Sunday, October 15, 2006

myspace proxy

There's a continous race between the blockers and the blocked, very seemingly to the one that takes place in the wild, between the hunter and the pray. At work, at school and sometimes even home - for the "lucky" ones that have parents with a harsher way of parenting - some myspace
users find themselves unable to access their accounts; the solution is well known by almost any of them : a web proxy! The real problem is a bit more complicated than this, as the blockers weren't born yesterday either, so soon the helpful proxy would be blocked. So the myspacer looks
for another proxy, which will eventually get blocked too...and so on. Neither of the two parts gets what they want: one has a problem in having a all times, full access to his account, one in maintaing his rule of forbidding that access. The only one who wins in this situation is, as
you can easily see, the proxy owner. Because some good this aren't for free... So if people want to surf unblocked, fast, anonymously etc. they must often pay....Until all are free, here's the myspace proxy of the week: http://www.ip-privacy.com

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Linux on SONY VAIO VGN FE-21B

Since this laptop comes with a very bright shiny display, one of your first problem after you boot your linux is too adjust brightness.
Doing some searches on google will reveal you a kernel module called sony_acpi which should make /proc/acpi/sony containing brightness and brightness_default files(these appear after you load the module) . Changing the value in this file should ajust the screen brightness, but on this FE21B model it seems not working.

After some more research(hours of trying and testing) I have found an application called smartdimmer, a NVidia specific utility which worked.
I assume it is not harder now to make FN+F5/F6 working, since one way or another you have now the control over your brightness level, but I haven't tried yet.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

HeaderName and PHP scripts execution problem

If you are using mod_autoindex to list your directory contents on the web, you may want to add header and footer using HeaderName and
ReadmeName directives.

However, if you refer to .php scripts in these directives, they are
either ignored or listed as plain text(php source).

In order to have HEADER.php really executed, you need to add in your httpd.conf some code like:
 
<Directory /dir>
AddType text/html .php
HeaderName /HEADER.php
<Files "*.php">
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php
</Files>
</Directory>

Heroes Of Might and Magic 5 Artifacts

I've spent the last two weeks playing the Heroes of
Might and Magic V(HOMM5) campaigns, and i write this not
so much to share my thoughts on it,
but to try at least to help those who find the lack of
information or description on some particular items
as annoying as i do.
Of course, this is not the major issue in the game,
but if all the people who discover anything new about
such an item would contribute to this mini-database
it would be awesome. It would be useful, at least
until Nival&Co. decide to polish the oh-so-small (?)
details of the game.
So , here it goes:

Ring of Caution : +2 Hero Attack, +2 Hero Defense
Tunic of the Carved Flesh : +3 spellpower, -1 morale
Helm of Chaos : +3 knowledge, -1 Defense

Of course, i couldn't (oh well, i could have, but too
complicated in the middle of the game ) detect any
properties that could manifest during the battles,
like particular spell improvements,
enemy penalties or movement bonuses.But if anyone
knows more about these or other items similar to
these, he/she should feel free to add it/them here.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

The Moldavian Blackhat

First of all people should stop blaming Google, they are not perfect but still the best on removing spam sites.

If MSN and Yahoo have much fewer indexed pages from this guy's domains, it is only because their bots are lazier and their index space lower.

Some of his sites are already banned from Google, some not, of course you would probably expect G to act faster, but I think they want the banning process to be automatically to avoid further spam. If they ban manually, tomorrow 10 others will spam again.

Here is a quick explanation on how he did this whole madness:

1) He registered a couple of domains (t1ps2see.com, eiqz2q.org, etc)

2) He used some lame automatic page generator to make thousands of meaningless pages.

3) He setup his web server(probably mod_rewrite rules) and DNS to work with anysubdomain.domain.com, we can see this on a random query:
$ host worihqweoirhwqer.t1ps2see.com
worihqweoirhwqer.t1ps2see.com has address 70.87.73.35

4) A little programming on the site for interlinking pages and probably for querying some mysql databases where he stored the generated pages.

5) He setup some kind of cloaking, using body onLoad="document.f.submit()" and also giving a page to googlebot and another to visitor, creating confusion. He even denied page caching, but seems like he missed msn where cached pages still appear.

6) He used a couple of trusted(or ex-trusted) PR5 sites like
www.intermedia.md, www.chat.md, www.faces.md, etc. to get backlinks
Although we no longer see them now, in a cached page of these sites there are entries like:

a href="http://2333.water.eiqz2q.org"
img src=http://images.faces.md/images/0.gif border=0
a href="http://1272.manager.eiqz2q.org"
img src=http://images.faces.md/images/0.gif border=0
a href="http://307.pizza.eiqz2q.org"
img src=http://images.faces.md/images/0.gif border=0

7) He waited a few days for his pages to get indexed


Have you noticed anything spectacular? No! Any webmaster with a few programming knowledge can do this... but it will be totally unethical.

And you should also notice the BAD parts in this: he has nothing stable, he will get banned sooner or later and will have to start over and he had to sacrifice those PR5 sites: faces.md, welena.com, intermedia.md, etc. Another bad part for him is that he attracted too much the attention of webmasters, many forums talk about this now and sending abuse reports to Google.


