Snowulf

I was just looking back through the calendar of posting for earlier this year and was amused by the sporadic posting schedule that I "followed". If you go back to January (or even farther), you can see how infrequently I posted back then. Now we're up to a respectable 3 posts a week schedule, and we've stuck too it. It is really nice to come to the end of the month and look at the calendar and have 3 nice columns. We're now up to 4 months of solid, on time posting.

I'll admit though, that I think the next month or three might be a challenge. I am writing this post this (Monday) morning because I didn't get around to prepping anything last week. I also didn't get around to writing this weekend due to a party and wanting to do some "non-computer" stuff - Gasp! Plus, I'm anxiously awaiting the delivery of my new Nikon D300s. If you hear some squealing that sounds a Japanese school girl, that's probably me and indicative of my Nikon's arrival.

Oh, and PS. Hi Mom (she finally found my blog after 5 years).

I've been running VMware ESXi 3.5 on one of our servers at work; I have been also been running the VMware Infrastructure Client (for 3.5) and it worked just perfectly. Now I'm going to upgrade to EXSi 4.0, so I figured I'd upgrade VMwave vSphere, which seems to be the exact same software. Anyways, as it turns out this wonderful new client is not Windows 7 compatible (oh yea, I'm running on Windows 7 x64 in case I forgot to mention that).

vSphere launched properly but as soon as I tried to connect to the server, I got the following:

Error Parsing the server "<ip address>" "clients.xml" file Login will continue contact your system administrator

Followed directly by:

The type initializer for "VirtualInfrastrcture.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy" threw an exception

Continue reading "Getting VMware vSphere working on Windows 7" »

I think it is safe to say that Starcraft (the original) was one of my all time favorite games. It is one of those few rare games that I kept going back to playing time and time again (much like Planetside). If I didn't have it installed, inevitably it would be installed at the next LAN party. StarCraft was a mainstay of our college's video gaming experience events. We still had StarCraft tournaments, and I'm not afraid to say that we all lost to the Asian high school kids, but we had fun. Now that I think about it though, it's been a few years since I've played it. It's gotten dated, plus John and I replaced it with C&C:Generals Zero Hour, as our RTS of choice. For a LAN party, I wouldn't mind going back, if nothing else so I could set up my walls of photon cannons to piss people off with. Ahhh... good times... good times.

Then... there was StarCraft 2, and great excitement. Obviously with how much I loved StarCraft 1, StarCraft 2 was an immediate pre-order. Or... it was... until Blizzard decided to release some news about it.
Continue reading "StarCraft 2: From Day One Purchase to Piracy" »

I just want to preface this posting with the obvious: This is my personal investigation of the site. I could be wrong, though I don't think I am. If you've got more information on this website, I'm all ears.

Hateno.com. Is. A. Scam. I thought I'd make it really simple for everyone as to what point I'm trying to convey here. Hasteno is an attempt to be another one of those "Micro auction" sites like Swoopo (as has been previously covered, twice). I'll admit, the site looks fairly good. They've got a fair bit of design work, JavaScript and even flash adverts. I personally wouldn't theme my site pink & black, but I'm sure its a matter of personal taste. Regardless, I spent a fair amount of time hunting down information on this site and I will share it with you, in detail.
Continue reading "Hasteno is a Scam" »

I've been doing some reasonable amount of programming as of late, working for miscellaneous projects around the Wikimedia universe. I'll announce the specific projects as I get things to a "finished" or releasable point. For now I thought I'd tease you with random bits of "fun" I encounter when working with PHP.

Today's posting is not the failure of PHP to live up to my expectations, it is about HTTP Error 417 "Expectation Failed". I was writing a file upload bot to push images up to Mediawiki sites, and on my local testing environment it worked perfectly. I then re-pointed the script to upload to Wikimedia Commons and it went all to hell. I started getting HTTP Error 417, which for as long as I've been around the net, I had never before seen. I turned on the debug info for curl:
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, TRUE);

I watched the headers closely and saw that my application was sending "Expect: 100-continue" and after a bit of googling I found that it was something from the HTTP/1.1 spec on negotiating data upload. This is great, but my application sends that it is playing in HTTP/1.0. Obviously this isn't a good thing, and it has been known about for a while. Why it still does it, beats me, but there is an easy way to "fix" it in a PHP application:
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array( 'Expect:' ) );

That's it.
This way curl will send an empty "Expect:" instead of the full "Expect: 100-continue", and subsequently it will get ignored by the server you're talking to. I've found that Apache handles this sort of issue gracefully, which is why my local tests worked. The issue is Squid (which the Wikimedia Foundation uses as reverse proxies) which is much more of a stickler for standards compliance.