the weekly whinge

Problem: Broadcom wifi adaptor in HP 6735s running Vista won’t connect to internet via Zyxel Prestige 660HW-T1 running WPA mixed mode

Issue: WPA1 support on Vista with the Broadcom drivers doesn’t seem to work, but turning on Mixed Mode WPA2/WPA1 on the Zyxel stops internet access; meanwhile we have some WPA1-only devices (Belkin print server) so we can’t use WPA2-only

Solution: updating the Broadcom drivers didn’t help, and neither did getting the latest firmware for the Zyxel. Eventually I realised that some sites (mainly google) worked while others didn’t and (after a few tests) figured out that the MTU size needed to be lowered to 1482.

Whinge: Why on earth would WPA mixed mode alter the maximum MTU? That’s just crazy.

FWIW, changing the MTU on the Zyxel is a fairly complicated thing: this page describes how to do it temporarily and permanently. I’d also recommend changing the MTU on Windows because otherwise the router will have to split up your traffic into chunks, and you can actually get away with just changing the Windows MTU if you don’t want to change router settings; download the excellent TCPOptimizer from speedguide.net and set the MTU with that.

Tags: Broadcom, Vista, wifi, WPA, Zyxel.

Edit: this is fixed in 5.1.30, so I’m guessing it was fixed a while back - I’m working on a legacy system using 5.0.15.

So MySQL thinks that

SELECT -COALESCE(null, 0);

should return -0

(Whatever -0 is)…

Clearly I’ve simplified my code and there are ways around this, but… WTF?

For what it’s worth,

SELECT -COALESCE(null, 0) + 0;

results in the expected “0″ value.

I was disappointed that

SELECT -COALESCE(null, -0);

doesn’t work though - if you’re going to believe that -0 is a valid number, you should be able to get +0 out of it.

Tags: -0, -zero, coalesce, mysql, negative zero, null.

So the web is full of people asking about this symptom and I hit it myself. Seemingly randomly (but consistently) IE will complain about nonsecure items in the page, with this warning message:

The error message from IE7

The usual response to this is that you’re loading images (or other media) from a non-SSL connection (hence “non-secure” items); there are also some mentions of IE not being happy about IFRAMEs without SRC= attributes (the browser assigns “about:blank” as a default SRC, which - being non-secure - flips the error); however none of these things applied in my case.

I discovered that if I turned off javascript the error disappeared, which suggested my script was problematic, but I still couldn’t find anything in the scripts which was loading any non-secure items.

In the end after much messing around it turns out that the offending script was setting object.style.background to a relative path, eg 

myObj.style.background=”url(/images/mybackground.gif)”;

Even though this will correctly resolve to an https:// address (assuming the root of the document is https://) IE can’t figure this out and moans.

Simply adding the full path to the background solved my problem.

This doesn’t apply to CSS files setting backgrounds - you can happily have relative paths in these and all will be well. 

Of course I then wondered why I hadn’t found that on the web and figured you might be looking for it too - so here it is

Tags: error, fix, internet explorer, nonsecure items, warning.

No, that’s not a question on the state of my sanity.

The last few live games I’ve played I’ve bemoaned the fact that I’ve hit no cards. However last night I played in a game which was the weakest table I’ve ever sat at but I singularly failed to make any moves at all. Maybe it was because the first hand I tried I lost but it’s almost like I was having some sort of out-of-body experience, watching myself playing as a complete passive fish.

I have been blaming my recent run on a complete lack of cards (which is admittedly true, last night I hit one pair - 66 - and one AQ in 90 minutes of play) but I’m beginning to wonder if actually I’m running scared.

Perhaps I went out early too many times playing overly aggressive; however I think I’ve reached the conclusion that I had more fun losing quickly being caught out in a bluff than painfully. Last night I just watched myself melting into nothing and, unless I can fix it, I think my live game will be dead.

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I’ve been persuading friends and family that using OpenOffice is going to save the planet and all the fluffly ikkle animals and everything.

I’ve been using the Novell-sponsored go-oo version (from go-oo.org) because it seems to have better compatibility with the MS stuff as well as being quicker and generally more fluffy-ikkle-animal-friendly; however it looks like something they’ve done has caused the British English thesaurus to break. I’m assuming it’s Go-oo’s fault because the standard OO install on Harry’s machine (on the next desk) is fine.

Anyway, after some hours of searching the web for a solution (all of which seemed to be based around editing a file which no longer exists in oo3) for now I’ve packaged up my own extension based on the stock en-gb dictionary and PaulH’s thesaurus from brit-thesaurus.sourceforge.net

Apparently this could also be useful if you don’t like the fact that the British English thesaurus in ooo actually points at the en_US version anyway…

So here it is. Just install it and restart OO, that should do it. Let me know if it’s broken.

Edit: to install (assuming that just opening the file doesn’t work) go to Tools->Extension Manager in OpenOffice, click “Add” and navigate to wherever you saved the file!

Tags: british english, en-gb, en-uk, en_GB, go-oo, oo v3, ooo3, openoffice, openoffice v3, thesaurus, uk english.

So Google Streetview has come to the UK, with street-level pictures of Southampton, London, Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford, Norwich, Coventry, Birmingham, Nottingham, Derby, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, York, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Swansea, Cardiff, Belfast, Lisburn and… Scunthorpe.

WTF? Does Google UK’s mapping director live in Scunthorpe or something? I mean, I’ve nothing against the town but it’s not exactly the most attractive or well-known, is it?

Tags: google.

Who at Mysql AB decided that SHOW TRIGGERS LIKE ‘…’, unlike the SHOW TABLES LIKE ‘…’ command on which it is modelled, should not display triggers whose names match the ‘…’ string but instead display triggers which relate to tables whose names match ‘…’

??

Sometimes I wonder about these people, I really do.

Tags: mysql.

Did this slip out without much fanfare, or did I just miss it completely?

Tags: exchange, mailservers, microsoft, protocols.

So I’ve criticised the last couple[1][2] of Full-Tilt howtos that have dropped into my inbox; I thought I should redress the balance and say that Aaron Bartley’s discussion on early-aggression in MTTs is a good read. The content may seem obvious and I’m sure it doesn’t say anything that’s not in a thousand poker books but I think it’s always good to crystalise things like this.

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Today’s state-the-bleeding-obvious award goes to Jordan Morgan in the featured tip in this week’s Full Tilt newsletter.

One of the keys to making money at the poker table, however, is being able to interpret when the three-bet means what it’s supposed to mean, and when a player is only representing a big hand and making a move.

The next tip in the series is “only bet when you think you have the best hand or your opponent might fold”.

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