Some of the white hats maybe now wants to try this? I don't know if it's illegal or not, probably not but you should "Know well what leads you forward and what holds you back".

black hats and massive indexed pages

It seems that a guy who owns domains t1ps2see.com, eiqz2q.org, etc managed to index in google a huge amount of webpages.

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,250,000,000 from t1ps2see.com

Pretty impressive, however the number is not real since google is doing some kind of estimations for site:domain queries, estimations which are not accurate at all.

Nothing new until now, since we know blackhats existed and will exist until google and other search engines would become perfect, but it's amazing how webmasters are so interested in this subject, threads like http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=97090 are so visited.

I also have to mention that he runs adsense on some of his domains, so this is making a very bad image for Google, letting the impression that highest part of adsense income for google comes from black hats.

Friday, June 09, 2006

Enom put REGISTRAR-HOLD because of inaccurate whois info

Although the email was correct, one day I have found that one of my domain was not working(it had the REGISTRAR-HOLD flag). I wrote to my registrar which was actually an enom reseller and he told me to contact enom directly. Enom has only 12 working hours/day so I had to wait until next day. The next day I wrote about 3 emails which and got no reply in about 10 hours so I decided to call them. After 2 phone calls where they told me the problem is because of false whois information, I waited 10 more hours for the whois team to reply by e-mail and the domain was finally working again.
So if you are using Enom or one of their resellers, I suggest you to think twice before using fake whois info.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

PHPMyAdmin freezes on databases with too many tables

If you are using phpmyadmin on a database with more 1500 or more tables, you may experience problems. The page will not load at all so you will not be able to operate propery with phpmyadmin.

Of course you can still run commands from a terminal or console but it is not as confortable as using phpmyadmin.

After digging a lot in the config.default.php filesand trying diferent results and limits for various variables, I found out that problems comes from PHP itsels. So the first thing you should do, is to raise the memory_limit in php.ini . It worked for me.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Peakclick PPC program review

A few months ago I have discovered Peakclick.

I was very skeptical, because almost all PPC programs I tried before were not even making 30% of adsense. Once you login, one of the first thing you notice on Peakclick is the top webmaster section where you see that some guys are making $2000/day with the program. So you say "yes, it is possible" and give program a try. First you don't make so much, since after you join you have the "Not Approved" flag which prevents you from getting all ads. However, in a few weeks you get approved and income starts to raise.

One of the best part of this program is that you have a lot of freedom. You can use javascript codes, XML feeds, premade google doorways, etc. You can even create some kind of adsense codes by generating feeds automatically based on page keywords.

Another good thing about program is that you get paid twice a month, even more often if you make requests and many payment methods are supported such as: Epassporte, wire transfers, Webmoney, Western Union, check by mail, Fethard.

In my opinion this is the second program after adsense that you should use(I didn't check YPN yet).

Monday, June 05, 2006

Linux on SONY VAIO VGN FS315S/FS315M

In order to use your lappy in linux to it's maximum power, you need to recompile your kernel and to download and install some drivers. I've installed Debian, but it should be simillar for any distribution. If you have a good Internet connection, the whole installation & setup process should not take more than 2-3 hours.

Sony VAIO VGN-FS315S main specs
- Intel Pentium M 750 1.86 GHz, 2MB L2 Cache (Centrino) processor
- LCD X-Black 15,4 screen with 1280x800 resolution
- 1024 MB RAM
- 100 GB Hard drive
- DVD-/+RW optical drive
- NVIDIA GeForce Go 6400 with TurboCache technology (128 MB)
- Realtek High Definition Audio Soudcard
- Intel PRO/100 VE (wired network interface)
- Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG (802.11b/g standards)

First of all, grab the latest 2.6 kernel from kernel.org.

Then enable ALSA as follows:

Device Drivers -> Sound
Device Drivers -> Sound -> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
Device Drivers -> Sound -> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture -> PCI Devices

Now enalbe wireless:
Device Drivers -> Networking support -> Wireless LAN (non-hamradio)

But this is not enough, you will also need to get http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net and http://ieee80211.sf.net and follow the installation instructions for both. Reboot and you should see the wireless interfation on ifconfig -a, then you can play with iwconfig.

If you dont need 3D acceleration and 1280x800, you can use the standard vesa driver. But I am sure you wanna go for 1280x800 so you will need http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html. Follow installtion instructions, then add the next lines to your /etc/X11/XFree86-4:


Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
HorizSync 28.0 - 110.0
VertRefresh 43.0 - 90.0
Modeline "1280x800" 80.58 1280 1344 1480 1680 800 801 804 827
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "nvidia geforce go 6400"
Monitor "Generic Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth24
Modes "1280x800"
ViewPort0 0
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "nvidia geforce go 6400"
Driver "nvidia"
EndSection


Now you can enjoy your notebook in Linux.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Article rewrite by rephrasing sentences

Many hire persons to rewrite certain articles and then to republish them in their own site, trying so to avoid duplicate content penalty. How legal is this? I am not very sure and I think all depends on the article author and I assume the more the article is changed, the more legal it gets.

