Exploits of a Wench

New Age Gate for Drupal 7

Monochrome Wench — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:42:19 +0000

I have a new Age Gate module for Drupal 7. Its called new age gate. It uses css and javascript to do its magic and is SEO and static page cache friendly. This new module also has a number of configuration options that you can set in the Drupal admin interface so you don’t need to edit the module to change what it says.

New Age Gate Readme
New Age Gate module

Skyrim 4GB

Monochrome Wench — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:42:34 +0000

Same as I did for Fallout New Vegas I made a loader (well actually updated the FNV one) to load Skyrim with the Large Address Aware Flag.

Details on Skyrim Nexus

MySQL Dramas

Monochrome Wench — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 03:39:22 +0000

I was unhappy with the performance of our Drupal websites when using them logged in. We have a local test machine that is LAMP (Linux, Apahce, MySQL, PHP) and it was had page load times of over a second quicker than the production server that is WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP). While the machine are using different OS and Webservers that didn’t account for the issues. Using the Devel module it was telling me the MySQL queries were almost identical between the two machines but the page execution time was significantly slower on the production machine.

After using a profiling extension for PHP I tracked down the problem. PDO was taking over a second (!) to connect to the MySQL database on localhost. After much searching around it turns out the problem seems to be due to MySQL having issues with resolving names with IPv6 addresses. Windows Server 2008 R2 by default returns an IPv6 (::1) and IPv4 (127.0.0.1) address for localhost. In order to work around the issue I needed to add ‘127.0.0.1 localhost’ to the servers \Windows\System32\etc\hosts file. It should be noted for anyone else doing the same, make sure there is no IPv6 address for localhost in the hosts file either.

After making the change, database connections were instant and the performance of the sites improved considerably.

Age gate for Drupal 7

Monochrome Wench — Mon, 23 May 2011 06:01:09 +0000

After not being able to find a module that worked quite as we wanted, I created a simple Age Gate module for Drupal 7. This module very basic and has various hardcoded paths in it.

The module redirects all anonymous users to the agegate page and requires that they check the ‘Over 18′ checkbox before they can view content on the site. If they don’t check to box and press submit they get redirected to a page at the path ‘access-denied’ (this is the page we use on our site). The module is coded to allow non agegate access to logged in users, the ‘user/login’ page and the ‘access-denied’ page.

Download it here. Module is provided as is. Agegate Module for Drupal 7

4GB Fallout New Vegas

Monochrome Wench — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 03:59:33 +0000

4GB Fallout New Vegas is a loader for Fallout New Vegas that sets the Large Address Aware bit on the executable but not causing steam to detect a modified executable. It also provide some small stutter improvements.

File Details on NewVegasNexus

D3D FSAA Viewer

Monochrome Wench — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 07:13:00 +0000

D3D FSAA Viewer is a tool to examine the Antialiasing sampling pattern used by 3D Accelerator cards. Its an old program that I wrote, that has been very useful for a lot of people, in particular when reviewing graphics cards. Expand the post for download links.

Download

D3D FSAAViewer 5.4 55 KB – DX9 Only

D3D FSAAViewer 5.2 206 KB – DX9 Only

D3D FSAAViewer 5 205 KB – DX9 Only

D3D FSAAViewer 4 224 KB – DX8 and DX9

D3D FSAAViewer 3 51 KB – DX8 Only

D3D FSAAViewer 2 48 KB – DX8 Only

D3D FSAAViewer 1 48 KB – DX8 Only

D3DX9 August 2005 (27) 1.4MB – Download and install only if FSAA Viewer fails to run and you get a D3DX9 error.

How It works

In words D3D FSAA Viewer works by drawing regularly spaced subpixel sized quads that are fractionally more than a single pixel apart.

For the geometry mode the quads are made out of 2 triangles, and the texture mode the quads are a region in a texture.

The following two images shows how D3D FSAAViewer works. The image represents a ‘zoomed’ in view of the boxes that D3D FSAAViewer draws if it was running using a 8×8 grid and 1/4 point size.
The blue boxes represents pixel edges.
The yellow squares represent the quads that D3D FSAAViewer draws.
The red dots are the pixel sampling positions used by the graphics card.
The green filled regions are the pixels that are drawn on screen.

No FSAA Example	4x FSAA Example