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Eircom Hacked?

July 19, 2009

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My internet service provider (ISP) is Eircom. I always notice that my c0nnection is really slow, and apparently that is to be expected with Eircom.

However last Monday my broadband was actually cutting out now and again and was becoming slow at loading pages every so often. I thought nothing of it, I just put it down to the fact that Eircom’s broadband was always that slow.

Then on Wednesday of this week I was reading the newspaper (The Argus) and found an article saying that Eircom had been in fact hacked on the Monday night that I had experienced the really slow page load speed!

Apparently a lot of unwanted traffic was directed to the Eircom servers, which caused a strain on the servers and by chain reaction caused a lot of users to experience either really slow speeds or to lose their internet connection completely.

I then went over to Eircom’s tech support page and saw a customer notice explaining the problem that occurred, the article below is the notice they published to their site which was put up the day after the problem was fixed.

I was also reading an article about how Eircom are fully aware that there network is slow at times, and apparently they say they have no intention in the near future of upgrading their networks. You would think that since they are one of the most popular Internet Service Provider’s in Ireland that they would want to have the best service available.

We currently subscribe to a package for our landline and our broadband to be in one bundle. When you sign up to Eircom you must take out a one year contract with them, it is a clause they have built in to keep their customers.

However our one year contract is up and we have begun to look at other providers to see what they have to offer. Recently Vodafone have started to offer a bundle for your landline and broadband and are giving it at a much better price.

My current broadband speed it 3mb however I could change to Vodafone and upgrade my broadband to 7.6mb and still save money!

The only thing stopping me at the moment from changing is that I have to find out more about their broadband.

First I want to see if it is actually good and second is they say they have a 30gb download limit, I want to know if they actually enforce this limit or do they let you away with going over it because I know with Eircom they have the same limit however they do not enforce any penalties if you go over it.

Holidays Over, Work Again

July 14, 2009

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Well as of today my 2 weeks of summer holidays are over 🙁 . It was great though having those past few weeks off. I just really enjoyed relaxing about the house and not having to get up really early in the morning to go to work.

Now though I have been given a semi good week of hours. I do get this Saturday and Sunday off work so that is great! I never get a full weekend off work and could not believe that I am getting this weekend off 😀 . Also I have a few early shifts this week, beginning at 7 in the morning. I always hate having work that early and also I like it in a way. First of all I hate the fact that when I go to sleep I know I have to be getting up really early and go to work, so I usually sit there worrying that I will not hear the alarm and end up sleeping in, so in turn that makes me lose sleep and then I usually sleep really lightly so that I will hear the alarm go off.

The reason I actually like having that really early shift is that I will be beginning it at 7 and finishing work at 12! Like who would complain of only having to work for 5 hours! So I get up really early when I usually sleep, and then I finish at noon which is usually the time I get up at in the morning, so I will have the full day to myself to enjoy 😀 .

During my holiday weeks I went away for 5 days to Edinburgh. That was a great trip, I went with all my friends and we also celebrated two of their birthdays while we were over there. That was the main reason we went anyway. We all booked into a hostel, so that made the accommodation really cheap, it was roughly £50 for the four nights that we booked in. The hostel we stayed in was called the Cowgate Hostel. It was in a really good location, everything you wanted was just a 5 minute walk from the hostel.

Another note on Edinburgh is that drink and food were very reasonable in price, drink worked out at about £2 – £3.50 in most places, but would cost more for more fancy drinks such as cocktails. Cocktails are something that I had never had before and one of the nights we were out we went to a cocktail bar, it was great, we bought them in pitchers that worked out at about £8 so even then drink was still not expensive. When comparing it to home here (Ireland) you were saving a killing 🙂 .

I also went and done a lot of the touristy things such as visiting Edinburgh Dungeons and Mary kings Close, Edinburgh Dungeons was good enough, nothing special, there is also one in London and other places but the one in Edinburgh had a lot more Scottish orientated stories. It was good fun since we went with a large group.

449px-Drrae The other place we visited was Mary kings Close, this was basically a bit of a history tour of the real old Edinburgh City Underground, it was really interesting and showed the harsh living conditions of how people lived years ago and how the plague affected them. I would definitely recommend going to see both these locations if you ever go there 😀 .

On my last day in Edinburgh we decided to go to the airport early so that we would not be rushing. But when we arrived at the airport there was a bloody bomb scare! So everyone had to leave the airport and sit outside for a few hours, our flight ended up being delayed. I thought the experience was good though, the atmosphere seemed to be really good 😀

So in the end I thought my 2 weeks of holidays off work were great and I definitely am looking forward to my next week off in September 😀 .

The Sims 3 Problems

June 29, 2009

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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

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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!