Kerblam! by Christopher

Monday, June 22
Problems with shaderapidx9.dll? This fix worked for me

I was doing some housekeeping on my PC earlier, and as it was taking up a fair amount of space on my C: partition I decided to backup my Steam install, uninstall it and reinstall to another HDD.

I backed up my installed games using Steam's Backup feature, then reinstalled Steam and restored my games (also downloading the newly released Smashball for good measure, which is an HL2 mod). Strangeness ensued however... Any time I tried to load HL2 or Smashball, I got a DX9 error relating to shaderapidx9.dll.

However, I stumbled upon a YouTube video seemingly offering a one-line fix... Here's my message to Steam support describing it all in more detail:

Hi,

I'm running Windows XP Service Pack 3, fully patched and up to date. I uninstalled Steam earlier this evening so I could reinstall it to a different HDD - this went perfectly. Before uninstalling Steam, I also backed up my games using the Steam Backup facility. Once Steam was reinstalled on my secondary HDD, I restored the games. The only two games I had installed were HL2 and CS:s - after restoring those, I also downloaded Smashball.

My original Steam and games installation worked perfectly, however when I tried to load HL2 or Smashball (which is an HL2 mod), I got an error regarding shaderapidx9.dll and the game crashed out to the desktop. CS:S continued to load fine.

I did some searching around, and almost by chance I came across this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRcFfFxigpE. The video instructs you to open a DOS prompt and enter "net localgroup administrators networkservice /ADD" (without the inverted commas). I did this, and the command was issued successfully - I immediately tried to load HL2 and it worked perfectly, first time - the same for Smashball too.

Why should uninstalling and reinstalling Steam make this happen? It was working perfectly before, so why should a simple uninstall and reinstall cause this problem? Also, why don't you offer this advice as a potential fix on your Support pages? Cheers...

While I understand that there's quite a few Vista users out there who are having to muck about with the WMI service to get their Steam games running, this simple usergroup fix seems to have solved whatever the Steam uninstallation process broke. However, I'm not discounting that it was something the Steam platform update did (my client updated when it first connected, before I uninstalled - and I didn't play any games after updating the client, so it could've overwritten a DLL or modified something which persisted across the uninstall and reinstall).

That said, if you're using XPSP3 and suddenly any HL2-based game stops working, try inputting

net localgroup administrators networkservice /ADD

from a DOS prompt and seeing if your games start working.

Labels: fix, hl2, shaderapidx9.dll, source, steam, workaround

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 6/22/2009 03:04:00 AM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 8178185947995077977· | Permalink

Sunday, April 19
I'm responsible for my own DNS. Bollocks.

Bollocks bollocks bollocks. The IP address of the server this site's hosted on changed last month, and I totally forgot to update the DNS records for it. WHOOPS!

For those who were wondering if I'd evaded paying my hosting bill... Me? Evading hosting bills? Never. How dare you think such a thing. ;) My site was never gone (the whole world was just looking in the wrong place for it!) That'll learn me. Perhaps I should get some site monitoring just to watch over me for when I fsck up. Good idea or no?

Labels: facepalm, idjuttiem, LART, meatspace, meatspace error, never underestimate the power of human stupidity, picard

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 4/19/2009 09:41:00 PM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 2559445674056530461· | Permalink

Thursday, March 19
Stuff I've Found: w/c 16th of March, 2008

Every so often I just go exploring across the Web. One link leads to another, and after a while you find yourself truly ensconsed in a marvellously diverse selection of web pages.

