Subjects are legion and quite what the motivation is to launch these things I am not always sure but God do they do the rounds and people blindly repost. “DON’T CHANGE THIS SETTING IN FACEBOOK IT WILL STEAL ALL YOUR INFORMATION AND INFECT YOUR PC!”, “John suffered horrific injuries in a bike accident, in this his hour of need pray for him and repost on your facebook status”. And you know people blindly do, accepting the word because a “friend” told them. And so they propogate the garbage….

The one about the bike accident, and the wording here is not correct but the idea is, had been going round for 6 years in various ways ( not solely in facebook as far as I can tell). Its so old there is no one who can tell you if it ever started as a genuine post or was ever simply contrived. But in short the rule is- unless you 100% know for yourself that something is genuine and factual, you would do better to simply delete the request to repost as a waste of bandwidth.

In truth its too late there are too many of the gullible out there and these things have gained traction.

How to spot this stuff:

• Always mistrust anything thats asks to be reposted!
• Anything that says you will catch a virus from changing a setting on a Social Networking site- why worry- you have Anti Virus right?
• you won’t catch a virus- more like someone wants you to retain some setting thats actually benefitting them by way of seeing what your up to on fB than locking it down
• If you are worried, set all your settings in fB to the most Private and then undo the ones you decide are safe.
• If you are worried about your posts being seen on the wider web, DO NOT POST THEM ON FACEBOOK!!!!! There are no secrets on the web.
• When you get a repost request, take some of the key text- no more than 10 words, but something key to the post and paste it into Google. You will be surprised how much has been written on many of these posts.
• Subscribe to the HOAX-SLAYER list on Facebook. This guy really knows his stuff, I beleive he is a fB employee and posts on all the crap going round.
• This list is not definitive.
• and remember just because you got it from a friend does not mean its true!

Be safe.

The calls are made on the premise that your pc is generating some sort of error which has been picked up on the internet either by the IP carriers generally or your isp. They point you to your pc event log and point out these “errors”. if you have a pc and look in your event log you will always see errors in there and while not ideal , in general they are in no way indicative of serious problems or internet detectable issues.

They then get you to download remote access software and login to do their mischief on your pc. At best they point you to a number of bogus issues on your PC which they then charge you some sort of mtce contract to resolve/maintain. I have heard though that they can  install some sort of malware with which they can effectively format your disk if you don’t pay up or co operate. This allegation is unverified by me.

The phone numbers they present are bogus ( the calls originate in Asia- most likely India) Also you will find they present themselves with very European names like “Claire Smith”, “Roger Jones” but have a very distinct Indian accent- the names are obviously bogus.

If they call- tell them you don’t have a pc or better still hang up.

On no account allow them to access your PC, install software or give them Credit Card details. If you have given over access or details I strongly urge you to change passwords on all sites you use (especially those with financial liabilities- online banking, PayPal, stockbrokers, gambling, or e- retailers that retain payment info like Amazon or Google). When changing passwords use something unique on each site and at least 8 characters including one non alpha numeric wherever possible like a “@” or ! character.

If you need more advice on setting secure passwords, get in touch.

One thing you really need to get this working is Ajax. You don’t want to be having full page reloads as each selection is made, wouldn’t it be cool to just update the next selection box?

Now no doubt there are many ways to skin a cat but to be honest

1)There are few (if any) out the box scripts on the web to do this that I could find

2) I am a great believer in not reinventing the wheel and KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid!)

3)Most purely javascript scripts I could find “cheated” in that they pulled down a predefined list of data to the browser and used client based scripts to sort and filter it. This is Ok I suppose in a static environment but its not terribly flexible for a dynamically driven site, and if you have a lot of data to be sorted, as potentially I do in my project,you are dumping the whole list for the user to ultimately choose one item. Better to send only whats needed.

For this reason, and for the reason that its handy and available in DW4 as it comes out the box, I decided to use Adobe’s Spry Javascript Framework. DW4 is a pretty expensive package but there is a free trial version for 30 days use if you want to use this, or if you are a student you can get the package (for non commercial use ) for much cheapness- relative to what it costs me!!!

