Just a note to make sure everyone thinks about and remembers the forums. We have a nice forum setup here at Solarum dot com, and a good base of users, so let’s all get in there and get some good jibber jabber going!
Author Archives: Laz
Installing World Of Warcraft On Vista
Having trouble installing WoW (Word of Warcraft) on your Windows Vista box? Well, I was. Recently I wanted to go back and give WoW a try once again, and by now I have a new machine from Alienware running Windows Vista. I popped the original first CD in and low and behold … I got an error, it wouldn’t run the executable. I got an error number 132 and something about a bootstrap problem.
I thought this might just be a problem with the older installer and Vista, since I got these disks years ago, so I downloaded the latest installer from Blizzard’s website. So, 3.5 GB later I try to install from the download and it doesn’t work either. Different error, this time Vista just popped up a box saying that the installer wasn’t working. Support at Blizzard was no help, in their opinion I had bad memory but I didn’t think that was the case since every other game I have runs great. After some log searching and Google-ing, I hit upon something that clicked for me. It seems the installer was failing because of a problem with the LAME MP3 codec. Aha!
The answer was there in front of me. I took a shot, downloaded and installed the LAME MP3 codec and tried again. Lookout, now the installer worked! I didn’t go back and try the old CD’s, but the installer that I downloaded worked great.
So, if you are having trouble installing WoW on your Vista box, and especially if you get any kind of LAME MP3 errors, go and download the codecs here (http://www.freecodecs.net/files/lameACM-3.97-final.zip) and see if that helps.
Great stuff at PortableApps
In this post, I’d like to do two things. First off, I want to plug a really cool site called PortableApps.com that has some really cool software in the form of … well, portable apps. What these are, are common widely used applications that have been transformed in such a way that they can run right off of your thumb drive, no install necessary, hence the term portable. They have lots of cool stuff that you can download, absolutely free, and use right off your thumb drive, or hard drive, or anywhere really. It’s nice being able to have firefox and open office (and much more) with you, no matter where you go, even with all of your own settings and customizations. That’s hard to beat! Go check it out, you won’t be disappointed I am sure. Continue reading
Comcast and a P2P Bill Of Rights?
“Comcast has just announced its plan to lead an industry partnership in the creation of a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” that would apply both to users and to ISPs.”
This is an article about Comcast and their efforts to create this so called Bill Of Rights for P2P traffic. I would say that in light of continuing legal trouble over Comcast and their throttling of P2P traffic, this is a shuck and jive maneuver or PR stunt. But, that is just my opinion. I wonder if any “users” will actually get to help write this thing? Yeah, right.
SmoothWall 3.0 Released
Also known as, the best little firewall in … well, anywhere! I have been using SmoothWall (the free, open source version) for years. I have used it with modems for dial-up access, as well as with cable and DSL connections. It’s a great product that is robust, feature rich, easy to manage and above all, very secure.
Not familiar with SmoothWall? Read more at http://www.smoothwall.org
I used to run an ISP and the majority of our customer base were dial-up customers. Even now, there are a majority of dial-up users out there still. SmoothWall is a great tool for dial-up users because it is essentially a hardened Linux distribution built solely to be a firewall/router. The IP stack in Linux is more efficient and much faster than Windows, so even on dial-up, you will get a performance boost running SmoothWall, plus the added security of a top notch firewall.
For all of the broadband users out there, you will get a tremendous performance boost when comparing it to the White Box store Linksys products. I am not knocking Linksys or anything like that, but in my own tests, I got almost double the throughput from my SmoothWall box versus my Linksys router. Plus, the SmoothWall box has loads more features and version 3 has even more piled on.
With built in features like this:
- Bandwidth usage graphs
- Transparent caching proxy server
- VPN support
- Anti-virus scanning of incoming pop3 email
- Dynamic and static DNS support
- QoS and more
There are really tons more features than I can list here, the ones listed above are just some highlights. Best of all, this wonderful product is free. Yep, that’s right, free. They do have commercial versions if you have a need for that, but they still maintain the open source GPL release that is absolutely free. So, all you have to invest is the cost of an old low powered pc that has been laying around the house anyway! 🙂 I very highly recommend you check it out if you have a need for a good firewall product.
WordPress 2.5 Is Out
I wanted to write up something about the latest WordPress release, version 2.5. I have updated all of the WordPress powered sites that I manage which is more than ten and the upgrade went flawlessly on all sites. Each upgrade was the same, no variances. Why do I mention this part of the process? Well, because I have seen many instances (*cough*Win*cough*dows*cough*) where the same upgrade went very differently (and sometimes even failed) on different computers, even though they had been built or imaged or the application installed off of the same baseline. So, when I can install all of the WordPress upgrades and every one of them not only works, but operates as expected, that’s a big deal to me. This has been the norm in the past as well, not just in this last upgrade. Continue reading