Author Archives: Riscy

Upgrading Drupal from 5.7 to 6.1

Well it took a while but I managed to get all three sites updated to Drupal 6.1. Riscy.biz and gonetogove.com actually have less features now than they did before because not all modules are up to 6.1 yet. I am also running patched versions of TinyMCE and Image Assist modules just to get by.

The biggest problem was that the update doesn’t work properly. DO NOT UPGRADE TO 6.1 WITHOUT A DATABASE BACKUP. I hosed Riscy.biz and Gonetogove.com because of this and had to restore an old database backup. Make sure you have a full backup first.

The problem is the migration of the image, file and node tables into the new format. The normal upgrade doesn’t care about the image module and removes an essential field.

I posted the details here:

This issue is caused by the upgrade procedure deleting the nid field
files table before the image module update has a chance to get to it. I
spent most of this weekend working this out. What you need to do (make
sure you have a database backup) is to get ready for the upgrade to 6.1
then when you run update.php, click on the select versions button and
set all of the modules to 'No updates available' except for image
module. You will get lots of errors but now you can run update.php
again but this time you need to go and select the earliest version 6 update for all modules except image.

If you need more details just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

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Company of Heroes – Carentan

This is by far my favourite mission in Company of Heroes. Mainly because the computer is actually a challenge and the Axis use artillery and tanks. Initially you don’t have any tanks and this makes the battle pretty exciting.

You start the mission with 2 units of paratroopers and four units of engineers. Two engineer units are inside your bases (the church at the bottom and the main HQ in the square). Get them out and put them to work.

 

You can use the engineers to put some sandbags down in front of the bridges.

Because it takes time to make the defences you need to do a few things at the same time

Use the paratroopers to go over the river and capture the two points. Be careful with the right hand point there is a sniper covering the point. I use the jeep and a paratrooper unit.

Use the troops to throw a grenade over the wall and hit the German squad.

 

The use the jeep to attack the sniper in the building while you sprint your troops and throw a grenade in the window (the example shown below isn’t very successful because I lost a couple of guys to the sniper.

 

The other sniper is on the other side in the building shown below:

Capture the two points and fortify them as usual. Now build another unit of troops. They will be used to man two Anti-tank guns. They are located:

and here:

Move them across the river to the two points you just captured. I try and make a defence similar to the one below:
 

The sandbags provide you with some cover. There is a MG there to pick up. You can build a MG nest as well to cover you if the enemy soliders get too close.

Make sure you cover the flanks. The other point defence should look similar to this:

MG in the house, wire and sandbags to help cover. The anti-tank gun works well in this spot. I cover the flank of this spot with a MG nest and wire to stop the enemy from moving around behind:

I put a few paratroopers around each flag, upgraded with anti-tank weapons (either found or upgrades). Now you should be mining the bridges:

This will take out a few tanks after your troops over the river are wiped out (yes sorry but they will be killed) . Create some traps for infantry and tanks like below:

 

MG for the infantry and anti-tank gun. When you have run out of time the Germans will spawn on the edge of the map. To get a good look at them I have two snipers each told to hold their fire and invisible. Put them in a spot where they won’t be too close to the action but gives your troops advance warning of their location. This works very well with the anti-tank guns. You can also use the off map artillery to wipe out tanks and infantry:

 

The battle will be pretty hectic, they will have heaps of tanks, mortars, and engineers with flame throwers. They don’t have any more snipers (thank goodness). You need to keep these two points for as long as possible. At each point I had a sniper, three para squads and engineers with flame throwers and a MG nest and a MG unit.

 

The Germans spawn on the edge of the map. You can be pretty nasty on the right hand side and have units camping their spawn 🙂

Eventually they will overwhem you. The get a mass of troops and stuff moving forward and not stopping. This happens after they bomb the crap out of everything and blow up the HQ. The voice over tells you to fall back to the church. This is the signal to build up some defences there for the last stand. Keep troops up forward to get more kills so you can get closer to the 250 mark

You need to have at least two or three anti-tank guns. A MG in the church is handy, three or four paratroop squads with anti tank guns.

Flank around behind tanks using buildings to get the rear armour shots:

Place a MG nest here to cover the sides.

 

You have to hold out for a while before Able company comes to help. As soon as this happens move a tank that spawns to each of these locations. Go straight there and don’t worry these tanks take almost no damage for some reason:

Another tank here:

Another tank here:

Do this because the Germans are going to retreat and this takes some potential targets away. You need to cover all the escape routes. Once the tanks are in place move your infantry forward to flush out the enemy. DO NOT KILL ALL THE TANKS. As soon as all the tanks are killed the mission ends. You need to keep at least one alive so you can flush out the infantry for kills. Take back all the points so you have enough points for grenades and upgrades etc. Your population will probably be over the cap of 70 so no new troops for you. Use a invisible sniper to spot the Germans.

Push the Germans out like in the pic below into the range of your tanks. Easy kills!

If you didn’t take out this sniper earlier, do it now. Another kill!

 

Use a sniper to take out infantry because tanks will just want to blow up the German tanks and possibly end the mission too early.

