June | 2009 | Leateds.com

The Sims 3 Problems

June 29, 2009

: Image by Flickr@GOD_Team.fra via Flickr

I ordered myself a copy of the Sims 3 for when it was going to be released. I got it about 5 days after its release, which was pretty fast so that was good. Then I did not get around to installing the game until about another week or so since I did not have the time to do it.

I decided to install it onto my main desktop PC, it met all the requirements for the game and so I popped in the disc, and then the problems just began from there. It was fine for about 75% of the install until it ran into a crc error, then I kept retrying it and had no luck whatsoever. I then tried to ignore the error and it would finish the installation, but then when you went to play the game it would not load, obviously the file I skipped was important!

I started to look online to see if anyone else had run into a problem like mine and to my surprise a lot of people had the exact same problem! 😀 Not just me! So they all had no idea what was wrong, some people suggested that the crc error would of occurred due to a corrupt disc, but there are only so many corrupt disc’s per batch created and it was unlikely that we all happened to get them!

After about 2 hours of trying to find a decent solution to my problem online I decided to take a break and try it again myself. I also own a laptop so I decided to see if it would install on it, and what do you know it did! It actually worked for some reason! 😮 The laptop is not as good as my PC in any way, so it was very strange that it worked at all! I came to the assumption that the disc drive on the laptop was newer than that of the PC so it would be a better quality one, that could be the only reason for it working.

The file that the crc error always stopped (FullBuild1.package) on seemed to be one of the biggest files on the disc so I thought that the disc drive on my PC must struggle with reading large files. So I decided to copy the entire disc’s content onto my PC’s hard drive, excluding the file it had problems with, and then I put the disc back into my laptop and copied the large file to a memory stick and the put the memory stick into my PC and added it into the right place along with all the other installation files.

You can always install a game by copying the disc’s content to your hard drive; you just can’t play it from the hard drive. So after having all the files on my hard drive, this took about 40 minutes, I started the installation and it worked perfectly! No errors, no problems, it was great. Then I decided to start playing the game and no problems at all occurred. If you have the crc error, then chances are if you try this method you should have no problem with getting the game working.

So that was the problem out of the way and then I found another! I started to play the game and created my first family in it, then bought a house, began to decorate it and then BOOM! Screen flashes blue then black and no amount of buttons would get it back up! The bloody PC crashed! I had to restart the PC then I found out what the error was and it was an error regarding my graphics card. I quickly checked my graphics cards specs and compared them to the back of the games case, and they were better than the box! So there should be no problem with it, and it is even in the list of supported graphic cards provided on the Sims website!

I had no idea how to fix this so I tried all the usual updating the graphics card driver and no joy, it still would not work :(. I then went over to the Sims 3 support page and filled in the tech problem form and sent it off along with a direct x information file that they request, it contains all the specs of you system. I got a response from them the next day. They told me my graphics card needed to be updated and gave me a link to a page with it, and when I went to install it, my bloody PC crashed again, and again every time I tried it. So I just gave up.

At the moment I am playing it on my laptop, it is a bit slow but it is better than nothing, I will at some stage try to get back around to having a look at it and try to get it working again.

It Has A Mind Of Its Own

June 27, 2009

: Image via Wikipedia

For the past week i have been having trouble with my wireless card on my laptop. Usually i would just use my desktop PC however the rest of my family use the laptop a lot.

They recently started telling me that the wireless was cutting off a lot and also sometimes it would not pick up the broadband signal at all, even if they sat right next to the router!

I spent hours trying to figure out why the wireless card refused to work, and i had no useful result 🙁 I tried many things such as resetting my routers wireless settings, unblocking firewalls, also removing all existing connections on the laptop and then just added back in the wireless internet connection, and unfortunately none of these worked.

I also tried to update the wireless cards driver, also i removed and reinstalled the driver for the wireless card and that also did not work. Then i just became really confused on how it used to work and then suddenly stopped.

I then restored my pc back to an earlier date, to around the beginning of the year, and then suddenly it was back working perfectly. Then about a week later the same thing would happen again and i would have to keep doing the same thing.

It was not worth restoring the PC back to an earlier date all the time, so i just decided to completely wipe the laptop and start fresh again, and it has worked perfectly. Now there is nothing wrong, and the wireless card is working perfectly now 😀

I still have no idea what caused the wireless card to stop working, i did not install anything that would of interfered with it. the only change to the system was the widows updates that would automatically install. So although i did not figure out what was wrong, i am glad to finally have it working again, but it would be great to know what caused it in the first place, in case it happens again in the future!

Facebook Usernames

June 14, 2009

Last Friday, June 12th, Facebook launched a new way of allowing there users to share links to their pages that would be easier to remember, in the form of a username. The launch in Ireland would have been at 5am GMT so I decided I was not that eager to get a username so I decided not to stay up 😀

However the next day I got up and tried to get my name as my username but I couldn’t so I settled for leateds! so instead of having a easily long url to give out to people so they can find my page, usually people will end up misspelling url’s that are long, now all they have to do is go to a really short url: www.facebook.com/leateds , its much simpler.

So the idea of being able to finally get a username seemed a big hit with everyone on facebook, so within the first 3 minutes of facebook beginning to issue username, over 200,000 were registered, that is just mental :o.

And then when the first hour of username registration passed over a 1,000,000 had been issued! The biggest worry that facebook engineers had was how they were going to prevent there site from crashing with the most likely sudden burst of visitor traffic, so they made a lot of modifications on ways they can improve the quality of the site and reduce server load requests. And they ended up being successful because there site did not go down, which is amazing considering the amount of traffic they received.

