I’ve added Alexa Traffic Ranking button on my site few months back. I know that Alexa’s traffic ranking is not accurate but its a good motivation to keep me going to get more visitors. Whenever the traffic ranking number drops, I work even harder to find and write good articles. Alexa ratings are based on a level from 1 to 4,000,000 and it goes beyond 4 million sometimes. The lower the rating on Alexa the better. So if a website has a ranking below 100,000 then the website should be getting a good number of daily visitors. 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 ratings are for new sites mostly, or sites with no traffic. While a rating of 1 will be the website with the most traffic, a spot currently occupies by Yahoo. The main flaw in Alexa is that it only measures visits from people with the Alexa toolbar installed and Alexa assumes that this group of surfers are representative for all Internet surfers.

Anyway, when I added the code from Alexa to my blog in order to track my traffic, a small picture will be displayed stating the Traffic Ranking and date it was updated. Below is the picture of how Alexa’s Traffic Ranking picture looks like.

If you click on that picture, it will bring you to Amazon.com with a small thumbnailed screenshot of your website together with your traffic details. I am quite surprised to find that the thumbnailed screenshot of my website shows Precondition Failed. I honestly have no idea what is the meaning of this Precondition Failed error so I waited for a few weeks waiting for Alexa to crawl to my site and get a new screenshot. Weeks has passed and still the same Precondition Failed screenshot.

To solve this problem…

Honestly, I don’t play much computer games but I do once in a while when I get really bored and can’t think of anything to do on the computer. I went to Reflexive Arcade to look for some small sized games but nice to play with. If you visit Reflexive Arcade’s website, you’ll find hundreds of games in there but only around 9 games are developed by them. Reflexive Arcade is like a reseller for small sized downloadable computer games. Hence, the payment goes to Reflexive Arcade if you buy them and also the software registration protection method is also provided by them.

Looked around and found that Tradewinds Legends screenshot is pretty nice. I get to buy ships, upgrade canons and use magic spells. Plus the reviews for this game is awesome. This game gets almost full scores from every reviewer! Moreover, to download this game only takes a few minutes with a broadband connection since the size is 13.92MB. The description for Tradewinds Legends is “Trade and battle with legendary heroes in the mythical Far East as you discover a world of magic on the high seas in this strategy adventure!”

I played Tradewinds Legends for a while and I am kinda addicted to it until I finish the game. However, it’s not really that easy to play with. You have to really manage your money or it’s called Dinar in the game properly. Otherwise, you won’t be able to repair your ships, buy new canons, buy magics, or even repair your ships in order to battle with the future pirates! Some of the items even costs a bomb such as a magical ring cost 1 million dinar! How in the world am I supposed to get that amount of money if I get around tens of thousands Dinars when I complete each task? After each battle with pirates, I need Dinar to repair my ships and buy new canons to replace the spoilt canons.

Before I stop playing the game and uninstall it, I thought that I should look for cheat codes, trainers or hacks on how I can increase my dinar in Tradewinds Legends. Searched around in Google, I can’t fine ZERO cheat codes or hacks for this game! I find it hard to believe because usually a game creator would build-in a cheat code in the game. Since there are no cheats for Tradewinds Legends, I thought that I should find a way to cheat the game myself. Whenever I load the saved games, it would load everything including how much Dinar I have. I looked in the saved games file which is savegame0.sav located in “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Sandlot Games\Tradewinds3″ with a hexeditor and couldn’t find anything related to Dinar. Thought for a few minutes and remembered to look for references in memory. So I used a freeware called Memory Gutter XP to locate the Dinar and I found it! I changed the values and indeed the Dinar also changes according to what I changed in the memory “AFTER” I purchase something in the game.
This is how I did it… and I believe it should work for old version Tradewinds 2 as well.

Having a hard time seeding after downloading files from a torrent tracker site? In Malaysia, we do have a decent 1Mb download speed but our upload speed is only 512Kb. In order to get a 1-1 ratio, we’ll have to spend double of the time or more to seed after download because our upload speed is half of our download speed. This is also IF there’s enough seeders to leech from you in order to maximise your upload speed… There is a bug to increase your upload/download/ratio in bittorrent trackers illegally. I call this the bittorrent ratio hack.

