Stephens’ Blog

For a while now I have been interested (jealous) of the photos some people can take without even thinking. I on the other hand only manage to get a few nice shots every once in a while. So last week I took the discison to do something about it and actually learn how to take nice great photos.

My first step was to find a basic book that would help even with a non SLR camera. I found this book, the book arrived today and after having a quick look through it I start playinig with the exposer level and seeing what difference it would make.

Over the course of the next few weeks I shall upload my photos to this site to show how they may and may not be improving.

Here is one I took yesterday during one of the many snow showers I saw yesterday.

Just before Christmas I decided to order a documentary I had heard about on one of the hak5 episode that I have finally managed to find time to watch, it turned up yesterday which I thought was a great delivery response around the Christmas period. I am actually managed to find time to watch it last night whilst I was doing some out of hours work.

The documentary is call hackers are people too and is available from this website. The documentary focus on hackers and asks for their view on how the media perceive them, how they perceive them selves  and how the culture has or has not change of the past decades.  I must say this does beat any of the films out about hacking and goes some way to bring a new way of looking at the mainstream of hackers, as yes there are bad hackers but that is a small percentage of the whole spectrum.

Hackers Are People Too Trailer from Ashley Schwartau on Vimeo.

I would recommend everyone watch this, for no other reason is that the next time you hear the words “A hacker broke into … today” you may have a different view on what to think.

First off I would liek to wish everyone a happy new year.

As I do almost every year I am going to attempt to write on this blog more often. I shall also write up here  wider variety of subjects.

Over the course of Decemeber I spent most of my time preparing for the Christmas period that is now upon us and thankfully almost over. I am not saying I am not a fan of Christmas but I must say that I can’t be doing with the whole let rush around to see everybody. That being said as this year as well as last years Christmas was quite a quiet affair I did find myself relaxed over the period which is a new feeling for me.

I haven’t written much in regards to computer related topic up here as of late and part of the reason is because I am spend alot of time researching how to offer a cut down version of Microsoft Exhange in a hosted environment for work. Once I have the project put in place and actually start to configure the service I shall write something on the principle. The webbook I have which is the Compaq 2133 is still going strong and I am still using it when I just need to do something quickly.

I have also managed to catch up on watching a internet programme I dive in and out of which is hak5. this is a internet TV show geared towards technology and computing with so very cool ideas.

As soon as I have anything more interesting to say I shall put it up on this blog.

Well it has a long time since I have updated this with what I am actually doing, so here goes.

On Sunday I did the usual think of going ice skating and I most say that over the past couple of month I have been improve a lot, I still can’t ice hockey stop but that will come with time.

Over the Weekend I decided to upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10. I decide to do this at 22:00 on a Saturday night which is never the best idea I could have as I kept falling asleep and the whole process didn’t finish until 5:00 the following morning and then I had to go back through the ubuntu guide to make sure everything was working on my laptop correctly.

All of last week I was learning about Active Directory (AD) at the “Learning Tree” centre in London. I must admit that I did know some of the things that were being discussed the slightly more basic things such as adding machines to the domain, promoting a machine to be a domain controller and creating users, groups, Organisational Units (OUs), but I was unclear about how to actually plan an AD but this course I believe has helped put me in the mind set of what requirements to look at when planning.
Also on Sunday the 26th of October I was invited by Microsoft to watch an American Football game at Wembley Stadium in there corporate box. It was the San Diego Chargers Vs New Orleans Saints. The Saints went on to win the game but is was a close game which went down to the wire.

That is about all I have done over the past week and a bit and I shall update with a bit more technical information shortly.

For some stupid reason I didn’t change the permalinks on this site when I moved it from one server to another, this meant that when I did change it today most of the site wasn’t working. Arghhhhhhhhhhh

The only way so I did a search which lead me to this page at codex.wordpress.org. This page give out the basics of permalinks and a quick read of the page showed me that my virtual host coonfiguration for this domain in apache was missing some options.

This is what I was missing

<Directory /path-to-website/>
AllowOverride ALL
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

Once I had added that and done the necessary “httpd -k restart” to pick up the new changes in the config it all came together and started to work.

Today at work I had the need to change the regional settings for an IUSR as the data and time format were set to US not the UK. I had found a page which told me how to do this for the standard IUSR_<machine-name> but as the website with the issue wasn’t using the standard IUSR.
The website I found the information on was Fresh mango

Which is followed but it wasn’t all the information I needed so I experimented as best I could and found that if I type cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/X/root/anonymoususerpass
with X being the identifier for the website it would give me the password I wanted or at least I thought so. With the credentials now available I tried to log in and change the regional settings but the password wouldn’t let me in.
so what should I do now?

Well I decided to take a jump which isn’t always the best idea but this is what I have done.
within computer manager I located the IUSR I was after and reset the password for the user.
Opened up regional settings as that user by holding down the shift ket and clicking with the left mouse button on regional settings.
changed the regional settings and closed the window.
Within DOS I inputted the following command “cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/X/root/anonymoususerpass <password>
I then checked to make sure the password had been accepted by running this command again cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/X/root/anonymoususerpass “although it does print it back when the it has been accepted”.

