This is what Site Penguin's website looked like when I reviewed it:

Copied SLA Page

The SLA (Service Level Agreement) page is copied from QuillHost. Site Penguin's SLA still mentions QuillHost.

QuillHost's SLA:

"The SLA (Service Level Agreement) is applicable to all services provided directly to Customers of QuillHost. This SLA is not applicable to unrelated third parties who do not maintain a contract with QuillHost. The following guarantees and resulting credits are applied in monthly terms."

Site Penguin's SLA:

"The SLA (Service Level Agreement) is applicable to all services provided directly to Customers of Site Penguin. This SLA is not applicable to unrelated third parties who do not maintain a contract with QuillHost. The following guarantees and resulting credits are applied in monthly terms."

Here is a quote from the owner of Site Penguin: (source)

"Yeah, I liked their SLA, it covered everything we needed. Missed a piece. How many companies out their have copied another companies TOS? Plenty…"

Inaccurate TOS

The TOS (Terms of Service) mentions a now nonexistent zipohost.com. It is not compatible with the promises and guarantees that are made on the homepage and other pages. For example, in the TOS it says:

"99.5% uptime guarantee:
If for any reason (except for scheduled downtimes) our network or servers are down for longer than 0.5% in any month, you can request a 20% discount for your following month's services. For clients paying yearly, the equivalent to 20% of a monthly payment will be deducted off the next payment."

However, on the homepage it says:

"We understand that when your web site is down, you will be losing potential customers.. which leads to lost money. This is why we places a 99.9% uptime guarantee on our hosting packages."

If the uptime drops to 99.8%, what will happen if a customer asks about the guarantee?

Hosting template promises and guarantees

The promises and guarantees that are listed on the right side of the page came with the template that the owner purchased. The owner may live up to these promises 100% of the time, but I found it to be interesting that they were not changed from what came with the template.

Note: VirtualBox supports 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts, but does not support 64-bit guests on 64-bit machines. If you are running a 64-bit operating system, you must download and install the 32-bit edition of Windows 7.

Preparation

Open VirtualBox and start the virtual machine wizard" by clicking the "New" button.

Give your virtual machine a name and select "Windows Vista" from the OS Type list.

Windows 7 has been somewhat optimised compared to Vista. 512 MB of RAM is enough for testing. Feel free to give it more if you want.

When prompted to select a hard disk image, press "New…". The default disk image type of "Dynamically expanding image" is fine. Use the recommended size of 20 GB unless you want more space. I suggest that you do not go any lower than 20 GB. When you have configured the disk to your liking, press "Finish" to create the disk image.

Once that is complete, double check all the settings to make sure everything is how you want it. Press "Finish" to create the Virtual Machine.

Now you need to mount the Windows 7 disc image. Select the Virtual Machine you just created and click the "Settings" button. Select CD/DVD-ROM from the menu at the left. Check the box labeled "Mount CD/DVD Drive". If you have already burned Windows 7 to a disc, click "Host CD/DVD Drive" and point it to the CD/DVD drive that the physical disc is in. Otherwise, click "ISO Image File" and then the folder icon with the green arrow at the right.

Click the "Add" button, and select the Windows 7 disc image that you downloaded. It should be named something like this: 7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso. When you have selected the correct image, press "OK" in the settings window to confirm the selection.

Installation

Select the Windows 7 Virtual Machine you just created and press the "Start" button. If you properly mounted the disc, the Windows installation will start loading and you will be greeted with a shiny blue installation window. Select your language and click "Next" to start the installation.

Since this is a new installation, click "Install Now". Agree to the terms of the licensing agreement and click "Next". When the installer asks "Which type of installation do you want?", press "Custom".

You should see the disk that you created earlier. Select it and continue with the installation.

Windows 7 will start installing. This may take a while. You can minimise VirtualBox while it is installing.

When the initial installation finishes, the Virtual Machine will reboot and Windows will prepare to boot for the first time.

When the installation is complete, Windows will ask you for some information. Enter your name, give your computer a name, and enter a password if you would like to use one.

Then it will ask for a product key. If you do not have a valid Windows 7 beta key, uncheck "Automatically activate Windows when I'm online" and press next without entering a key. You can test Windows 7 for 30 days without a key.

Choose "Use recommended settings" if you want Windows to install updates when you go online, or "Ask me later" if you want Windows to bug you about it. Select your time zone and click "Next".

Once all of that is done, you will be greeted by a blue fish. This is the default Windows 7 Beta desktop. Almost done!

Configuration

As you may have expected, not everything is compatible with Windows 7 yet. To make your life a little easier, you will want to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions package to enable certain features and improve the performance of the Virtual Machine.

While you are using the Virtual Machine, click "Devices" from the toolbar at the top and choose "Install Guest Additions…". This is a standard CD image that contains an installer. It behaves just like the Windows 7 disc image you mounted before.

When the Guest Additions image is mounted, an autoplay window will appear in Windows. Close it. By default, the guest additions installer will not work because it cannot recognise the operating system that it is running in. You will need to use the program compatibility feature of Windows to trick the installer into thinking Windows Vista is running.

