da blog

I was flicking along through the TV stations the other day on sky and flicked over to see BBC’s Planet Earth. There was a Polar bear attacking a walrus colony. At first i was hoping the Walrus being attacked would be ok and then the said truth of how cruel nature is emerged. This video clip is one of the most amazing clips ive ever seen of nature in action.

I noticed yesterday that Eset Security was picking up a virus coming from a few of the websites i have.

When i went to try and figure out how this happened, i noticed that on a few of the php pages i have the filesize was bigger than it should be. When i opened the php file i found that code had been added to the top of the php file which seems to redirect the page to another dodgy site.

Basically malcious code is added to php files and html files;

I havnt found out how this happened or how to fix it, more info to come.

Update: 28 Dec
It seems my entire website has been infected, i had thought it was just php pages that got infected but its ordinary html files as well. A college assingment i did a year a go has been infected, well the index.html page has been infected. Again i have no idea how, its the same virus.

Scanning:
Ive scanned my sites with a online scanner which does a good job of telling if your site is infected;

http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/#

however how to fix it is proving to be difficult. My hosting company havnt replied back to me yet so im searching for a solution.

The recent set of trailers for movies coming out next year are really amazing. The one that i cant wait to see is the Alien “Prequel” by Ridley Scott called Prometheus. To add to the impressive set of trailers you have the new “Batman Film” and “The Hobbits” by Lord of the Rings Director Peter Jackson.

I cant remember one good movie during 2011 that i can say was a film of the year. If i was to compile a list of my favorite films of 2011 id be stuck to name any that were good, well not just good i mean “must see” movies like The Lord of the Rings Films and the Alien Movies.

Prometheus Trailor: (due summer 2012)

Batman – The Dark Knight Rises: (due summer 2012)

The Hobbit (Due dec 2012)

The best cover version of any song ever.

Ive been playing the new expansion since the release date and i cant shake the feeling that this expansion is World of Warcrafts worst one yet. For all Blizzard have  done in the new expansion it seems they have finally run out of ideas.

New Features:

• New Level cap at 85
• Two new Races: Worgen and Goblin
• 5 New Quest Zones
• One new Proffession: Archelogy
• New Dungeons and Raids
• Guild Leveling System (Which seems to favour large guilds)
• The old Wow World is totaly changed
• You can now fly around Azeroth! (Took Blizzard almost 4 years to finally add)
• 1000′s of new quests
• Improved Graphics, water is now shiny and finnaly textures get an overhaul.

In fact to be bloody honest its the same thing as the last two expansions except its more colourful and with bigger numbers!

“Bigger Numbers” i hear you ask, i mean Players Health and attacks are simply bigger numbers. Theres still the same game mechanics as always;

• level up, Quest or do Dungeons
• Hit the max level (85) and wonder what the hell to do now?
• Repeat Dungeons over and over to gear up and gain reputation with various factions.
• See nothing much has changed, this has been done to death in the last expansion.

Reasons the Expansion has left me Dissapointed:

Guild Leveling:
Is a great idea basically you get “Perks” that can boost the XP you get or the “Reputation gains” you get from doing quests or dungeons. But it seems to favour large guilds, small social guilds will take much longer to gain those perks and while there not a necessity they are nice to have.

Same oul shit:
Theres still the same thing when you hit the level cap, the problem of gearing up to do dungeons. Running instances is fun but theres a point where you simply “burn out” and say enough is enough and simply cant be bothered anymore. This happened in WOTLK, Heroic Dungeons were a bit of a joke compared to how Blizzard made heroic dungeons in the first expansion “The Burning Crusade”. As far as i know at least from what ive read Heroic Dungeons this time around are very tough. But at the end of the day its still the same thing over and over again no matter how Blizzard try to dress it up.

Two new Races:
I mean who the hell cares about this, this is great for new players to the game but not for someone who is fed up of leveling a few alts. Ive quite a few alts and i certainly dont want to go from level 1 to 85 just to have my characters race different. So what has happened is most players have simply payed real money to change their characters race, making Blizzard more money as if they needed any more.

Quests: No Voice Acting in majority of quests:
At lot of the quests have no voice over acting making them dull, boring and simply a click “Accept Quest” and read later monotomy. You would think blizzard could have added a bit more voice acting to the game for some quests, not all quests just to make things a bit more interesting. A minor gripe but still something they could have done better. They did add cut-scenes to some quests which was a nice touch.

Most of the 5 new Quest Zones are Dull:
I hate to admit this but they really are dull, the only zone that strikes you as “wow” is the underwater zone.

Vah’iir Isle:
Amazing zone completly underwater with a ridable seahorse.

Mount Hyal:
Same old typical graphics in here nothing new to see.

Deepholm:
Totaly different to any zone in the game which is a good thing but not amazing by any standards.

Uldum:
Egyption pyriamds,yawn.