Then I checked the website to ensure it was still working and it was phew but has the date change I well find out when I reboot the server in the next couple of days and let you know.

Well I know I said I would update this yesterday after I install the latest alsa release candidate but I become really busy trying to fix an wireless connection between a linksys wga54g and a netgear WGX102. I am yet to fully fix the issues regarding the connectivity issues but that should be fixed tonight. I have the microphones working but not without issues. The main issue I had was that I did not have the patch utility install so I grab that with apt-get and then all seemed well. I would like to say cheers to ed for his help in my time of need. The microphones are working but require a bit of tweaking once this is done I shall post my settings to share the information.

caio for now

On my wonderful HP Compaq 2133 laptop the issue still lies where the sound card is not recognised properly which mean on microphone and a nasty bug with the inputting of a set of headphones in to it’s jack would not result in the speakers muting. Now it wasn’t really an issue for me as such as I didn’t really use the headphone socket or have needed to use the microphones on it. Now thanks to the developers at the alsa-project and the people using ubuntu and contributing to the forum this issue seems to have now been fixed well at least until the next kernel update. To get this sound card working the way it should go the alsa project download page http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Download, download the alsa-driver-1.0.17rc3 and follow the instructions on this ubuntu support forum topic http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=749693&page=14. Now although I haven’t tested this to see it work I am very confident as I have done all of the other instructions and got the wireless card working the graphics working better than just using the standard system. I shall be trying the instruction out tonight and shall let you know how it goes.
Also since I last posted I manage to kill an ipod nano 3rd generation by performing a simple firmware update. The ipod was just showing the apple logo. Now this happened at 22:30 one night and whilst trying to fix it the time got later and later until around 00:30 I decided to give up for the night. I then proceeded to fix it the next day but following the instructions from this article I found the night before and didn’t read properly http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1399?viewlocale=en_US. Now if I had bothered to read this properly that night I would have had it fixed within 20 minutes instead of wasting at least 2 hours. I always forget to read all the instructions before attempting to repair anything.

So here is the deck that I made at the booster draft.

Land

7 Plains

7 Forests

1 Vivid Grove

Enchantments – Aura

2 Fertile Ground

2 Soaring Hope

Enchantments

1 Sylvan Echoes

1 Entangling Trap

Instant

1 Spring Cleaning

1 Heal the Scars

Creatures

1 Veteran of the Depths

1 Lys Alana Huntmaster

1 Elvish Harbinger

1 Elvish Handservant

2 Cloudcrown Oak

1 Battlewand Oak

1 Bog-Strider Ash

1 Oakgnarl Warrior

1 Nath’s Elite

2 Gilt-Leaf Seer

3 Elvish Eulogist

1 Elvish Branchbender

1 Woodland Changeling

Sorcery

1 Primal Command

1 Woodland Guidance

Artifacts

1 Springleaf Drum

and in the sideboard there is

1 Glimmerdust Nap (Enchantment – Aura)

2 Herbal Poultice (Artifact)

1 Lace with Moonglove (Instant)

1 Gilt-Leaf Ambush (Tribal Instant – Elf)

1 Hunt Down (Sorcery)

1 Rootgrapple (Tribal Instant – Treefolk)

1 Amoeboid Changeling (Creature – Shapeshifter)

1 Nightshade Stinger (Creature – Faerie Rogue)

1 Hoarder’s Gred (Sorcery)

1 Facevaulter (Creature – Goblin Warrior)

1 Prowess of the Fair (Tribal Enchantment – Elf)

1 Exiled Boggart (Creature – Goblin Rogue)

1 Goggart Loggers (Creature – Goblin Rogue)

1 Quill-Slinger Boggart (Creature – Goblin Warrior)

1 (Blind-Spot Giant (Creature – Giant Warrior)

Now from the sideboard there wasn’t many cards that were green, white or colourless so the sideboard wasn’t much use although towards the end of the night I decided to move some of the instants,  sorcery’s and artifacts for some of the creatures that ended up in the deck list now. The plan is to see if I can make 60 card decks which are legal in most formats in the colours other than Black and I shall be playing them against the some decks that are to work in tournaments this Sunday in Bristol.

I shall let you know how my decks perform against these next week.

Well Saturday night I got invited to a booster draft with my brother and his mates. The boosters were from the set Lorwyn and with 3 booster packs each we went about making our decks. We were allow a minimum of 4 cards including land in our deck so I went ahead a started searching for my first card to take out before I pass the booster pack on to the next person (first and third booster pack to your left second to your right) and for so reason which escapes me I decided not to play the good old black deck like I always do, for some reason the act of mindless and complete destruction wasn’t in me that night I want a more structure attack with some cards making other cards a lot bigger (yes I do know that in the black cards there are lots of cards that well make other cards bigger but I never seem to manage it. So with this reasoning in my head I choose to go white and green deck(mainly green). Needless to say I didn’t go to well losing all my games yet again but I am starting to get a lot better and I think I should soon start winning games. I shall post the deck that was created up tonight so you can all see what you think.