Cowdude's site

Router keeps resetting to factory defaults?

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 06:21:08 +0000

I have a six-year old Linksys WRT54GL router, but twice this evening I lost connection with it because it reset all of its settings (SSID back to "linksys", network went insecure, port forwarding table wiped out, admin username/password reset, etc) to the factory defaults. I set it all back up after the first time, hoping it wouldn't do it again, but a few hours later (four or five hours) it did it again.

So obviously I here to ask why this is might be happening. Both times it did this while I was connected to it on multiple machines and I know nobody physically touched the router. The power didn't go out or anything, but I can't say for certain whether or not it rebooted itself when it happened. Is it just doing this because the router is really old? Or is it likely someone (or a virus?) is hacking in and resetting it all somehow? I don't think that's likely, but you never know, I guess.

The router's set up with a WEP code, and the username and password are changed from the defaults, and I don't thhhhink any of the computers on the network had the username/password saved, but mine might've. I tend to check password-saving checkboxes instinctively...

This router doesn't cause us nearly as much grief as our ISP, but the router says its firmware is six years old, and that's probably correct for the hardware, too, so maybe the router's just too old and needs replacing. Or maybe there's a virus out there targetting people on Linksys routers, resetting their routers to the factory settings instead of doing cooler, more productive things like stealing personal information.

HDMI Graphics Card Sound Problem

Sun, 15 May 2011 16:23:35 +0000

I've got a computer with Windows 7 and an ATI Radeon HD 4600 graphics card with an HDMI output, connected via HDMI cable to some sort of Sylvania flat-screen TV, but sometimes there's no sound. If I go to the volume controls, the volume slider for the TV is gone, and all I have is the slider for speakers (which I don't have connected because I have a TV). Usually if I turn the computer on before the TV, the sound works, but sometimes not, and if I turn the TV off and back on it loses the sound. The only way I can find to get the sound back without turning the computer off is to unplug the HDMI cable and plug it back in. Sometimes when I lose the sound I get an error message that pops up and says:

An HDMI to DVI display connection has been detefcted. In order to hear audio on your HDMI based TV or display, you will need to have a separate audio connection from your computer sound outputs to your TV or audio equipment. For more information, click the Help button.

And the Help button, of course, doesn't help, because it assumes its diagnosis of the situation is correct and that I am using an adapter, when really no, I am just using an HDMI cable.

So does anyone who knows things about technology know how I can get sound all of the time and avoid this error?

Infinite Loop Problem

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 02:22:50 +0000

Code:

mob/verb/Loops()
    infiniteLoop()
proc/infiniteLoop()
    sleep(20)
    spawn() infiniteLoop()

Problem description:

This may or may not just get closed since I've already submitted this as a bug report, but eh. BYOND tends to not fix my bugs, or at least not fix them soon. But anyway, the issue is that I have a loop that I call this way that crashes without an error after about a day and a half, so I need a way of doing this that does not crash. The bug report is here if you want to see what the problem is.

Essentially, any infinite loop that I call from world/New() crashes eventually. I thought it was just fine to do while(1) and let it go forever, as long as you didn't want to execute any code after the while loop started. If I'm wrong about that, replying to this post will be easy, but otherwise I'm wondering if anyone has had problems with calling infinite loops from world/New.

I've used infinite loops in projects before, and they can be especially handy in games that are hosted for days or weeks at a time, but I've never had problems with them silently crashing like this. And it's not my loop; I originally had one loop that was doing two completely different things at different rates, and I split it into two loops to see if one half of it was crashing, but they both eventually crash if I do that, and not at the same time. Currently I've got it back to one loop, and it just all happens inside world/New() in a while(1) instead of spawning and calling another function, because I thought spawning was the issue, since spawning causes the issue described in my bug report, but the procedure eventually crashes anyway.

Making a hidden admin verb that started the infinite loop wouldn't fix this, would it? I wouldn't do that permanently, but since I'm assuming that BYOND bug is related to my loops crashing, if someone thinks that'd work I might try it. These loops take at least half a day to crash, though, so it's kinda hard to debug.

Weird Browser Issue (Nope. I fixed it.)

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 01:36:06 +0000

It's called Caret Browsing, and apparently F7 can turn it on. It is that easy.

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For some reason if I click somewhere on a web page in IE8, a cursor appears there. This has been going on for about a week, and screws me up when I'm trying to scroll with arrow keys and PageUp/PageDown. If I hit arrow keys, the cursor moves, and I can even hold shift and it'll highlight text as it goes.

