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Tips for Aligning Satellite Dishes

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I have just spent a ridiculous amount of time setting up a satellite TV system for receiving Freeview, free satellite TV for New Zealand. A lot of this time was due to my own lack of experience, and the difficulty in knowing whether something is really working, or not aligned. Here are a few tips for anyone else wishing to set this up themselves. This is not a complete guide, just some ideas that should save time. It assumes that you are installing a Ku band dish for digital TV, but a lot of the advice applies to any satellite dish.

Before Installing the Satellite Dish

Buy/borrow a satellite finder. Do NOT rely on just the satellite finder that is built in to the receiver.
Some receivers are advertised as having a built in satellite finder. What this means is that it can emit the same annoying sound that a satellite finder does. However, it will only indicate the signal strength of the current transponder that it is tuned to. If you have incorrect settings (e.g., the wrong LNB oscillator frequency) then you could have the dish pointed at the satellite and not know it. More importantly, the satellite finder is much more sensitive and, therefore, does not have to be aligned as precisely. This will save you much time and frustration.
Buy/borrow a spirit level.
Taking the time to get the dish mounting mast perfectly vertical will save time later. If you are using a motor, this is essential.
Buy/borrow a compass and be sure to adjust it for the local offset for magnetic north.
It will be much easier to find the satellite if the dish is already pointing in roughly the right direction. Magnetic north and true north are at different locations, and the offset varies from place to place.
Write down the Local Oscillator (LO) frequency of the LNB. NOTE: A universal LNB has two LOs.
I made the mistake of mounting the dish complete with LNB before noting the LO frequency, which just happened to be different from most "standard" LNBs for the KU band. As a result, the satellite receiver was looking for the signals at the wrong frequencies. The box that the LNB comes in usually does not list this information.
Unless you have access to the right crimping tool (i.e., a coax cable crimp tool, not a normal crimp tool), it is much easier to use the screw on connectors.
Use dishpointer.com in order to find out where to point the dish.
Using the dishpointer.com data, check that there are no obstacles blocking the view of the desired satellite(s).
The high frequencies used by satellites are line-of-sight only. What this means is that you will not be able to receive from a satellite that you do not have a clear view of (by which I mean clear sky; you won't be able to see the satellite with the naked eye). Note that most Ku band satellite dishes have the LNB mounted offset from the centre, so they appear to be looking lower than they really are (typically by 20°-30°).

Installing the Satellite Dish

Make sure that the mounting pole is vertical using the spirit level before attaching the satellite dish.
The more accurate you are earlier on, the easier it will be to find that satellite.
Make sure that the you have compensated for the offset between magnetic north and true north.
Dishpointer.com provides a magnetic azimuth compass reading, so it may be easier to use that. However, a compass that has be pre-adjusted should use the true offset. If the arrow is not pointed at 0°, then it may have been adjusted.
Do NOT trust the elevation/lattitude markings on the satellite dish.
Obviously the markings are a good reference, but they can be off by over 5°. In my case, the elevation adjustment mechanism was very loose, and I finally found the satellite 5-10° lower than the markings on the dish. I have read that some people manually check the elevation, but remember to look-up and compensate for the LNB mounting offset (e.g., a dish with a 28° LNB offset should be pointed 28° lower than the actual elevation).
Check if the LNB as a mark on it indicating the horizontal polarization angle.
Satellite signals can be vertically and horizontally polarized (and circularly polarized too, but this is less common for TV). There is also a "skew" angle for the satellite which should be used to adjust the angle of the LNB. If the LNB is rotated to the wrong angle, then a weak signal, or no signal could be received. I made the mistake of assuming which way the horizontal antenna was oriented, and payed for it later (see the section below called "Some Transponders are not Working").
Be as accurate as possible with alignment.
The closer the dish is to the correct alignment, the easier it will be to lock on to the satellite. This includes the azimuth (compass angle), elevation (how high), and LNB skew (rotation of the LNB in its mount).
Even with the satellite finder connected, it is still useful to have the satellite receiver and TV visible/audible from the satellite dish during alignment.
The satellite finder is great for telling you whether the dish is pointed at a satellite, but it won't tell you which satellite; that is where the satellite receiver's signal level and quality indicators come in.

