If you're looking for useless, you found it!
Gnometer, NowPlaying.dll and Windows Media Player
0Gnometer, a skin for Rainmeter, has been out for around 3 years now and it has a few outdated settings. So far, I have noticed that the Windows Media Player settings for the Media Player gnometer does not work at all. A quick search through the links on the skin and google will lead you to this new plugin called NowPlaying.
The changes to make it work are simple but they are not easy to find as they are scattered through a few posts on the rainmeter forums.
Below, the fully working settings.ini file.
Photography and Video Class – The End.
0About 2 months ago, I wrote about a photography and video class. It was my intention to write about them weekly and turn those posts into some sort of a summary that would form a mini dossier for this class.
But I didn’t had the time.
And it went too fast. Yes.
But it was nice. I learned a few things (a lot less than what I had imagined, but whatever).
Now, I’m only talking about the Photography part of this formation because, the video part was just ridiculous! I wouldn’t recommend those lessons to anyone in all honesty.
Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object.
04 months ago
by steves
in development
After deploying one of my applications a user reported this error. This is the type of error I personally hate because the Exception Message is not clear to what object is it referring to.
Anyways, nothing that a quick search on Google couldn’t help. Turns out, there’s a limit for input objects in forms defined in ASP.NET since December 2011 Microsoft security patch to prevent malicious code through injection. To change this limit you have to edit your web.config file and add the following code inside your <configuration> tag.
<configuration>... <appSettings> <add key="aspnet:MaxHttpCollectionKeys" value="your_value_here" /> </appSettings> </configuration>
Save your file and restart your IIS.
Photography and Video Class – Lesson #1
06 months ago
So today I had my very first class. We went through the very basics of taking a picture.
The process of taking a picture is always split in three moments. Visualize, understand and learning the environment, that will be the first. You shouldn’t be trigger happy and shoot a bunch of picture hoping one will come out perfect or as you idealized it. You have to get involved with your surroundings and learn from it. See what happens, how everything moves. The second one is composition, best angle, best framing. Finally, comes the technical part where you work with light and exposure.
We went through a selection of photos the teacher (Duarte Neves, if you’re interested) chose, discussed and analyzed them. How they were taken, light position, composition etc. The concepts of light and contrast were also explained and he gave us some pratical examples for better understanding.
All in all it was a blast! Can’t wait for the next lessons!
The worst part of it all is the fact that its 11.54pm and I’m on the train home writing this.
Rant of the month
0Because the “a picture is worth a thousand words” cliché sometimes just doesn’t cut it and the dictionary itself is rather incomplete to come up with a faithful description of whatever travels through the axons of the human brain, I leave this space _______ open to enter whatever word best describes one of the most disgusting, aggressive and pissed off moments I have ever had. (it will come up, eventually)
Discuss.
(pun intented, ha ha!)
Nginx not reading real client IP address?
07 months ago
Recently, while building a logging class to be used on all my php REST/JSON and SOAP webservices, I came across an issue when reading the REMOTE_ADDR server variable.
When using Nginx, the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable comes, by default, with the IP Address of the Nginx machine, which makes sense, if you think about it. Meaning, in a scenario like the following, every single request hitting Nginx, will be forwarded to one of the nodes with the REMOTE_ADDR variable filled with the value 172.20.0.10.
| Nginx 172.20.0.10 |
||
|
Node 1 |
Node 2 172.20.0.12 |
Now, what I wanted was a way to know the client real IP address, which means, on the scenario I mentioned above, if I call a webservice from my computer, the IP address read from my scripts will be 10.104.3.88 instead of 172.20.0.10. But how?
There are several of websites giving you a way of accomplishing this by installing a mod on Apache called mod_rpaf (Reverse Proxy Add Forward) but this mode is not available on the default repositories which makes me unsure on having this running on my server. I want something more transparent.
Solution:
Edit your nginx.conf located on /etc/nginx/ and add the following line:
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
Basically, adds the X-REAL-IP header containing the client ip address.
Reload Nginx, and run the following piece of php code:
<?php echo $_SERVER['HTTP_X_REAL_IP'] ?>
Reference
My thread on the official Nginx Forums: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?11,231704
Maratona Fotográfica
07 months ago
Participação na Maratona Fotográfica de Vila Nova de Famalicão 2012.
Site Oficial: http://12horas12temas12fotografias.blogspot.pt/
GoDaddy apology: Are You Serious?