Browse the contents of the VirtualBox Guest Additions CD with explorer, right click on "VBoxWindowsAdditions-x84″ and select "Properties". Click the "Compatibility" tab and check the "Run this program in compatibility mode for" box. Select "Windows Vista" from the drop-down menu. Press "OK" and start the guest additions installer by running "VBoxWindowsAdditions-x84″. Install it with the default settings.

Conclusion

You now have an installation of Windows 7 that is suitable for testing. Enjoy.

The following error message is displayed after running Notepad++:

This ANSI plugin is not compatible with your Unicode Notepad++.

This plugin is not compatible with current version of Notepad++.

Do you want to remove this plugin from plugins directory to prevent this
message from the next launch time?

Solution

This error occurs when you update from the older (ansi) version of Notepad++ to the newer (unicode) version. Some plugins only work with the ansi version, so the error is displayed.

Download the latest version of Notepad++ from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=95717&package_id=102072.

Download the zip archive, not the installer. The filename will look similar to this: npp.5.x.x.bin.zip.

Open the zip file you just downloaded and drag the "ansi" folder to the desktop.  This is a complete, working copy of Notepad++. (You just don't have to run an installer to use it.) You do not need to do anything with the "unicode" folder.

The Notepad++ that is in the "ansi" folder is the version you want to use from now on. If you want to continue using the ansi plugins, you must use the ansi Notepad++.

Copy any plugins that are causing the error from the "plugins" folder of the version of Notepad++ you had before downloading this version into the "plugins" folder inside the "ansi" folder you just copied out of the zip file. For example, if you had Notepad++ installed to "C:\Program Files\Notepad++", you want to copy the plugins from "C:\Program Files\Notepad++\plugins" to "ansi\plugins".

Open Notepad++ by running "notepad++.exe". The plugins should now be working properly, and the error should not appear.

Google Chrome is now available for download.

Rumors have been floating around for a while about Google making its own web browser. Google Chrome is Google's entrant into the browser wars.

Chrome's about window

Features

Chrome boasts an impressive feature set. Google is known for their innovative applications such as Google Earth. Chrome is no different. Here are some of the main features of Chrome:

Google-centric homepage

The homepage opens when you create a new tab or start the browser for the first time. It lists the most recently viewed pages, your bookmarks, as well as recently closed tabs.

Recently closed tabs are listed on the homepage

Dragging tabs between windows

Another interesting feature related to tabs is the ability to drag them out of their parent window. Simply drag the tab out of the browser to open it in a new window. You can drag tabs from window to window in the same fashion.

I

Each tab is associated with a process

The memory page tells you how memory is being used by a particular tab or plugin

In Chrome, each tab runs another instance of the browser. If one tab becomes sluggish it will not affect the other tabs. You will no longer lose what you were working on if another site causes the browser to close. Sluggish processes can be ended before they become a problem.

Use Incognito for those "special" sites

Incognito windows are recognizable by their dark blue theme

Incognito can be activated with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+N. Websites loaded in an Incognito window do not store cookies and are not saved in the browser's history. To return to normal browsing, open another instance of Google Chrome.

Search terms are automatically highlighted across the page

Chrome's find feature works much like Firefox's except for one key addition. When you start searching, yellow lines appear on the scroll bar. A higher concentration of yellow means that the term appears more frequently on that part of the page.

View all past and present downloads in the download manager

Track the progress of a download at the bottom of the screen

Downloads have their own dedicated page in Chrome. New downloads are stored at the bottom of the current tab. Click "Show All Downloads…" to open the download manager.

Theme

Many tabs make little work

When I first read about the tabs being at the very top I was slightly skeptical. You will get used to it quickly however. Chrome manages tabs in a different way. Instead of having arrows on the left and right sides of the tab bar, the tabs shrink to fit in whatever space they are given.

The blue and dark blue gradient might not be your cup of tea, but I am sure theme customization will be added in the future.

V8 JavaScript Engine

I felt that this feature deserved its own section because of its importance. Much of the web applications we use are powered by JavaScript. A handful of apps use it to emulate a desktop experience. While the language continues to evolve at a rapid pace, the engine that powers it has not.

Google's popular web mail service Gmail uses JS. One of the main reasons Google developed a new browser was to implement a JavaScript engine that would dramatically speed up JavaScript based applications. The speed boost is noticeable from the minute you start using Chrome. As the engine is tuned and refined, the advantages of Chrome will become apparent.

Conclusion

Google has packed some cool and useful features into Chrome for its first beta release. While it may not be a full browser right now, Chrome will soon be a serious competitor in the great struggle that is the browser wars.

For more information, visit the Chrome website at: http://www.google.com/chrome/

Issue

Crysis shows a blank/black screen when I run the game and the error message "Crysis has stopped working".

Possible solutions

• If you have a 64-Bit processor, make sure that you are running "Crysis.exe" and not "Crysis64.exe".
• Update your video drivers to the latest version:
  Nvidia: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
  ATI: http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.HTML
• Make sure you are running the latest version of Crysis(1.2.1): http://www.crymod.com/filebase.php?fileid=1194

YouTube's TestTube suite of applications are designed to change how you interact with videos and the people that create them. For example, the Streams application allows you to chat with people who are watching the same video.

The most recent addition to the TestTube family is an application called Warp. Warp is similar to Digg Lab's Swarm visualization tool in that it groups related content by how users are interacting with it.