Aligning the Satellite Dish

Start with the satellite finder sensitivity turned right up; it will make a noise when the dish is pointing close to a satellite, and the needle will swing to the right.
Check if the LNB is working (see "Is my LNB Broken?" below) before starting.
Once it starts beeping (squealing really), turn down the sensitivity of the satellite finder, and rotate the dish (very slowly) a bit more until it starts beeping again.
You should not have to move more than a degree from the initial point at which it started beeping. If you do, try turning in the other direction. This process is repeated until the dish is aligned.
Try to align the azimuth first, and then adjust the elevation, and then the LNB skew.
If you cannot find the satellite at one elevation, perform a grid like search swinging back and forth with the elevation adjusted by 1° increments per sweep.
New Zealanders should start their sweep a little to the east, so that Optus D1 is the first satellite that they find (assuming that you want to watch freeview).
Optus D1, C1, and D2 are quite close together, and it is easy lock on to the wrong one.
Make sure that the satellite receiver has the correct LNB LO frequency(ies) set.
As was mentioned above, the receiver must have the right LO frequency, or it will be searching for signals in the wrong place.
Once you have a reasonable lock, check the signal level and quality on the satellite receiver, with it tuned to the desired satellite.
If you are not receiving a signal despite the satellite finder indicating the presence of a satellite, then the dish is aligned with the wrong satellite.
The LNB skew can make a big difference.
I ended up with being able to receive signals from some transponders, but not others. This turned out to be due to the LNB not being rotated to the correct angle. See the section below called "I Can Only Receive Some Transponders but not Others" for more details.
Check that all transponders have a signal.
This assumes that the satellite receiver has been preprogrammed with the channels on the target satellite. If not, the satellite receiver should have the ability to scan for transponders.

Is My LNB Broken?

After scanning the sky for a while (without the satellite finder), and finding nothing, I started to wonder if the LNB might be broken. Searching through the internet, the best advice seemed to be: "point the dish at a satellite, and check if you get a signal." How on earth can you do this if you don't even know if the dish is aligned! Well, I have found out a relatively easy way to check if a Ku band LNB is broken: a satellite finder that is turned up to maximum should start squealing if you put your hand in front of the LNB (in front of the end that should be pointed at the dish). Alternatively, pointing the LNB at the ground should have the same effect. Your hand and the ground are sources of noise which the LNB should pick up, resulting in the signal detected by the satellite finder. If the satellite finder does not make a noise, then the LNB is likely broken.

It is unusual to receive an LNB that is dead, but it does happen. This test is also useful if satellite reception suddenly stops, since this could be caused by a number of different things; it could be caused by a dead LNB, a broken cable, the wind pushing the dish out of alignment, etc.

I Can Only Receive Some Transponders but not Others

This is a problem that I had, which initially had me confused. I was receiving strong signals from some transponders, whilst some others (which had channels that I wanted to see), were completely dead. To make things even more confusing, those very same transponders had worked not too long agon. It turned out that I had rotated the LNB slightly (adjusted the skew), resulting in a lost signal. In fact, my initial skew setting was significantly out from where it should be, and I had switched from a standard LNB, to a universal one. Universal LNBs seem to have stronger polarization characteristics, which can result in a better signal, but also requires better alignment.

Final Comments

This blog entry has become much longer than I had expected, but it contains a good summary of the kind of issues that can come up during satellite dish alignment, and how to avoid them. I hope that it will save other people some time and frustration. There are plenty of satellite installation "how-tos" on the internet, but none of them prepared me for the issues that I encountered.

Online for a Year

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Roughly a year ago this website was opened. By opened, I mean first indexed by Google and Yahoo; the web-space and domain name were registered a year and a month ago (the start of June 2008). It took about a month to get this website to the point that it was ready to receive visitors. At that point, I registered a Google Webmasters account, added this website to the list, and started creating external links.

One of the reasons for creating this website was simply to find out how it all works. In particular, I was curious as to what level of traffic a newcomer's website would actually obtain, and how much effort was required. There are plenty of claims on various websites that one could get rich quick by doing the following:

Pick a "niche" topic,
Slap together a website,
Put Google AdSense and/or other advertisements, and
Watch the traffic and watch the dollars roll in.

Pure fiction of course; building anything takes time and effort. No-where could I find solid details on website visitor numbers and advertising revenues, so the only way to find out was to create a real website, and record its performance This is why this blog has monthly reviews/statistics posted; they provide a profile of the first year of a personal website's existence. Unfortunately my Google AdSense was disabled for invalid click activity (which I still do not know who was responsible for), so those results are unavailable. However, the total would not have been more than tens of dollars anyway, as the number of page-views has been far below the hundreds of thousands of views required.

