cjsimmons.net

I’ve been running Windows Vista for a while now. Everything seems to be going fine, but as I do a bit of BitTorrenting, one thing slipped my mind. Our good friend Event 4226.

As it turns out, fixing the 10 connection limit in Vista isn’t as easy as it was for WindowsXP. As of Vista SP2, Windows requires that tcpip.sys be a signed file, so hacking/replacing/modifying it will cause to become unsigned.

I thought I was screwed, until I came across Half Open Limit Fix. It’s a simple program that will modify the tcpip.sys file, and sort out all the signing so Windows remains happy.

I’ve noticed a huge difference already, but it’s not all fixed. Any future updates to tcpip.sys will revert it to the default version, meaning that the limit will return, and you’ll have to run an updated version of the patch. But for now, it’ll do me fine.

About 2 weeks ago my wife and I went out and brought some DVD movies. One of them had a competition promoting the movie ‘AUSTRALIA‘. So my wife entered her unique code to the competition and won on of the prizes. The prize she won was 100 DVD from Twentieth Century Fox and/or MGM Studios and comes in a leather compendium.

Well, today it finally arrived in the mail. I wasn’t expecting it to arrive so soon, but I quickly worked out what it was. The box was damaged and I feard that it may have been tampered with, so I quickly opened the box, but it was all fine, and wrapped up in a stack of bubble warp.

So yes, 100 movies, most of which I haven’t seen. The oldest movie is Heidi (Colourised) from 1937, and the latest is The Last King Of Scotland from 2007. Here is a photo of the list.

Click for larger version

One that I have to do now is decided what to do with movies that I already have. Now, to get out the popcorn, and start watching all the movies I haven’t watched.

As some people may know DreamHost (my previous host) offer a very generous amount of storage and bandwidth. So much that an average user would not use it, and as a result I never really took to much notice of my bandwidth usage. Now that I’m on a budget plan with only 2500Mb of bandwidth to use every month, each Mb is very precious to me.

I just had a look at my stats, and followed a few of the incomming links to a few sites, and found a few of my images that I’m hosting for my blog appearing on these other sites. Taking a look at the source of these images pointed back to my site, resulting in these sites using my bandwidth for their gain. Or they are just tight and cannot afford a decent size host of their own.

As a result of this, I have enabled HotLink Protection in cPanel, so now all images can only be hotlinked to if I approve it. I could go way beyond and set it up so that it could show some really grose or horrible images, but I’m not that mean of a person. I work hard for my money and pay for my hosting myself, so why can’t others.

If some one really wants to hotlink to one of my images, then please contact me and we can work something out, but just remember that nothing in life is free.

If you want more information on hotlinking, have a look at this wikipedia entry, or do a Google search.

I imported all the content from my previous host, so everything should appear as normal. I’m still using the default theme for now as that is the least of worries for now. Besides, I don’t really mine it. :p

I’m going to be implementing a few new changes around here, the first of which has already been applied. Post that are older the 60 days will have commenting disabled. Who really comments on old posts anyway?? I’ve noticed no one except for spammers, so this will cut that down. I’ve also installed WP Super Cache, but have it running in Half-On mode so mobile users wont be affected.

That is all for now. Other changes will be announced as they are implemented.

Once everything has settled down and things are back to normal, I’m now planing to get back into blogging a bit, so do stay tunned and keep watching this blog.

Ok, so I’ve made the change to my new host. There was a temp page up that some of you may have seen. I’ve installed WordPress, as you can see, so everything should start working fine again.

If anyone has any good ideas for themes, please leave a comment below with your suggestions. I’m thinking of going back to using k2, but I’m starting to get a bit sick of it.

Oh, also let me know if you notice any difference in speed. I’m interested to see now that this is hosted in Melbourne, Australia, rather then in Los Angeles, USA.

Well, that time has come that I’ve decided to look at my current hosting offerings and see if I can beat what I’ve got now, and it seems that I can.

I’m currently using DreamHost for this site, which offers a ridiculous amount of space and bandwidth for US$9.90. Might seem like good value for some folks, but as I’m an Aussie and with the AU$ falling compared to the US$, this amount is going up and up.

As I said before, DreamHost offer a ridiculous amount of space and bandwidth, and looking at my usage shows that I’m only using about 250Mb of space, and about 1Gb of bandwidth, both of which don’t even make 1% of usage.

So I’ve decided to use some local AU based hosting. I can get 2Gb of space and 5Gb of bandwidth for about AU$2/month. Now that’s a huge saving and will be more then I can poke a stick at.

Also, with the savings that I now have, I’ve started using Amazon S3 to store offsite backups of my digital photos, about 10Gb worth, and that works out to be only a few US$’s a month, which I can handle and be at peace of mind knowing that if something bad was to happen to my PC and/or home, they are all safe.

So you can expect to see things change in the coming weeks. One thing that I’m looking forward to is that latency will decrease. AU based hosting is much quicker down here then US hosting. I haven’t yet decided if I will continue blogging, but the increased latency may give me a spark to start it again. WordPress may or may not be installed, but either way, there will be something there providing ways on how you can contact me.