Trying to start the game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men from the Steam client on a default Windows 8.1 installation will not work. Furthermore, you’ll get no error message other than the obvious lack of the gameplay.

As usual with these kinds of errors, a good starting point is to locate the actual game folder. From Steam’s Game library, right click on “Kane and Lynch: Dead Men” and select properties, then select the tab called “Local files” and finally click the button labeled “Browse local files”. You’ll now find yourself in the game directory. By trying to execute “kaneandlynch.exe” you’ll get an error message stating that “xlive.dll is missing from your computer”. Thankfully, Steam has already included the necessary libraries inside a folder named XLiveRedist which contains the installer package XLiveRedist01.02.0241.00.msi.

With the release of OTRS Help Desk 4, it seems that running OTRS on a native Windows environment for all intents and purposes is no longer viable. By killing off the Windows installer and recommending migration into the OTRS appliance, the OTRS Group seems to be subtly hinting that OTRS on Windows is dead in the water.

Switching to the OTRS appliance might be a good solution for some Windows installations, but in my case OTRS is configured with MS Active Directory as a customer and agent backend, and we’re relaying on IIS for single sign on. It might be possible to do a source based update and subsequently hack it all back together, but who really wants to travel down that road.

No additional software is required on a full Slackware 14.1 install.
Slackware 14.1 ships with KDE 4.10.5.

Prerequisites

If you don’t already have a key pair (secret and public key), then your first order of business is to create one. The preferrable option is to use the CLI with the command:

gpg --gen-key

KDE provides two graphical tools for working with GPG, namely KGpg and Kleopatra.  KGpg will walk you through the initial setup using an interactive wizard and subsequently create the needed key pair and config files (do not use Kleopatra for your initial setup).
If you’re importing an existing private key then make sure to change the default trust level afterwards.

A while back I did some consulting work for a small ISP who had received complaints from a few customers that believed they could not use the ISP’s SMTP server to send email to outlook.com or hotmail.com accounts. These customers claimed they never got any bounce message (Non-Delivery Report)  in return, so they firmly believed the problem resided with the ISP.

IPredator is a swedish VPN service offered with the stated goal of providing internet privacy.

BlueOnyx uses the PAM ABL module to mitigate brute force attacks. Though it’s not a good idea to rely solely on this module to protect your services, it’s definitely better than nothing. However, for some reason the database storing the failed hosts and users tends to corrupt easily on BlueOnyx systems.

This installation procedure will extract only  relevant libraries and executables from the BIND 9 package, and not install a full-blown DNS server. The installation method is also applicable on Windows 7 64-bit systems.

Head over to http://www.isc.org/downloads/ and download the BIND 9.10.0-P2 package. Select the 64-bit version and leave the 32-bit package as a last resort. The 64-bit version is dependent on the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable package, which you can download and install from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679#

Instead of logging on to each of your external email accounts, you can retrieve all your accounts’ email messages directly from Zimbra. It’s one of those things you just expect to work with an enterprise ready solution like Zimbra.

I bought BioShock on a Steam sale once upon a time and finally got around to playing it. However, a few minutes into the game I realized that the lack of sound was not due to my character going deaf from an initial explosion.

After trying to tweak the sound settings without any success I came to realize that BioShock is rather old as it was released back in 2007. Thus, it’s not exactly certified for Windows 8. A quick fix was to run the game in compatibility mode for Windows XP (Service Pack 3) which immediately brought the in-game sound back to life.

What was supposed to be a quiet Saturday morning quickly turned into a couple of hours trying to mitigate an increasing strain on a  WordPress based site. After getting around 800 post requests per minute to the WordPress xmlrpc.php file, resources for the site in question was getting sparse.