Oops – the Download Squad website is broken at the moment coming up with the error message “Microsoft VBScript compilation error ‘800a03e9’ Out of memory /b-c/design-43/posts.asp,line 0”. I’m not quite sure how you can have an error in line 0 of a web page but this does give you information on the structure of the website.
Interestingly, a google search shows that the problem is either a string/line which is over 1022 characters long or that you can’t have more than 64 for/next loops in a web page.
Waymarking is a spinoff from geocaching where rather than hiding cache containers in places, you now go to a certain place (or can obtain the location of certain places). An example are Trigpoints, libraries etc. As the domain has just been launched today there is not much information in there but later it will be populated with all the locationless, virtual and webcam caches.
I’ve already added a wifi point, my blog location and the Dublin Library.
For some weird reason my wifi started to get disconnected whenever the cordless phone was used. Apparently 2.4Ghz phones cause interference with wireless as they operate on the same spectrum. The weird thing is that this was working ok for 3 months without causing obvious dropouts. A bit of searching suggested that changing the channel that the wifi is on should fix or reduce the problem. I changed from channel 11 to 1 (the other end) and the problem didn’t go away. I changed it to 6 and still it didn’t go away. Interestingly though a wifi card placed about 1′ away from the access point with the cordless phone being used downstairs would result in no wifi service. I changed the channel back to 11 last night and for some reason the wifi no longer gets disrupted when the phone is in use.
Seeing as though that is how I started off I am not sure why this problem has occured. Still, at least I can now use the internet when other people are on the phone.
WordPress 1.5.2 is out and includes an important fix to an important security bug. If you don’t upgrade then make sure you follow the instructions at the support site for a temporary fix until you do an upgrade (which I’ll do on my other site on Monday)
Update My test site is now upgraded (I forgot to disable the blacklist plugin first though (again)). I just have to do the installation on my uniform server too, but as that is not available on the internet there is no rush.
I had another interview with a recruiting company this morning and after the interview I was asked to complete two Windows2000 server tests. Both of them were on the setup and installation of Windows2000. The scores had been marked with an average of all the people across the consulting company who had taken the tests and I was suprised to see that the average was about 55% (I think – it could have been less). Although I found some of the questions hard, some of them were easy and quite a few of them were ambiguous – just like the Microsoft exams really. However I was pleased to get the results of 70 and 71% correct. I think if I had known I’d have been tested on these programs I would have swotted up a bit. I also think that some of the answers were incorrect.
One of the questions was “Which of the following servers can NOT be configured to use dhcp for a network address”. The answers were Dns server, dhcp server, AD controllers, print server, Wins server. I know for a fact (because I’ve done it in the past) that you can use dhcp for all of the above. Not necessarily recommended but it is possible. By setting a dhcp reservation for the mac address of a DNS, AD Controller and DHCP server , it is possible to have it use dhcp to get an address. The answer, according to MS, was that the last 2 were ok as dhcp servers….personally I beg to differ, but you just have to remember that there is the right way, the Microsoft way, the Real World way and the I can’t believe its not butter broken way.
Anyway, with those results, hopefully that will give the recruiter proof that I know what I’m talking about even if I don’t have the certifications to prove it. However the good thing is that they will have online training and also sponser the majority of the costs for accreditation once employed so I will be able to get my certs soon.
Very funny cartoon about working on a technical support line – Weakend Productions. Oh how scarily true to life it is. For the non-brits see the extended entry for a spoiler explanation for the last scene.
I was going to get some tickets to see Phantom of the Opera Tickets at Ohio Theatre but when I saw that they were $215 each I thought better of it. Can’t believe they are so expensive!
Kristen and I were watching the Hall of Fame football game last night on TV when an advertisment came on featuring Johnny Vaughan. He is hosting My Kind of Town on ABC Sunday, August 14 at 9/8c. We’re looking forward to it as we used to really enjoy the Big Breakfast when he did it. Wonder if Denise will put in an appearance……
Tip of the Day: Pasting wrapped URLs in Firefox
This must be on everybody’s pet peeve list: Somebody e-mails you a URL, but it’s long (it seems they all are these days) and wraps in your e-mail client, so when you click to open it you only get the first line, which is completely useless. In 2005, you’d think that most e-mail clients would be smart enough to get this right, but many of them don’t. For Firefox users, thankfully, there’s a fix on the browser side, but for some reason it’s not enabled by default nor available on any screen in Preferences. As the power users reading have probably already guessed, it’s in about:config.
The trick is this: type about:config into your address back and hit enter. After boggling at all the arcane options now available to you, find editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines (use the Filter box at the top to skip to it quickly). Double-click on it and change the value to 3. That’s it!
[via Download Squad (Windows)]
Mike had a question about rotating the apache logs under windows (with Uniform Server as he was struggling to get it to work. Looking at google and various other locations it seems to be a common problem but very few people had the solution (or the whole solution).
What I found that is if you edit the httpd.conf stored in the usr\local\Apache2\conf directory and add the 2 lines
#rotate logs set here
CustomLog “|w:/usr/local/apache2/bin/rotatelogs.exe w:/usr/local/apache2/logs/access_log 86400” common
just before the <directory /> section then the logs will get rotated every day. Change the 86400 to 61 for once a minute (61 secs to be precise) to test it first.
The .exe on the end of rotatelogs is important (and that seems to be the bit missing from every other page) and naturally the logs directory and the path to rotatelogs.exe needs to exist. The files will start access_log and will have the date and time stamp at the end of the filename.
I include the line starting with a # as a comment but this line is not strictly needed. You will need to stop and start apache for this change to take effect. If any of the paths are incorrect, you will probably find that the welcome page for the web server appears but no other pages on the website will work. If that is the case, then check your path statements to the exe file and to the log directory.
One disadvantage of this is that the rotatelogs.exe file fires up in a dos box (on my machine) but this can be minimised out of harms way but it would be nice to not have this on the machine. I think running apache as a service might solve this problem, but the advantage of uniform server is that the whole thing can be run from a removable disk with no installation required.