Hover over a green circle to show related videos. Click on a video to view it, and click close to return to the main screen. The different colored circles in the upper right hand corner allow you to see how videos are related, and to quickly locate a particular group if you wander away from the original screen.

This feature can be enabled for any video while in full screen mode by clicking the button with three circles, which is located to the right of the play button.

I am amazed that someone would pay money to register a domain name and create a site like this. I thought it was a joke at first. The author of the site makes claims such as:

Digg users who don't click on these ads are stealing bandwidth without paying for it.

I will not put words in other people's mouths, but I would be delighted if a large group of people were interested in my content, even if I did not profit off of it. What ever happened to the mentality that a site is nothing without loyal users? Digg is certainly a good example of this in action. Money is nice to have, but it cannot always come before the users.

Even though I display advertisements on this site, I support a user's right to block them with ad blocking tools. It is silly to attempt to prevent a whole group of people from viewing your site just because they want to enjoy your content without being bombarded with ads.

whydiggisblocked.com has a page that instructs website administrators on how to block traffic from Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Netscape. If there is someone actually foolish enough to add this code to there site, any and all links from urls containing these words will redirect to whydiggisblocked.com.

Follow these simple instructions to bypass the script:

1. Copy the url of the site you want to view
2. Open a new tab or window and paste the url into your address bar
3. Enjoy the site

If you have not yet downloaded Firefox and Adblock Plus, I suggest you do so now for a better browsing experience.

Update:
Check out slated.org for more information about this issue.

ImageShack.us has always been known for their free image hosting service. They claim to serve 85 million objects every hour. Video files were recently added to the list of supported formats.

Aside from image and video hosting, ImageShack now has the ability to record directly from a webcam and microphone, effectively eliminating the guesswork that is typically involved in compressing and uploading videos. It is incredibly simple to use. Simply plug in a webcam and click the record button. Once you are finished, click the host button to upload your video.

It has never been easier to create short videos for use in emails, discussion boards, or even as a daily journal.

Early web pages consisted mostly of text with little or no images. Businesses and hobbyists who hosted their own websites did not have to worry about staying within bandwidth limits. With the rise of shared web hosting however, people have had to be more stringent about how they allocate their bandwidth.

Most websites contains one or more of the following elements:

• Text
• Images
• Large files

Some people automatically save their images in a particular format regardless of what it is. For the sake of argument, I am going to assume that they are saving all of their images as JPEGs. The JPEG format relies on a lossy compression algorithm to decrease the size of image files at a reduction in quality. It is for this reason that JPEGs are better suited for photos than for images that contain large areas of solid color.

Observe the artifacts around the text in this enlarged screen shot:

(JPEG)

Compare it to this image:

(PNG)

Notice how the solid blue background is consistent throughout the image. What I am trying to convey is that you would not be able to distinguish between this image and an actual explorer title bar.

While both images are small in size, the JPEG takes up seven Kilobytes while the PNG takes up only one. As you can see, not only is the PNG smaller, it also looks better. The difference in size would be even higher for the whole image.

I recommend using IrfanView for compressing and saving your images. It does not beat commercial programs, but it works well enough for most quick tasks. Compressing the images can seem confusing at first, but the best way to learn what works best is by playing around with the options and seeing how they affect the image. Ask yourself these questions when saving an image:

• Where am I going to be using this image? For personal use on your computer, you should always save the image in a lossless format such as PNG. You can always make changes later if you choose to upload it to your website.
• What type of image is it? Use JPEGs for pictures with many different colors in one area. Compression tends to be less noticeable on textured surfaces such as wood, grass, buildings, etcetera. Use PNGs for images with areas of solid colors such as screen shots from your computer. Anything with a repeated color or shade of color qualifies for this format.

Other guidelines to follow:

• Never save an image as a BMP! BMPs do not use any techniques for reducing the size of an image file. If you need to retain as much of the original image as possible, save it as a PNG. They are lossless like Bitmaps, but the file size is also reduced.
• Do not use paint to manipulate and compress images. Paint was not designed to be a full-fledged photo editing program. It does not posses the same features that Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView, and other editing suites do.

Using these guidelines will not only save bandwidth and increase the quality of your images. All your pages will load faster because users will download a smaller amount of data. This is important for people who still use Dial-up to access the Internet. You will also be able to store more images without worrying about how much disk space you are using. It may not seem like a large gain at first, but over time the savings will become apparent.

There are a variety of content management systems available for use on websites. The ones most widely used today are: WordPress, Blogger, and Movable Type. If you did not already gather it from the title, this site uses WordPress.

Let me start by saying that this article is not intended to be a review or comparison of these pieces of software, but an account of the decisions I made when choosing which of them to use. Even if the end result looks the same, using what a person feels comfortable with is the only way for them to become a successful writer. You do not want to limit your creativity by using the wrong software.

One of the first qualities I looked for was extendability and extensibility, meaning that the software must allow me to modify and upgrade it as I see fit. I immediately removed Blogger from my list because it can only be used on Google's servers and is closed source. Even if you use the "advanced blog setup" feature, your blog is still reliant on Google to some extent.