However, if you cannot afford or you dont want to hire human rewriters, you can use this free tool.

I've seen other tools too, but most of them were commercial or hard to use so I could not really test them.

Emptying Yahoo Mail bulk folder is unsafe

It should be simple, you take a look in bulk folder, you don't notice anything which may not be spam and push the "Empty" button.
But what happens if you go to toilet and push the button only after you return? Some emails may have arrived meanwhile and you will lose them. Actually you could lose bulk folder emails in the miliseconds between taking a look at the folder and decide to Empty. Some non-spam email may have arrived into it exactly at this time. Solutions? The only that comes to my mind is to delete emails manually from bulk, without using Empty button.

We know that is common for the bulk folder to contain often non-spam emails. This is because spammers become creative and they always try to create new kind of headers and content for the email to avoid anti-spam triggers.

Automatic and reciprocal link exchange, good or bad?

In the last years, many sites and directories started to offer automatic link exchange programs. Some ask for money while others ask for reciprocal linking. It is pretty clear that such programs and the sites involved don't have a shiny future because Google didn't introduced the backlinking system for being abused.

I tested some of these programs: www.linkmachine.net, www.monsterlinkswap.com, www.gotlinks.com, etc. The result? Getting 100 backlinks from these programs is worse than getting 1 single backlink from a PR4+ site "not flagged". By "not flagged" I mean a site which is not involved in automatic/reciprocal link exchange programs. I believe that search engines and I mean specially Google, identify the sites involved in these programs and flag them somehow. They don't get banned(at least not all of them) but their backlinks get ignored and their outgoing links too. Let's take for example gotlinks.com. They claim to have about 10,000 sites in their network. Each of them backlinks to gotlinks.com. By now, they should be about PageRank8, considering they are also promoting their service by many other ways. But they are only PR6 and I have a feeling that they gained this Page Rank only from directories, forums and blogs where people talk about the program. The 10,000+ sites involved are flagged and they don't pass Pagerank.

So if you are looking for a long term result for your site, don't involve in these "easy to gain backlinks" programs. Remember that the most effective way of getting back links is to make a site actually useful, then people will backlink to it without any incentive.

Friday, June 02, 2006

Penalized or blacklisted by Google?

It is easy to check if a site is blacklisted. If it is older than 3 months, you can simply check the PR, and if it is 0, then either site owner is one of the worst webmaster or the site is black listed. Another method is to search if google has indexed any pages from the site doing a site:www.domain.com search.

About penalization it is much harder. A site can be penalized, but it can still have a good PR and it is still indexed. It just don't show good on SERP. And this does not mean it is not on top for an important keyword. It means it is on the bottom of the list even when you do a very particular search.

Blacklisting can happen on cloaking, hidden text, blog spam.

Penalization usually occurs when you are involved in link schemes, link exchange, duplicate content, stuff keywords, affiliate links.

World Of Warcraft tips and tricks

Although it's highly recommendable to complete any quest at low levels, as the experience gained is usually worth it ( u have to grind those mobs anyway, why not gain some extra experience while doing it?) there are some quests which either should be done at high levels or , for the patient ones, completed as any other quest with the sole remark that the reward is not to be used at low levels if the benefit is a percent of some kind and not an absolute value added. You will understand this by looking at the quests i selected:

1. The Alliance "Selling Fish" started by Dockmaster Baren in Redridge Mountains, available at level 16. The reward includes 5 x Fishliver Oil, which might be almost useless to a level 20 rogue, but very useful in certain situations (pvp, instances, world bosses etc.) for a higher level character.


2. The horde quest "A Solvent Spirit", obtained at level 5 in Durotar, from Master Vornal in Sen'Jin Village has the awesome reward which consists of 10 x Really Sticky Glue, excellent for the classes which can't trap a running foe. My rogue used it successfully in pvp either for catching a mounted enemy trying to run away either for escaping from one when the situation got out of hand. When the 10 charges where all used i even bought more from the low levels, but that was in the happy days before this item became BoP....:)


3. "Gold Dust Exchange" is a quest for Alliance only and it can be obtained at level 4 from Remy "Two Times" in Goldshire, Elwyn Forest. The reward is a Bag of Marbles with 10 charges. Imagine what this item would do against a opposite faction warrior or rogue :)


4. For the hordies willing to make a trip to Tirisfal Glades, Apothecary Johaan in Brill gives the quest "A New Plague" which rewards 5 x Slumber Sand, useful for those classes without any crowd control abilities or simply for those who can't use them against particular enemies ( for example, a mage fighting 2 demons might want one asleep, or when fighting a battle on the edge, the 20 seconds of sleep would be a nice chance to bandage if the frost nova failed etc.)

Some new and some old things about Google and SEO

Is SEO(Search Engine Optimizing) good?
Depends. If you join a webmaster forum, you may notice that some members there, have 30 or more sites about various topics(ringtones, mortages, pharmacy). Those sites contain no good content except some stolen/poor text and affiliate links. Such sites are definitely not good for internet for the simple reason that one person cannot maintain and keep up to date so many sites, so they are just junk, therefore one of the google's goal is to eliminate junk from their search results.
But if you already have a site, and you do SEO just to make it more friendly for spiders, so more people will be able to find your site, then SEO is good. So you should do SEO for your existing sites and not make new sites just to do SEO.

