
  • Ogg Vorbis (aoTuV)
  • MPEG-4 AAC (QuickTime/CoreAudio)
  • MP3 (LAME)
  • Apple Lossless
  • FLAC
  • HE-AAC (aacPlus v1/v2)
  • Wave64
  • WavPack

As you can see the list of supported formats is pretty extensive.  XLD also supports splitting large files into tracks provided a cue sheet is available with the recording.  Support is also there for using XLD as a CD ripper, allowing you to create FLAC files from the audio cd’s that you own (for personal consumption only right?).  Files can also be tagged with metadata using the freedb.org project data service.

SHN need to get the short end

While XLD is a great program in it’s own right, it doesn’t support the older SHN format.  This is not a large problem due to the existence of xACT.  xACT is an Apple-script based GUI frontend for a variety of Unix tools: shntools, Shorten, monkey’s audio compressor, flac, and cdda2wav.  The cdda2wav functions include paranoia support.

The main shortcoming to xACT is that it only supports the following decoding formats: WAV and AIFF.  While this is not always a drawback, if you have SHN files that you would like to play on a device that only supports mp3 files then you will need to use xACT as a middle-man for another program, like XLD.  iTunes is also capable of importing the WAV and AIFF formats.

xACT also allows you to write out the FLAC tags and uses AtomicParsley to accomplish this.  You can encode files using SHN, FLAC, APE, Wavpack, TTA, and Apple Lossless.  This is great for extracting content from CD directly to a lossless format.  When extracting CD content you also have the ability to create a single file, instead of individual tracks.

I hope that this will help you enjoy those awesome shows while on the road!

References

Editor’s Note: This article is part of the Tales of A Linux Switcher series.

One of the things I have always hated about using Linux is the difference in the base font collection.  Many web designers still use the defaults of Arial, Verdana and Georgia.  The reasons for this are that these fonts are available on the two main commercial operating systems, Mac OS and Microsoft Windows.

Until the majority of websites support webfonts like Google Web Fonts or Monotype’s fonts.com service, we still need access to the standard MS fonts. For more on this situation, check out the article A Web Designer’s Guide to Linux Fonts by Six Revisions.

Fortunately, these fonts are available for installation on Linux.  You can download them directly from the Sourceforge repository or look for the package in your particular distribution.

In Ubuntu you can install them from the Ubuntu Software Center by searching for the package named ttf-mscorefonts-installer or by using the following on the command line (Note: if you install from the command line then you will be prompted to accept the license aggreement in an ncurses interface.):

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Either way, you will end up with the following additional fonts:

• Andale Mono
• Arial Black
• Arial (bold, italic, bold italic)
• Comic Sans MS (bold)
• Courier New (bold, italic, bold italic)
• Georgia (bold, italic, bold italic)
• Impact
• Times New Roman (bold, italic, bold italic)
• Trebuchet (bold, italic, bold italic)
• Verdana (bold, italic, bold italic)
• Webdings

To see the difference in the display of websites after the installation, check out the following screenshots from this website.

As you can see the use of these fonts definitely make a difference.  Happy surfing!

I would like to welcome my grandson, Riley James Dowling, to this wide, wide world!

Riley was born to my step-daughter, Caitlin Elise Vickers, on May 21, 2013 at about 7pm.  He came into the world weighing 6lbs and 7oz.

I wish all my love and the best of life to both Riley and his mom!!

Recently I was tasked to install the Nagios add-on NRPE on two OS X 10.5 servers.

I read a little on the ‘net about it, but no one actually had much in the way of a walkthrough, so I thought I would fill the void.

The basic steps involve compiling the NRPE source, but doing so involves altering some of the code.

Continue reading

Recently I was tasked to install the Nagios add-on NRPE on two OS X 10.5 servers.

I read a little on the ‘net about it, but no one actually had much in the way of a walkthrough, so I thought I would fill the void.

The basic steps involve compiling the NRPE source, but doing so involves altering some of the code.

Continue reading