Mostly I want to know if this is a browser setting I hit on accident, or if something downloaded itself onto my computer. I haven't really gone to any new web sites in the last couple of weeks other than just general browsing, though I just did a CS project for school with a group, and for some reason my group decided to use Google Docs to keep our code synced instead of one of the two or three programs recommended by the teacher that are actually... made for that... But Google Docs has a browser-based text editor, which reminds me of what's going on here, so maybe Google intruded on my browser settings or something. I hadn't used Google Docs before that point, so that's who I'm blaming right now.

I don't have any other browsers to try this on, but I don't think a browser setting or virus would affect multiple browsers anyway. Probably just the one I was using at the time. But I don't know that.

(Also, I will not switch browsers just because someone I don't know on BYOND tells me IE is a bad browser. I already ignore people whom I do know. So don't bother with that.)

Trying to format an SD card

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 22:39:23 +0000

I have an 8 GB SD card that I need to format, but my computer won't read it. It's kind of a paradox; I need to format it so that my computer can read it, but my computer won't format it because it can't read it. I've got a program that tries to read the card, but eventually gives up and claims it has an unknown file system. I dunno why it needs to know the file system to write zeroes all over it, but whatever.

For the sake of keeping this simple, let's say I have no idea what the file system is on this card, and I have no idea what's on it. It should work -- I've barely used it -- but I was experimenting on it with a program a few months ago so I don't remember exactly what I did to it anymore.

As for what I've got that can read this SD card, I've got my Grandma's computer downstairs, a cheap USB thing up here, and my Wii. When I try to open the card in Windows Explorer, it freezes up for about a minute before telling me to put a disk in the drive, so I dunno what to do from here. My Wii has a DOSBox port on it, but other than its SD reader being more reliable than my USB reader, I doubt it can format it any better than a computer can. Also, if I put the SD card in the Wii, it says "the device inserted in the SD slot cannot be used."

So I dunno what to do with this card. Mostly, I hate SD cards. I have always had trouble with them when I try connecting them to a PC. I need to just leave them in whatever I'm using them for, I guess.

Refreshing HTML Windows Without Scrolling to the Top

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 07:49:28 +0000

I need a good way to have an HTML popup window that, when I output new text to it, will refresh to exactly where it was scrolled to instead of going to the top. I've tried a couple of things, but mostly just tricking it into thinking I didn't change the content at all, such as browse_rsc'ing the HTML over to the user in a file, and then outputting a frame containing the HTML file to the browser. There also doesn't appear to be a way to winset/winget the location of the scroll bars, or this would be easy. I'm pretty sure the solution has something to do with winset/winget or browse_rsc, but I'm not very familiar with either of them, so this is little more than a hunch.

mob/verb/Test() //Browser window opens; window is scrolled all of the way up usr << browse("LOTS OF TEXT! ENOUGH TO MAKE IT SCROLL!!",window="html_window") sleep(60) //Scroll down the page while this sleeps usr << browse("OH MAN! LOTS MORE TEXT! MAYBE EVEN MORE THAN BEFORE!",window="html_window") //Browser window refreshes and jumps all the way to the top. Ideally, it would still be wherever you scrolled to.

Maybe it can be done with a skin control I missed or something. Just hopefully it doesn't need a complicated workaround.</<></<>

Computer lag issue

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 07:59:59 +0000

This is probably going to be a really long and fluffy description of my fairly-simple-to-explain problem, since I ramble a lot at three in the morning, plus I already hate when I feel I didn't explain myself thoroughly, but here we go.

Lately my desktop computer's been having this weird performance issue when I play games, and it's been getting worse. I'll be playing a game, and it can be pretty much any game, from Super Meat Boy to Resident Evil 5 to Minecraft to Left 4 Dead, and it'll be running smoothly until it randomly decides to seize up and be a jerk to me for about a full minute, at which point the game'll slow down a little, to maybe 70% speed (not too much), and the frame rate'll drop to about one frame per second while the audio lags chopilly. If I'm playing something single-player I can just pause and wait for it to stop (It DOES "lag" while paused, and it is not any better. Trying to navigate a game's pause menu while this is going on is painful.), but if I'm doing something online like Left 4 Dead it obviously gets in the way of things. Furthermore, for the last two or three days it's been doing it more frequently, like every ten minutes or so. That kind of frequency pretty much renders my games unplayable.