How does google sort search results?
Some say they use pigeons, others say they do it by PR(the famous green bar). But the correct answer is: all internet users that search using google, contribute to the results ranking. How is this possible? Simple, some use google toolbar, others simply help by clicking or not on a search result.
Of course, in order to get into google's attention, a site first needs a few backlinks and some good original content. Then google allows the users to transparently make the ranking.
Let's consider the next scenario with a user with google toolbar: He searches "free ringtones" and gets to a page(let's name it "site A") where there are ringtones but they are not free. He will close the page and continue the search. At some point he will find a "site B" who has indeed free ringtones so he will spend more time on it to search whatever he needs. He could also bookmark the page, or he will memorize the address. Later he will return to the page or even tell to a friend about it. Google will see that he either type-in the address or used it from bookmarks, so he will consider that site B is good to be on top for "free ringtones", google will also penalize site A. The idea is: the more type-ins/bookmarks a website has and the more time a users spend browsing it, the useful it is, so it should have a high rank. Google easily track user's behaviour if they have Google Toolbar installed. Even if they don't have it, on Javascript enabled browsers, Google can see which sites you click from SERPs.

So how can I get on top of the results?
Make a website thinking to your potential users and what they want to see. Make it SEO friendly but don't exaggerate with this, always put your visitors first. Use ethical promoting methods.

How about PR? Why aren't pages sorted strictly by PR anymore?
Because at some point, many webmasters were using unethical methods to get backlinks, such as link farms, blog spam, aquisition of existing websites with high PR, only for linking purposes (this was bad for the Internet because those sites were no longer developed, they were just abused).
The PR sort was also a little unfair for new sites, which had no change to get on top without getting tons of backlinks. With the new algo, if a site turn out to be useful and used(clicked+browsed), it can get on top positions.

What is sandbox ?
The sandbox applies to new websites, and is a kind of pending status. Google simply says: "Hey you are new, stay down and let the elders first, keep the good work and at some point you'll get into their club too".
This way google can first watch over the new sites to see how often are they updated, how they and where they get their backlinks from. If they get the backlinks at a high rate, they are probably spammers so they will never be ranked good. If their backlinks are up only for a short period, then they probably are buying links or again spam so at some point owners remove the spam or their paid links expire, so the site will be again penalized. Of course google watches to old websites too for such actions, but the elders are always considered more trusted for the simple reason that doorways and unethical sites don't live long.

What is google blacklist or exclusion ?
A site can be manually or automatically excluded from SERPs if it is found to be completely useless for the internet comunity. Such sites usually use spam to get backlinks, they have no content quality but some duplicate or stuffed keywords, and they are full of affiliate links or redirects.

Why META keywords and description are no longer important?
Because they are not seen directly by users, therefore in many cases they were unrelated to the page or outdated. A normal webmaster updates page title and content and often forgets about keywords or description. Meanwhile other webmasters obsessed by SEO, were giving much more attention to META optimization than to content itself. From the user side, the first kind of websites with outdated/missing/unrelated META was usually more useful. So google simply decided to almost ignore META keywords or description.

Is W3C Validation important for SEO?
No, take a look to www.yahoo.com, www.google.com and www.msn.com and you will see that all of them fail the validation tests with several errors. So if they dont care about their own pages, I doubt they care about others'.


Want more? Check http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

The Dark Future Of RTS Games

Have you all played Dune 2? In 1992 that masterpiece started this genre called RTS. The game gives player an outstanding feeling, combining the events on the battlefield with some nice music which is calm when there are no gunshots and which become very aggressive on a big fight, raising your adrenaline.

Then, Blizzard came with Warcraft I (Orcs&Humans) which was a good alternative for all those who finished Dune 2. Unlike Dune 2, Warcraft had multiplayer support giving new perspectives in the RTS world.

Warcraft II came 2 years later, introducing Battle.net, where you could find many players to fight with. It had better graphic and map editor and much more campaigns.

Other Game companies were making RTS games like: Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, Age Of Empires, etc. But most of them were bad clones of those existing, one of the only with new elements was Age Of Empires, which introduced something from Civilization giving the game an unique feeling.

Z was good, came in with a new idea of territory control instead of buildings construction for getting units, but without multiplayer, the game did not live long.

And then the revolutionary Starcraft came out, many believe that even nowadays it is still the best game ever. One of the best AI ever, everything you need for multiplayer, supporting up to 8 players in the same time. But above all, the game had 3 completely different races to choose from. For the first time, they were completely different in both looking and administration/strategy. So now it was like 3 in 1 game, after you play with Zerg, you get the Protoss and you feel like you are in a new game.

Rise of Nations, Age of Wonders, Empire Earth, Earth 2140, War of the Worlds, etc etc.. All these were a complete waste of time from the developers.

However I should not miss Dungeon Keeper which came with new elements and new feeling but the games lack in units' AI, specially on multiplayer when you meet the opponent and things get too chaotic.

