Mass Effect 3 questions

As someone who played (and loved) the first two Mass Effect games on the PC (after being badgered to just try them by a good friend), I'm on tenter-hooks waiting for the third installment's release on Friday (after the USians got theirs today).

As I'm moving between platforms these days and having a whale of a time in multi-player on XBox, including in the excellent multi-player section of the ME3 demo, I've had a few concerns about the PC/XBox divide, here are the answers I've found:

• Can I transfer saved game files from my PC to my Xbox360?
• Does the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer component has any effect on the Single Player component and vice-versa? [sic]
• Will I miss out on anything by not playing Mass Effect 3's multiplayer?
• Does multi-player levelling count between games and across platforms in Mass Effect 3?
• What modes of multiplayer are present in Mass Effect 3?
• Does Mass Effect 3 require Origin?

Tons of useful info there to keep me interested and informed until the final release!

Deploying Adobe LiveCycle Launchpad ES2 (9.5) for use by end users

As in many companies these days, our users don’t have administrative permissions to their PCs or to the various servers and services we give them access to. This means that the standard one-click web page deployment of LiveCycle Launchpad won’t work for our users, and also we have to configure the permissions within LiveCycle to give them the permissions needed. Here’s how we got it working:

Throughout this please replace any references to "LiveCycleServer" or port numbers in URLs with the appropriate ones for your environment.

Software Deployment

• Log into your LiveCycle server's admin console (as a user with at least some admin privileges):
  http://LiveCycleServer:8080/adminui/
• Then go to http://LiveCycleServer:8080/launchpad
  You should be able to download the .AIR executable from your server from this page, its address will be http://LiveCycleServer:8080/launchpad/installer/LaunchPad.air ).
• (If you haven’t already) Sign up to Adobe’s AIR Runtime distribution agreement, this should get you a link to the direct download for the corporate deployable, bare-bones, all-in-one, AIR runtime installer.
• Once you’ve been sent the link to the "Download Adobe AIR Runtime" page, you want to download the installer files under the "Adobe AIR Runtime Installer files: For use with a native installer or through CD/DVD redistribution using the Adobe AIR side-car configuration" heading.
• Put your LaunchPad.air and AdobeAIRInstaller.exe files into a folder together, and you can now push out the two together, with a command line like:
  AdobeAIRInstaller.exe -silent -eulaAccepted -programMenu LaunchPad.air
• Finally the first time that you run the LiveCycle Launchpad app, you’ll notice that the servername, protocol and port are all set to defaults, and not to your server’s settings. Have a look in c:\Program Files\Adobe\LiveCycle ES2\Adobe LiveCycle Launchpad ES2 on a PC that has Launchpad installed and you should see a Server.xml file, copy that to your distribution location, open it up in a text editor and change the server details to match your environment. You can now push this file out along with the Launchpad app to give your users the correct default settings (I just use an Xcopy to put this in the folder after install).

Now you’ll find that any users (who don’t have admin permissions within LiveCycle) who try to log into the Launchpad app will get an error like: "Server configuration specified here is invalid. Do you want to reconfigure the server settings?"

Permissions

So, once users have the app, you need to ensure that normal users can use it without needing admin access all through the LiveCycle server.

• Log into the LiveCycle admin console (as a user with at least some admin privileges):
  http://LiveCycleServer:8080/adminui/
• Go to Settings -> User Management -> Role Management
• Create a New Role, I called mine LaunchPad User, and obviously fill out the description field


• Assign them enough permissions to use the Launchpad app, according to these articles they need these permissions at a minimum they’ll need "Repository Read", "Repository Traverse", "Repository Write", "Document Upload" and they’ll also need the PDFG User role assigned as well. Depending on your LiveCycle config, and which modules you have, you may have to give them additional permissions to other modules to give them all of the available modules. See these articles for more info on permissions needed: Adobe Knowledgebase: Unable to use LiveCycle Launchpad services without administrative role - LiveCycle Launchpad ES2 (9.x) and Adobe Forums: Launchpad ES2 - Logging In Issue.


• Now assign these roles to end users (or preferably to a group to keep things tidy).

Done! You should now be able to deploy and give your users access to LiveCycle Launchpad. Next up (hopefully) deploying the LiveCycle ES2 PDFG Windows printer to your non-administrative users.

Dropbox

Just started using Dropbox to sync between my PC, server, Android phone and the web, it really is great. Easiest and simplest syncing solution I've found.

Had been thinking about it for a while, and then it was Gina Trapani (of TWiG fame) releasing her new Todo.txt Touch Android app that finally convinced me, as it uses Dropbox to do the behind the scenes updates.

If you sign up for Dropbox please use my affiliate link Sign-up for Dropbox as it will get us both an extra 250MB of storage on our accounts for free. Thanks.