So, how did this website perform? The monthly visits, unique visitors and page views are shown below. The number of visitors quickly rose up to about 1500 in October 2008, when I first announced the RadeonHD for Amiga OS 4.x project. From October onwards the number of visitors dropped off a little, and then rose back to the 1500 level. Most likely there are around 1000 - 1500 people who are interested in my Amiga projects, ignoring the additional visitors who come looking for various things via Google, Yahoo and other search engines. Thus, this website's visitor levels have probably already hit the boundary of the Amiga "niche." The increase in page-views in the last month was caused by the introduction of the forums, and the opening of the RadeonHD driver beta testing program.

Another thing that I was curious about was visitor locations over time. Each monthly review contained a snap-shot of the ClustrMap for that month. These have been collected into an animation (below), showing a record of visitor locations over a year. This animation gives a vague idea of how the animated visitor website location map concept that I posted on the "Free Ideas" page might look.

So there you have it: a profile of visits to a personal website in it's first year for the curious, or the bored. With this complete, I am going to stop posting the monthly statistics. This "experiment" was all about the first year of operation (and creating the animation above), which is now complete.

Site Statistics for June 2009

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The statistics for June 2009 are:

Attribute	Value
Number of Pages	194
Size of site	131.98 MiB (HELM provides the total)
Number of Visits	2041 (Google Analytics)
Number of unique visitors	1468 (Google Analytics)
Total page views	5809 (Google Analytics)
Bandwidth	1.66 GiB (server control panel)

A snap-shot of visitor locations on 1 July 2009.

Site Statistics for May 2009

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The statistics for May 2009 are:

Attribute	Value
Number of Pages	188
Size of site	127.38 MiB (HELM provides the total)
Number of Visits	1866 (Google Analytics)
Number of unique visitors	1412 (Google Analytics)
Total page views	3768 (Google Analytics)
Bandwidth	1.20 GiB (server control panel)

A snap-shot of visitor locations on 1 June 2009.

Every Man and his Dog has a Web Forum...

Sat, 30 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

... and now, so do I.

Previously I saw no point in adding a forum, because there was little to discuss, and I didn't want to join the hordes of webmasters with forums on their website simply because "I can." There are enough online discussion boards without a topic to discuss as-is.

This website has slowly grown to the point at which a forum could be useful. In particular, the RadeonHD driver project is now reaching a stage at which I am ready to release a beta version to a select group. Now that there is something to discuss, the HDRLab forums (or fora) are now open.

Marketing Matters, Even for Engineers

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Today a section on marketing was added to this website. It may seem strange for marketing to appear on the personal website of an engineer. However, marketing is an essential component of engineering companies. If you build a better mouse trap, the world will not beat a path to your door unless they know about your mouse trap, understand why it is better, and why it would be useful to them. Without a marketing strategy (which is more than just advertising), that better mouse trap will languish in obscurity.

Motivation for this new section came after reading through Mark Joyner's book on Integration Marketing. This book has details an interesting strategy for low cost (and low risk), high reward marketing. It struck me that engineers could benefit from thinking about marketing, especially entrepreneurial types who will invariably end up trying to sell their own products/services. A little thought about who the target market is, and how they are likely to use the product/service at initial design time would go a long way toward making something that people actually want. Too many good ideas are marred by poor user interface design and/or designing for a non-existent market. Thus, this new section provides reviews and links for material by marketing experts that I think are of value.

Incidentally, Mark Joyner's book can currently be obtained for free.

Where did that Earthquake Come From?

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

New Zealand is on the Pacific rim of fire, and so has volcanos and periodically experiences earthquakes. This geological activity has shaped the stunning scenery that New Zealanders (and visitors to the country) enjoy. It also occasionally makes you jump when a strongish earthquake hits the local area, as happened recently. Eruptions of molten lava, ash, or just boiling mud happen once every several years, which can close airports due to the danger of fine ash clogging up the jet engines.

Some people living in countries without earthquakes and volcanos may wonder if we live in fear of "the big one.; after all, New Zealand experiences over 15,000 earthquakes a year of which 250 are seen as significant. I cannot speak for all New Zealanders, but I think that, while the country is prepared for a large earthquake, most people do not think about it. If anything, when someone notices an earthquake, the first instinct for others is to sit down so that they too can feel it (people standing or moving usually do not notice). Door posts and areas under tables are sought out only if the shaking becomes serious, and most earthquakes are over before anyone manages to take a step toward the door. It is also important to remember that buildings in New Zealand are designed to withstand large earthquakes.