08 months ago
by steves
in technology
Listen, my website is crap. I know that. I do not sell goods or offer any kind of service other than the occasional “waste your time reading my posts”. That being sad (intentional typo here), the damage made was small (more like none) compared to big websites.
From a marketing and customer care perspective, whether I am a big website or not, is meaningless when we are talking about a failure of delivering service which I (the client) am paying for. So I wonder, who was the genious inside GoDaddy that thought sending an email with a 30% discount code for (and here’s the catch!) new purchases or renewals is a decent way to apologize for your service outage?
SQL: Unable to begin a distributed transaction
0Last week I devoted a full working day to this subject. Distributed Transactions, Linked Servers and MSDTC (Distributed Transaction Coordinator) were the only words available on my internal lexicon. I’ve abused from Google as much as I could with no success. Apparently, there are quite a few issues that can trigger this error, most of them related to a bad MSDTC configuration on both ends (the target SQL server and the one starting the transaction). I was on holidays for 2 weeks and, before I left the office, the queries between servers were working. So I checked, double checked, triple checked all of my configurations. Nothing had changed, and I was not going to change anything on the other end as several other processes could be compromised.
I ended up figuring that, the issue, had nothing to do with _any_ of the solutions found on Google. My problem was totally different.
While taking a break from this issue, I decided to address another issue I had on my TO-DO list, so I started scrolling through my Event Viewer and I had a couple of DFSR (Distributed File System Replication). The error stated:
The DFS Replication service failed to contact domain controller to access configuration information
I ran the following command, as this paper on Technet suggested:
Dfsrdiag pollad /verbose
The result was Operation Failed.
I decided to re-add the server to the Domain. Ran the command again and it ran successfully. I also checked on the Network Adapter if the DNS suffix was properly configured (just in case!). The DFSR started working normally and, out of curiosity I tried to ran my cross-server queries to see if the issue was related to this error, and to my surprise, the query ran with no errors.
Seriously, I am not 100% sure that the cause of the error was the one I described, but the fact is it made it work. On another note, I thought that since there was a problem contacting the DC, maybe that NT Authority/NetworkService account the MSDTC uses to run was not logging on properly thus not being able to authenticate on the end server. I hope this helps someone out there and hopefully save you a few hours of troubleshooting. If it does, drop me a line! If your issue had a totally different solution, I am interested in knowing about it.
Google Searches I made:
The operation could not be performed because OLE DB provider "SQLNCLI" for linked server "dvorak" was unable to begin a distributed transaction.
the dfs replication service failed to contact domain controller to access configuration information
"Msg 7391 Unable to begin a distributed transaction"
sql server 2005 to sql server 2008 msg 7391
sql server msg 7391
linked server unable to start distributed transaction
Distributed Transactions fail on Linked server
We are not guests anymore.
09 months ago
Today I read that Google is testing its latest feature for searches: Gmail results. Meaning that if you type something like “eBay great deals” you will get your eBay emails in the search results. Personally, I don’t see much use for it I mean, if I wanted to search through my emails I’d go directly to my gmail. I’ve been using it for years and it always worked flawlessly, so why would I need another place to search for my emails?
Social Networks
The thing is, this is another step from big companies that already own a considerable share of our data to merge our personal data with the rest of the web. (calm down, mail search does not turn your emails public, only you can see them.) Two weeks ago YouTube (owned by Google) started to ask its users to start using their real names in an attempt to decrease the amount of troll comments on videos by linking your YouTube account to your Google+ profile.
Slowly, your real life persona is invading the digital world and you don’t really notice it. The demand just comes to you in a very, let’s call it, natural way. You add your information because it’s actually fashion to have a Facebook profile, a Twitter account, Instagram, etc. – if you don’t have one of these then eventually someone will ask you “What planet are you from?”.
Now let’s gather everything up and what do these websites know about us? They know what you like, what you do, where you are from, where you live, which college you graduated on, who your friends are, where you usually go and who usually goes with you, how old are you, what you do for a living, where you work and ultimately – because most people do have their photo on their profile – they know who YOU are. There is no place on earth gathering so much information about someone like these websites do – unless you are a terrorist and FBI has eyes on you.
Google even knows what websites you usually visit since it tracks you – through the adds they serve on websites, AdSense & AdWords – so they can provide you with more accurate advertisements.
This might sound a little conspiracy-ish, specially if you are one of those people that spend countless hours on social networks, but there was a time when we were just another person walking around the park and nobody knew us, today, as soon as you hit that “Go” button, you put a big sign over your head with a considerable chunk of data about you.