There are a few frameworks out there, Spry, jQuery, Scriptaculous, prototype, but for me Spry was most accessible  as fundamentally I am a non Javascript developer and I have some experience of its use through other projects.

If you don’t have Spry now and you want to follow along, go to Adobe’s website and download the files. In DW4, it loads up the files you need as you use each function, but if you are not using DW4, feel free to dump the whole package on your server in some folder.

For this example I will use a directory called /spry but it can be anything you want.

If you are bandwidth constrained, you can get a minified version of the files too, this reduces the amount of code being sent to the browser, it does not make much odds on a quiet website, but in a busy case it might save you considerable bandwidth fees down the line.

So with the basis of this project set before you, get the bits you need here and next time I will show how I got the multi level search started.

My assumption is you know a little php to run a database query and know how to get that out the database into xml format. For this project i will be using static xml files.

I tried giving ht emachine a good dust out including the fan but no life was seen. You could smell burning though when it was switched on, so I pretty well gave up hope for the fan and was cursing the whole thing, as it coul dmean a complete motherboard/CPU/RAM upgrade to sort. Not a big deal technically but a pain in the backside financially when the PC is otherwise fine.

I decided to have a look see if I could fix it.

Its a bit tricky to get out and basically I needed to remove all the motherboard securing screws to get to the back of the board and the two retaining plugs that hold the fan on the chip. The only way I could see to remove them was to pull each plug out from the borad one at a time against the spring tension of the securing pillars on the front of the board, and cut them with side cutters.

This causes the retaining pillars to ping off  so watch out for losing them and the springs. Its going to be hard to resuse them but watch the springs don’t end up trapped in amongst the components onthe bard and cause further problems.

The Fan comes out once the pins are released and the power plug needs to be removed from the board.

Its held closed by 4 tiny cross head screws (a very small phillips will be required) then once the cover is off the fan is secired to the bottom of the heatsink with three further similarly sized screws.

I got these out and gave the whole assembly a really good dowse in Electrical Solvent cleaner. This certainly got it clean but it did not feel especially free spinning.

I had a wee trawl on the web and it seems this is a very common fault and the general recommendation is to replace it with a Zalman ZM-NB47J Passive cooler you can get them at micro direct here in the UK. Most appear to fail early in the life of the PC, so I guess we have been luck as this board is a few years old now.

They only cost a few pounds so I decided to order one though have to admit I have doubts its going to fit as my sons PC has a pair of NVidia  graphics cards in SLI mode that are very long and I think they are going to impede the cooler. However the cooler is rotateable so I might be able to make it fit…nothing ventured nothing gained.

Anyway I decided to have a go at getting the fan going again if I could, so after the liberal cleaning in Solvent gave it another good dose of WD40 lubricant.

I cleaned off the excess, set the motherbaord back to at least power up (plugged the atx connector in) and connected the fan – just holding it in my hand. I could feel it wanted to go – it pulsed but did not turn, so I had another wee look at it, and it seemed to be a bit squint on its axis. I applied a bit pressure to try make it look more evenly mounted, and this time it fired up.

I gave it another oil and tried again, this time it seemed much faster. So time to put it all back together, connect up and apply a bit heat paste to the chip . Now I don’t have any screw to fix the cooler back to the chipset so am kind of counting on the paste and the friction of the graphics cards above the fan holding it all in place, but the warning is gone and the fan is working fast and smoothly.

I will report on the cooler when it arrives but this might have saved things for now.

The details of this error seem to point to the F Secure Firewall I run ( the 2008 version in my case) However even disabling this failed to resolve issues (if only to debug- I strongly recommend you don’t disable security measures to enable messenger apps!)

I found various purported solutions to the problem but none worked for me.

Remove any custom themes from Vista (ie. Windowblinds) – I don’t use this so not applicable to me.

