Dora the Explorer World Adventure workaround

My daughter was heartbroken when we bought this cheap and it didn't work under IE7, so with a little investigation I came up with this workaround rather than 'downgrade to IE6' as Activision recommend.

Download the 'standalone' IE6 from http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone

Uncompress it into C:\Program Files\Activision Value\Dora World Adventure

Then bring up a command prompt (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories under Windows XP) and type

        cd "C:\Program Files\Activision Value\Dora World Adventure" 
        copy IEXPLORE.EXE.local DoraAdventure.exe.local 
        exit 

And voila, it should just work. I'd expect this would work for any of your games that rely on IE6 for their presentation engine

iptables rules to lock out multiple failed ssh attempts

Two simple lines to run at boot:

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -i eth0 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set &

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -i eth0 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 -j DROP &

Minimal Debian 4.0r0 install on VMWare

Did the install and unchecked all uses except 'base system'. To install the VMware tools, had to add the following packages

psmisc - for killall
linux-headers-`uname -r`
gcc (with deps binutils, cpp, cpp-4.1, gcc-4.1 libssp0)
make

Accepting the defaults for vmware-config-tools seemed to do the trick. Except for the HGFS module - that didn't load on reboot.

Dualboot VMware

I got fed up with running out of disk space so I stuck an old EIDE disk (PATA?) in my Dell to stick my virtual machines on (using the advice from the previous post).

Having two different drive types worked out well. I want to play with Xen when I get a chance, so I thought I'd try setting up CentOS 5 for dual-booting and for running inside a VM when I'm running Windows.

After a quick read of the old docs for VMware 4.5 I found by Googling (http://www.vmware.com/support/ws45/doc/disks_dualboot_ws.html) I created a custom machine configuration that exposed the physical disk to the virtual machine.



Installed CentOS using VMware (because I couldn't get my machine to boot of the DVD-ROM for some reason) without a hitch, rebooted and hit F12 for the boot menu, selected the Master Primary IDE disk (rather than the SATA Master) and it booted right into CentOS.

There are a couple of issues to resolve - the graphics and audio drivers change depending on which environment CentOS is booted in. I need to add something to the init process to switch around the configuration files depending on the boot configuration. I suppose there could be a mechanism built into the OS...

VMWare Workstation Tweaks

I found a useful little article on VMWare disk performance

http://www.virtualization.info/2005/11/how-to-improve-disk-io-performances.html

It recommends disabling anti-virus auto-scanning of the VMDK and VMEM files - I also followed the .ISO recommendation as I attach a lot of them for installation/liveCD testing.

Wot no updates

So much for blogging - haven't updated this in weeks. I'm working on a couple of projects - replacing my phone service with Asterisk running on my Linksys router and I'm toying with integrating Bacula with the Amazon S3 service so I can stop worrying about backups.

I'm also trying out the CentOS 4.92 beta. Running the hgfs driver for shared folders with SELinux enabled caused the kernel to panic. Once I disable it, it worked fine. 'dmesg' had an error in it about hgfs not supporting labelling so I thought I'd get rid of it.

SQLServer 2005 trigger debugging

They've removed the T-SQL debugger in SQLServer 2005. Luckily I have 1 day left of my Visual Studio 2005 trial.

The way to debug a trigger is to create a stored procedure that exercises the trigger (mine just did an update on the table), set a breakpoint in the trigger where you want, and then step into the *stored procedure* by right clicking on it. Bobs your uncle, VS grinds away and you get to your breakpoint (eventually).