The scientist in me still has not lost that child-like desire to know the whys, wheres and hows of everything. Thus, when an earthquake is felt, I am always curious as to how big it was and where it was centred. I recently discovered that GeoNet's website provides near real-time data about seismic activity in New Zealand. It was from this website that I discovered that one earthquake was centred just over a kilometre from where I was at the time, ignoring the earthquake's depth, which was kilometres below the surface. Being that close, it did have more of an upward jolt to it as opposed to the usual sideward rocking motion.

Other interesting items that I noticed whilst scanning the GeoNet website is that Mt. Ruapehu and White Island are both on level one (out of five) on the volcano alert scale. These two volcanos are typically the most active in the country. Hopefully Mt Ruapehu will remain at that level and not erupt, or it will ruin the ski season for the two ski fields on that mountain.

There are a few areas of the live geological data stream on GeoNet that I hope will be improved. There is no data shown for earthquakes that occur in the South Pacific, which is of interest due to tsunami risks. New Zealand's own seismic sensor network is not large enough to locate these earthquakes accurately on its own, but GeoNet provides data to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the International Seismological Centre in the United Kingdom, so it should be possible to accumulate and display data for the entire planet on one website. In fact, the USGS already do so, although their map is missing a few of the minor ones in New Zealand).

Site Statistics for April 2009

Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I have decided to drop the "month in review" blog posts in favour of simply posting the statistics. The montly reviews seem a bit pointless now that developing and maintaining this website has become routine. The statistics for April 2009 are:

Attribute	Value
Number of Pages	170
Size of site	121.49 MiB (HELM provides the total)
Number of Visits	1651 (Google Analytics)
Number of unique visitors	1241 (Google Analytics)
Total page views	3501 (Google Analytics)
Bandwidth	1.19 GiB (server control panel)

A snap-shot of visitor locations on 2 May 2009.

Googlebot Knows How to Use Search Engines

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Recently I noticed that Google's "Googlebot" was using this website's search engine. This is not exactly surprising since a website's search engine may be able to find pages that are not well linked to by others. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how the Googlebot performs its task. Here are some entries from the log (truncated so that its easier to fit into the page):

url=search/&commit=Search&q=operates	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=resulting	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=gl	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=truly	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=fullscreen	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=occurred	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=screens	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=hack	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=shift	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=ddc	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=wordpress	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=compositing	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
url=search/&commit=Search&q=avaliable	Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)

It looks like it is taking individual words from this website, and feeding them into the search engine. However, it never reads more than the front page. This can be seen because there is no start parameter included in any of the URLs. Google's bot is the only one that I have noticed using the search engine so far.

Fixing the Page Anchors and Content Disappearing Under the Header Problem

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Last night I discovered that all CSS capable web-browsers would make the page content above an anchor vanish when that anchor was linked to. For example, clicking on the comments link for a blog post would result in all content above the comments section to disappear under the page header. This is rather unpleasant behaviour since it looks unprofessional, and it is impossible to scroll up in order to view the rest of the content. After hours of fault-finding and internet scouring, it turned out to be the "overflow hidden" method that was being used in order to make the sidebar and main content equal in height.

The Problem: Using "Overflow: Hidden" in Order to Obtain Equal Height Columns

CSS offers no direct method of making two columns the same height. If these columns have different colours - as they do on this site - then columns ending at different points looks messy. One commonly used solution is to pad out the bottom of the column with empty space, and then use "overflow: hidden;" in order to hide the extra space. This technique is described here (amongst other places) in more detail. The advantage of this method over others is that it requires no Javascript, or other complex mechanisms, in order to work. Unfortunately it also causes the content above an anchor to vanish when that anchor is the target (e.g., "http://a-website.com/a-paget.html#an-anchor").

The problem with this method is that it creates a large amount of extra space that is hidden from view, but still exists. The overflow attribute gives four options:

visible - the overflow is simply drawn over the top of other content,
hidden - the overflow is hidden from view and no scroll-bar is added, so it cannot be reached,
scroll - a scroll-bar is added so that the extra content can be viewed by scrolling down, and
auto - the scroll-bar is added only when the content does not fit into its allocated space.