Movable type used to be completely commercial, but had its license changed in 2004 in an attempt to please the open source community. It remained commercial however, so I also scratched that one off of my list.
Update: As of December 12, 2007, Movable Type is a (partially) open source application.

This leaves me with one choice left, WordPress. WordPress had all of the features I looked for when I was searching for a blogging platform. It is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is completely free. I have a bit of a bias towards WordPress because it is written in PHP, which makes it easy for me to modify it to suit my needs.

Plugins are a huge part of WordPress. The official WordPress plugin page is home to over 1,190 plugins with more being added each week. Three of my favorite plugins are:

• WP Super Cache – There is nothing worse than working hard to get a large burst of traffic, just to find that your site went down. The WordPress Cache plugin attempts to solve this problem by making the most frequently accessed pages on your blog static. Basically, it helps your site stay up under high loads by allowing it to serve requested pages faster, and to more people.
• Google Sitemaps Generator – Most of my visitors find this site from search engines like Google. (I'm sure you are familiar with them if you have your own site.) Some people find it difficult to get search engines to index what they have written. Aside from writing good content and having people link to it, you can submit what is known as a sitemap. A sitemap is exactly what it sounds like, a map of links that point to every part of your website. It can be tedious to copy hundreds of URLs to make an sitemap. This plugin takes care of the hard work by creating and submitting the sitemap for you based on the posts and pages that make up the site. With the help of GSG you will quickly show up in search engine results.
• WordPress.com Stats – I first experimented with WordPress using WordPress.com's free blog hosting service. When I migrated to my own hosting, I found myself longing for the ability to check who was reading my site straight from the admin panel. I was finally able to do that with the release of this plugin.

If none of these plugins suit your needs, there are plenty of others to choose from. You can even write your own if you know a bit of PHP. Read the WordPress Codex article on Writing a Plugin for more information. For those of you who are complete newbies to WordPress, Lisa Sabin-Wilson of justagirlintheworld.com has just completed her book titled, WordPress For Dummies. It is available for purchase at bookstores and online shops alike:

So, we've confirmed at long last, the official WordPress For Dummies book is reality and will be on the shelf at your local bookstore in no time! As well as Amazon.com, Barnes and Nobel, Books-A-Million and, of course, Dummies.Com and Wiley.Com.

If I don't win a free copy, I'll probably skim through it the next time I go to Barnes and Noble. A book written by someone who has been blogging for more than five years and currently manages a blog design company is bound to know a thing or two about WordPress. I suggest reading this book if you want to learn how to use WordPress effectively, or to improve your current knowledge and learn advanced features that will make your blogging experience more enjoyable.

Have you ever spent  time downloading a movie just to be greeted with this message when you try to play it?

Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file.

In most cases, the "Web Help" button will not offer any useful information. This leaves people feeling frustrated. Do not worry, the person who gave the file to you was not trying to trick you. Your computer just does not yet know how to play the file.

The Combined Community Codec Pack is a collection of software that allows you to view a variety of media formats including Divx, Xvid, Matroska(MKV), OGM, FLV, and H.264(H264). AVI containers with multiple audio streams also work. One feature I find particularly useful is its powerful subtitle support. A full list of supported formats can be found here:
http://www.cccp-project.net/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ#Supported_Formats

Even if you are already satisfied with the media player you are currently using, consider giving CCCP a try. It is not a media player per say, but more a set of files that decode audio and video formats. Since CCCP runs in the background you can continue to use the same media player that you are already familiar with.

CCCP is easy to install and set up. Download it from one of many free mirrors and run it:
http://www.cccp-project.net/download.php?type=cccp

Choose all the default options during the installation as they provide the greatest compatibility with as many media formats as possible. You are finished once  you choose which files you want to associate with CCCP.

That's all there is to it. Grab some popcorn, relax, and enjoy the movie.

The highly anticipated demo for Crysis has been made available for download.
http://files.filefront.com/Crysis+SP+Demoexe/;8895698;/fileinfo.html

Be sure to update to the latest drivers to ensure you get as much performance out of your machine as possible.
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/betadrivers.aspx?lang=en-us

Mirrors:
http://www.fileshack.com/file.x/11333/Crysis+SP+Demo
http://games.internode.on.net/filelist.php?filedetails=12816
http://download.nvidia.com/downloads/nZone/demos/nzd_crysis_spdemo.exe
http://www.ausgamers.com/files/details/html/31644

I am one of the brave people that woke up bright and early on October 10th, 2007, expecting to play The Orange Box in all of its glory.

After allowing Steam to decrypt the GCFs, I launched Portal and started a new game. To my surprise, I was not greeted by the familiar robotic speech that we were introduced to in the trailer. This is probably one of my favorite parts of the game and to be without it almost makes me not want to play.

You may have seen an error message similar to this one in your console:

Failed to load sound "vo\aperture_ai\00_part1_entry-1.wav", file probably missing from disk/repository

Even Episode 2 was plagued with this problem as I could not hear Alyx's voice.

I have found a solution. Follow these steps to fix the problem:

1. Open either Portal or HL2: EP2 and click "Options".
2. Click the "Audio" tab and change the option "Audio (Spoken) Language" to one of the other three choices.



3. The game will now prompt you to restart the game. Select this option and restart Steam before attempting to play again.