Mozilla Weave Minimal Server Setup on Windows

So I've been following Mozilla's Weave project for while, and kept meaning to have a play with it. It's one of their experimental labs projects which recently came out of beta with a 1.0 release. Essentially it's a Firefox add-in that syncs and backs up a whole load of your settings and data back to a central server, including your bookmarks (and I have a lot!), saved passwords, preferences, history and open tabs. If, like me, you use more than one PC in more than one location then it's great knowing that Firefox is always setup how you like it wherever you are.

There are two parts to Weave; the Weave Firefox add-on (Weave is also available as an add-on for Mozilla's Fennec mobile browser), and the Weave server.

Most people install the add-on and sync their data back to Mozilla's Weave server, there's nothing wrong with that, all of your data is encrypted on your PC before it's sent to Mozilla's web server, so it's all secure and they have no way to access your private information. However you can also download the code for the Weave server and set it up on your own machine. Now, being that I have my own Windows Home Server* that's on 24/7 and accessible both within my home network and across the world via the internet I didn't really see the point in using someone else's server!

So I looked into it, and there are two options for installing your own Weave server there's the full server, which is a complex install and has all sorts of components that are only needed if you're going to act as a Weave server for many thousands of clients, or there's the Minimal Weave server, which has an incredibly simple server install (provided your machine already has all of the pre-reqs) and yet still implements the full Weave 1.0 API. Linux PCs are very likely already going to have most of the pre-reqs already installed (Apache web server and PHP for the Minimal server), Windows machines very likely won't.

I decided that as my Weave server is only ever going to be used by me, and possibly a few family members in the future, the simple install option sounded best! Particularly after I'd looked into it, and seen just how much effort was needed to install a full Weave server on a WHS box!

(Instructions on how to install an older version of the full Weave server on WHS are available on WeGotServed's wiki. note that this is for an outdated Weave version and won't SSL encrypt your traffic)

* A great little Tranquil PC SQA-5H series 1 server running MS Windows Home Server.

---

Stage 1: Setting up Weave Minimal server on Windows Vista

I don't like to mess up my server too much, it has a job to do, and does it well. I have a number of WHS add-ins installed, but have done the minimal amount of messing around on the server directly (and as a Microsoft certified server admin, this is against my nature ;). So to work it out, step one was to set Weave up on my Vista desktop, which luckily already happened to have a copy of Apache running, and I really don't care if this box gets messed up in the process!
Step by step instructions for how I did it are below.

Installing and configuring all required software for the Weave Minimal server:

1. Download and install the Apache 2.2 web server (I cheated here as I already had Apache set up and working on my PC, stage 2 coming in a few days will have more detail for this step). Apache download page.
2. Test Apache, point your web browser at http://localhost/ and make sure that you can see the Apache welcome page.
3. Stop the Apache server -
   
   • Either using the Stop item in your Start menu under Apache HTTP Server -> Control Apache Server
   • Or by double-clicking the Apache 'feather' icon in your Windows system tray and clicking the Stop button in the Apache Service Monitor window that appears.
4. Download and install PHP 5.2. Go to the PHP for Windows Download page scroll down to PHP 5.2 and click the Installer link under the VC6 x86 Thread Safe link. Run the installer, it will ask you the following questions after you Accept the licensing agreement:
   
   • Where to install PHP to, just accept the default that it offers you.
   • Select the web server you wish to setup: Select Apache 2.2.x Module.
   • Apache Configuration Directory, click Browse and go to C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\
   • Ensure that the following Extensions are selected:
     
     • Extensions -> Multi-Byte Strings
     • Extensions -> PDO -> SQLite
     • Extensions -> SQLite
5. Download the Weave Minimal server files from tobyelliott.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/weave-minimal-server/ unzip them using Winzip (or any other similar tool, Windows' built-in unzip tool can't unzip .tgz files) into a new folder called weave_minimal in the following folder: C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs
6. Open Apache's configuration file via Start -> All Programs -> Apache HTTP Server... -> Configure Apache Server -> Edit the Apache httpd.conf... and add the following line to it at the bottom:
   Alias /weave "C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs\weave_minimal\index.php"
7. Start Apache
   
   • Either using the Start item in your Start menu under Apache HTTP Server -> Control Apache Server
   • Or by double-clicking the Apache 'feather' icon in your Windows system tray and clicking the Start button in the Apache Service Monitor window that appears.
8. In Firefox go to http://localhost/weave/1.0/blah/info/collection if everything has worked you should see an "Authentication Required" box pop up, enter "blah" for the username and type anything as the password. The box will pop up again, just click Cancel, don't worry about this. You'll see a "File not found" web page, don't worry this is normal. Now if you go to the weave_minimal folder that you created earlier you should see a new file called weave_db this means that you now have your very own, working Weave server - well done!
9. All that remains now is to create your user account(s) on the server and set up Firefox to talk to the server!

