Solving technology problems, one at a time
I came back from a trip, turned on my iMac, only to see a black screen with a DOS-like prompt: “No bootable device — insert boot disk and press any key.” It did not seem
Continue readingIn my search for the best way to synch video with slides, I’ve tried a number of different software packages. At this time, I’ve settled on the Rich Media Project’s flash extensions as the most reliable way to create synched presentations, but I’m always looking for a better way.
When I came across Adobe Presenter, it seemed like another promising tool for this purpose, and possibly easier for clients to use than anything else so far.
Unfortunately it does not yet seem to be the case, at least not yet. When I tried to sync a video of a lecture with a powerpoint using Presenter, it proved to be a hopelessly frustrating and tedious task.
Continue readingIn thinking about the current Chinese milk scandle, the reference that comes to mind is Edward G. Robinson’s movie, “Brother Orchid,” about a gangster who hides out in a monastery, and while there, improves their dairy’s milk production by adding buckets of water to the milk.
Helpful tip to new Linux Acer Aspire One owners: Before you even open the box, be sure to buy a 2Gb USB stick to use for system recovery. Follow the instructions in the recovery DVD
Continue readingI run a dotproject site on a hosted server. Once more than a few people began using the site at once, we found that peformance was dropping enough to warrant looking into optimization possibilities. So far, it seems that there are two main steps to take: turn on caching, and add indexes to several tables in the database.
In the file gacl.class.php, change the following settings to TRUE and FALSE as shown:
/** @var boolean Caches queries if true */ var $_caching = TRUE; /** @var boolean Force cache to expire */ var $_force_cache_expire = FALSE;Continue reading
A few days ago, I allowed a LiveUpdate on my new Aspire One. After the update, wifi stopped working. In addition the removable drives (smart cards or keydrives) are no longer recognized. Apparently this is
Continue readingThe Acer Aspire ships with Linpus Linux configured to be extremely simple to use. It is likely that you will soon find the simplistic interface too restrictive. To get to the functions you can’t see,
Continue readingIf you are having problems with applications which use liveconnect, you may find it helpful to know that there are some issues with certain updates of Java 1.6 and Liveconnect. I’ve found that sometimes installing
Continue readingI recently had the (undesired) opportunity to learn about HTTP and SQL injection attacks. It took a great deal of effort to diagnose and clean up, but hopefully what I learned from the experience may help you prevent these attacks on your own site or clean up after such an attack.
I first found out my site had been compromised because one of the subdomains started displaying “403” errors (permission denied) and one of the users notified me that the site could no longer be reached. At this time, the rest of the site seemed fine, so I had not noticed anything was wrong with it myself.
On examining the subdomain files, it turned out that the .htaccess file had some new directives written into it, which had the effect of blocking all access to the site. When I further examined the file, it appeared that the actual intent had been to redirect only the users that arrived at the site through a search engine, while allowing direct visitors to see the site as usual.
Continue reading
This pot-bellied piglet is about 10 days old, and lives at Domino’s petting farm. We were told that these pigs are mostly used as pets, are very smart, and keep their enclosure clean. There are about 20 of these little critters running around in the pen, and they all sleep together in a long line.
Extra! Extra! This Piglet featured on Cute Overload!