4. Finally, change the language back to English and restart Steam once more to ensure that the correct files have been downloaded.

If all went well, you should now be able to hear people speaking. Have fun and be sure to spread the word about this solution.

This guide will attempt to solve common but sometimes hard to diagnose problems you may have when listening to online radio stations, or when watching streaming video.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Choppy/skipping video/audio

• Constant buffering

• No picture/sound

• Not being able to connect

Any time you are downloading or uploading something, you are using bandwidth. Even viewing this website used a small portion of your available bandwidth. Depending on your connection, you are allocated a certain amount of bandwidth you can use at one time.

Put in simpler terms, just as animals in an environment compete for resources, all the applications that utilize the Internet compete for bandwidth. Whether it be your web browser, video games, media player, or P2P application, they all use these resources when performing tasks. If your connection is powerful enough, you will be able to run these applications together. The trick is to limit the amount each is using at one time.

The suggestions below apply to every computer in your home.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to close all other background tasks while listening. You may even need to close IRC if you are downloading too many files over DCC. Instant messaging programs such as MSN and AIM don't use much bandwidth, so don't worry about them. If you must download, limit any P2P applications to about 25% – 40% of your upload speed and pause any unnecessary files.

You can limit the upload speed in Azureus by right clicking on the name of it, clicking "Advanced", "Set Up Speed", then clicking "Manual". Choose the speeds that pertains to you connection. Most users should be good with around 15 KB/s, but lower it if you experience problems.

Changing it in µTorrent (or uTorrent, however you choose to spell it) is just as easy. Right click the name of the file, select "Bandwidth Allocation", "Set Upload Limit", and choose 15 KB/s. The values vary by what you have your maximum upload set to, so choose the value that works best for you.

The process is the same for nearly every peer to peer application around.

Lastly, make sure you don't accidentally open the same stream more than once. Doing so will only reduce your chances of staying connected. Rapidly tapping the play button doesn't help either.

Keep in mind that the station you are trying to listen to may be having problems of its own. If this is the case you will have to wait until the problems are resolved before trying to listen again.

Update: It appears that Kwari no longer exists. :(

No, I am not talking about starting your own contract agency, I am talking about an innovative new first person shooter called Kwari.

What exactly is Kwari? While the name leaves much to be desired, one thing is for certain, Kwari is a game to keep your eye on. One thing wrong with the modern MMO gaming world are the lack of free FPSs. Companies such as Webzen are trying their best to fill this gap. The highly anticipated MMOFPS Huxley is slated for a beta test in Korea on September 13th, 2007.

The most unique aspect to Kwari is the reward/punishment system. It is best summarized by this quote from their website:

Every time you hit another player in Kwari you make money. Every time you are hit by another player it costs you. Every shot counts. How much is down to the stake level you play in. But this is not the only way to win.

What does this mean for you? You will be able to earn money just by playing. The main difference between this game and services such as www.tournament.com is that Tournament.com only manages the money, while Kwari provides the servers, the game, and everything in between.

Unless they fine tune the game's mechanics well enough so that both the player and the company can profit, I don't see it lasting long.

If the items above got you excited, you may sign up for the beta test here:
http://www.kwari.com/beta/signup.php

The PC demo of the award winning game Bioshock is now available to download.

Instead of having to wait for it to finish with Bittorrent or signing up for the Fileplanet pre-release, you can download it directly from one of the following mirrors:
http://www.gamedaily.com/games/bioshock/pc/game-downloads/bioshock-demo/4903/7007/
http://files.filefront.com/BioShock_PC_Demo_FF.zip/;8363410;/fileinfo.html
http://www.ausgamers.com/files/details/html/30227
http://games.softpedia.com/get/Games-Demo/BioShock-PC-Demo.shtml
http://www.fileshack.com/file.x/10997/BioShock+Demo
http://www.gamershell.com/download_20697.shtml
http://games.internode.on.net/filelist.php?filedetails=10800
http://www.gwchannel.tv/BioshockDownload/BioShockDownload.html
Steam:
http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=game&AppId=7710
The mirrors below are temporarily offline:
http://chonnom0.filezaru.com/BioShockPCDemo.zip
http://bioshock.unknownserv.net/BioShockPCDemo.zip

As always, download speeds will vary by connection type and the amount of people downloading. I recommend using a download manager such as Free Download Manager to ensure you download as fast as possible.

This demo will allow you to gauge whether or not your computer can run it before you purchase/download it when it comes out tomorrow. It is important to note that the release of the demo was timed so that updated video drivers could be released by Nvidia and AMD, so be sure to download those later today to achieve the best possible performance.

Update for users of ATI cards:

http://support.ati.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=29041

This update might be able to solve the graphical issues that many people are having.

The official system requirements as taken from the ReadMe.txt are as follows:

Minimum System Requirements

CPU: P4 2.5 GHz single core.
System RAM: 1GB
Video Card: Pixel Shader 3.0 compliant video card with 128 Meg Ram and floating point frame buffer blending.
Sound Card: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
Hard Drive: 7 GB

Recommended System Requirements

CPU: 3GHz dual core processor
System RAM: 2 GB
Video card: Pixel Shader 3.0 compliant video card with 512 Ram (Nvidia(R) Geforce(R) 7900 GT or better)
Sound Card: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
Hard Drive: 7 GB

Enjoy!

