Age of Mythology – Widescreen Resolution

Posted on .

In order to play the epic game Age of Mythology, or its expansion in widescreen, just add xres=1680 yres=1050 to the shortcut.
"C:\Games\Age of Mythology\aom.exe" xres=1680 yres=1050

Replace 1680 and 1050 with your own resolution.

UPDATE: From comments below..

Find the icon on your desktop you use to load AOM
Right click and choose properties
In the Target field add: xres=1920 yres=1200

Should be something like this:

age-of-mythology-widescreen-resolution-image1

Also, hello to PirateBay visitors. Have fun 🙂

UPDATE: This still works on Windows Vista, Windows 7 & Windows 8

114 Comments

Exchange 2007 Failed to Install

Posted on .

Having just upgraded a server to Windows Server 2008 with Microsoft Exchange 2007 I came accross a frustrating issue.

If IPv6 has been disabled on your network interface prior to installation of Exchange 2007 then Exchange will fail to install the Hub Transport Server role with the following error,
Service 'MSExchangeTransport' failed to reach status 'Running' on this server.

Other Exchange services will fail to start if IPv6 has been unticked in your network adapters configuration settings. I routinely disable IPv6 if it is not needed on the network, but it seems Exchange has been written to utilize the new protocol and requires it to function.

Leave a Comment

Exchange 2007 Pre-requisites on Windows Server 2008

Posted on .

Exchange 2007 requires that some features be enabled on Windows Server 2008 prior to installation. It is also worth noting that only Exchange 2007 with Service Pack 1 is supported on Windows Server 2008. If you try to install Exchange 2007 without SP1 then the installation will fail.

You can download the full installation of Exchange 2007 with SP1 from Microsoft Technet

A quick way to install the required Windows Server 2008 features, is to utilize the ServerManagerCmd command for feature installation,

Then you can install Exchange 2007 on your Windows Server 2008 server knowing your server meets the requirements.

Leave a Comment

Mapped Network Drives and Vistas UAC

Posted on .

When a non-administrator is prompted by Vista’s UAC to enter Administrator credentials for security elevation, the program that then runs under Administrator priveleges will not have access to the logged in users mapped network drives.

For example, if Mike the user was to copy some files from the mapped network drive S: to C:Windows, he would be prompted by UAC to enter Administrative priveleges. So the Administrator John enters his details but then the copy fails because the network drive is no longer available now that the user is elevated.

This scenerio happens also when installing programs that require administrative priveleges during installation from a network drive.

To fix this, an administrator can make the following registry change,

You can also download and run this registry file to import the above change to your registry,
  EnableLinkedConnections.reg (134 bytes, 2,680 hits)

Leave a Comment

mythtv-dvb-reload.pl

Posted on .

I’ve been having problems with my Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T 500 Dual DVB-T Tuner. Using MythTV every day or so one of the tuners on the card would no longer lock onto any channels. I wasn’t the only one.

As I don’t have any errors in logs, I can hardly troubleshoot. So I just automate what I have been doing, and that is,

  • Check the Encoders are idle
  • Stop Myth Backend
  • Unload the v4l driver, dvb_usb_dib0700
  • Reload the v4l driver
  • Restart Myth Backend

The only problem is I can’t just simply put this in a crontab entry, else I will get interrupted and split recordings.

The script does the above, but only if all the encoders are idle. It checks the xml feed on the backends status port (ie. http://localhost:6544/xml) for the encoder status and will perform the 4 tasks once an hour. If when the next hour comes around and MythTV is busy recording, the script will check each minute until they are idle.

To help you mould it to your system, the url, port, sleep times and the commands that are run can all be modified at the beginning of the scripts.

The script is relatively silent by default, stating it is being run and spurting out errors should they occur. If you want to see what is happening however a -v commandline option shall output something like,

20080215 19:13.41:debug: Fetching 'http://localhost:6544/xml'
20080215 19:13.41:debug: Begin XML parser.
20080215 19:13.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Found element '<Encoders>'
20080215 19:13.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Found element '<Encoder>'
20080215 19:13.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Attribute 'id' = 1
20080215 19:13.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Attribute 'state' = 4
20080215 19:13.41:debug: End XML parser.
20080215 19:13.41:debug: Encoders are busy, waiting 60 seconds.
20080215 19:14.41:debug: Fetching 'http://localhost:6544/xml'
20080215 19:14.41:debug: Begin XML parser.
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Found element '<Encoders>'
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Found element '<Encoder>'
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Attribute 'id' = 1
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Attribute 'state' = 0
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Found element '<Encoder>'
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Attribute 'id' = 2
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Attribute 'state' = 0
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Found element '<Encoder>'
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Attribute 'id' = 3
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Attribute 'state' = 0
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Found element '<Encoder>'
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Attribute 'id' = 4
20080215 19:14.41:debug: XML::Parser -> Attribute 'state' = 0
20080215 19:14.41:debug: End XML parser.
20080215 19:14.41:debug: Encoders are idle, begin restart.
20080215 19:14.41:debug: Executing: '/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend stop'
Stopping MythTV server: mythbackend .
20080215 19:14.41:debug: Executing: 'rmmod dvb_usb_dib0700'
20080215 19:14.41:debug: Executing: 'modprobe dvb_usb_dib0700'
20080215 19:14.42:debug: Executing: '/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start'
Starting MythTV server: mythbackend .
20080215 19:14.42:debug: Backend and Driver reloading complete.
20080215 19:14.42:debug: Sleeping for 3600 seconds. zZz.

You need to run this script as root.

I may modify this should I find out what is triggering the problem. I’d prefer to only restart Myth when it happens.
Download
  mythtv-dvb-reload.pl (5.1 KiB, 2,811 hits)

Leave a Comment