Settlers series is good, but has too many bugs and some problems in battle where you cannot control your soldiers well, giving you the feeling that you are not really in control of your army. Kinda frustrating.

After Warcraft III - Reign of Chaos which brought in some RPG elements into RTS making the game attractive, no other strategy game had success. Why? Because the developers are working only on graphics and only on bringing new units, 100 new units, 1000 new units, addons with even more units, maps but nothing new in the game engine or in the strategy.

They all are obsessed in introducing 3D in Real Time Strategies and even Turn Based ones. Hellooo!!! People who play such games are not very interested in the 3D elements, they want something new in the game, to make it attractive!!! Waste your 3D on shooters and RPGs where people might appreciate it, but not on strategies.

Some of you probably wonder why I did not mention Command&Conquer series. It's because they are not good, they are Dune2 clones bringing only new units, nothing new in the feeling part of the game. A good strategy game is tasted in 2 phases: 1) You explore the game and it's features playing single player scenarios or campaigns, unfortunately after some time you get bored. 2) You start making strategies and play with other players always improving your style and never getting bored because the games turns out into a sport like ping-pong or chess or even soccer from the coach side of view. The games which are poor at 2nd phase, die fast. Therefore I would make a top 3 of best RTS ever:

1) Starcraft
2) Warcraft III
3) Dune 2

Yea, yea, no multiplayer(at least not in the original version) on Dune 2, but it deserves it's place since it was the first of his type.

World Of Warcraft how to make cash tips

World Of Warcraft how to make cash tips

The only place where you can double your money in 2 days is Auction House, where you can make profit even without farming, only with a few silver to invest on cheap listed items which you will resell later for higher prices. You can also go for speculations between Gadgetzan AH and your usual AH. Farming such as Scarlet Monastery is only about (or mostly about) luck and waste of time, therefore is not recommended.


Here is a list with 7 easy ways of getting money:

1) Get Enchanting and Tailoring as professions. First go farm some linen, wool, silk, etc. Then make as many green items as possible. Disenchant them and put the essences and dusts on AH. It will take you no fee for listing, so you can list for high prices without losing money if they dont sell.

2) Farm elementals. If they are low level they will drop elemental fire, elemental earth, elemental water or elemental air which are used on many professions and will sell good on AH. Higher level elementals will drop heart of fire, core of earth, globe of water and breath of wind. All these also sell good on AH. And if you decide to go for the highest level elementals, you have chance to get essence of fire, essence of earth, essence of air or essence of water. A single such essence could sell around 10 gold or higher, depending on the server where you play.

3) Go to AH and buy cheap green items(without buyout, just bid on those listed for low) and you will eventually get a lot of them for a small amount of money. Disenchant then all and list the resulted materials back on AH.

4) Get Herbalism and Alchemy professions. Watch the AH on your server to see if herbs or potions sell better. Even low level herbs such as Briarthorn could sell for 40s a peace(not 1 stack). Always list the herbs in the quantity of 1 and not 20 stacks. If some potions are selling good(like frost oil) go gather as many herbs possible for those potions and make them.

5) Are you a herbalist? Do you know what Ghost Mushroom is? Do you know that on some servers you can sell a single piece for 1gold+ ? Go to the dungeon in The Hinterlands and gather as many as you can, this will be one of the quickest way to make money. While you wait for the herbs to respawn, go kill some trolls, they have chance to drop Wildvine, which also sells for 1 gold on most servers. Some of those troll camps also have treasures.

6) Planning to get a mount? Don't forget to get a seargent pvp rank first and honored state so you can get it much cheaper. Others which are not pvp rank or honored need mount? you can buy for them and also keep some cash for yourself since it will make it worth for both parties.

7) Get Skinning profession but always keep in mind that you must stay as much possible on areas where there are many beasts(The Barrens, Thousand Needles, Desolace, Swamp of Sorrows, Dustwallow Marsh, Ungoro Crater). Hunting the yellow turtles from Hinterlands would be very easy and you could get lots of turtle scales, which would sell good on AH.


Do you want more? Check Tips and Tricks or go to the forums at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

used reese hitch

Tom was forced to admit today he needs a new reese hitch for his Wolkswagen, as his old one finally gave in. The problem is not only he is short on money, but so am i these days, so he might end up buying a used reese hitch, even i advise against it. Usually, that is. I don't have so much experience with these technical/mechanical things, but i surely know an used object is less reliable than a new one. On the other hand, maybe if the quality of the reese hitch is good enough, it could overcome the fact that it's used, so it could be better than a new, low-quality one.

ford 24 foot motorhome

I saw an interesting announce today ( "Caravan International on Ford Transit chassis 1981 1993cc petrol. Aluminium CI body, 4/5 berth, shower/toilet, electric water pump, full cooker, 3W fridge, heater, dual battery, mains hook-up, fresh & waste water tanks, re-upholstered.Carefully restored in 2004. New brake calipers and cylinders, cambelt etc. MOT. Inspection welcome. Realistic price. More pics available. £1650" ), i'd really like to give it a try, although i only
have £1200 for this. I've always wanted a Ford Transit, and my
husband shares the same preference, but i have my doubts about it. We'll see... If it won't be this one, another 24 foot motorhome will wait for us out there, maybe at a higher price, tho. I won't
give up in this quest of finding the perfect motorhome for me and my family, which would give us the means of living the life of liberty we want.