According to this behaviour, setting the overflow to hidden creates a scrollable region without a scroll bar. Unfortunately a browser will correctly scroll down this scrollable region in order to bring that anchor into view. With the scroll bar hidden, there is no way for the user to scroll back up, making the webpage look horrible.

The Solution: A Background Image that Mimics the Column Colours

Obviously the hidden overflow technique of matching columns is not a good method if anchors are present on the page. My solution was to fake the column backgrounds by using an image as background for the enclosing "div." That way the column backgrounds continue to the bottom of the page regardless of where each column ends.

The background image was created by taking a screen grab of the page, and cutting out a single line spanning the width of the content out of the screen-shot. Saving this as a GIF file (be careful with colour conversions) results in an image that matches the columns of the page exactly.

Next, this must be incorporated into the CSS code. This is achieved by adding a single line to the code of the enclosing div,. For example, the extra code for this page's "content-wrap" div is:

background: #F0F0F0 url(http://hdrlab.org.nz/../images/content-wrap-bg.gif) repeat-y center top;

Of course, the code for the overflow hack had to be removed but, once done, the result was a website that looked (and still looks) exactly the same as the original, minus the problem of text disappearing when an anchor is used.

This method does have one limitation; it requires that the column widths remain constant, or that only one column varies in size. Changing column widths is also not as straightforward since both the background image and the CSS code for the columns must be modified. Having said that, it is very effective for fixed width layouts, and works around the CSS issues without resorting to Javascript trickery.

IIS 6 Does not Know What a CSS File Is (Missing MIME Types)

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Recently the OWB web-browser for Amiga OS 4.x was updated to version 10, and last night I upgraded and tested this website with it. To my horror OWB was ignoring the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) stylesheet and presenting the user with an unformatted page. Initially I thought that CSS might be broken, but no other website that I visited had this problem. Even stranger was that the webpage was shown properly when viewed from a version that had been saved to disk.

After a lot of checking and rechecking that there was something in the page code that was breaking the latest version of OWB, it turned out to be the webserver at fault. This website is hosted on a Microsoft IIS 6 server and it was not sending the appropriate MIME type for CSS files. The latest version of OWB appears to be very strict about MIME types, and thus refused to use the CSS files given that the server had not identified them as such. CSS files have a MIME type of "text/css".

The fix to this problem was to add a custom MIME type associating .CSS files with the type "text/css". In truth, OWB's overly strict MIME type handling was also part of the problem; web-browsers should be tolerant of mistakes made by other systems that they interact with.

Personally I think that MIME types should be made irrelevant. software should generally determing file types by looking at the file itself. This is what the Amiga datatypes system has done for years. Where this is not possible (e.g., a CSS file has no header, and is also a plain text file), the file suffix (e.g., ".css") should be used. This is what servers tend to do when sending MIME type infromation, anyway. Why trust/rely-on a server to perform a task that could be just as easily performed by the client?

Invalid HTML Markup in Widget/Advertising Code

In the process of searching for the CSS layout on OWB problem, it was discovered that this website had over one hundred XHTML errors on the page. Almost all of these were due to code in the advertising widgets not being standards compliant. In fact, almost all of the errors were due to incorrectly using the ampersand character, i.e., "&". The & character has a special meaning in HTML. Therefore, if one wishes to show an &, it must be written as "&", not "&". This is true even if the ampersand is contained within a URL. Not one advertising provider got this right; not even Amazon. Every & character resulted in several errors, so eliminating these errors quickly dropped the number of errors to almost zero.

At this point this website is still not 100% W3C compliant. The ClustrMaps widget also contains code that does not pass the W3C validator. However, all browsers handle the code correctly, and there are plenty of other things requiring my attention. I do find it surprising that even large organizations are providing code for others to use their services that is not standards compliant.

Month in Review - March 2009

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

This month, the major change to this website was a proper logo, and corresponding layout changes. This was motivated in part due to Google disabling my AdSense account (thanks to visitors to this site making invalid clicks on AdSense advertisements). Other improvements to usability, have also been made. I did intend to write a blog entry regarding creating logos with no budget, but I have lacked the free time necessary to make that happen. Maybe later...

The statistics for the last month:

Attribute	Value
Number of Pages	161
Size of site	113.8 MiB (HELM provides the total)
Number of Visits	1182 (Google Analytics)
Number of unique visitors	895 (Google Analytics)
Total page views	3231 (Google Analytics)
Bandwidth	1.81 GiB (server control panel)

A snap-shot of visitor locations on 1 April 2009.

