Anyway, I wanted to watch a movie and that’s no problem when we got a NAS at home but the DLNA server of the device is setup to only take content from the music folder on the device (for some reason the DNLA server in the NAS can only provide content from one folder). So I had to find another way to push content to the PS3 system. I knew I wanted to use the network connection since the whole house is build on this network anyway, and secondly I’m rather lazy. Furthermore I really wanted to take advantage of the build-in DNLA streamer/player in the PS3 so I had to setup some kind of DNLA server on my laptop or other kind of computer.

I Googled around the interwebs and found Java PS3 Media Server at Google Code. It’s an awesome project which I hope continues. Well the project looked really nice and I downloaded and installed the server only my laptop which easily should be able to serve the content seen from a processor (Intel Core 2 Duo, 1.8 GHz) and memory (3 GB) point of view.

First I tried to stream some random video content and is ran smoothly but when I choose a bit more demanding kind of content the stream just couldn’t keep up with the demand. I firstly tried to lower the transcoding settings and looked at the network load at the same time. This is what I found:

Note that I boosted the transcode buffer maximum size up to 600.0 MB.

Streaming audio

I set the default quality of audio streaming down from 640 KBit/s to 320 KBit/s and I did that first of all because I wanted to keep my portability and not needing a network cable plugged into both the laptop and the PS3 which both were operating wirelessly. Secounly I didn’t need all of that quality since I rip my CD’s at 320 KBit/s and the transcoding was going into AC3 which means that even at a low bitrate I would get rather good quality out of the Samsung LE32B535 which is connected to the PS3. I also changed the number of audio channels from a whooping 5.1 (6 channels) to stereo (2 channels) again because I wanted portability and I wasn’t streaming to any surround sound system.

When buffering a song the network load hits properly just maxes out. When the starting buffer is full and streaming normally the network load is just around 125.000 byte/sec (0.96 Mbit/sec) which I think is really good (when filling rest of the buffer). Keeping the normal network load under 1 Mbit/sec. means that nearly every wireless setup will be able to stream smoothly.

Streaming pictures

Not much to say here to be quite frank. The times it takes for the pictures to load is of course dependant of the size of the pictures and of course the maximum network speed.

Streaming video and problems

Good software always have a butt, and this one got a bad one of those. My network connection couldn’t keep up with the request of data and therefore the video was a real pain the in ass to watch. Well this only happen with some movies. I tried ripping in different bitrates at 1800 kilobyte/sec. the video stuttered every some seconds, but at around 1150 kilobyte/sec the network connection could keep up, but only just (stutters sometimes). So the real pain in the but is the network speed, I would recommend using cables (at least 100 megabit/sec. of course) when streaming stuff to your PS3 using this software. You could use at lower bitrate but then it wouldn’t really be fun to watch on a full HD monitor, right?

I think you should try it out In my tests both my PS3 and my laptop was in the other range of the wireless access point. When I get the time I’ll try the same tests with both devices connected to the network with cables.

But despite the fact of this almost (in computer and internet terms) prehistoric release date TrendLabs’s writer David Sancho still found it relevant to comment on it December 21, 2009. Hole smoke, talk about late timing.

The paper is written about which files you can let your antivirus software not scan in order to increase the performance of your operating system. The decrease of performance is due to file locking. Microsoft recommends that if you are having performance issues cost by the antivirus which is caused by these locked files. It’s a quick and rather dirty fix, which is also what David Sancho wants to point out.

David Sancho got the point when he say the following:

In line with this, we advise users to educate themselves fully about these recommendations before taking any action.

I states that the biggest risk to the consumers computer and internet security is the consumer themselves. As security professionals we need to secure the consumers from themselves because, sadly, they don’t have a clue of what they are doing or what they are agreeing when visiting malicious and non-malicious websites. This of course, is badly generalised but if you as a security concerned programmer wants to create the most secure environment for your user, you’ll have to secure the user from the user itself.

Back to the Microsoft paper. Microsoft as a huge influence on the users should consider more carefully what they are releasing to the public and most of all they should re-read their own papers at least every year in order to make sure that they are giving their users the best kind of advise and in that way contributing to a more secure environment for the normal user.

What do you think of all this? What should Microsoft do to create a more secure envirnorment? Or should the users be more poweruser like?

The Microsoft paper can be found here.

The blog post by David Sancho can be found here.

This has resulted in some dramatic changes and improvements. But I’ve also got some things I would like to investigate further to improve the extension further.

Why doesn’t the extension (toolstrip) catch backspace key press but it does catches a normal key press like an enter key press or a simple letter?

