Blogging On A Shoestring | nedge2k.com | Had, Virtuemart, Have, Out, Xbox

The back story...

I used to be fairly religious with my Xbox Pro. It all started with PGR3 and Cat & Mouse - a group of us played that online almost everyday for hours at a time for a good couple of years, it was awesome. PGR4 screwed all that up but then Forza 2 came out - it blew everything out of the water. We primarily used to tune cars to run round the Nürburgring Nordschleife and at one point, I got up to 5th in the world in S Class with a GT40! Forza 2 had problems that never got fixed but we lived with them because overall, the game was awesome.

Then Forza 3 came out, the online play was destroyed by the "hopper" system, the game now heavily favoured 4WD cars and conversions - which as we all know, both FWD and 4WD are WRONG wheel drive - and the handling of all cars had become very numb. All the proper petrol heads dropped the game like a hot stone, leaving the kids to play with their unrealistic toys. Need for speed shift came along - the realism of the "driving experience" was spot on, I've never seen a game do it better, as were the engine sounds, amazing! Unfortunately the handling and tuning left alot to be desired and most quickly lost interest, leaving me without a decent racer to play online.

The meat of the issue... 

Sufficed to say, by the time the new Xbox "Slim" came out, my Xbox Pro had been sat next to the TV, unused for quite a while. I work in motorsport, I only do racing games, petrol runs through my veins and I'm constantly playing with cars IRL so a lack of decent racing game left me, disillusioned shall we say. For some reason though, I decided to get the slim anyway - mainly because I like new shiny things but also because the built in WiFi, low noise and 250GB HDD appealed, I was future proofing ;) Anyway, the day I got it, I had a quick play, stuck Forza on the HDD and went for a burn round the 'ring. All good, had a chat to some friends then turned it off. This was at the end of July and I haven't used it since.

Last night, after a spirited drive home, a tuning idea popped into my head so I decided to try it out in Forza and after about 30mins of hooning about, the new Xbox slim cut out, no warning, nothing. Went over to the Xbox (which stands upright, alone next to my TV stand - well ventilated) and attempted to turn it back on, nothing, dead. Noticed the brick head a red light and at the time, didn't know what that meant but figured it wasn't good. A quick bit of research lead me too some troubleshooting advice but none of it works, the Slim is lifeless and useless, great work Microsoft! My Pro had to be repaired three times, I would have hoped the all new (ish) Slim would have none of these issues....

In summary...

Here's what happened and what I did to try and fix it: 

• Xbox Slim cut out
• Tried to turn it back on - dead
• Checked online for what to do
• Disconnected everything from everything
• Waited a bit
• Reconnected everything and tried to power up
• Brick light went from yellow to very briefly green to red almost instantly
• Xbox beeped slightly, light went green to red almost instantly
• Tried the above again, with a 2hr wait, same story
• Tried the above again, with an overnight wait, same story.

Recently I built a new Media Center, the only part that wasn't new was the Pinnacle 3010ix PCI-E Dual DVB-T tuner that I'd had for a while and had been running (with numerous issues) in an old HP server. Long story short, under Vista and Windows 7, this card has habit of not being detected on resuming from hibernate. In the old server, the cure was a reboot. In the new Media Center, the cure varied. Sometimes a reboot, sometimes a full shutdown and boot, sometimes I'd even have to cut the power. It was driving me mad and meant I had to keep my old PVR in play for recording stuff "out of hours" (e.g. the Formula 1 at 5am). Anyway, I tried a few drivers from Pinnacle, no change. The last few versions of W7 had newer drivers but they either made things worse or, no change. So I decided to think laterally and went on the hunt for drivers of tuner card made by other companies but which shared the same Philips SAA716x chipset (716x for short). After a short search I found that the Avermedia H788 card shared the same chipset so I force-installed the drivers and, touch -wood, the card has worked perfectly ever since! The Media Center wakes up to record properly, the card is detected properly, it all just works :D

If you're having similar issue with this card - or even other issues, mebbe you're in need of an x64 driver? - you can download them from the Avermedia H788 Driver page

You have to download the AVer MediaCenter 1.7.3Beta dated 26/02/2009, extract the drivers from the package (WinRAR) and force the install of the AVerBDA6x.inf - after that, all should be good. It all went a bit wierd on first use but after that it's been fine :D I also found another driver for a Twinham card on the DVB Support driver download page that I've yet to try - the file for this one is the Twinhan DTV 3.4 Build 19 (BDA Driver), dated 13/02/2009.