Twilight Highlands:
Nothing new here.

Channel 4′s superb 4OD allows us irish folks to watch all programs on the site while for other reasons the BBC wont allow anyone outside the uk too.

After a bit of research and googling i found and tried a way that does work at least if your in Ireland. Full credit goes to a boards.ie member but heres how to;

Originally Posted by joeyamg

Looked at various ways of doing this, best free way I’ve found for getting iplayer to work:

Step 1: Download and install the latest stable release of Tor using the default options. Run setup and make sure you’re connected to the network. Green onion will appear in system tray if it is working ok.

Step 2: Download and install mgeni, it’s a browser that uses the Tor network to allow you to choose what country you want to route through.

Little bit slow loading webpages (maybe turn off image loading) but video feed is perfect (I’ve only got a 7mb connection). Much easier than messing with foxy proxy or whatever else.

*Doesn’t work for hulu unfortunately

There are 3 basic ways to do this;

1) Realplayer Downloader:

The best one and its free and dead simple to use.

2) Record Youtube Videos with TubeZen

You simply paste the youtube video link into the site pick what video format you then download it to your PC.  Its simple and very easy to use.

3) Recording Video Streams:

Sometimes youll want to record a “Live Stream” of a tv show or webcam. The best and easiest way to do this is a program called “WM Recorder 14″. The demo version lets you try it out and you can save 5 mins of almost any live stream on the web. To record more than that you will need to pay for the full version.

The 90s had some good songs when i was young I loved dance/trance music, some of it is very cheesy but some of it still is quite good. There are 2 Tunes that stand out the most from the 90′s well from around 1997+ and thats “Moby – Go” and “Chicane – Saltwater(Disco Citizens Remix)

Heres a massive playlist of 90′s Dance Acts that rocked the 90′s;

Featuring:

• 2 Unlimited
• Divine Inspiration
• Alice Deejay
• Chicane
• the grid
• atlantic ocean
• Sub Sub
• KLF
• The Prodigy
• ATB
• Sash
• DJ Quick Silver
• The Venga Boys
• Corona
• Jam and Spoon
• Cappella
• Ace of Base
• Aqua
• The Chemical brothers
• and more to come…

Part 1 The best 90′s Dance Songs Embedded PlayList (Note not all songs will play)

Click here for Youtube link;

World of warcraft at times really can perform very badly, its an old game engine and it doest seem to work very well at times. Ive huge problems getting it run smoothly despite having a dam good PC. In raids at times my fps rate just drops to 10 fps or less same in wintergrasp.  The game becomes unplayable and very frustating so i started searching for solutions to try and fix the problem. The main problem seems to be the game cant cope with many players on the screen at the same time and it doesnt seem to handle CPU Cores very well.

First ill list my PC’s Specs;

• AMD Phenom Black Edition Quad Core 9850
• ATI Radeon 4870
• 4 gigs Ram
• Windows 7 64 bit

I started by turning most of the graphics settings down, some them make a huge difference such as “draw distance”. But nothing thats really going do the job, in fact nothing i tried really helped.

Deleting and reseting all your addons:

After setting the video dettings in wow to low and deleting all my addons and addon settings, my fps in stormwind went up to 100 fps.  I also set the ATI control panel image quality to “High Perfomance”.

Before i did this the fps rate was about 30-40 fps. I did this at a bad time too when there was nobody in any of the major cities so that is probably a huge factor in the fps increase.

Adding back your addons:

I then started to add to my addons back and with the following addons enabled my framerate dropped a little to about 40 – 60 fps average.

• Xperl Unit Frames
• Bagnon
• Titan Panel
• Outfitter

When i added back Bartender4 i lost about 20 fps, so this addon is causing a huge drop in performance for some reason.

Fixed:

After reading the Wow forums i found this link;

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=10971909544&sid=1

Which is all about trying to improve wow’s performance and its the only thing thats worked for me.  The problem i had seemed to be to do with AMD’s “Cool and Quiet” feature, as when i disabled it wow framerates went up and my PC was way more responsive.  Im able to be dalaran now with out framerates dropping to 4 or 5 fps and wintergrasp is playable. Um getting about 100 fps where before i was getting 30-50, so its a huge improvement.

In case youve been living in a cave for the last few days, Eircom irelands largest ISP is now looking for people to disconnect from its service. According to the details a third part compnay called “dTechnet” will be watching downloads of music on popular Peer to Peer Networks like Limewire and Torrents. They will then give those IP addresses to Eircom who will then give you 3 warnings to stop and then they will cut you off. AT which point Eircom will have lost a customer. If Ever a plan to stop Piracy seemed a bit mad then this is surely one of them.

How many people are going to stay with Eircom with kinda crap going on? Any compnay that restricts your internet access is just the same as the chinese government in my book.

You can read more about on the boards.ie forum;

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055919718