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No HDCP using the Gigabyte MA69GM-S2H onboard card??
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Loading ...Ok I recently got a very weird problem with my HTPC. Since a couple of days I’ve been unable to play any Blu-Ray disc. Even after updating my PowerDVD to the latest patched version.
Before this update of PowerDVD the weird behaviour was the disapearing of PowerDVD when playing discs. No message no error nothing, just gone! After the update the DVD player informed me that HDCP was not available and it could not play protected Blu-Ray discs.
This sounded weirdt to me since I have played them in the past, and I know the onboard graphics chip (the Ati Radeon X1250) supports it.
As it turns out, after a lot of digging, I had recently installed an updated version of the Catalyst Control Center. Which should not be anything strange, its recommended practice by a lot of software developers. However the graphics chipset on the motherboard appears to have some custom stuff, since after installing the latest version from the Ati site HDCP was no longer supported.
When I reinstalled the version of the Catalyst Control Center that came with the PC all my troubles went away. No more warnings / crashes or unable to play disc reports.
Some unexpected down-time
As you may have been able to notice over the past week or so my websites and those I am hosting for clients had some down-time last week. As such I’ve not been doing much other then trying to figure out what is going on, and haven’t had to much time to write something new.
Unfortunattely for me and my clients the problem seems to be with the provider I have to rent my servers. After some digging I found out even their own servers where unreachable. (Could not even setup a SSH connection to my servers).
It seems to be fixed at the moment, so keep praying that it stays that way 
.
PHP catching all function calls
Recently I came accross something really fancy that was introduced in PHP 5. It is appearantly possible for any class to catch all functions that are called on a class. So one function would catch $obj->callOne() as well as $obj->callTwo().
So why is this a nice feature to have, well because I am a very lazy progammer and this feature allows me to magically generate getters and setters. To do this I have the following setting for each class:
- The constructor method __construct initializes an array containing the names of all variables that we want to store. We also create a second array to save the values in for the variables.
- We implement the __call function to catch all functions being called on the object, which is currently still undocumented by PHP.net
So a basic class would look something similar to this:
class MyObject {
private $my_vars = array();
private $allowed_vars;
function __construct() {
$this->allowed_vars = array('var1', 'var2', 'var3');
}
function __calls($function_name, $arguments) {
$_variablename = substr($function_name, 3);
if (array_search($_variablename, $this->allowed_vars) !== FALSE) {
if (stripos($function_name, 'get') == 0 && stripos($function_name, 'get') !== FALSE) {
return $this->my_vars[$_variablename];
} else if (stripos($function_name, 'set') == 0 && stripos($function_name, 'set') !== FALSE) {
$this->my_vars[$_variablename] = $arguments[0];
}
}
else throw new Exception('Unkown function called on '. __CLASS__);
}
}
Which does exactly that which I described above. Mind you it’s just a very basic example but it shows the power of a catch all function.
Netbeans 6.5 Final Release
A short while back I wrote a quick review on the beta of Netbeans 6.5 and that it had some issues. Since the final version was released some time ago I thought it was time for a new review. This time of the final version.
The reason for me not to write one straight away was simple, I first wanna play around a little to find all the pleasant features and those less pleasant ones.
Bigger, better, best
The first thing you expect is this new version to be bigger, better and the best one yet. Well it is bigger in size, with 190MiB for just Java development. So this means a lot more time downloading, but hey that’s a one time thing.
So lets move onto something more relevant. Is it better then Netbeans 6.1. Lets summorize some of the issues I had with the previous version and see if the problem is solved:
- It crashed when working on larger projects. This issue has been fixed, netbeans won’t crash or hang. Though on occasion the parser may crash. Disabling autocomplete and syntax checking.
- For some reason previous versions had difficulty displaying the names of parameters when using Java libraries. For as far as I’ve been able to determine this has been solved.
- The autocomplete completely fails in some more complicated web projects. Well I’m sorry to say this is still true. For some projects not only does autocomplete fail, but so does the syntax checker, both for the JSP files as well as the Java Source files.
So are there any other changes that would make you consider moving from Netbeans 5.5 to 6.5?
New stuff you will like in Netbeans 6.5
Well have there been any changes that would make you wanna switch to the new version.
- The new version actually has some basic debugging integrated of JavaScript. Though I haven’t got it working yet.
- PHP development is now support. Which is a big plus, but it still kinda feels like a cheap addon that doesn’t work perfectly yet. (Maybe in the next release)
- Thread debugging has been improved and made easier
Unfortunattely not all is good in the world of Netbeans. There are also some new bugs, some of which are really annoying.
- For some unexplainable reason adding of libraries by right clicking the ‘Libraries’ in the project view doesn’t work all the time.
- Like I stated earlier the code completion fails in some of the older Java project I’m working on. Not only does code completion fail, but the syntax checker tells me every single line is wrong. Even though the project compiles beautifully
As a final note: is it worth upgrading to this version. Then I’d have to say hell yeah, it’s a lot better then previous versions. If you are a PHP developer however I suggest not using it, for the moment. Especially when you are already using Zend-Studio, which is still a lot better.
Working On WordPress Mobile plugin
A while back I got some questions if it was possible to create a more mobile friendly version of this blog. Appearantly I have several visitors that are browsing using mobile devices. And I must say my design is not user friendly for them.
Off course they are right, any user should be able to access this blog. Be it from a mobile phone or a computer. So I had to find a way to offer my mobile visitors a better experience. First thing to do that is looking into the wordpress.org plugin library. There are a lot of plugins available for a lot of different things. There had to be some for switching the display to mobile when a mobile device is detected.
And there are. I first tried WordPress Mobile Edition which is pretty good. Big issues I had with it are that it’s not as light weight as I want it to be. And the coding is crappy! But beyond that it does what it’s supposed to.
But me being a developer I decided to write my own little plugin to offer a mobile version of this blog. Fully customizable using templates and settings in the admin menu. I haven’t yet completed the entire design, nor is the admin part working . But it’s currently running on this blog 
. If you want to check it out just add ‘?mobile=true’ to any page or visit using your phone.
When I’m done developing the plugin I’ll share with you all how you can write a simple WordPress plugin. I will also publish the plugin for anyone to download, for free!!!
So stay tuned for an update…….
