Eye-Glazing Geek Stuff
Technical mutterings
Now relegated to Blogblivion...Monday, January 17, 2005
CotC and Busy This Morning
Forgetting it was a holiday, even if a lesser one, not realizing it would snow fairly substantially, I committed to being in Quincy at 9:30 this morning to meet a client vendor regarding a networked scanner/copier/printer/fax problem. I don’t even remember the problem, as the client first mentioned it so long ago and to me I believe it sounded minor. It took several weeks to get the guy from the company that leases and maintains the device to actually respond Thursday. I called him Friday, said “Monday or Tuesday?” He said “how about Monday at 9:30?” I said “sure” and here I am with facing late rush hour traffic to Quincy (which really isn’t a big deal but could be) in snow. Though the main significance of the snow is having to clean off the car and do some shoveling.
This also explains why the client called yesterday to confirm when I was coming to his office, since he could have taken the day off or shown up late. He’s a workaholic, but with courts closed he’d have had nothing pressing.
Anyway, last I looked, Carnival of the Capitalists was not up yet at Small Business Trends, but that is where to keep an eye out for it. I have no idea when I will be able to announce it properly when it is up, or whether Anita plans to delay it a day due to the holiday. Don’t be alarmed if it goes up tonight or first thing Tuesday. If it goes up while I am busy, I’ll update the CotC page and announce it when I can.
Okay, coffee is almost gone. Gotta get moving.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
I Rock
Well, Deb always tells me I do, if that counts.
I solved the Expression Engine relocation problem. As far as I can tell, completely. It was all about file locations and permissions.
To recap, we started by setting up EE in a folder off of AV called, surprisingly, ee. When all was setup in the modified dancing raisin theme, and the pMachine data was imported, we sought to move it to the root, so it would come up just by going to accidentalverbosity.com, no directories or subdomains.
That worked. Partly. It kept using some locations under ee for some stuff, including paths to posts, and the main page at AV didn’t show all the newly added categories, only the original three Deb created. One of the holdups on changing color schemes has been that we wanted to be sure it could be made to work right.
I found a couple of PHP files with improper permissions, but it seems the most important find was the cache location. In EE, under your control panel directory is one named cache. That has to be set to 777, which in FTP shows up as drwxrwxrwx. Full read, write and execute across the board. Under that is a db_cache directory. It also must be 777. Under it were some directories with GUID names. That is, randomly generated sets of characters designed to be unique. It all must be 777. Some of this existed in the new location, but not with correct permissions.
In addition to the db_cache, there were two other cache directories, both empty, in the old but not the new location. Also 777 permissions.
I copied those, set the cache and db_cache to the correct permissions, and copied everything in the db_cache to the new db_cache. Figured that way it can look at the old location and still see what it needs, but if it does look only at the new one, that too has everything.
Then I refreshed the page and… yay for categories! It seems to have worked, assuming there’s no residual oddity I have yet to uncover. If I really want to be sure, I can rename the old directory and see if it all works.
All this while feeling like getting in bed for some extra sleep. Go figure.
Saturday, December 18, 2004
Categories
See the categories over to the left? There are only three of them listed. There are actually about 19 in all!
When Deb setup the new blog with Expression Engine, it was in accidentalverbosity.com/ee so we wouldn’t have to be down at all on the old one from pMachine.
After the old one was imported, I set out to move the new one to the root, just accidentalverbosity.com. There are a bunch of settings for file locations you change, and I did that, as well as copying everything to the root and the relative positions occupied to the location of index.php, and changing permissions on a couple of files.
Trouble is, the primary locations you have to change in the control panel revert right back to the EE folder. They won’t take. No matter; it all works and people coming to the original URL see the blog.
The first thing that went wrong was the categories. I added a mess of them and they didn’t show up. They are available options when publishing. They show up in the posts, like the one below categorized under both rugrats and moosic. You can click the category in a post and see the whole set of posts for the category. But you can’t see the categories in the sidebar. This makes me very sad.
I’m sure I’ll figure it out when I bother to expend effort to that end, or I’ll be able to hack it into submission or get help from the EE support/forum people, but hey, if I mention it here, someone might have thoughts offhand. Plus it makes everyone aware we have categories, which we didn’t before. I went back and applied them to some old posts, but not all. Thus the baby pictures I posted do show up under baby pictures and it’s a shortcut to see the more recent ones, and the older ones are still at http://accidentalverbosity.com/alien for now.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Hey Computer, NOT NOW Please
A few weeks ago my home computer’s power supply died. Popped in a new one, no problem.