The “bug” has been tested on the torrent trackers that use the torrentbits source code (I don’t know if it works on other trackers).
The idea of this this “bug” is that you will sniff your torrent info using the HTTP Analyzer and with Firefox you will update your stats to the tracker being identified as a client. This is a simple and short tutorial that shows you how to do it, if you are “more” advanced you can use other tools to do it.

Programs that you need:

Both my PC and laptop has DVD-RW drive which I can use it to burn mp3 to audio cd. I usually use my laptop to burn and never had any problems with it.
Suddenly, one fine day I wanted to burn my mp3s to audio CD to listen in my car. Everything went as normal but when I played the audio cd in my car’s player, a few songs had the skipping problem. It doesn’t skip the whole song, but it skipped a couple of second. I thought the audio CD might be scratched. I took out the CD and the back layer looked perfect. I poped in a different audio CD, and it played fine. Meaning, it can’t be my car’s audio player.

Then I tested the CD on my Hi-Fi set at home and also my laptop and computer. All 3 had the same audio skipping problems for a few second at the same track. Ok, it’s quite obvious at that time it’s the audio CD’s problem.
I took out a new CD-R and burned the mp3 to audio cd at the slowest speed. Tried it again, and still had the same audio skipping problem. I listened to the MP3 on my laptop and the whole track played perfectly.
I got a shocked and thought that it might be the problem with my laptop’s DVD-RW drive.
So test whether the problem is on my laptop’s DVD-RW drive, I tried burning the same mp3 on my PC’s DVD-RW drive.
Installed the latest Nero7, burned the same mp3 at the slowest speed and still had that audio skipping problem!

It’s getting frustrating because I am wasting a lot of CD-Rs and they are not the cheap type. I usually buy the high quality CD-R Imation so it can play on any player. But then, it could be that batch of CD-Rs that is causing the problem. I took out a usable CD-RW and burn the mp3 to audio cd, problem still exist.
I thought to myself that it might be the mp3 problem. Perhaps the person who converted from audio cd to mp3 didn’t do a good job. So I tried burning other mp3 to audio CD on my laptop. SH*T! Some of the tracks skipped for a few second!

A lot of people has been asking for the cracked version of Legitlib.dll to enable them to install the new Windows Media Player 11 Beta without having the original Microsoft Windows installed.
Crackers put them up on free hosting such as RapidShare and MyTempdir but the file will be removed within few days time due to complains. In fact, no one dares to put the cracked legitlib.dll file on their own domain because they can get into real serious legal problems with the multi million dollar Microsoft company.
Instead of using the cracked version of legitlib.dll, you can also searched for patch that is able to automatically crack the legitlib.dll file or if you’re good in bytes and bits, you can use a hexeditor to edit the bytes.

Windows has rolled out a new updated Windows Genuine Advantage Validation v1.5.532.0 today.
If you’re using a cracked version of Windows Genuine Advantage Validation v1.5.526 or v1.5.530 LegitCheckControl.dll to get your Windows Update and download from Microsoft Download Center, I believe it will soon not work for you because Microsoft has just updated their Windows Genuine Advantage Validation file to version 1.5.532.
Whenever you visit Windows Update to get updates for your Microsoft Windows, you will get a page asking you to install the latest Windows Genuine Advantage Validation v1.5.532 (KB892130) before you can proceed.
“The Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool enables you to verify that your copy of Microsoft Windows is genuine. The tool validates your Windows installation by checking Windows Product Identification and Product Activation status.”

I’ve downloaded and took a look at LegitCheckControl.dll file size and to my surprise it’s exactly the same as v1.5.530.0
LegitCheckControl.dll v1.5.532.0 = 566 KB (579,888 bytes)

LegitCheckControl.dll v1.5.530.0 = 566 KB (579,888 bytes)