Here are some more figures (from mashable) on username registration on the launch of username registration:

– It took 3 minutes to reach 200,000 usernames registered. That’s an astounding 1111+ registered per second during the first minutes of the feature release.

– After 15 minutes, the number of usernames jumped to 500,000. The pace slowed down, but there is no laughing at 555.5 usernames or so taken per second. How many other websites could handle that type of load?

– By 10:01 PM PT, a full hour after release, around one million custom URLs had been claimed. That’s an average of 278 usernames per minute or so.

– Where do Facebook usernames stand now? Well, as of 2:00 PM ET/11:00 AM PT, over 3 million usernames have been taken. That’s 3,000,000 custom URLs during a Friday night.

So basically a lot of usernames have been registered since the launch. I wonder why facebook waited this long to release usernames, most social networks had them from when they started out, and considering that facebook is one of the biggest sites in the world, you would think they would of had usernames by now! Anyway for more info on username registration, check out the blog post over on mashable.com

You can get yourself a username by going here, before they are all gone ;), well not all of them, but all the good ones!

Increasing My Blogs Load Speed

June 14, 2009

: Image via Wikipedia

A problem that I have always found on my blog is the speed that it loads at. It takes far too long for my content to display fully and although in reality it only takes a few seconds, it will frustrate people because most people are used to the content displaying instantly ( maybe they never experienced dial-up before, so they cannot be grateful for the speed difference) ;).

Anyway my blog is of course powered by the open-source platform: WordPress. In my opinion the best platform for blogging. So yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to find different ways on how I could increase the performance of my blogs load speed, and it has definitely been successful.

So first off I went around a variety of different blog posts reading the different methods people used and also reading a lot of tips on how to go about improving load speed/time. So the first thing is that my blog used to take approximately 2.5 seconds to load, of course this speed varies from page to page, but on average the load time would be 2.5 seconds. It’s not too bad, however there is always room for improvement and I hate having to wait for my blog to load, so that means if it annoys me it will definitely annoy others 😀 and also if people have to wait for a page to load they will generally give up and go elsewhere and you will now have lost out on a new visitor :(.

So here are the few steps that I took to increase my blogs performance. Before you do any of this I always recommend backing up your database and export a copy of your blog posts (Just incase 😉 ). So apparently when you install plugins and then remove them and save and edit your blog posts and pages it will cause a lot of inconsistencies within your blogs database. By having all of these inconsistencies it can contribute to your database being very complex and will in turn cause the site to slow down, and that is what we do not want. So the solution I used to fix this was a simple plugin that is called: ‘Fix Database‘. It will add a page to your admin backend under the settings section called fix database, so once you click into it there is only one button in it saying fix database, once that is clicked it runs through the database fixing and optimizing your database by updating table information.

The next thing I done was to add a cache system to my site, this will save a copy of the page for a set amount of time so that when you next visit the site the page will be loaded from the cache and will cause less communication to be needed to your server so page will load quicker :D. The plugin I used for this cache in my site is called WP Super Cache, this is probably the most popular cache plugin used on wordpress. By going though the various setting in the WP Super Cache plugin you can set when and how long a page will be cached for, for example you might want the cache page to load until a new post is added and then have the cache cleared so visitors can see the new post you have added. Also you can turn on compression so that less space is used by the cache pages. Having a cache on your blog is a must and especially if your traffic is very high.

The final plugin I added is called WP-DBmanager, this is another plugin for maintaining your database and it does contain a lot of complex settings that I do not bother messing with. However there are a lot of useful things such as being able to repair and edit your database and also you can make queries into your database, I would not really make many queries into my database but it is always helpful to be able to do this. Also you can make back-ups of your database and download them or have them e-mailed to your e-mail address. Also you can set your blog to automatically send a backup daily to your site so if your blog goes down you won’t lose anything and also you can set it to automatically optimize the database on a regular bases so that your site will be in a great performance state.

So after doing all of this the new page load speed on average now is about 0.777 seconds, that is now less than a third of the original load speed (2.5 seconds) before I added all of these plugins. So I am happy at the moment on my blogs performance 😀

Also in terms of administration I have increased speed in the back-end of the site by upgrading to wordpress 2.8, it has helped a lot but the speed in the back-end never really annoyed me too much 😀

NewMovies.ie — Live Online

June 10, 2009

So here it is today, as promised i have launched my new website: newm ovies.ie There has definitely been a lot of work put into creating this site. The site actually is running on open source software, Joomla! 😀

Up until now i had never used Joomla! before in my life. I always thought it was very complex and i was not ready to get into learning the way it works. Now however after over a month of toying around with Joomla! i am now confident with how it works, where everything is and also how some parts of the layout code work.

So in case its not obvious what this site is about i am going to give a bit of a brief summary on what it is and what it has. First off the site revolves around Films/Movies, more importantly the latest movies being released to cinemas. At the moment we have about 40 film trailers on the website and also a few film reviews.

These numbers will begin to rise over the next few weeks as we will be adding more and more content. Most movie sites focus on when films will be coming out in the United States, however not too many, i can only think of one other, actually focus just on what movies will be coming out in Ireland.

So if you are from Ireland, like us, you will definitely enjoy this site because you will see all the latest films that will be coming to our cinemas. Currently we list the current films in the cinemas and also we have a few films that were previously in the cinema and also have a few films that will be coming in the near future. There will however be a lot of new films added soon to the site because that is the whole concept of the ‘new’ part of newmovies.ie

Anyway there is a lot more i could say, instead why not go over and have a look at the site, maybe sign up, or just to our newsletter. You can even submit movie reviews, rate movies and also there is a forum where you can go to discuss your favorite films and actors!