Category Archives: Things to remember…

No Card!

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Another entry in the ‘Things to remember’ category:

When going on a photo safari, make sure you have a memory card in the digital camera.

Ginny and I went out to the Morton Arboretum today to wander around and take some pictures.

After walking about 3/4’s of a mile on one of the paths, I wondered why my camera didn’t have the normal ‘number of shots left’ display.

I tried to preview the shots I had taken and I got the disheartening message “NO CF CARD”.

<sigh>

I had thought I had taken about 30 pictures already … some of which I had high hopes for. Sadly, the camera transfered them to /dev/null.

Luckily Ginny had a spare 256mb card with her … so I was able to get SOME shots.

Ok, sometimes I am so dumb

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Ryan told me that my blogs (both this one and IMHO) were not displaying properly when viewed with Internet Explorer. Every time they visited a page, IE wanted to download the page instead of displaying it.

I had just made some tweaks to the web server, so I figured I had screwed something up.

I searched and searched, but couldn’t figure out what I had broken.

I decided the best way to figure out the problem would be to sniff the line with an ethernet sniffer program to see what was actually being sent down the wire.

When I did, I noticed the http ‘content-type’ header was blank.

Turns out the WordPress configuration option that contains the content-type value was empty. I had neglected to run the upgrade script on the WordPress database when I finished the upgrade to version 1.5!

Oopsie.

After I ran the upgrade script, the pages displayed fine in IE.

Out of disk space

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Had a minor emergency today … my main linux machine completely hung up (for no apparent reason at the time).

My first indication that a problem was a foot was when Ginny asked me if there were any problems with our internet connection.

I didn’t think so, but I checked … I could get to DSLReports without a problem … I was even able to run a speed test (with respectable results).

Ginny told me she wasn’t able to get to her blog. So I went over to the actual machines and checked out TheShire to see if something was wrong. Something was. I wasn’t able to logon as root.
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Hot water is good

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This is in the ‘things to remember’ category … turn the hot water back on after doing plumbing work.

I had to replace the saddle valve, that feeds the humidifier, on the hot water heater yesterday. When I opened it up in the morning, it started leeking bad. Luckily when I closed it it stopped leaking.

Getting a new valve wasn’t hard … and instsallation wasn’t a big deal either (although I had to open up the hole in the pipe to 1/4″). I did, however, turn the hot water heater temp down since I also turned the water feed off.

I replaced the valve, no leaks, no broken bones, no floods (all things good).

This morning, however, I got into the shower and had to turn the water temp up very high… then I realized I had forgotten to turn the temp on the water heater back up.

Oh well. There was enough hot water to get clean … and now the temp is back up to normal.

Dash or underscore

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I just spent 2 hours helping a co-worker resolve a database connectivity problem. The software we were trying to install (our own product, as it happens) kept telling us it was having a problem connecting to the SQL server database.

We tried to install the software three times … each time it failed with same error.

Finally I looked at the database name we were trying to use … the my co-worker was telling me to use was ‘qa-db3278’ … but the database he created was ‘qa_db3278’.

Well of course it couldn’t create the tables … the database we were telling it to create them in didn’t exist.

Oh well 🙂

Windows XP Desktop Grid

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Note: I found this somewhere on the internet … but I can’t remember where.

Sometimes there just isn’t enough room for the all the text underneath those icons. Or, you maybe you are having some kind of overlapping problem. You can fix this by adjusting the space between your icons.

There is an invisible grid on your desktop the computer uses to place icons and associated text in to. This grid sort of looks like a checker board. You can adjust the size of the boxes. Here’s how:
Right click on any empty spot on your desktop. Click Properties, and then click the appearance tab. Next click the advanced button and you should find yourself in the “Advanced Appearances” window. Click on the pull-down window under “Item” and select “Icon spacing (horizontal). Note there is also an “icon spacing) vertical too. Click on the size arrows to adjust icon size. Do the same with Vertical. You will need to work at this some until you get the size/spacing you want. Click ok.

Note: You may have to uncheck and recheck the “Align to grid” option before your icons will move into place. Here’s how: Right click on any empty spot on your desktop. From the menu select “Arrange icons by” and click on “Align to grid” to uncheck it and then click to option again to recheck it. Once you do that your icons will move to your new grid settings.

Gotta remember to update the blog

Had a panic this morning … browsed to the weblog (you’re reading it now) and found that my main index page was empty!

Problem is: I hadn’t changed anything in the config to cause this.

I did try posting a blog entry through a new blogger interface with Gaim plugin. But that shouldn’t have caused any problems.

I checked the style sheets, templates, configuration, etc, and couldn’t figure out what was going wrong.

Well, it turns out that the MovableType configuration option for the number of days of posts to publish on the index means CALENDAR days (which I misunderstood). This basically means that if you don’t do a blog entry in x number of days, your index page goes blank.