I hate closing browser tabs too, so sometimes I have these pages open for weeks, months at a time (or saved across sessions!) I thought I'd start jotting some of them down on my blog for others to peruse and enjoy, so here goes.

~~~~

Wondered what all the police call-sign codes mean? Disabled-World.com has the lowdown, along with some other info about PB scanners and links to similar sites.

http://www.disabled-world.com/artman/publish/police-radio.shtml

Nick Crowe put together a rolling radio station called Police Radio a while ago, and you can listen to the shows on his web site.

http://www.nickcrowe.net/works/policeradio/track_01.html

Irational.org has a really cool mashup - the guy has an FM receiver hooked up to an Icecast server in his house in London, and from the web site you can control which web site it's tuned to... If you like roaming the FM bands to see what's being broadcast, you might enjoy this.

http://scanner.irational.org/cgi-bin/pirates/listing.pl?sort_by=last_heard

Dandelion Radio is an internet radio station "inspired by John Peel", and it fairly lives up to that reputation. There's an incredibly diverse roster of DJs and music styles on the station - if you enjoyed John Peel's show, you'll love just tuning in over the web and listening for hours on end.

http://www.dandelionradio.com/thismonth.htm

Yes, there are such things as Magic Buttons. Read this story from the legendary Jargon File and marvel and geek humour.

http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Bitty Browser is a quite useful mini-browser - I can think of several useful applications for it, from testing content rendering on small screens to embedding a browser within another web page. What can you come up with?

http://www.bitty.com/

For web designers, making pages degrade gracefully for being printed is of paramount importance - and with some intelligent CSS design, it can be remarkably painless to do. Envisionic and ALA (A List Apart) have the skinny on this.

http://envisionic.com/webtips/user_experience/printer_friendly.php

and

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/

Finally for now, Font Frenzy is a free application which indexes your installed fonts - insanely useful for designers picking out typefaces, and also has some useful features for paring down your font installations to speed up Windows boot times.

http://www.sdsoftware.org/default.asp?id=5929

Labels: exploring, links, linkshare, resources, roaming, Stuff I've Found, useful, web

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 3/19/2009 01:08:00 AM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 3811068009883562789· | Permalink

Sunday, March 1
Happy to accept all comments except less-than-adoring ones?

Interesting... I just commented on an article off the BBC's sprawling U2 microsite, and although "all comments are reactively moderated" it seems that they're all being PRE-moderated too. Nice.

My comments were in response to the U2 rooftop gig; here's what I wrote:

So, er, does this mean that the Beeb is going to start doing more rooftop gigs to help promote new artists? What would be far better are some rooftop gigs for (truly) upcoming, quality artists who could do with some good free publicity far more than U2 does - I'm sure sales figures for their latest album would be just fine even if they didn't have a licence payer funded gig to help. ;)

Just seems a little hypocritical of the Beeb flying their "In New Music We Trust" flag, then little more than a year later giving a free gig in a coveted setting to a band that's been around for twenty years... Or is this just the start of a whole series of rooftop gigs? That would be genuinely exciting to see.

I'll be interested to see if the comment makes it to the page! I'm all for the BBC doing what it sees fit in the name of the public interest, and I largely support the BBC (particularly in their online and R&D sections of the organisation) but sometimes things smack a little too much of croneyism or rampant, thinly-veiled publicity to not say anything at all which is even slightly to the contrary of 'the public opinion' (and, as usual, the U2 fans will be shouting louder than everybody else about this rooftop gig).

As I mentioned in my original comment, what about some gigs for artists who may need the publicity a little more? For every U2 there's tens and hundreds of artists who are just as good if not better who could do with that leg-up far more. Come on Beeb, show us that you really trust In New Music.

Labels: BBC, comment, impartiality, opinion, publicity, U2

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 3/01/2009 04:46:00 PM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 3624474697485612227· | Permalink

Monday, December 1
The most sense I've read all month

Hello, I'm not dead yet! Been superSUPER busy recently but I'm keen to get back into the blogging (just as soon as this latest batch of brain-zapping coursework is over and done with).

In the meantime, this, from the latest Zen customer newsletter, made me smile:

GRAMMAR SCHOOL
Even the most educated readers and writers can fail to get a
complete grasp of English grammar. The book: 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' has
evidence that a surprising number of people struggle to define parts of speech
and few have any idea about, say, passive and active verbs. Why the book's
peculiar title?
It's from a joke: A panda walked into a cafe. He ordered a
sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter in the foot. "Why?"
groaned the injured man. The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated
wildlife manual and walked out. When the waiter consulted the book, he found an
entry that read: "The Panda is a large black and white mammal native to
China.
Eats, shoots and leaves". We see signs in shops every day for
"Banana's" and even "Gateaux's". Competition rules remind us: "The judges
decision is final".
There are many punctuation guides explaining the principles
of the apostrophe; the comma; the semi-colon. These books do their job, but
somehow punctuation abuse does not diminish. Why? Because people who can't
punctuate don't read those books! 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' adopts a more
militant approach and attempts to recruit an army of punctuation vigilantes,
telling them: Send letters back with the punctuation corrected. Do not accept
sloppy e-mails. Climb ladders at dead of night with a pot of paint to remove the
redundant apostrophe in "Video's sold here".
The BBC Skillswise site has an alternative guide for non-activists.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=b7e
http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/

Now, I'll avoid pointing out the glaringly obvious mistakes in the paragraphs above (I quoted them verbatim from the newsletter, so don't blame me!) but I cannot believe the depths to which Britons' grasp of their OWN language have sunk - often peoples' poor language skills verge on the abhorrent! (And there's a new word for you.)

Labels: annoyances, english, frustration, languages, pet hate, skills, spelling punctuation and grammar, whinge