There are two memories that are brought to mind when thinking about the site www.experts-exchange.com. One comes in the form of a chain letter passed around a few years ago and the other of frustrated computer users hoping to solve their issues only to find a page with garbled text and a link to sign up to view the solutions.

Lucky for you there is a way to bypass the restriction.

Before I tell you how to install the required files to make this work, I will explain what will make all of this possible. Google has its own "robot" that browses the Internet and automatically adds any websites it finds to its index of pages. The reason that Experts Exchange pages appear in your searches is that they give full access for Google to read the solutions posted by users of their site. This means that if we can disguise ourselves as Google we will be able to read everything on their site for free. Ready? Let's get started:

(If you already are a user of Firefox you may skip to the second section.)

Download and install Firefox using the default settings. Once Firefox is installed, open it and navigate to http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/ to download the extension we will be using, User Agent Switcher.

A bar should appear below the address bar. Click the button, and then the button. Now click the download button as you did before, but this time click the button to install the extension. Restart Firefox and continue on to the next step.

Right click this file, choose "Save As", and save it to your desktop:
Googlebot User Agent

We will now enter the information that allows us to "trick" websites into thinking we are Google. Follow the image below to open the User Agent Switcher options:

Once it is open, click the User Agents tab in the menu on the left.

Click "Import" and select the file "useragentswitcher.xml" you downloaded before, or follow the instructions below to add it manually.

Click on the "add" button and fill in the following information:

Description: Googlebot

User Agent: Googlebot/2.1 (http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

Double check that you have entered the information exactly as it appears above and click the "OK" button when ready.

Finally, switch your User Agent by clicking "Tools", "User Agent Switcher", and selecting "Googlebot".

The last setting we must change prevents ExpertsExchange from placing cookies. These cookies are what makes the useragent trick stop working. To do this, click Tools, Options, and then the Privacy tab. Select "Exceptions" from the Cookies section and block both www.experts-exchange.com and experts-exchange.com. When finished, your exceptions window should look like this:

You are now able to view the solutions on Experts Exchange.

This should hold true for many membership sites. Feel free to post a comment with other sites you have found this to work with. Thanks.

Note: If the above technique does not work for you, follow these steps to view a solution:

1. Open the page with the solution you want to see.
2. View the source of the page. (Right click, view page source.)
3. Translate the text using one of many ROT13 decoders: http://www.google.com/search?q=decode+rot13

It`s a very nice day today.

Your browser, whether it be Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, etc, uses the vertical ' apostrophe instead of the curly ' apostrophe. This means that if you were to search for a post such as "Dan`s Food Store" you would not be able to find it on Google.

This issue is caused by the function wptexturize. I recommend that all WordPress users download and enable the plugin wpuntexturize to disable this behavior. This will not only allow your readers to search your blog more effectively, but you will receive more traffic as a result.

For many, one of the most discouraging parts of learning to create and manage their own website is the question of where it will be hosted. In the early days of the web other people would host your sites as you would not have the ability or money to do so yourself. That is no longer the case. With the introduction of free, open source web server software such as Apache and Lighttpd, combined with high speed internet services such as cable and DSL, users are finally able to test and host their sites using a spare computer. While significantly cheaper than the previous options, the idea of installing and configuring such programs seems nearly impossible for beginners. This is where software like WAMP comes into play. WAMP stands for Windows Apache MYSQL PHP. Simply put, it packages the major components of a web server into an easy to install form. This means that anyone can get their site running as fast as possible for free.

Installation

Download the latest version of WAMP from http://www.wampserver.com/en/download.php.

There is one option in particular to look out for when you are installing it.

When given the option to install WAMP as a service, I would recommend unchecking it. Since it will be used only when needed you may want to keep it closed to save memory. If you do not want to deal with the "hassle" of turning it on every time, leave it checked.

Open WAMP and ensure all the services are running by clicking the icon in the lower right corner of the screen. Copy or create all the files for your site in the www folder. (C:\wamp\www by default.) Finally, browse to localhost to see what is currently stored on your server. Bookmark this for future reference. You now have a quick and easy way to test any scripts you may have, whether they are plain HTML or PHP.

Google has now made it even easier to customize how ads will appear on your website. The update adds the following style choices:

Square corners:

Slightly rounded corners:

Very rounded corners:

This will come as a relief for people who are currently using CSS to style their advertisements.

Shareaza is a P2P (peer to peer) application that supports the Gnutella2, Gnutella, eDonkey2000, and BitTorrent protocols. It happens to be one of my favorite clients, but it can be confusing for new users to set up. This guide will familiarize you with some of the settings of this program. It will also help fix common problems such as slow download speeds, slow searches, and network connection issues.

You will need to download Shareaza if you do not already have it:
http://shareaza.sourceforge.net/?id=download

Install Shareaza with the default settings, but do not run it at this time. Users of Windows XP Service Pack 2 will need to modify some system settings before continuing. Users of Service Pack 1 and other versions of Windows may continue to the next step.

