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iRacing installs a local server, running as a Windows service, that commands the game execution. The server is interacted with by regular localhost http calls, e.g.

http://127.0.0.1:32034/gotesting?local=yes&launch=yes&customerid=YourCustomerId

appended with other parameters that for example identify the track and validate the session call, with all calls done by the official members’ site at http://members.iracing.com/

Unfortunately, in these days of permanent cyber security red alert, the hardware and/or software that users have, can cause the game to NOT launch at all, for multiple reasons, the most basic being a firewall blocking the request.

I was a victim of the “game won’t start” problem, but because of a less trivial issue, related to my network configuration. Basically, when more than one Internet access is available, the user must make sure that:

- iRacing traffic is always routed by the same access;
- if there is a chain of devices between the Internet access device and the [router] device directly connecting to the PC clients, the proper port forwarding rule must be set in place.

In my case,

(1) since the first device that the iRacing servers connect to is NOT the router that indeed connects to the iRacing PC clients, that first device had to configured to do a port forward to the second device.

I found that iRacing local server is always listening on port 32034, so my forward rule, set on the device with direct connection to the desired Internet access, is doing a “single port forward rule” for UDP traffic from port 32034 to the IP address of the second device, e.g.

single port forward all UDP traffic from/to port 32034 to the device at IP <the local network IP address of the device that connects directly to the iRacing PC clients>

And that did it for me.

(2) At a point, I was forcing the clients’ end router – which supports multiple WANs – to route all traffic to iRacing servers to the desired WAN, of more than one available:

the iRacing North America servers are in the range
69.25.205.241 .. 69.25.205.249

But this never worked properly and was more complicated than (1), which is a solution, alone.

I was looking for a tool to do bulk images conversion, e.g. many .PNG files to .JPG.

I considered http://www.command-line-imageconverterplus.com/ but it is NOT free.

Then I found http://sourceforge.net/projects/imgbconvert/. Super simple and elegant. It just does the job, for free. Great!

I just received a laughable e-mail phishing message: it is written in such bad Portuguese that it is hard to believe that an actual person wrote it – it feels like a very bad automatic translation of some original.

It starts with “querido costureiro”, which I presume was the sender’s translation attempt of “dear costumer”. But “dear costumer” translates to “caro cliente”, while “querido costureiro” actually means something more like “loveable tailor”.

I use ZScreen for regular desktop snapshots, but it also works fine for in-game captures on some games, Crysis 2 included. But not rFactor.

http://code.google.com/p/zscreen/

The 2011 DTM calendar

2011-05-01 : Hockenheimring Baden-Württemberg (D)
2011-05-15 : Circuit Park Zandvoort (NL)
2011-06-05 : Red-Bull-Ring Spielberg (A)
2011-06-19 : EuroSpeedway Lausitz (D)
2011-07-03 : Norisring (D)
2011-07-17 : Show event @ Olympic Stadium Munich (D)
2011-08-07 : Nürburgring (D)
2011-09-04 : Brands Hatch (GB)
2011-09-18 : Oschersleben (D)
2011-10-02 : Valencia (E)
2011-10-23 : Hockenheimring Baden-Württemberg (D)
2011-11-06 : Shanghai (CN)

It is an old album, but I had never listened it before. Really enjoyable. I suppose it was never produced to lift someone’s spirit, but somehow it is doing it for me. 5 *

Downtown Tokyo, Naoki Kenji

Nick Heidfeld’s blog:
http://www.nickheidfeld.com/?1000A0A1

Pictures from Gary Paffett:
http://plixi.com/6274675

Pictures from Tony Fernandes:
http://plixi.com/2113475

Pictures from Noah Everett:
http://twitpic.com/photos/noaheverett

Pictures from Lotus Renault:
http://www.yfrog.com/froggy.php?username=OfficialLRGP

Pictures from Ross Westgate:
http://twitpic.com/photos/RossWestgate

Tubemogul on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/tubemogul

Tweets from F1 drivers:
http://motortweets.com/

Superb racing tech magazine:
http://www.racecar-engineering.com/

For some reason, my WordPress based blog was redirecting to itself, in an infinite loop, after upgrading to WordPress 3.1.

The solution was to disable the “canonical URL redirection”, by installing this plugin:

http://txfx.net/files/wordpress/disable-canonical-redirects.phps

To install the plugin, just download the file, copy it to the plugins folder and activate it via the administration panel. This solution assumes you still have access to the administration panel.

This was helpful:

http://enlightenedwebmastery.com/how-to-fix-the-redirect-loop-error-in-wordpress

and this:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/redirect-loop-problem

Google still #1 in 2011, according to Nielsen. Facebook ranks #3.

http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/top10s/internet.html

Previously I was under the opinion that Image Grabber II (IG2) was the top tool for the job of extracting video thumbnails into a single file:
http://arturmarques.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/02/01/creating-a-single-jpg-with-many-snapshots-from-a-video/

Indeed, it was the only program to handle my Canon’s 1080p video files.

But I was surprised to find that IG2 fails with my MPEG2 satellite recordings, so I went back hunting for a new solution.

I found “movie thumbnail”:
http://moviethumbnail.sourceforge.net/index.en.html

It is free, open source, the fastest and most configurable solution I know!
The “problem” for some is that it is a command line tool, having no graphical interface.

Still, for those who aren’t lazy and are willing to read the command line options, this software does deliver results!

Here is a copy/paste of my command line call for creating thumbnails for ALL .mpg files in a folder (*.mpg), each having 2 columns (-c 2), with a .JPG output quality of 100% (-j 100), no file information (-i), every 30 seconds (-s 30), the generated file being 1024 pixels wide (-w 1024).

<your path to>\mtn.exe -c 2 -j 100 -i -s 30 -w 1024 *.mpg