I don't have my computer's specs on-hand, but if you want them I can post them tomorrow. It's running Windows 7, if that helps. Most of the games I know this affects are Steam games, but not all of them. Minecraft and RE5 are good enough examples of non-Steam games that do this. I have no idea what's doing this, or even what it's doing, but I'm starting to think it's either a piece of hardware dying or something wrong with Windows. I don't think it's a matter of me not meeting a game's system requirements or having outdated drivers because I've seen it happen on almost much every game I play on that computer. I'm not sure if it's ever happened on any windowed games, though I do remember a few months ago my Dream Seekers used to lag horribly and freeze up every few minutes. They don't do it anymore, so it might've been a BYOND bug that got fixed.

I do not know which games do this more often than others, so I can't really decide if a certain hardware device is causing the problem. I don't think it's my graphics card because games like Minecraft and Super Meat Boy will do this just as often as Resident Evil 5 or Borderlands.

As far as what I've tried to do to fix this, not too much. At one point it was doing this more often when I played Left 4 Dead online than when I played solo, and reinstalling it changed that, but that's the only thing I've done that even helped. It didn't even fix the problem; it just made it happen less when I played online. I've also tried changing settings such as turning down graphics, but that hasn't helped. However, I have not tried anything that might remedy a problem that affects nearly every game on my computer, such as formatting and reinstalling Windows. I should probably do that and see if it works, but first I wanna know if anyone thinks my processor might be about to die or something. As much as I don't want my computer to be dying, I don't know why else a game could run smoothly for ten minutes and then less-smoothly for the next two.

The Taiwanese Spammed My Mercury Server?

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:02:07 +0000

For a while now I've been using XAMPP's Apache and MySQL services to host my own web site, but recently I decided to try out Mercury because of just how cool it would be to have an @Cowness.net email address, but I seem to have hit a large problem. Firstly I'd like to mention that I have little-to-no idea of how this program works, but then I guess that's why I'm here instead of fixing it myself.

I was trying to sign into Windows Live Messenger using my email but I couldn't seem to receive the verification email, so I had to plug a monitor into the server to see what was the deal and noticed that Mercury was frantically trying to connect to Yahoo.com.tw, which I assume is Taiwanese Yahoo (I believe the window was labeled "SMTP Client"). I dunno if it was trying to send messages or what, but I've only used my Cowness.net email address once, so unless the company that sells Snuggies sold my email address to Taiwan I have no idea how they even got my address... Regardless, I proceeded to check out Mercury's directory and discovered a folder named "QUEUE" that held an unacceptable 500,000 files that absorbed a gig and a half of my hard drive and took a delicious hour and a half to delete. Ow.

Basically I need to know how to stop it from doing whatever it's doing in Taiwan, and whether or not this is likely to recur once I've fixed it. I don't need a Cowness.net email address -- Hotmail works fine, it's just not Cowwy enough -- so if I can't just let the server sit there and do its thing without plugging in a monitor and mouse every few days and performing maintenance I'll probably just abandon this bad idea right now and stick to simply the web hosting.

OS Selection Screen

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:18:39 +0000

I used to have the Windows 7 RC on one partition to test it out as well as XP on my main partition until I decided to nix the Win 7 RC since I installed real Windows 7 on my desktop and XP is working just fine for my laptop, but apparently I'm not aware of the process used to uninstall an operating system. I figured if I just formatted the whole partition it'd go away but it still asks me if I want to boot from Windows 7 or "Previous version of Windows", and if I don't choose in 30 seconds it annoyingly defaults to Windows 7 and throws an error because I formatted it D:

I'm hoping there's just a quick fix for this, I'm just not entirely sure what it is. I assume I just need to be told where it stores the list of installed operating systems to choose from and remove "Windows 7" from the list, or something similar to that.

Making lists in "Edit Instance" window

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 06:35:48 +0000

So what I'm talking about is when you're in the map editor and right-click a turf and go to "Edit..." and pick a variable to edit. I'm pretty sure you used to be able to edit a list variable by putting something like this in for the value -- surronding it in braces and separating each thing with a comma: {"List Object One","List Object Two",3,4,"The Cowness"}

However, that doesn't seem to work anymore. Is there new syntax for this, or should I file this under BYOND Features/report it as a bug?