MiniGL 2.1 Beta for Amiga OS 4 Released

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Celestia running using MiniGL 2.x on Amiga OS 4.

I'm pleased to announce that MiniGL 2.1 beta has been released. This release includes many bug fixes, including the elusive MiniGL watchdog task crash, which was responsible for random lockups. The release also includes updated developer files for all new features in MiniGL 2.x.

MiniGL is a 3D API which is compatible to OpenGL(tm). It implements a subset of that API and was designed for speed, therefore it directly interfaces with Warp3D. This also means that there is currently no software mode.

MiniGL 2.1 beta can be downloaded from os4depot. More information about MiniGL 2.x can be found here.

Changes in V2.1

Fixed the bug in the MiniGL watchdog task. GL screensavers should no longer freeze.
Fixed a problem that occurred when vertex arrays were included in a display list
Fixed a bug in rendering huge vertex arrays
Fixed rendering of line strips and line loops. No more spurious extra lines (e.g. Celestia, GLBoxed blanker and the Dr. Fungi demo)
Lots of other bug fixes
Added pop up requesters informing users of problems (e.g., wrong MiniGL.library version)
Added stack cookies to demos using GLU NURBS functions in order to ensure that they have enough stack
GLUT now only requests a stencil buffer when applications ask for one
No longer need -DMINIGL defined when compiling OpenGL apps

Changes in V2.0

Added support for evaluators (glMap*, glEvalCoord*, glMapGrid*, glEvalMesh*, glEvalPoint*)
Added selection support (glListBase(), glNewList(), glInitNames(), glLoadName(), glPushName(), glPopName(), glSelectBuffer(), and glRenderMode())
Added gluPickMatrix()
Added gluProject()/gluUnProject()
Added glGetDoublev()
Added glIsTexture()
Added glGetTexEnviv()
Added glGetLight*() functions
Added GL_PROXY_TEXTURE support
Fixed some rendering bugs (e.g., a bug causing incorrect lighting for clipped primitives)
Added const qualifiers to improve OpenGL compliance
Mglut.library now has glutKeyboardUpFunc(), glutSpecialUpFunc(), and glutIgnoreKeyRepeat()
Added text functions to Mglut.library (glutBitmap*(), glutStroke*())
Added glPushClientAttrib()/glPopClientAttrib()
Added glDrawPixels()
Added game mode to mglut.library
Added glutDeviceGet(), glutLayerGet(), glutGetModifiers(), glutSetOptions() and expanded the number of attributes supported by glutGet()
Added glut geometry rendering functions including the teapot functions
Added glut overlay function stubs for completeness (overlay is not actually supported)
Added glGetMaterial*()
Added the complete set of glNormal*() functions
Added glGetTexImage
Added full set of glPixelStore modes, as well as glPixelTransfer
Added glutTimerFunc(), glutCloseFunc(), glutWMCloseFunc()
Added glutWarpPointer()
Added glutExtensionSupported(), glutIgnoreKeyRepeat(), glutSetKeyRepeat(), glutKeyUp(), glutSpecialUp(), and glutForceJoystickFunc() (note: no joystick support yet)
Added stubs for glutSetColor(), glutGetColor(), and glutCopyColormap() (note: these functions really don't make sense

Improving this Website's Usability

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

A screenshot of the new and improved HDRLab website.

This website has undergone some changes recently in order to improve its usability. In chronological order, they are:

The top navigation bar now highlights the current section,
The side-bar navigation menu marks sections and pages with arrows and highlights, and
The page header so that more content fits into a web-browser's window.

Highlighting the Current Section

The current section is now highlighted in the top navigation bar. With this change, visitors can instantly see what section of the website they are currently viewing, thus making it easier to decide what to do next.

"Breadcrumbs" in the Navigation Side-Bar

The first change can be seen in the navigation side-bar on the left. It now contains arrows marking which sub-section/page a visitor is currently on. The current page is highlighted in a different colour. This is similar to the "breadcrumbs" concept, except that it is built into the navigation menu. Breadcrumbs are a navigation aid that shows where within a website/folder the user is currently looking.

This change should make it easier for users to know where within the navigation menu the current page is, and what else is available in that section. In doing so, users should find it easier to navigate the site.

Shrinking the Page Header

A screenshot of the old HDRLab website.