Service Pack 2 Only

While Service Pack 2 includes many enhancements such as a Security Center, it also changes some settings that affect the performance of P2P clients.
The first setting we must change is the amount of half-open connections that are allowed at one time. This can be done with a patcher located here:
http://www.lvllord.de/?lang=en&url=downloads

Extract and run EvID4226Patch.exe. You will hear a beep, and then it will prompt you to change the limit. Press the 'C' key. If you are confident in your antivirus software to protect against fast spreading worms, enter 16777214. If not, just enter 100. Ensure you have entered the amount you wanted and press the 'Y' key. Press 'Y' again to move to the next step.

You will now be prompted to reinstall the system files that got replaced. Press Cancel as we need these files to stay at our custom amount.

Choose "Yes" when prompted to keep the unrecognized version of the file.

Service Pack 1 and 2

Open up network connections via the control panel. Look at the "Status" column and see if any connections are firewalled.

If one or more are, right click on the connection and choose properties. Click the advanced tab, and then the first settings button. Click the exceptions tab and add an exception for Shareaza if it is not already present. By default, it is located at C:\Program Files\Shareaza.

The last setting we must change before actually doing anything with Shareaza is forwarding ports on our router. This is important as connections cannot be made to other peers without having the port open. If you don't have a router, feel free to move on to the next step.

Shareaza's default port is 6346. A great website about port forwarding can be found here:
http://portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm

Find your model of router and follow the instructions until you know how to add port 6346.

Settings

Now we will move onto Shareaza's settings. These are the settings that work the best for me, but you may find that you get better performance with other values. Try to experiment with each setting and see what works the best for your connection and computer.

Open Shareaza and choose the setting that applies to your connection. Ignore the warning about Service Pack 2 as we will deal with that later on. If you see a NAT error, follow the firewall and port forwarding sections again.

Click "Tools", then "Shareaza Settings…"

Rather than typing out every setting, I took screenshots of each window.

General:
General:

Library:

Internet:
Connection:

Fill in your preferred port and ensure your download and upload rates match that of your connection. My maximum upload rate is about 47 KB/s, so I set it to use 39 KB/s for the sake of sharing more. I would recommend using 80% of your total available bandwidth for the upload setting. You may test your upload rate here: http://www.dslreports.com/stest?flash=1 Remember to convert it from Kilobits to Kilobytes with this tool: http://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/

Downloads:

Networks:
eDonkey2000:

I would not suggest connecting to the eDonkey network as it is better suited for larger files and tends to have very slow downloads.

Advanced:

Change the values of these settings:

Gnutella.ConnectFactor – 5 (The value of this setting is heavily reliant on your internet connection. Dialup users should set it to either 2 or 3. If you notice poor performance after modifying this value, play around with it and see what works best.)
Downloads.ConnectThrottle – 100
Downloads.MaxFileSearches – 4
Downloads.MaxConnectingSources – 50

The rest of the settings are a matter of personal preference.

The last step will help you get connected to the Gnutella network. Close the settings dialog and press the "F9″ key. This opens the Discovery Services tab. Go to this website: http://gcachescan.jonatkins.com/

Copy at least five of the URLs under the "Cache URL" list and add them to your list in Shareaza. This can be done by right clicking anywhere in the window and clicking "Add Service." Once you have added some healthy caches, double click them in Shareaza to query them. This will greatly improve the speed at which you connect to the Gnutella network.

Searching is an important part of any P2P network. Without it, no one would be able to find anything to download. Gnutella has been the target of many spammer and hacker groups who spread viruses and worms on the network. Shareaza includes a security feature that allows you to filter out bad results. Download this file which blocks bad files and peers: Magnet Link

When it finishes, press the "F7″ key and right click anywhere in the window. Click import and select "All-In-One AntiSpam Filter [Jun-10-2009] {By Cyko}.xml" located in your downloads folder. (C:/Program Files/Shareaza/Downloads by default)

This configuration will suit most users that have either Cable or DSL. If you are forced to use dial-up, I feel bad for you.

Rockbox is an operating system that supports many MP3 players, including:

• Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano
  (not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd gen Nano, Classic or Touch)
• Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio
• Cowon: iAudio X5, X5V, X5L, M5, M5L, M3 and M3L
• iriver: H100, H300 and H10 series
• Olympus: M:Robe 100
• SanDisk: Sansa c200, e200 and e200R series (not the v2 models)
• Toshiba: Gigabeat X and F series (not the S series)
• Additional models are in development

This article will take you through the steps necessary to install it on any version of iPod.

Update: It is no longer necessary to manually install Rockbox. Use the Rockbox utility to automatically install it on your MP3 player:
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/RockboxUtility

If you want to manually install it for some reason, keep reading below.

First, download the latest firmware that pertains to your model of iPod. Daily revisions of Rockbox can be downloaded here: http://www.rockbox.org/daily.shtm

Attach the iPod to you computer and extract the files to it. Ensure it is installed to the root of your iPod. For example, if your iPod is assigned to drive letter "I" you would want to extract Rockbox to I:\rockbox-xxxxx (xxxxx being the type of iPod you own.)

Now that the firmware is on your iPod, we need a way of telling the iPod to load it instead of the default firmware on startup. This is achieved with the Rockbox bootloader: http://download.rockbox.org/bootloader/ipod/ipodpatcher/win32/ipodpatcher.exe
Download and run the patcher to set Rockbox as the default operating system.