Four Points by Sheraton Lexington (4points)

I wonder if u should choose Four Points by Sheraton Destin-Ft Walton Beach, in my next vacation's trip to Florida Panhandle.
I read a lot about it, it seems people love it (highly rated, very appreciated and all) and it does get all kind of awards lately, but i just think it's a tad boring; all the "nice oasis"stuff it's a bit stereotypic for my taste, but i don't think i can get more of such a "paradise" like idea of resort....whatever. At least i can plug my laptop there, and maybe , just maybe, i *could* ( hmmmm ) check out the pools there, hehe....and the drinks, yeah, mmmmmmm...I didn't understand where they got their name, though, i don't quite like it. What, 4 out of 5 points? Like that "11 euro" hotel, which, of course, didn't offer any rooms at 11 euro per night, gosh :P Much higher, much higer. Why the hell did they name it like
that, then? 4points, u say? or maybe the 4 points in mathematics: 3
that form a plane and 1 for whatever, u could draw a line that
intersects it. Or whatelse u want :P Ok, time to draw my wise conclusion for tonight-> my 4 points are (very original, huh?):
1. If i get the time, i'll go there
2. Can't be bothered to look for another hotel, this one seems fine
3. Maybe a cheaper one will do, tho?
4. Can't get my dog with me, that's bad :( They should understand we can't be separated , lol.

domain name appraisal scam?

Recently I get this kind of emails from some guy(s) who says he is interested in my domains:


I need a proof that our price is fair. I hope you understand the
importance of this question.

Usually, people who are selling names or web sites, provide buyers with appraisals. This is a common practice and I'm not going to change this rule because it's the best way to protect an investment.

I heard many appraisal companies often made inaccurate appraisals. So I cannot accept appraisal from each and every site. I will only accept appraisals from independent appraisal companies I know and trust.

Reading responses from experienced sellers I was impressed by one
reply: "Many Internet users are not smart enough and popular domain brokers are using this fact to make money. They offer them cheap appraisal services. But if their customers would have something in their heads they'd understand experts could not make a professional research for $15-$20. These appraisals are made by machines. Easy money for such appraisers as http://www.Afternic.com and several other major brokers that offer cheap auto-generated appraisals. In my eyes, all services under $60-$65 are not manual and the results are generated by special scripts. I don't trust auto-generated appraisals."

The same is true for GoDaddy and SEDO. Their services are not manual.
They are just collecting money using their well-known names.

Thank you for understanding. I'm looking forward to do business with you.


He probably has some appraisal sites and wants me to appraise the domains there, then he will not gonna buy them anymore.
If he was such a big domain investor, he should know which domains to buy and which not, without any kind of appraisals.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

SONY vaio VGN-FS315S and Geforce go 6400 problems

After getting a SONY VAIO VGN-FS315S with the following config:

Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.86GHz
LCD X-Black15,4 screen with 1280x800 resolution
1024 MB RAM
100 GB Hard drive
DVD-/+RW optical drive
NVIDIA GeForce Go 6400 (128 MB)
Realtek High Definition Audio Soudcard
Intel PRO/100 VE (wired network interface)
Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG (802.11b/g standards)

I installed Warcraft III Frozen Throne and after half hour of playing, I was getting errors like:

BCCode : 100000ea BCP1 : 855E9810 BCP2 : 843AC848 BCP4 : F7A57CB4
BCP4 : 00000001 OSVer : 5_1_2600 SP : 2_0 Product : 768_1


among with the "System has recovered from a serious error" message.

The same thing was happening in Civilization 4.
In the benchmark and stress programs, all was fine, I was not getting any error. I was in the point of returning the laptop, but I have found one some forums something about new drivers and I gave one more chance.

I downloaded the NVIDIA Forceware 82.10 (x32) drivers from
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1227 and things are much better now, almost no more crashes.

So it was definitely a video card problem, I assume some kind of overheating since it was happening only after some minutes of playing.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Checking if a site is banned/blacklisted from Google

If some site violates Google TOS, it is very possible it will get banned. The most common reasons are: hidden text, link spam, link farm. If your site does not apear in Google, there is a simple way to check if it is simply not indexed yet, or if it has been blacklisted.

Go to www.google.com and type the site name in the search bar (let's take testdomain123.biz for example).

If you get an answer like this:

Sorry, no information is available for the URL testdomain123.biz
If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: testdomain123.biz
Find web pages from the site testdomain123.biz
Find web pages that contain the term "testdomain123.biz"

Then your site is not banned.

BUT

If you get an answer like this:

Sorry, no information is available for the URL testdomain123.biz
Find web pages from the site testdomain123.biz
Find web pages that contain the term "testdomain123.biz"

Then your site is blacklisted.

Note the line If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: which is the difference between two cases.