Setting up user accounts on the Weave server

Go to your weave_minimal folder that you created earlier in Windows Explorer, hold down the shift key and click the right-mouse button on a blank bit of the window, you should see a menu entry that says "Open Command Window Here" select that. Copy and paste the following line into the new window (Right-click -> Paste):

"C:\Program Files\PHP\php.exe" create_user

You can then press "c" to create your user and enter the desired username and password. Repeat for any further user accounts that you want to set up on your server.

Setting up Weave in Firefox to sync with your new server

1. Install the Weave Browser SyncFirefox add-on from the Firefox add-ons website.
2. Restart Firefox
3. When Firefox starts up again it should take you straight to the Weave settings screen in Firefox's Options. Select Use a custom server from the drop-down menu. Fill out the boxes as below:
   
   • Server URL: http://localhost/weave/
   • User Name: The username you created earlier
   • Password: The password you created earlier
   • Click Sign In
4. You'll be asked to type in a secret passphrase, you need to make a not of and remember this, it is a bit like a second password and is used to encrypt your data in Firefox before it is sent to the Weave server. You'll need to enter this and your user name and password when you set another copy of Firefox to sync with your Weave.
5. If everything went well you should get a successful login and the Weave status at the bottom of your Firefox windows should show that it is successfully syncing
6. Well done!

Next Steps

The server that we set up above is OK as a test server but is only accessible by Firefox on your one PC (or by other copies of Firefox on your home network if you enter the Server URL Weave's settings as your http://yourPCname/weave/ but it's not accessible over the internet at all. That's deliberate, the Minimal server doesn't encrypt your username and password as you login to Weave, these are sent over the network in clear text, not something you want to do over the internet.

Next time I'll be setting up Weave on my Windows Home Server box and taking advantage of the free dynamic domain name and free SSL encrypted connection that you get with WHS to allow me to connect to my Weave server over the internet using an SSL encrypted connection, so that my username and password are encrypted as they travel across the internet, and safe from anyone snooping.

---

Music that got me through this: The Orb - "The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, deluxe edition" playing on my Logitech Squeezebox Boom, classic, calming ambient house - just what I need.

---

Edited 16/5/2010 to correct the PHP version used.

EVE Central Market Upload Utility Trojan Keylogger Warning

Please see the update at the bottom of this article. I no longer suspect EVE Central or it's Market Uploader utility of any wrongdoing here.

So a friend of mine found that around a £1000 of money had been siphoned from his bank account recently (all in bank transfers of under £150). After talking to the bank about he found that the attacker had got into his bank account using the web login.

The question then became, how did they get his password? Like me, he works in IT so is pretty savvy about security generally, so had no idea how anyone could have got a keylogger onto either his home or work PC.

After much searching around he finally found this blog post a Mule in EvE: Learn and live to fight again that pointed to the fact that someone else had found a Trojan keylogger (a piece of malicious software similar to a virus that logs all of your typing and sends it to someone else on the internet) hidden inside the popular Market Upload utility from EVE Central. This is a popular tool that allows players of the game EVE Online to upload data about the ingame market place to a website where analysis can be run.

He rang me to let me know (as I also play EVE and have this tool installed), and sure enough a "deep scan" by Sunbelt Software's VIPRE Antivirus found the following trojan on my PC: Trojan-Spy.Win32.KeyLogger.acm, hidden in the "evec_upload.exe" file in the "EVE-Central MarketUploader".

Not good news, so one removal, uninstall and a few hours changing passwords later, here we are warning the rest of the public about this. As EVE-Central doesn't have any kind of public forum to post in, I'm putting this up here whilst I mail the developers for comment.

Please note that I am not blaming the EVE-Central developers here at all, I have no idea whether they are simply the victims of being unwittingly hacked themselves, or whether they are doing this deliberately. Also there is the possibility that this could be a false alarm and something in the way the Market Uploader was written is accidentally triggering a false warning in the anti virus software.

I am also most definitely not blaming CCP or EVE Online. CCP have made a great game that many, many people enjoy every day, and neither myself or EVE-Central are affiliated with them.

Update 20/8/08: Having carried out further investigation and emailed back and forth with Yann of Eve-Central it seems that we were too hasty assigning blame here. I no longer suspect EVE Central or it's Market Uploader utility of any wrongdoing here. I'm sorry for any misunderstanding or distress that could have been caused by this.

An up to date version of the VIPRE Antivirus doesn't pick up the "EVE-Central.com MarketUploader" as any kind of malware (or 'bad' software) at all.

