Friday, December 21, 2012

Asus RT-N66U, Asus EA-N66, and Airplay

Alright, long story short, here was my setup:

Asus RT-N66U as my main wireless Access Point. Asus EA-N66 acting in Repeater Mode. And NO Airplay was working. No matter what I connected my devices to - the main Access Point, or the Repeater, Airplay would not work. Airplay devices would not show up. Just basically at a loss.

After trying a bunch of things - I e-mailed ASUS - and as it seems with most routers - the issue was the firmware.

I upgraded the EA-N66 Repeater's firmware to the latest at this link:

http://support.asus.com.cn/Download.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=11&s=1&m=EA-N66&os=30&ft=20&f_name=FW_EA_N66_1017d.zip#FW_EA_N66_1017d.zip

And all was fine! Everything was working again!

Hope this helps some peeps.

Friday, December 14, 2012

jQuery animate scrollTop Flicker

Hey everybody,

was doing some scrolling animations on my one-page site using jQuery's animate function.

This is the basics of what I had:


$(function(){
  $("#link").click(function(){ 
    navigateTo(".section");
  });
});

function navigateTo(destination) {
  $('html,body').animate({scrollTop: $(destination).offset().top - 48},'slow');
}

The issue I was seeing is that the animate was happening, but so was a flicker. The flicker was caused by the default behaviour of clicking on a link with href="#". The problem is the default behvaiour of that is to scroll to the top. So it would quickly scroll to the top, then scroll to the destination. Solution? Block the default behaviour by returning false in the event handler of the click.


$(function(){
  $("#link").click(function(){ 
    navigateTo(".section");
    return false;
  });
});

function navigateTo(destination) {
  $('html,body').animate({scrollTop: $(destination).offset().top - 48},'slow');
}

Hopefully that will help some peeps.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Nest Thermostat Heating Issues

Problem

Alright, so I absolutely love the Nest - as it seems every Nest owner does. I was using it all leisurely during the summer and enjoying all of its benefits - but then when winter came - my Nest starting wigging out.

I thought originally it might have been my setup at my condo. My condo is one of those buildings where it's either "COOL" or "HEAT" on. Not both. So at one point in the winter, the building switched the heat on.

Now, even with my old thermostat - it's one of those on/off dealies. So if my thermostat was set to cool - the heat would actually turn on when the thermostat was "Cooling". But that's a separate issue. This is true of all thermostats for these types of buildings.

No - the issue that I was having separate. When I switched to heating, on the Nest - and when I set it to temperature that was higher than the current room temperature - the Nest should have started heating my place right?

Wrong.

Here's what happened (ie. the symptoms in case you're having the same issue)

Setup

  • Nest V1
  • Electric Forced Air Furnace
  • Wires: RH, Y1, W1, G

Symptons

  • The Nest was in "HEAT" mode
  • I set the Nest to a temperature hotter than the current temperature to engage heating
  • The display would show "Heating" for about 2 seconds, and then go to "Delayed for 3:00 Minutes". My fan would kick on for a bit, but that was it.
  • After the 3:00 minutes, same thing would happen "Heating" for about 2 seconds, and then back into "Delayed for 3:00 Minutes"
  • Here's the telltale sign - just after "Heating" for about 2 seconds, and just before "Delayed for 3:00 Minutes", the little green LED in the sensor area would blink (this should have been a sign to me).
  • So it would end up in the endless loop of "Heating" for about 2 seconds, and "Delayed for 3:00 Minutes" with that green LED flashing.

I called Nest Support - and it turns out it was a Voltage issue. Even though I was getting good voltage readings, there was an issue.

How to solve it?

I'm not taking any liability for this - and you should probably call Nest support - but you can try the follwing.

Temporary Work-Around

This has actually become my permanent work-around, because I don't feel like re-wiring my condo. The work-around is to UNPLUG THE COOLING "Y1" WIRE from the Nest during Heating seasons like Winter - so you just have RH, W1, and G. This apparently reduces the load or something. This works perfectly for me. I just have to unplug the wire/plug it back in once a year.

Permanent Fix

Nest support told me to run a wire from the furnace board's "Common" terminal to the "C" terminal on the Nest. Basically you need a common wire. However, I didn't have any extra wires long enough in my setup to do this.

Hope this helps some peeps.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Windows 7 Mongrel Rails Port 80 Permission Denied Bind(2)

Alright, just spend an annoying amount of time on solving this issue, and although this issue can manifest itself for many reasons - I'll share my specific reason and hopefully it will help others.

The specific error from the mongrel logs is


** Starting Mongrel listening at 0.0.0.0:80
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.5-x86-mingw32/bin/../lib/mongrel/tcphack.rb:12:in `initialize_without_backlog': Permission denied - bind(2) (Errno::EACCES)


The issue is, I was trying to deploy a rails app that's run using mongrel on Port 80. This has been successfully deployed to many sites running Windows 7 Pro, and I was trying to deploy it to Windows 7 Home Premium. At first I thought the operating system was the issue, but it definitely wasn't.

After googling around for awhile, I found a lot of posts linking it to IIS conflicts. But the thing is, I didn't have IIS running on my machine - no "World Wide Web Publishing" service running - or at least not in its entirety.

You see - what the issue was - was that I do some .Net development on this computer - and at one point for testing purposes, I installed IIS Express. Yes, IIS Express was the culprit. The hard part was, is that IIS Express shows up as a differently named service - it's called "Web Deployment Agent Service".

I launched up Services.msc, disabled this service- and bam, things were up and running.

Hope this helps some peeps.