Delete the contacts directory in the Windows live folder (you can find this in Vista by going to your user profile folder (usually C:\Users\<your login name> and then ensuring you have set “show hidden folders” go to App Data\Local\Microsoft\

In here you will find a Windows Live Contacts directory- you can either delete it (or like me if your less trusting of such advice- rename it to something like Windows Live Contacts.bak)  and then try your messenger again.

This has apparently worked for many users- but alas not for me. In case you are worried the program recreates the directory if it cannot find it- like so many microsoft programs.

So you can then persevere with trying to find your own solutions- if you get it sorted be free to comment on it here, but in my case I chose to uninstall it and try to get back to an older version. These are a bit more tricky to find as any normal searches for them turn up the latest problematic one.

I found the last version ( I think its the last version 8.5.1302.1018) – it looks Ok to me – here ( be warned there are a lot of Shareware apps using the messenger name that appear when you search in Google) . While they may be harmless I have a degree of concern that other apps use similar names to confuse users and may ultimately end up with you either a paid for program you did not want or possible spyware or malware you did not ask for.

This link takes you to the 8.5 version on microsoft.com

I got hold of a utility called ShellExView from Nirsoft which allows you to see which shell extensions are running on your platform and to selectively disable them. Be warned disable them one at a time and only those you suspect. If your not sure ask a PC savvy friend!

Anyway working chronologically backwards- ie newest first I noticed an Icon Handler extension supplied by Arachnoid Biometrics Identification Group Corp. Disabling this restored the icon function onthe start button.

Unfortunately I see no easy way to uninstall this as it has no entry in the Control Panel. Looks like a manual/ registry hack job for later.

I need to look into if there is a fix for this first though. Perhaps an updated driver for the Transcend USB stick.

My workstation runs Vista Home Premium. Now really  should have Vista Business but its a long story that I am not going to go into here why I have Home premium.

I do my backups two ways, I run Sync Toy every day to an external drive and I run Windows Vista Backup to an internal drive.

Following a recent crash with my Raid array (a striped set) I went to restore my user data from a back up. I was surprised to find that none of my files with php extensions were there.

Fortunately I had the copies from by Sync Toy images so I was OK but its worth stating that unless all your interested in is the back up of “personal” files- ie images, mp3s and common file extension docs like xls or doc files you cannot rely on the back up tool for Vista to save you. Somewhat oddly it does save html files- probably due to the fact that many programs can generate html files as an output format, that are not deemed as “professional” file types.

Be warned! 

1) First issue is if you try to install it anywhere but on a c: drive expect issues. The program does not appear on the start bar, the desktop or in the games explorer in Vista (32).

All these issues can be fixed by a c: drive install.

2) Once installed, don’t expect it to run easily- you start it from the Play button fired up from the DVD menu. Then it tells you to insert a valid disc in the drive! A work round for this is to run up the menu but don’t hit play, eject the dvd and insert dvd 2 inthe drive, this seems to then work oddly. However thats not a permanent fix.

The real fix for this is to install a Vist Hot fix available from the kaos website. However you need to install the 1.0.1 vista patch first and as the game won’t load you might be stuffed as it auto updates- though see bodge round in point one. The solution is to copy down the hotfix and the 1.0.1 patch to your PC as exe’s before installing the game- do a clean install then patch it then hotfix it.

This seems to sort all these issues out.

3) Finally if you have a Nvidia graphics card you may experience the game freezing every 20 seconds or so between bursts of running smoothly. As my sons PC is base don Nvidia GT8800 in SLI mode it might be an SLI problem only- I don’t know, however the fix for this is to grabe the Nvidia beta drivers for vista from the Nvidia website version 169.28

My original plan was to load the game on to my sons PC- this is much higher spec than mine- and less critical should anything bad happen. This I did and the Single player game run beautifully- looks glorious with the high spec Graphics (Twin Nvidia 8800GTS’s in SLi mode).

However Multiplayer was dire- ping was at lowest over 100ms and often more so no good. This is because his machine is on a wireless bridge. It doe snot seem to affect a lot of games but COD4 was unplayable. On the few times I got it going though I was getting kicked around 60 seconds in by Punkbuster. The error was initially indicating PunkBuster was not responding to the server.