Friday, February 17, 2006

WoW Murloc Pet secret code from Blizzcon

Gurky Murloc Pet
It seems the love for the murlocs, especially the infant ones, is expanding among the players of World of Warcraft. In fact, i really am wondering if, somehow, this phenomenon isn't spreading across the "uninitiates" too. It all started with someone noticing the gurgling warcray let forth by any murloc attacking a target; then people began to talk about this, making fun of the standard situation: a player walks close to a murloc base (murlocs have villages, i know), tries to pull one of them, ends up with 10 crying, gurgling, running to fight the poor player =>
player dead. Rinse and repeat, until insanity. The human nature can turn the unpleasant to being harmless by making it the subject of a joke, i think this may be a factor that contributed to the increasig simpathy for the murlocs of any kind (and the baby murloc in patricular, since the babies are always cuter, see the kittens, puppies and human babies too). At some point, even the official Blizzard website had a mouse-over sound making section which - surprise - let you hear the famous murloc battle cry : "Grahralahgrahrahrahrararaw".
Murky
As the new tendencies must be exploited, Blizzcon, the international convention for showcasting the upcoming Blizzard titles, offered the opportunity to raise the Wow's murloc population, delighting the attendees by a bag of goodies which contained, among others, a special code for
obtaining a in-game murloc baby. Entering the code by talking to a npc is the only way to aquire such a pet. If you are the lucky owner of such a code, you can either sell it by auctioning it and make a small fortune or you can talk to ( Alliance side :) the dwarf Ransin Donner in Forlorn Cavern in Ironforge standing there with a little murloc named Murky (blue) or the
other dwarf, Garel Redrock, for Gurky (pink) ( Horde side: )Zas'Tysh near a small pond in the Valley of Honor in Orgrimmar for Murky (the blue murloc baby) or Tharl Stonebleeder in the
same location, for Gurky (the pink murloc baby).

The baby murlocs don't have any usage except their presence being a symbol of your belonging to the few special ones (hehe) and being cute and all, gurgling in a smotther and childish way; and oh, they burst into dance sometimes, cane and tophat included.

The murloc babies popularity increases as the time passes, i've seen t-shirts and towels for sale with baby murloc prints, i have recently admired some pictures of a clay murloc baby, created for a child's great joy and not for sale. People express their creativity and start turning the virtual cute, little pets into real copies that can be hugged and loved. I haven't seen yet a plush toy representing a baby murloc, but it wouldn't be a failure to start a business in selling these things, now would it?

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

White Hat vs Black Hat SEO

By definition a blackhat is someone who uses hidden text techniques or cloacking in order to create doorways and rank better. A doorway is a page with stuffed keywords without any meaning for a human reader, but valued by certain search engines.

But how about those who create web pages on domains like
"buy-cheap-medicine-health-now.com" and put some copy pasted content from other pages. They create 30 such sites and start submitting them to directories and doing link exchanges. They pretend to be white hat, but are they trully? They have no idea about the subjects in their sites and they don't bring any new content for the Internet. They create those pages with the only purpose of having traffic in order to monetize it. So I consider this last category black hats too.

A true whitehat never creates new pages and domains about subjects he don't have any idea about. He only promotes his existing sites with unique and useful content, not just affiliate links and google adsense on them.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Razorgore Strategy


Razorgore the Untamed is the first boss of the Blackwing Lair, a tough , yet possibly very entertaining encounter.

Is is recommended that you try him and BWL in general only if your guild or raid had passed at least Majordomo in MC, (as BWL is harder than MC ), otherwise it would be just a loss of time and repair money.

Razorgore's location is a room filled with 30 large dragon eggs, much like the ones found in UBRS (Leroooooy!, that's right), just that these ones can be destroyed only with Razorgore's help, and in the following you'll see how.

The fight starts by aggroing the controllers on the west platform, killing them and triggering the spawn of adds (they appear in about 40 seconds after that). Kill Grethok and his adds and remember that and this
stage one it's all about managing the number of the adds and destroying the eggs, as quickly as possible, as there is a risk that the numbers of the mobs should raise to an incontrolable situation.

On the west end of the room there is an Orb, used to mind control Razorgore through stage 1 of the fight; the ideal situation consists of 2 controllers (paladins -bubble and control- for an alliance raid or anything else suitable, but keep in mind that the controllers must survive during this phase, as the use of Razorogore's abilities is crucial for the success of this stage) taking turns in mind controlling Razorgore.

The mind controlling process can begin even before the kill of Grethok and should be targeted on destroying the eggs (95% of the time), the only case in which you won't use this ability is when it is on cooldown. Then you might want to use the "sleep dragonkin" ability, as the fireball volley usually draws too much aggro on Razorgore, which, as you might guess, must stay alive during phase 1.