Furthermore I’m considering letting an “enter” key press in the input field call the TwitterMe() function instead of letting the button (id=”submitMe”) doing so.

If you got some thoughts on this please comment this post.

Now for the changes and improvements of the new version of the extension. As Aaron suggested in my last post as a comment to the first and earlier version I let the Twitter-icon be a controller for toggling the visibility of the input and button. This works quite well after I decided to use jQuery as the JavaScript framework in this extension. I would have liked to expand the extension in the height but I couldn’t get Chrome to “dynamically” change the height of the toolstrip, only the width. I think the below quote should be rewritten if it’s only possible “dynamically” change the height of the toolstrip.

The toolbar automatically detects how much space a toolstrip needs and reflows. So you can resize your toolstrip dynamically if you need a little more room temporarily. - http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensions/toolstrips

Aaron also asked why I didn’t use a XHR call to the (brilliant) Twitter API instead of using the server-layer and that me research the possibilities of such a solution. After some investigation it’s now working fantastic.

Furthermore I decided to kick out the username and password fields since they were ruining the flow of extension. Your username and password is now to be entered in the “twitter-interface.html” which now also is XHTML Strict 1.0 valid (if that matters anyway).

Underneath I’ll include the download link to the new version as well as some new screenshots. Have fun and comment please!

Download link: http://e-x-e.dk/labs/chrome-twitter/twitter-addon_v_0_2.zip

Did you enjoy this post? Have a look at the post before, in this post there are some more information about installing the add-on (extension): http://www.e-x-e.dk/2009/05/29/labs-twitter-add-on-extension-for-google-chrome/.

So, today I saw some article about the Google Chrome add-ons (extensions as they also call them). And since I’m a Chrome user myself I decided to play along by creating a small basic extension for Chrome.

I went along and created a small extension which would update a persons status on Twitter (and possibly also Facebook - through the Twitter application). It works in a really simple fashion using a client-part and a server-part. I had to do so since Google Chrome doesn’t support native cURL yet. So this is how it works:

Client-part: A simple form containing the status, username and password which is posting to a php file (post.php).

Server-part: The server-part consists of the post.php and the twitterAPI.php. The post.php handels the post from the client and calls the function (in twitterAPI.php) which does a cURL post to the Twitter API. The function returns a fresh form ready to update the status after entering the new status and the password (username has been passed on after the return). The twitterAPI.php is a modified edition of the original work of Antonio Lupetti (http://woork.blogspot.com/2007/10/twitter-send-message-from-php-page.html)

For testing I just used the commandline option by editing the shortcut:
Target:
    "path_to_the_chrome.exe" --enable-extensions --load-extension="The_path_to_the_addon_folder"

    fx.
    "C:\Users\Thomas Stig Jacobsen\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --enable-extensions --load-extension="C:\Users\Thomas Stig Jacobsen\Documents\Chrome addons\twitter"
Start in:
    "path_to_your_chrome_application_folder"

    fx.
    "C:\Users\Thomas Stig Jacobsen\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application"

I’m allowing anyone to use my server as the server-part (there is no kind of logging, I’m using the files that you can download underneath).

All the files can be found here:

http://e-x-e.dk/labs/chrome-twitter/twitter-addon.zip

Screenshot:

Though the years one.com has upgraded it’s offers from time to time and each time I and other old customers have been upgraded as well, for that I’m sure we all are very grateful.

Even though one.com is a nice, reliable and fast host it still has some lacks and the one of them that has been most frustrating has got be the fact that you CAN NOT connect to the MySQL server externally. The first year of my subscription with one.com I didn’t really use the MySQL at all since I was a HTML kid who didn’t got broadband yet and therefore did all my server-scripting (with a database) at home on a private local server. But the problem was shown it’s UGLY face each and every time I’m doing a new project on my one server for a change.

The main problem is really that I’m a desktop- and not a all-browser-guy. Summed up: I DOSN’T LIKE phpMyAdmin at all, in any way what so ever. I uses the desktop administrative tools from MySQL.com which I find a lot more useful. But in order to connect to your MySQL server externally, you need to know the servers IP or DNS address but even though I’ve been literally begging one.com for an IP or DNS nothing good has come out of it. So sad…

All of this frustration puts me in a kind of messy situation. I doesn't want to leave a good and reliable host for this one thing. But on the other side I doesn't want to be dependant on other peoples servers/hosts where it’s an option to connect to the MySQL externally.

So my question to you dear reader, what should I do? Should I leave my good old host one.com and jeopardize my reliable site, e-mails etc?

I found a help article here: http://tinyurl.com/2qqc49

and I decided to to write a quick BASIC (*.bat) file to make a bit more automatic. I did that because I'm a lazy cow, as all programmers. (is BASIC really programming, anyway I think it is). You can see the source below.