 

 

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Nokia 6151 Problems

The company I work for recently got me a Nokia 6151 mobile phone and all the accessories recently as a replacement for the one that went through the washing machine. Initially I thought it was a great phone, nice screen, good quality sound, camera, MP3 player all good stuff. I even bought a 2Gb microSD card to put music on it so I could listen to tunes with the headphones.

However recently the phone has been giving me trouble, mainly with incoming call. When I hear the phone ring I press the Green button (or the middle button which is also Answer) and say "Hello" only to have no feedback and also I can’t hear the person who is ringing me. To start with this only happened once every 4 or 5 calls. Now it happens all the time. Sometimes the other person hears
Fax machine sounds" obviously digital information coming across the phone line.

This isn’t only happening to me, everyone at my workplace with a Nokia 6151 is having the same problem. We all have the same firmware:

V 03.91
25-09-06
RM-200
(c) Nokia

 

I found this message on the Nokia forums in Europe:
Link

Some people have said that turning the phone off for a while and turning it back on fixes the problem, not for me. I have also tried removing the battery and leaving it out for an hour before powering it back up, still no good.

I have also heard that you can’t buy new 6151 phones in Australia at the moment, shipment dates are "unknown" and "to be advised". Could Nokia be having a major problem with the phone and they are looking at fixing the firmware before sellling any more. I can’t find any information from Nokia on this and there isn’t any updated firmware available.

It will be interesting to see if Nokia fix these phones in the near future.

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Useful info for Gentoo users

Gentoo Forums :: View topic – emerge -U world – How often

I found this post in the Gentoo forums. Someone had it in their signature and is a useful hint on how you SHOULD use emerge to update packages.

Powered by ScribeFire.

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Windows Genuine Disadvantage

Sick of Microsoft sticking it's nose in your computer turn off the phone home facility of the Windows Genuine Advantage spyware.

http://www.firewallleaktester.com/removewga.htm

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Another dead hard disk

Another disk drive died today. This one was the system disk of my HTPC which runs Gentoo. I first noticed the problem when it dropped off the network and then was taking forever to rip a DVD. Rebooting only made things worse, Grub couldn't find the kernel. Uh oh!

So I'm in the process of trying to see if I can recover anything using information I found about using dd with disk errors:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050302225659382

Next I will have to do a fresh new install of Gentoo, what a pain. 

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BRW Triathlon – Melbourne

I competed in the BRW triathlon today. I managed to finish the 400m swim, 10km bike ride and 4km run in 56 minutes 20 seconds. I’m pretty happy with that for my first ever triathlon. The team I was in got the following result:

Team member 1 (that was me)

Swim 10:03, Bike 27:56, Run 18:21

Total 56:20 

Team member 2 (Nick)

Swim 14:13, Bike 25:37, Run, 17:37

Total 57:27

Team member 3 (Chad)

Swim 14:53, Bike 28:58, Run 26:12

Total

Grand Total 3:03:50

I think I got the easy deal because I went first I had to do less running. It was also significantly hotter later in the day when the sun came out. Chad got a cramp at the 2km mark on the run and had to get some massage from someone nearby. I imagine the heat would have contributed to that.

When I get some photos I will post them.

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Upgrade Home to Professional

c’t 12/2005, page 148 – Windows XP HomePro

Windows XP Home promoted to Professional

This is great! Finally people can all use the good feature of Windows XP Pro even if they only bought Home. Home is really a major pain. I have seen a few products that refuse to work properly on the Home version. But now, by following the instructions you can "Patch" XP Home to be almost as good.

Nice work!

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Cacti, SNMP and Gentoo

Here are the instructions I followed to get SNMP and Cacti working on Gentoo:

emerge cacti cacti-cactid
groupadd cacti
useradd -g cacti -G cron cactiuser

cd /var/www/localhost/htdocs/cacti/
mysql –user=root cacti < cacti.sql
chown -R cactiuser rra/ log/
mysql
mysql> create database cactidb;
mysql> grant all on cactidb.* to root;
mysql> grant all on cactidb.* to root@localhost;
mysql> grant all on cactidb.* to cactiuser;
mysql> grant all on cactidb.* to cactiuser@localhost;
mysql> set password for cactiuser@localhost=password(‘mycactipw’);
mysql> exit

nano config.php

$database_type = "mysql";
$database_default = "cacti";
$database_hostname = "localhost";
$database_username = "cactiuser";
$database_password = "mycactipw";

Now open browser to http://localhost/cacti

Follow the steps:

Login as admin password admin
change password

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Gentoo nano and word wrap

Well I said in my initial Gentoo post that I would detail how to make Nano the text editor default to non-word wrap mode so you don’t have to specify the -w option everytime to edit a file.

You need to make sure you have a .nanorc file in your home directory. If you don’t there should be one in /etc/ (/etc/nanorc). So copy that one:

cp /etc/nanorc ~/.nanorc

Now edit the file

 nano -w ~/.nanorc

I uncommented the following options:

  • set autoindent
  • set mouse
  • set nowrap
  • set smarthome
  • set smooth

I also inserted some syntax based colouring options (I think I found most of them either in nanorc or forums.gentoo.org)

Edited: If you want to look at the syntax colouring download the nanorc file attached to this blog entry. It’s easier to read anyway.

Hooray for nano! 

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