Hope this helps anyone with the same issues! Oh and for anyone wondering about my new Media Center specs...

• J&W JW-RS780UVD-AM2+ (128MB Sideport) Motherboard
• AMD 5050e 2.6Ghz CPU
• 4GB Corsair TwinX XMS2 RAM
• 1TB Samsung HD103UI HDD
• Hiper Media Slimline HTPC Case
• Slimeline DVD-RW
• Pinnalce 3010ix Dual DVB-TTuner

Here's a quick and easy way to get your alfcontact menu item to display it's alias when using sh404sef, as opposed to the ugly SEF'd version of the joomla query string that sh404sef produces by default as there is no plugin for alfcontact....

Navigate to the root of your joomla install, go to components/com_sh404sef/sef_ext, copy the com_contact.php and then paste a copy of it with the name com_alfcontact.php. Clear your cache (if you use it) and refresh your site. Your alfcontact menu item will now display it's proper alias :)

So, as any good "webmaster" of a site running Virtuemart should know, the powers that be have released an update. However, moving to 1.1.3 won't be anywhere near as easy as updating/upgrading your Joomla! 1.5.x install. No, if you're running Virtuemart, the chances are you've hacked the hell out of the core files to tailor it to your needs. Did you keep a proper record of your hacks though? In my case, the answer is no. I was under the impression that the next release would be Virtuemart v2.0 and that would be a total re-write so I'd cross that bridge when I came to it. However, 1.1.3 came out about a month ago and as there don't seem to be any security patches, I'd been putting off doing the upgrade.

Anyway, I sat down today and came up with a way that should make the upgrade a bit less painful. I downloaded to 1.1.2 to 1.1.3 patch and took a look at what was being updated. Out of the 120 updated files, there were a couple I was certain I had modified and others that I had no clue about. So, what to do? Go through each file manually? Fuck that! I wrote a PHP script that downloads the original full 1.1.2 install package (for Joomla! 1.5), extracts it to a temporay location, downloads the 1.1.2 to 1.1.3 update patch (for Joomla! 1.5), extracts that to another temporary location, compares the full release to your current install and then checks the updated files to see which of the files you've modified will be effected by the update. Phew!

Once it's done, it outputs the results into a table so you can print it off and refer to it later. In my install I had modified 20 of the core Virtuemart files but only 13 were due for update :)

Now, before I let this script loose on the world...

1. Make a backup!!! - Use something like the excellent JoomlaPack.
2. Try it in a test environment first!! - Setting up Ubuntu server in VMware isn't difficult and a good developer should NEVER run test scripts in a production environment unless they are 100% sure of the outcome!
3. This has only been tested with the Virtuemart 1.1.2 FULL package (for Joomla! 1.5) and the Virtuemart 1.1.2 to 1.1.3 update patch (for Joomla! 1.5).
4. The script uses fopen and system functions which may not be enabled on your webserver.
5. Finally, I accept no responsibility whatsoever for any damage that may be caused by this script and I also offer no support for it, so don't come to me for help unless you're carrying some cash ;) I know it sounds harsh of me but a) I don't have the time b) I don't have to release it in the first place.

...right, now the boring stuff is over...

• Stick the script in the administrator folder so it will be reachable at http://yourdomain.tld/administrator/vm_update_checker.php
• Paste the link to the FULL Virtuemart installation currently running on your site (e.g. Virtuemart 1.1.2)
• Paste the link to the UPDATE patch for the Virtuemart installation currently running on your site (e.g. Virtuemart 1.1.2 to 1.1.3)
• Hit download!

...that's it. If all has gone well, you will shortly see a table telling you which core files have been modified from standard and which of those files are due for an update. Please note: this script ONLY looks at the Virtuemart component, not and plugins or modules as, well, if you've modified them, you should have copied them and then saved them as new plugins/modules to avoid problems ;)

Right, so, to re-cap, this script downloads and extracts stuff then looks at stuff that's already there and tells you what you've messed with. As with everything, things can happen and while there's no way it could mess up your site, just be careful and back it up first in case you screw up!

Finally, whilst you may use this for commercial use and modify it to your liking if required, you can't sell it on or profit from it. If I catch you doing so, I'll coat your balls in peanut butter and point a rabid dog in your direction :)

Here's the script ->>>>>

Virtuemart Modified Files Finder