Shrinking the size of the page header is a change that I have been meaning to make for a while. The old header (see the figure on the right) took up too much space, meaning that only a little actual content was visible within the browser window. Making this change was put off because of the effort required. For example, the old logo really only worked with this layout, thus a new one would be required (which has been done).

Theoretically removing the header photo would have saved a lot of space. However, it provides more colour, and a bit of a balance from the otherwise highly technical content of this site. Thus, the solution was to create a new logo, and fit it into the header photo itself. In doing so, the top header bar could be deleted, and the navigation bar moved to below the header (see the screenshot at the top right of the page).

The overall result of this is:

Visitors see more actual content, and
The navigation bar is now closer to the content, where users typically expect to find it (i.e., less searching).

Final Comments

"Don't Make Me Think," by Steve Krug.

Steve Krug's book "Don't make me think" was instrumental in working on this website's usability. This book examines website design from the user's perspective, that is, how a user is likely to use the website. This is one book that I highly recommend to website publishers/designers.

Anyone else who is interested in reading this book can find it at the following online stores (select the one closest to you):

Available online globally from the following stores:
New Zealand	Buy from thenile.co.nz
Australia	Buy from thenile.com.au
United States of America	Buy from amazon.com
Canada	Buy from amazon.ca
United Kingdom	Buy from amazon.co.uk
France	Achetez chez amazon.fr
Deutschland	Kaufen bei amazon.de

Google AdSense Account has Been Disabled

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Some visitors may have noticed that the Google avertisements on this website have disappeared. This is due to Google deciding to disable my account because they detected "invalid clicks." Last month I noticed an unusual spike in AdSense earnings and expected them to drop again. Well, the earnings didn't drop at all. It looks as if these earnings were due to people deliberately clicking on advertisements that they have no interest in. Whilst I did suspect that this was happening (all the clicks were on the top banner, and there were too many of them), I am personally not responsible for them; nor did I know of any way to counter this. Naturally, the Google Adsense "invalid click" detection algorithms picked this up, and my account was promptly disabled without warning. I did appeal, citing that I am not responsible for these clicks, but I received a standard email reply stating that the account would not be reinstated.

Basically, I have been punished for something that I did not do. What bothers me is that anyone with a low traffic site could have their AdSense account disabled because of actions of others. Bots designed to click on ads in order to waste comptitors money, or even just people deliberately clicking could have an account disabled. In fact, this has happened to thousands of websites already, (e.g., see here and here).

In the end, Google does have to work in order to prevent fraud. However, it is clear that many people (like me) who have been adhering to their terms of service, are being kicked out. Whilst the additional clicks that this site received probably were invalid, I most certainly was not involved. My guess is that it is cheaper to just kick out and ignore low traffic sites rather than to work with them to solve the problems. For example, if they can detect patterns of invalid clicks, surely filtering out those clicks should be possible? Confiscating as yet unpaid earnings and treating the publisher as a criminal for the actions of others just makes Google look bad. Such rough treatment of website publishers will only serve their competitors such as Yahoo well.

The Bright Side

This incident has motivated me to redesign this site a little while I delete all the AdSense code (I will post more about the changes later). AdSense never really brought more than a few dollars a month (none of which I will ever get); I signed up for AdSense as an experiment, with the idea that it would cover any increase in server costs if the traffic did increase to a level that my current hosting plan could not cope with. With AdSense gone, I now have more motivation to look for other ways to subsidise the hosting costs.

Month in Review - February 2009

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0600

This month has seen further development of the RadeonHD driver, and a few more OpenGL templates. Fewer additions to this website occurred because I have been spending more time working on various projects. Unlike other websites, adding pages to this site requires extra work to develop the software/technology upon which the page is based (except for random musings in this blog). This results in fewer updates, but also less rambling.

The Google AdSense revenue spiked this month. However, this is probably an outlier because the increase is disproportionate to the increase in page views.

The statistics for the last month:

Attribute	Value
Number of Pages	153
Size of site	74.4 MiB (HELM provides the total)
Number of Visits	1456 (Google Analytics)
Number of unique visitors	1069 (Google Analytics)
Total page views	3358 (Google Analytics)
Bandwidth	1.07 GiB (server control panel)
Adsense Revenue	$10.53

A snap-shot of visitor locations on 1 March 2009.

Are Web Directories Obsolete?

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600

When was the last time that you used a web directory in order to find a site? In fact, when was the last time that you used a web directory for anything? The last time that I even looked at a directory was after Website Grader noted that this website did not appear in DMOZ or Yahoo's directory. Other than that, I probably haven't used a directory to find information in over a decade. My first instinct is to use Google, and just try different keywords until I find what I'm looking for.