@echo off
title Registrering the SSL- and XML-libraries
echo Do you want to do this?
set /P answer=Y for yes, N for No:
cls
goto %answer%
:Y
	echo Running function
	echo.
	%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\REGSVR32 /s softpub.dll
		echo softpub.dll done
	%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\REGSVR32 /s wintrust.dll
		echo wintrust.dll done
	%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\REGSVR32 /s initpki.dll
		echo initpki.dll done
	%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\REGSVR32 /s Rsaenh.dll
		echo Rsaenh.dll done
	%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\REGSVR32 /s Mssip32.dll
		echo Mssip32.dll done
	%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\REGSVR32 /s Cryptdlg.dll
		echo Cryptdlg.dll done
	%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\REGSVR32 /s Dssenh.dll
		echo Dssenh.dll done
	%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\REGSVR32 /s Gpkcsp.dll
		echo Gpkcsp.dll done
	%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\REGSVR32 /s Slbcsp.dll
		echo Slbcsp.dll done
	%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\REGSVR32 /s Sccbase.dll
		echo Sccbase.dll done
	%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\REGSVR32 /s msxml3.dll
		echo Msxml3.dll done
	echo.
	echo Function done, press any key to exit
	pause
	exit
:N
	echo Press any key to exit
	pause
	exit

Now that I have you here I'll also present some of my other helping BASIC functions I've written.

• ip.bat
• google.bat
• wiki.bat
• statuscheck.bat
• whois.bat
• findperson.bat
• ordbog.bat

I don't think I'll post all the source here but I'll upload a small ZIP file containing all the BAT files for you to review.

URL to the zip file: http://www.e-x-e.dk/stuff/bats.zip

Here is a small presentation to the files:

ip.bat

A simple bat file showing my internal IP, subnet and gateway IP.

Example: ip

google.bat

This reads the first argument, fx. google Hello+World will google the 2 words "Hello" and "world" (without the quotes). You'll have to use the + as a " " because BASIC doesn't contain a replace function.

Example: google Hello+world

wiki.bat

Same method as google.bat but searches Wikipedia.org with the argument instead. I've set it to search the Danish Wikipedia.org since I'm Danish. But this can easily be changed.

Example: wiki Hello+world

statuscheck.bat

This will ping a host or IP which it reads from the first argument and declare it UP or DOWN using errorlevel1.

Example: statuscheck e-x-e.dk

Example: statuscheck 192.168.1.1

whois.bat

A simple whois script for us non-linux users where it's a built in component. It reads argument1 which has to be the domain (fx. e-x-e) and it reads argument2 which has to be the type of doman (fx. dk).

Example: whois e-x-e dk

findperson.bat

This is for danish people since this looks up a person on the Danish site krak.dk. Argument1 is name and argument2 is address.

Example: findperson Anders+fogh

(Anders Fogh is the Danish Prime Minister)

ordbog.bat

Also a file for the danish people. It looks up a word in a dictionary called ordbogen.com. Argument1 is the word and argument2 is the dictionary code.

Best setting for dictionary is auto, enda or daen.

Example: ordbog human enda

In order get these to work in the best way you'll have to place all the files in the %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\ folder. In most cases C:\WINDOWS\system32\.

If you do that you'll be able to run them from the run-dialog (Windows-key and R) and use the example.

I'm going to write the tips in a chronology order as the day goes a long.

Morning: Get up early and start the day good. This could be a general tip for anyone but it's really important to get up early. In that way you'll have a whole day instead of just a half one. It's better to start early and end the day early than starting the day late and end the day very late!

And get really up, I mean you have to get up, take a shower, eat breakfast and get properly dressed before you work. You can't work in a pyjamas.

Noon:Make sure you get normal breaks. One at noon for lunch and one in the afternoon. In that way you don't have to leave your work behind because your starving.

NOTE: Do not take your break the same place your working, otherwise it isn't really a break. Have some zones in the house with work-only and non-work.

Afternoon and night: When the working day is about to end then end it. Don't "take your work home" otherwise you'll just keep working (or thinking at work).

General tips:

Separate your time. Don't take a hour out of your working day to raid in WoW or anything like that. You'll forget everything about work and keep playing (I've tried that one). AND: limit distractions, avoid TV, (non-)VOIP and phone calls etc.

Have a good working plan. Make a plan (maybe) a month ahead so you have some goals of the day. Else it can be hard to know what you've just spend a whole day working on.

Dedicated to my dear friend Stefan Bohlin, your the greatest dude! I wish you the best of luck with your firm!