From Yann:

I've been distributing the same package file since mid 2007. Its been at some time been listed as a Trojan all these major AV products, but detection had improved so the false positives were eliminated within a few update cycles.

It seems that some fairly old virus was written by someone using the same software that Yanne used to create the Market Uploader. This means that it has ended up looking slightly similar to an old virus, and has been at one time flagged up by many of the major anti-virus products, and then cleared again a few updates later as they fine-tune their virus detection.

This is a bit like if I used the same powerdrill to put up my shelves, as some serial killer used to do nasty stuff to people. Just because we both used the same tool, and both used it to drill holes, doesn't mean that I had anything like the same intention or outcome as the murderer.

Hmm tortuous analogy!

Open Parliament

Dad's organization (OFE) are organizing a petition to convince the European Parliament Government to change their IT systems over to using open standards.

Head over to www.openparliament.eu to sign up and show your support

Citizens and stakeholder groups should not have to use the software of a single company in order to communicate with their elected officials or participate in the legislative process.

All companies should be given the chance to compete freely for contracts to supply ICT services to the European Parliament.

I am a citizen of the EU, and I want the European Parliament to adopt the use of open standards and to promote interoperability in the ICT sector.

We believe that the current situation, where the European Parliament’s ICT runs on proprietary software that is not interoperable with that of other vendors, where therefore citizens and stakeholder groups wishing to participate in the legislative process are forced to use the products of a single company, is in conflict with the first article of Chapter 1 in the Treaty of the European Union. An example of this is the live Web streaming from the European Parliament's plenary sessions – aimed at improving communication with citizens and insight into democratic processes – which will only work with Windows Media Player.

Go on, head over and sign the petition.

EveBerry

This post's been sitting in my queue for a while, sorry!

Vlad (of Mozilla and Firefox fame) posted to the EVE-Online fourms a while ago about his new EveBerry tool, that can be downloaded here: EveBerry -- a BlackBerry EVE Character Monitor:.

It's similar to EVEMon and market monitoring apps, but for your Blackberry smartphone (assuming you have one, I do) and is very, very cool and very, very useful.

That's all!

I CAN HAS BOTZ

Since my last set of Lol Bots images (featuring Red Dwarf's Kryten, Ghost in the Shell's Tachikoma and Fritz Lang's Maria), the site seemed to go quiet for quite a few months. Luckily over the last few weeks rstevens has grabbed the editorial reins back and posted a slew of new images, including two more of mine.

I started off a little late for Valentine's with Kryten and Camille:

(It really was E5 A9 08 B7, no need to spell it out)

And finally got a bit of my favourite geekery in with 3PO:

(Metal body: 1, Fragile Skin and Bones: 0)

Safari for Windows Update

An update to the previous post: Safari for Windows.

I'd like to say that the Safari 3.01 beta update fixed the problems with my curved borders mentioned in the the previous post, but I probably ought to stick my hand up and admit that uploading the updated CSS file that's been sitting on my hard disk for about 2 months is almost certainly what fixed it! So Safari's new border radius properties do actually work on Windows, and they really do look gorgeous, all anti-aliased and shaded, against Firefox 2's pixellated efforts, or IE 7's non-existent effort :).

However still some quite quirky UI issues:
I'm really not sure I like the way that the Preferences window shrinks and grows every time you change tabs, and the fact that it's all instant apply with no 'OK' or 'Cancel'.
Also the Mac-style window re-sizing is really beginning to wind me up, particularly as the cursor doesn't change to the 'double-headed' resize arrow until after you start dragging in the one place that actually works, so there's absolutely no clue which parts of the UI you can or can't grab to resize until after you click the mouse to try it!
And finally just noticed that clicking the File menu on a non-resized window (with my Classic XP style) gives a really ugly blocky overlap of the window edge.

Safari for Windows

So Apple have just released a beta of the "Safari 3 web browser for Windows!

First impressions are great, all my web sites, and my favourite sites seem to work well, and look beautiful. Text flowing around flowing objects is definitely better than Firefox 2 or IE 7. Text just looks great full stop.

Downsides, its a bit like when Apple first shoved all that brushed chrome theme stuff over Quicktime for Windows, its just not a Windows app at the moment. You can't drag window borders to resize, you can't even drag window corners (except for one in the bottom right). Also if you're using XP with the Classic theme the menus are a bit messed up :).

Just remember to deselect all the stuff-ware that you don't want when you download and install it (the default download bundles Quicktime, and it tries to get you to install some network discovery tool as you install).

Hmmm seems to dislike my curved borders, even though I'd thought that I had the Safari CSS right, guess there's nothing quite like actually testing to find out what happens instead of just crossing your fingers and hoping!

Via Asa and Burnt Electrons.

UPDATE 18/6/07, see the follow-up post.