Computer Tips -Tech Info

Sometime back I setup my home server running Ubuntu Linux (6.06 – Dapper Drake LTS). I used two pairs of drives to do raid cloning. Two IDE drives were for the main system structure and two SATA drives for Audio/Video storage as well as CDimages and other large file sharing on the local network. Well… I noticed the hard drive light was on solid and sure enough one of the two SATA drives had failed. (I didn’t get my status email because I’d done a network structure change and didn’t update my local mail setup…) Anyway… replacing it was a pain in the neck only for the physical access to the box. Everything else worked as it should.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I had a request for help with some free pdf’s I’ve published elsewhere. I wasn’t really keen to spend a lot of time for free supporting free pdfs and really just wanted to give an alternative file format. (I suspected the pdf format may not have been one that their computer liked. So, I wanted to convert to a tif image as that’s something that should be universally usable. Some quick websearching reminded me that in linux it’s a very simple conversion. In fact, the command line program convert is all you need.

Read the rest of this entry »

I spent the better part of a Friday night sorting this out. I had just launched 4 new wordpress blogs that were secondary installs on each server. (I use a VPS and /home/domain/www/ was the primary wordpress install – the secondary installs existed at /home/domain/www/secondsite ) . The problem was that I switched on the fancy permalinks in the control panel of wordpress and after that nothing worked but the main page. Setting things back to the default I could see posts, but not the feed or anything else that relied on mod_rewrite.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes you see a malware implementation that you have to have respect for the cleverness/ingenuity of the design. These pests can be dastardly to get rid of, but essentially this pest was occasionally popping up a “windows integrity scanner” installer. It wasn’t frequent, but it was persistent and the user was afraid that it was the gateway to other bad stuff. (That’s correct…) Anyway on inspecting the msconfig list of programs running at startup I found gsudxz.exe or some such nonsense (psuedo-random string of letters). I opted to reboot into safe mode and run the smitfraud removal tool because this looked like a typical smitfraud infection… turns out it wasn’t though.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve seen a lot of strange behavior from windows updates, but this apparently wasn’t one. Essentially here is what was going on: the user would try to click on an attachment in Outlook 2003, particularly those that were forwarded emails. Then, nothing happened. No message, no error, nothing. Just doubleclick and that’s it…. right click and open didn’t work either. After a bit of research I found this happening with a few different versions of Outlook.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whois lookups are a handy and useful way to find out who owns a domain and when it expires. Sometimes it’s easier to do a whois lookup on a domain YOU own to see when it expires than it is to go back and check your (or your organizations) records. These days the online domain lookup tools have started expanding the kind of information they give to include such as the history of the domain, other domains owned by the contact, information on the server, the registrar, the DMOZ status, SEO information, related sites, etc. (Dizzying.)

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve started using a “universal translator” plugin for wordpress across most of my sites lately. In the past I’ve seen many people using google or bablefish translation to view pages (according to the logs.) I thought it would be a great convenience and perhaps open up my posts to be searched by viewers who read other languages. I’ve studied Spanish for quite some time and previously have studied German and French. Since, the universal translator plugin is based on google’s translation engine I know it’s not going to be perfect. But, I did a bit of proofreading in the languages I could and from what I could see it was more or less intelligible (obviously there were some problems, but I’ve seen (MUCH) worse translations of Japanese news-stories to English..)

Read the rest of this entry »

I vaguely remember hearing about Google Gears when it was announced and it wasn’t the kind of thing that grabbed a lot of peoples imagination or a lot of attention. Here’s the description from the Google Gears site (gears.google.com..

Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:
Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance

But… the next version of WordPress (2.6) is supposed to support Google Gears and here’s what exciting things this can mean…

Read the rest of this entry »

Ugh…. you hate to see those exception OE messages. This particular one happened on an old Windows 98 machine. (Yes, I know, but they want to keep it in service if possible.) The full details are as follows

An Exception OE has Occured at 0028:C004EA3A in VxD VCACHE(01) + 0000019A. … Was Called From 0028:C004BD2E in VxD VFAT(01) + 00009CB6

For starters I loved the detail that got recorded by my client – you feel like you can sink your teeth into that much better than “my computer crashed – it gave some strange error message – could you fix it?” Of course, when I looked at it I couldn’t reproduce the error and was told that it was maybe once per day.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some time back I did an article here about leaky capacitors and linked to some really great photos of a “healthy” mainboard capacitor and “bulging” capacitors. The long-story short version is this… Once upon a time there was some corporate espionage among capacitor manufacturers. Someone had a really good electrolyte formula (the goo inside a capacitor) and the other companies wanted it. Well, what they wound up getting was not the real formula, but a fake. So… any capacitors made with the false formula will be more likely to fail. In fact, it’s as though over time the electrolyte expands causing the capacitors to bulge and in some cases leak. Why is this computer related? Because if you crack the cover of a pc and look there are dozens of electrolytic capacitors on the mainboard.

Read the rest of this entry »