Jul31

Adsense vs ProjectWonderful

by Nick on 2012/07/31 at 18:00
Posted In: Website

On the 101 Week project for uOttawa, traffic is steadily decent. The first three week period showed 3,700 visits and 13,000 pageviews.  More recently, (in the last week), it has been averaging 200-400 visits/day and 1000 pageviews/day.  With this lower end amount of traffic, I decided to test out two advertising companies for websites: ProjectWonderful and Google’s AdSense.  After the first day, ProjectWonderful is still just gathering stats and AdSense is generating 3 cents per 1000 views.  The ProjectWonderful ad has no minimum bid.  They’re also both leaderboards.

While neither will generate any substantial revenue, it should be an interesting experiment to see which fares better for a short-term project.

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Jul17

Disable Device Install Windows 7

by Nick on 2012/07/17 at 18:07
Posted In: Windows 7

To disable the ability to install new devices on Windows 7, you can create/modify the following registry key:

 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceInstall\Restrictions]
“DenyUnspecified”=dword:00000001

 

To re-enable the ability, simply change the dword value of DenyUnspecified to 0.

 

Note that you will likely need to create the registry key directories for DeviceInstall and Restrictions.

 

Credit

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Jun22

Apache UID by VHost

by Nick on 2012/06/22 at 18:03
Posted In: Apache

Credit

You might want to increase security on your webserver by limiting what each VirtualHost or site can access. Whether you’re acting as a shared host or just want to separate your own sites, you can use the Apache2 mpm-itk module to do this. The linked article above explains how to accomplish this using Apache2 and Debian, but I will explain the simple steps required to do so on OpenSuse.

  • Using Yast or zypper, install the module “apache2-itk”.
  • Edit the file at /etc/sysconfig/apache2
    • Set the APACHE_MPM value to itk (ie APACHE_MPM=”itk”)
  • Add the following to your VirtualHost configuration (within the “VirtualHost” tags but not in any “Directory” tags)
    • <IfModule mpm_itk_module>
      AssignUserId owner group
      </IfModule> 
  • Update the file permissions on your VirtualHost DocumentRoot (chown owner:group -R somedirectory/)
  • Restart apache (/etc/init.d/apache2 restart)
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Jun21

Romer Suprastuff

by Nick on 2012/06/21 at 18:20
Posted In: Uncategorized

A very old version of Romer software called Suprastuff was designed to run in MS Dos.  Our original installation had it on a Windows 98 laptop provided by Romer way back in the day. A recent task was to migrate it to a new laptop because it was on its last legs. This turned out to be quite a challenge because of the legacy software.  It turns out that Windows XP and later virtualize MS DOS using NTVDM (more on that here). With this, the MS DOS applications cannot access the hardware (eg COM Ports) directly (whereas it could in old versions of MS Dos provided in Windows 2000, 98, and 95).

The end solution was to run a base install of Windows XP and virtualize an install of Windows 98 using Microsoft Virtual PC.  Once sharing the hardware COM and LPT ports, the virtual Windows 98 install could run the Suprastuff software to allow the Romer arm to make 3D point clouds.  Bonus: no more floppy disc file transfers.

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Jun13

PHP dBase and Extension Compiling

by Nick on 2012/06/13 at 18:27
Posted In: PHP

Credit to Zenware for this solution

In the later PHP versions (in this example, 5.3.8), the dBase extension is not included by default. You need to compile it from source.  Zenware’s blog post took a bit of searching to find, so I’m hoping an extra post about it will make the search faster for the next admin. These instructions (while vague) will be on an Open Suse 12.1, x64 system.  These instructions can also be generalized for compiling any PHP extension from source.

  1. Using yast (or zypper), make sure you have the following packages installed:
    • PHP5-Devel
    • GCC
    • (may not be required, but specific to later versions of dBase): PHP5-PEAR
  2. Download the dBase (or other extension) source files.  dBase link (I am using 5.1.0)
  3. Extract it using “tar -xf file.tar“
  4. Navigate to the newly extracted directory
  5. Run the following commands
    • phpize
    • ./configure
    • make
  6. Copy the resulting .so file in the modules directory to your PHP extensions directory (on a default 64 bit system, this might be /usr/lib64/php5/extensions). For 32 bit: /usr/lib/php5/extensions
  7. Add the following line to your php.ini (may be located in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini)
    • extension=dBase.so
  8. Restart apache (/etc/init.d/apache2 restart)

 

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