This makes me wonder if web directories are virtually obsolete. The main reason for adding a site to a directory, is not so that people will find it in that directory, but because search engines rank links from directories highly. This was one of the reasons why I added this website to the directories on amigaworld.net and amiga.org. Ironically, despite amigaworld.net listing this site as "popular," it's ranking is 1 out of 10, by two votes. Those two votes were probably cast by the two people who looked at the link when it was first created eight months ago. Back then, there was very little content on this website. This supports my hypothesis that almost no-one bothers to use a web directory these days.

Given that almost no one seems to use a web directory these days, why do search engines still rank them highly? And, is this ranking justified? The whole premise behind this ranking is the idea that humans are still better than computers at organizing information. That may well still be true, but a directory that no one uses is not worth much. Possibly, despite being having better organization of information, obtaining information from a directory is less convenient than using a search engine. Regardless, search engine technology has advanced far enough that it is now the preferred method of finding information on the internet.

It is possible that the search engines are actually leveraging the organizational structure of the directory. In this case the directories would still serve a purpose, since would be using them indirectly. However, it is also possible that there are enough other factors that search engines use (e.g., how many people click on search results), that the directories provide no additional useful ranking information. The exact workings of how Google or Yahoo rank pages are known only to the companies themselves, so I cannot provide a definite answer.

I'd be interested to hear what other people think. Do you still use web directories to find information? If not, are they obsolete?

Find Out Your Website's Grade

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600

I stumbled upon an interesting and potentially useful website grading service today. Website Grader examines the homepage of a website, and brings together data from multiple sources in order to give an idea of how effective the marketing effectiveness of that website. More importantly, it provides tips on how to improve. For example, this website is not listed on DMOZ and Yahoo Directories, something that could be done in order to improve ranking.

This website's grade of 62 (at the time of writing) is not exactly great. However, it is a personal website, not a commercial one, so that is to be expected. What surprised me is that this site is in the top 13.3% of websites, according to Alexa. This is surprising, because the site averages about 55 visits per day. This is rather low compared to larger, more prominent websites. This suggests that there are a huge number of websites with little or no visitors.

The website grader updates its grade periodically, so the grade in the badge above may change from its curreent value of 62; hopefully in the positive direction. I will be taking some of its advice, such as attempting once again to get this site listed on DMOZ. I'm holding off on adding this site to Yahoo, since I do not really want to create a Yahoo ID, and have yet another unneeded email address. We shall see what difference these changes make.

*.lha File Downloads Fixed (Kiwihosting and MIME types)

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600

This morning I received an email telling me that the template downloads in one of my OpenGL/MiniGL templates was no longer working. This surprised me since they had worked previously. What was even more perplexing was that the files were exactly in the right place; the download link pointed to the file. Stranger still, image files in the same directory could be downloaded and viewed without a problem.

The problem was eventually traced to a missing MIME type for *.lha archives. MIME, or Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, is a method of identifying which files belong to which program. Thus, adding the following MIME type to the server, solved the problem:

.lha application/x-lzh-compressed

The HELM server configuration pages on kiwihosting.net.nz's Windows servers has a section called "MIME Types," in which custom MIME types can be added.

Exactly why this suddenly changed, I do not know. It definitely worked without having to add this MIME type not too long ago. My only hope is that this was recent, so that not many visitors were affected.

Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) Based OpenGL Templates and Windows Builds

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600

The original set of OpenGL/MiniGL templates published on this site, were for using GLUT. GLUT is a cross-platform toolkit that provides a consistent method for opening OpenGL windows, and handling events from keyboards, mice, and other input devices. The Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is another toolkit that could be used for the same purpose. One of the advantages of SDL is that it is a more modern Application Programming Interface (API), and also includes an API for audio. It's joystick/controller support is also more extensive. Therefore, a set of SDL tutorials have been added to the OpenGL/MiniGL templates section.

The other change has been adding Visual Studio project files to all the templates. Originally, these templates were intended to be for Amiga OS developers who wished to get started with OpenGL (via MiniGL). However, a significant number of others have been finding these templates via Google, and downloading them. Thus, providing Visual Studio support should help a large number of people who are developing on Windows. Linux users should be able to use the Amiga OS make files with little/no modifications.

I plan to write some more templates, so suggestions are welcome.