Finally, restart your iPod by holding down the menu and select buttons for five seconds. If the installation was completed successfully, Rockbox will load. If something went wrong and your iPod will not boot, hold down the menu and select buttons to reboot the iPod again, and activate disk mode by holding down the select and play buttons.

Adding music to Rockbox is even easier than using iTunes. Simply create a folder on your iPod and copy the music files to it. Rockbox will automatically detect and build a catalog of your music.

Why would I want to use a proxy?
Ever wanted to browse a website away from home and found that the site was blocked? All you want to do is get around the block and view the site. This can be made possible with a web proxy. A web proxy is a script on a server that allows you to redirect queries for a particular website through the server. In simple terms, it sends the site's data through the server instead of directly to your computer.

Why not use existing proxies?
Many firewalls block the most popular proxies, and new ones are constantly being added. By hosting a proxy for yourself, you can make sure it will not be blocked. Sites used by only one or two people tend to load faster too.

Requirements:

• Web host supporting PHP with safe_mode turned on. (Contact your host for more information.)
• PHProxy
• A way to upload files to your site.
• Five minutes or less.

To achieve our goal, we will be using the popular proxy script, PHProxy.
Here is a short synopsis of what PHProxy does as quoted from its website:

PHProxy is a Web HTTP proxy programmed in PHP to bypass firewalls and other proxy restrictions through a Web interface very similar to the popular CGIProxy. School/country/company blocked your favorite Website? Look no further!

We will be using the latest release which can be downloaded from its SourceForge page:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=110693

Extract the files index.php, index.inc.php and style.css to the location of your choice, and open up notepad. To improve the chances of hiding the proxy's presence from firewalls, rename all references of the words "PHProxy" and "Proxy" in index.inc.php to some other phrase. This will prevent the words from being detected by firewalls.

Lastly, browse to the folder you created earlier and verify the proxy is in working condition.

The hlds updater tool can be downloaded here:
http://storefront.steampowered.com/download/hldsupdatetool.exe

Download and install hldsupdatetool.exe with the default settings. This article assumes you have chosen to install it to c:\srcds. If you have chosen a different directory make sure to keep it handy because you will need it throughout the guide.

Preparation

If you are running Windows Vista with User Account Control, right click c:/srcds/hldsupdatetool.exe and choose properties. Click the compatibility tab and check "Run this program as administrator". If it is greyed out then you already have UAC disabled and can safely skip to the next step.

Installation

Now that hlds is at its latest version you will install the server files for Garry's Mod.

Click start and choose run.

Enter "cmd" and press OK. Type in the command "cd c:\srcds"
You will now see a window similar to this:

The command prompt is where you will give commands to the updater, which will be used to download the server files. Before you do that, let's go over some of the commands you are going to use.

HldsUpdateTool.exe -command update -game garrysmod -dir games

1. HldsUpdateTool.exe is the program that downloads the server files for Source based games. Running this without any commands will make it update itself to the latest version.
2. -command is a parameter that allows you to issue commands to the tool via arguments such as "update"
3. The parameter -game is used to choose which server software you want to run. You are using the argument "garrysmod" but "cstrike" can be used if you want to download the files for a Counterstrike Source server.
4. The parameter -dir selects the directory that the files will be downloaded to.

Create a folder "games" at c:\srcds\ and issue the command above to the command prompt. The server files will start downloading to c:\srcds\games\orangebox\garrysmod. This amount of time this process takes will depend on the speed of your internet connection. Be patient as there are about 2.5 Gigabytes of files to download.

Before you run the server you must make sure people can connect to it. Follow the guide that pertains to your router model and forward the required ports:
http://portforward.com/english/applications/port_forwarding/Counter_Strike/Counter_Strikeindex.htm

This guide only covers Counter-Strike, but the ports for CS and Gmod are the same.

Configuration

There are hundreds of settings that can be used to fine tune your server. Some people want a build-only server. Others may want a deathmatch server. Server convars are used to configure certain aspects of your server such as the default gamemode, name of the server, or whether players take damage. This is all done through the magic that is config files. Configuration files, or cfgs for short, are text files that can be used to run multiple commands at once.

The garrysmod config files are stored in the cfg folder, located at "c:\srcds\games\orangebox\garrysmod\cfg". The autoexec.cfg is a configuration file that is automatically loaded when you start the server. This is where you will be putting the convars.
Here is a sample autoexec.cfg: autoexec.cfg Place it in the cfg folder.

The next time you run the server the convars you set in autoexec.cfg will be applied.

Running the server

Once that is complete, open c:\srcds\games\orangebox\ and run "srcds.exe". A configuration dialog will open. Any convars you set in autoexec.cfg will be applied instead of what is show here. Any convars you have not manually defined will be set to their default values.

Press "Start Server" to start the server. The server console will appear.

Congratulations, you now have the files required to run your own Source based game server.

Troubleshooting

• My friends can't join my server!
  Other people can only see your server if their computers can access the port that it is running on. If you have a firewall, make sure that you have added an exception for srcds.exe. If you have a router, make sure that you have forwarded all of the required ports. Follow the guide at PortForward.com for more information on forwarding the ports.