I did a bit googling and found out that there are many and various issues here.

First Firewall: If you run one- and you probably should then you need to ensure UDP port 28962 is open both ways. If you can’t do this as you don’t understand firewalls, you don’t have the rights or whatever- the only thing I can suggest is (assuming you can) disable any firewall to all traffic while playing COD4 online. On my machine I run FSecure 2007 and I had to set up a specific service rule for Punkbuster- allow all networks bothways, All IP addresses UDP Port 28962 in and out.

Next having sorted this the reachability kicks stopped and the Restriction Service Communications Failure: PnkBstrB.exe initialisation failed errors started.

I would love to say I totally got tot he bottom of this but probably haven’t- however I do have it working.

First of version control: the version that comes with COD4 is well out of date, its meant to update automatically when online, but then if your having network problems your going to be stuffed there I reckon. You can go to the Evenbalance website and download PBSVC to install the service properly (you need to be running this as admin in Vista- right click the icon and select run as admin).

Next there is an updater which ensures you have the right versions for your game. You can download PBSETUP here. Its worth running this even if you think your installed OK because it runs through a test that dumps to your screen and lets you see any obvious issues.

Run this , select COD4 and let it do its thing- takes about 60 seconds to complete. You could if you like now try your game but I suspect you will be unsuccessful.

You probably are not aware (or maybe you are- so why read this!) but when PunkBuster installs the executables for the services reside in C:\windows\system32 (PnkBstrA.exe and PnkBstrB.exe). The former appears to be a resident service that runs all the time in your machine once its installed. The latter is initalised by the game, which in turn is detected by the former- ie, A detects the game is starting and kicks B into life. You can see PnkBstrA running as a service if you go into Control Panel/Admin tools/Services and list them alphabetically- it should be running. If its not investigate why- check the properties and ensure its running with high enough privileges, it needs admin rights. If it snot use the “log in as” tab and set it to run under an admin account.

Also there are potentially compatibility issues. You can try these- I did on the way to getting things working but have since turned them off. Righclick on your icon for COD4 Multiplayer and in the properties option, select the Compatibility Windows XP service Pack 2 Option. Also select Run as administrator in the check box at the bottom.

Do the same for PnkBstrA and PnkBstrB in your windows\system32 directory. Now as I say I have since turned off the Windows XP setting but you DO need to leave the run as admin in place. According to the Punkbuster FAQ at Evenbalance.com this is not necessary. Well I would dispute this as if I set mine back to run normally I get the error back within 60 seconds of starting a game.

Its worth playing around with these settings but just change one thing at a time to ensure you know whats having an affect.

Another factor in the problem I discovered is that in C:\windows\system32\logfiles\PunkBuster there are service logs- for the kernel, and services a and b. I found when i was getting the init error the logs were populated with the following:

[01.12.2008 21:50:34] ERROR: File “C:\Program Files\Activision\Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare\pb\PnkBstrB.exe” does not exist.

[01.12.2008 21:50:34] ERROR: C:\Program Files\Activision\Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare\pb\PnkBstrB.exe does not contain a valid certificate; Load denied.
[01.12.2008 21:50:39] ERROR: Ignoring load request coming within a few seconds of prior load

The first error seems to suggest a missing file in the COD game – and indeed it did not exist but how it gets there looks to be down to the game running under admin privs. Its not as far as I can tell just a matter of copying the file there are there appear to be other files spawned here too. Again- don’t be afraid to try at worst you can delete them again! The second error appears to indicate a security issue. You can see the certificates associated withthe programs in the Security tab in the file properties- both seem OK, again it appears to be an admin rights thing.

Having tried this the game appears to run OK, however on my first session of about 30 minutes I suffered a total hang of my PC which takes me back to my opening lines that I probably should not run this on this PC, as I ended up having to hard reset it. This is the first total hang/crash I have had under Vista I have to say. Tomorrow, armed with this info I am going to tackle my sons machine again so at least it does not get the Punk Buster Issues, the high ping will be solved when I get some Ethernet over Mains adapters this week.