I discovered a quick fix to this is to use the d hotkey on the keyboard. This toggles between frame dropping modes. By default mplayer tries to draw every frame it receives, but toggling to either framedropping enabled or framedropping hard can help keep the video up with the audio track. I’ve found this has made my octoshape streams usable again! (Usually I just make use of the framedropping enabled instead of the hard setting. (I haven’t investigated the difference between the two.)

–Update 1:30AM eastern…. (gulp) - did I say between 1 or 2 and 30 visitors - this post has now drawn 257 visits from alphainventions.com and it may still be underway….

–Update 9:39AM eastern… (you’re kidding me…) - we’ve now seen 937 visitors from alphainventions.com overnight and it looks as though the flood is STILL coming. (Site load time has been a bit slow, but hopefully thanks to super-cache we’ll hang in there.)

So - I guess that means you HAVE heard of alphainventions.com…..

CMD+S while the Mac is booting will trigger single user mode. If you see a black screen with a lot of text you’re in good.

The first thing I did was an fsck of the disk to try to determine if the drive was failing (my suspicion is that could be what caused the issue. Problems on the disk found and corrected. So, that sounds promising.

I browsed around to list the /user directory to make sure I knew the username for the primary user (ls /user ) and attempted to follow the instructions for starting Systemstarter which should launch NetInfo. The only problem is I didn’t see any information that looked promising. The instructions suggested to run niutil -list . /users but that didn’t return anything. Neither did passwd username give any means of actually changing the username. (That plugs into NetInfo.)

So, I started suspecting that there was a problem with netinfo and found a logfile in /var/log for netinfo…. yes it had problems trying to retrieve entries from the database.

So… at this point I had read this thread as well talking about problems with netinfo and the possibility of deleting (or renaming the netinfo folder), but I didn’t want to be so drastic to start with. So, I thought the suggestion of keeping the database and making it go through the new user setup to add a user to the existing database might be worth trying. My plan was to setup a new user and then from within the full running system try to change the password of the other user.

Well, I deleted /var/db/.AppleSetupDone and rebooted, walked through the setup of a new user and after the “getting more info” page it essentially hung and kept just a blank gray window on the page with a greyed out continue button and a back button.

So…. it was pretty convincing that the netinfo database was, to be technical, snarfed.

So, I went back into single user mode and this time I moved /var/db/local.nidb to /var/db/local.nidb.corrupted and rebooted. I must say I held my breath a bit, but I knew the files were still there in the /user directory for this user and if there were permissions problems I could fix them back at the command line…

So… I setup a new user and then used that to add the old user back into the netinfo database. It told me there was a folder with the same name and asked if I wanted to make use of that for the home for this user and again held my breath (afraid that it would wipe it clean…) but of course, it didn’t it just churned a few minutes and finished creating the user. I logged out and back in as the old user and everything was there and in good shape. Some things about the profile had reset to defaults (from what I had last seen.) I went back in and reconfigured auto-login for the user and all seemed to be set.

Oh, and we talked about making backups to a USB memory stick because Mac hard drives can fail JUST the same as PC hard drives.

So, what caused it? I have no clue… There had been some updates installed the two days before, but I don’t know that they would have damaged the netinfo database. I’m wondering if an abrupt power failure could have been the culprit, but I don’t know.

Here are a few (systemstartup) other (vim on mac reference), references I made use of (automated login howto).

The company is also the apparent host of the master servers for FIVE well known botnets: “Mega-D,” “Srizbi,” “Pushdo,”"Rustock” and “Warezov,” according to the full writeup at the Washington Post. As if that weren’t enough - they also had many sites that were distributing information stealing trojan horse viruses through browser exploits (i.e. just visiting the page get’s you a free virus…)

Hopefully actions like this will continue to increase the costs for the spammers and make what they do “economically unviable”. However, I suspect we’re not to that point yet and will likely see them scatter like roaches to other locations and continue their spamming from somewhere else.

Unfortunately if you have been bitten by this, you’ll need to boot into a Rescue or Repair Console and do the following (from the Link above)…

Fix

When AVG have performed the same action on your PC, cleaning/removing user32.dll, reboot your PC with the Windows XP CD, hit in the upcoming menu the “R” on your keyboard, hit “1″, hit “enter”, answer password question with “enter” on your keyboard, after that you get the command prompt c:\windows>
Type behind that prompt copy c:\windows\$NTuninstallKB925902$\user32.dll c:\windows\system32 and hit “enter” on your keyboard.

According to this story it affects both AVG 7.5 and 8…. there are several “you get what you pay for” kind of comments over there, but there are a lot of people that pay for AVG - it’s not JUST a free scanner. For that matter I seem to recall Symantec flagging a system file as a virus not too many years ago. That’s part of the problem with antivirus - it works at a system level, many of the recent releases not only do on-access scanning (scan something when you try to load or run it) but they also do the forced daily search of EVERYTHING… which does increase the odds that a false positive will bite you.

Down for everyone or just me

Sales are predicted to be “poor” this year for the Christmas season, but from what I understand the forecast is still for GROWTH over last year, just not as much growth as people might be used to seeing year to year. Who knows. We’ll find that out when it happens.

But, to stimulate even more spending many stores open EXTREMELY early (4 AM?) and offer big discounts for at least a part of the day.

So, BlackFriday.info has taken on the task of trying to document some of these great offers, deals and specials that are given for Black Friday this year. I see offers from Toys ‘R Us, Sears, Ace, Walmart and others. It’s worth checking out if you’re planning to wade into the wild jungle that is Black Friday Shopping! (I know some people plan these outings with military style precision. I’m glad we can provide you the intelligence you need for your operations on the internet these days!)

Good Luck!

I figured out what I was seeing - I have two google logins, both of which have access to my analytics account. One can see the new beta features, the other can’t.

Anyway, here is the page I used as a model.

Essentially one end of the cable is white-orange/orange white-green/blue white-blue/green white-brown/brown and the other end is white-green/green white-orange/white-brown brown/orange blue/white-blue (I haven’t tested this yet - will update when that’s done.) Although - that seems to be backed up by this wikipedia page.

So… this document can give you a walkthrough of how to do it.