The adds that i've been mentioning so far are of 3 types: melee (legionnaires), dragonkin and mages. As you prolly expect, the melee ones (first 2 types) are hard hitting, heavy armoured etc. kind of mobs, while
the mages are more fragile but more dangerous too due to their AOE attacks. The easier way is to keep the adds population mainly consisting of melee and the dps group in your raid should nuke the mages asap; of
course, it's not a piece of cake to tank the melee damagers, but it's preferable to being batch killed by the mages. Healers, heal, tankers, tank and dps-ers, do the dps! It's that simple, isn't it? Now, balance is
everything. There's no need to keep the orcs alive with any cost, of course you must decimate them to keep a controllable population, but only if the mages are being taken care of, as killing them is the highest
priority for you. Tip: mind control the orcs and use them to kill the dragonkins, as they have 400% damage bonus against them. If the dragonkin number is too big, use the druids to sleep a part of them, anytime
required (and it is required most of the stage, in fact). Any other classes that can croud control should do so (sleep, sheep, fear, scream), in an organized fashion and if possible by taking turns, in order to keep a
even threat. During stage 1 also try to kite as much as possible, a horde raid could use the shamans' earth binding totems, everybody can use the hunters' traps etc.

By the end, the chaos is spreading and the numbers of the adds raises insanely, but do not panic, as all of them will go away when the last egg is destroyed. In order to make it to this final moment of stage
1,when there's only 3-4 eggs left, use all your CC abilities and chain fear everything, don't focus on killing, but escaping them.

Phase 2: time to kill Razorgore itself.

Razorgore has, beside his melee attack, a hurting fireball volley and a conflagrate attack that gets you out of your control, burning you and the people around you. This is the reason for dps-ing him mainly ranged
and using more than one tank. The MT is facing Razorgore, the backup tanks are behind him. When the unfortunate conflag event happens, the MT also loses aggro, so a backup tank should take his palce immediately, while the burning ex-MT steps back in order to protect the others of catching fire.
As you might have noticed, there's a lot of fire involved, so it's not a bad idea to bring along some fire resistance equipment, but bear in mind that you'll not leave the "in combat" state between the 2 stages of
the fight, so no gear switching is possible.

Try to take advantage of the large size of the room in the unfortunate case a healer should die. have a druid rez him in-combat, but as far away as possible from the action. The ressurected healer will be out of
combat and will be able to bring back some of the other fallen comrades.
However, it's best not to come to this, as the unpredicted can interfear and mess the things up.

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Toolbar Pagerank Update Delays

Three months passed and still no PR update. However, in the last 2 weeks, there are changes on the future pagerank, which was very static before. Maybe Google do the PR updates more rarely now because they want to let new sites with PR0 longer. Or they hope webmasters involved in linking spam will eventually give up if they see no results in PR.
Or they just hope link selling/buying will stop if the period of PR update grows.

One thing is sure, we see changes in future PR since about 2 weeks now, so the PR should update within one month. At least this is my prediction. I constantly watched these future PRs, which are actually not very accurate, but they were not updating for a long period until two weeks ago.

Many are talking that pagerank is no longer important. Statistically probably it is still very important since only a few percent of webmasters are doing search engine optimization. Excepting the webmasters which are really obsessed by the Page Rank and every day they submit to directories and do link exchanges to increase the "green", for the rest of the sites, which should be 90% or more, PR is still very relevant.

Basically a search engine should look first for content, then for site popularity, which is how many backlinks the site has, how many visitors, etc.

Since PR is so public and popular now, Google definitely has some other rank, which they keep secretly. Some are talking about a trust rank(how old is your site, how clean, etc).

So now the SERPs are sorted by these 3 factors:

1) content
2) trust rank
3) page rank

Why I think content is first? If you dont have a page about "wild animals" you will not appear on any "wild animals" search.

Trust rank? If your domain is new or you are involved in link schemes or you hide content, do redirections then it is most likely your trust is low so you go down in PR

And about PR, there are rare cases where a page without any backlink appear on SERP, however even if it does, it will never be on top for a competitive keyword.

The key to a succesful website considering the three factors?
1) Build quality content useful for your visitors
2) Don't involve in link exchanges and respect http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
3) Get some backlinks, but do it naturally and only from quality related websites

cif single chip driver

I recently reinstalled my operating system and my CIF single chip webcam was no longer working properly. I no longer have the original driver and after some search all I found is Tiny-cam.rar on DriverGuide.com. However with this new driver it seems like is slower and more framed. It is not working as good as before.

Monday, January 30, 2006

crt1.o: No such file: No such file or directory

While using gcc on a newly installed system you may get:
/usr/bin/ld: crt1.o: No such file: No such file or directory

This is a common problem, but with a simple solution.

On debian:
apt-get install libc6-dev

On Fedora:

$ locate crt1.o
/usr/lib/crt1.o


$ rpm -qf /usr/lib/crt1.o
glibc-devel-X.X.X-XX


Then install the package glibc-devel-X.X.X-XX using yum, rpm, etc

Sunday, January 29, 2006

start using cgi proxy

We all have something to hide? Not sure, but it's definitely that some want to go on certain websites anonymously. It usually happens when you want to write a review twice, or post more comments, from different IPs.

The safest way to do this is a VPN but that is not always easy or free to get one. A proxy server will also work but even if there are many free lists, it still requires a lot of work to find good working proxies.

Therefore the simpliest way is to start using a cgi proxy. Most of them are free and in a few seconds you can be anonymous.

Here is a list with free cgi proxies:

http://www.the-cloak.com/login.html
http://www.ineedproxy.com
http://www.proxify.com

Just enter ony of them, and you'll be anonymous.