Solving technology problems, one at a time
The British Museum, probably my favorite museum in the whole world, is a monument to curiosity, exploration and a refreshingly innocent nineteenth-century sense of national entitlement to the best the world has to offer.
The Great Court of the British Museum, transformed into a glass-covered public space in 2000 for the millennium. More…
My ipod classic died again the other day, after being alternately frozen and baked in my car for several months. I don’t believe in coddling my appliances. I tried the frozen ipod reset trick, and
Continue readingBlocking TGF-β-Smad2/3 innate immune signaling mitigates Alzheimer-like pathology.
A new possible treatment target has been demonstrated by a group of researchers working with transgenic mice that are used to model Alzheimer’s in humans. According to New Scientist:
“Richard Flavell at Yale University and colleagues created transgenic mice predisposed to develop brain plaques, and doubly transgenic mice that also had a gene that blocks TGF-beta, a chemical used by the immune system.”
“The researchers expected the second set to fare worse than the first. But to their surprise, the doubly transgenic mice performed better on various mazes”…
Continue readingHostgator recently migrated all its customers to php5. So far I’ve found very few problems with this but I had an old dotproject version on one site, and began getting the error: Fatal error: Call
Continue readingNote: this tutorial is still very much in draft form. Additional instructions for those not familiar with javascript and more examples will be added soon.
The Jeroen Wijering Media Player is a widely used free, open-source Flash-based media player, available for download from Jeroenwijering.com.
The JW player has an extensive Javascript API which allows it to communicate with events and elements on the page it is embedded in. Using this feature, the player can execute javascript functions on the page whenever the video reaches a specific time point.
Continue readingiPresent is new software for Windows that creates synchronized powerpoint and video presentations. It outputs to a variety of formats, but I purchased it for its Flash output capabilities.
However, when I output a file using the latest version, I found that IE6 was giving an error whenever a Table of contents button or slide thumbnail was clicked on:
It seems a species of pig that was thought to be extinct was really just hiding out in people’s gardens. They have been rescued from the brink, and are being re-introduced to the wild in
Continue readingFinally! I found a query that effectively deletes the comment spam from the Gallery 2 database. These can be run through phpMyAdmin, but my next task is to turn this into a php script that can be run as a cron job.
To delete comments posted by an IP, or a few IPs, run this SQL statement:
delete ce, e, co from g2_ChildEntity ce, g2_Entity e, g2_Comment co where ce.g_id=e.g_id and e.g_id=co.g_id and e.g_entityType='GalleryComment' and (co.g_host='67.104.112.176' or co.g_host='209.31.123.128')
To delete comments based on the comment itself, run this SQL statement:
delete ce, e, co from g2_ChildEntity ce, g2_Entity e, g2_Comment co where ce.g_id=e.g_id and e.g_id=co.g_id and e.g_entityType='GalleryComment' and (co.g_comment like '%[url=http://%')Continue reading
The other day I pulled my iphone out and nearly dropped it! It was burning hot and there was a big red low battery indicator in the middle of the screen! I had charged it only a couple of hours earlier so it was not likely that normal use had caused this condition.
I was in a wireless area, and had been checking my gmail earlier. The little activity indicator at top left was twirling.
A search through Apple support and discussions led me to this article. It seems that the iphone can get stuck in a checking-mail loop, particularly on certain IMAP accounts like gMail.
An Apple support article also says that a flaw in the Mail application in v. 1.1.3 causes it to persistently generate server activity even when it is not checking mail per user settings. Persistent mail checking can quickly drain the battery.
Continue readingIf you add screenshot images to a Word or Powerpoint document on a Mac, by either dragging them onto the page or pasting them in, chances are they will not be visible on a PC.
Continue reading