It’s a Pentium III 1 GHz that I built almost five years ago. Still as fast as I need it to be. It started out with an IBM DeathStar DeskStar hard drive, an early 7200x one, which was always overly loud. That died a couple years back, but it didn’t “die,” it just wouldn’t boot as a master. It’s been a slave drive since I put in a new one, working just fine.
Last night our DSL connection went out. Deb came in the living room and told me that, then a short time later she said I had some funky sound file playing on my computer. I came in to check it out. The machine was as I had left it, going squeak clicka clicka squeak clicka click squeak clicka clicka squeak clicka click, etc., and it didn’t go away when all overt programs were closed.
So I rebooted.
Well, the computer recognizes the keyboard and mouse, but doesn’t get beyond that. The rhythm section starts as soon as the machine powers up enough to juice the hard drives.
Yay, Self tech support. Yay, money I don’t have possibly needing to be spent.
Anyway, the possibility exists that the old IBM drive finally gave up the ghost and is afflicting the machine until it is physically disconnected. That would be a decent outcome. The possibility exists that the primary drive died, which would be a serious bummer, since my attitude toward backups is more “do as I say, not as I do” than “be obsessive.” And there’s always the tweaks and settings and little details that fit like a glove, which can’t necessarily be backed up as such. I don’t think it’s at all connected to the CD or CDRW drive. That would be too helpful.
This could also be a delayed result of damage from the power supply dying. That has to make me wonder about the rest of the system. Or it could be that drive that was on its way out two years or so ago, finally going.
Luckily I have a new 80 GB drive at the office, waiting to be a replacement in a machine where a drive dies, or to be used if I need to build a machine. Just in case. Also, ironically, in the car I have a computer from the office. It’s for working on code at home for our beta program I never work at in the office but had worked on very effectively at home before its deployment at one firm.
At this point the phone rang, I talked to the landlord’s sister and learned the story behind Slacker Dude’s girlfriend no longer living upstairs, found out she thinks Sadie looks like me, and reported that the gutter above the front steps needs to be cleaned so we aren’t walking through a waterfall when it rains.
Then I popped the side off, unplugged the power from the old IBM drive that was already partly dead (making it the most likely culprit), and viola, the computer booted! So I can finish this and give Deb her computer back. Woohoo!
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Firefox Ate My Bookmarks
I upgraded Firefox on my machine at home to the 1.0 release version, at its insistence. It’s cool in that it has more default search engines, and when it blocks a popup it tells you with a banner across the top (except Site Meter, which still gets around the blocker).
However, it ate my bookmarks. Gone.
Oh sure, the ones from IE that were imported I should be able to import again. But everything new… gone. Bookmarks Toolbar… gone. On that I had my frequently clicked things by themselves or in dropdown folders; weather, Gmail, blog and control panel logins, etc. Plain contents of bookmarks menu… gone. That tends to be where I would put blogs I ran across and wanted to check out again with the possibility of blogrolling them later. I’d added a bunch. Of course, my problem is I tend to forget to go back and they simply accumulate, as my “link these” menu of favorites in IE had done.
What the frick is wrong with people that they would write a beta that gently offered to import things, then wrote a release that would wipe everything out without mention or apparent recourse? I still can’t recommend Firefox enough, but if you are going to upgrade, you may want to use Manage Bookmarks on the Bookmarks menu, export your bookmarks to a file, then presumably import them back after the upgrade.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
What A Day
I ended the day by heading to the new client to inventory computers so it would be clear what they had before proceeding. Seems it’s going to end up being a combination of me, the person developing their B to B web site in-house, and the programmer who wrote and maintains their order entry application all involved in bringing them into the future.
Anyway, this involved going around to each machine, getting the OS, user, machine name, CPU, and other info. After first detouring through figuring out how to create an export template in the timeclock software to be compatible with ADP payroll processing. All went well and it took about the duration I had expected. There were fun details like my learning that many of the machines had BIOS passwords set, and learning they do in fact all log onto Novell as the network controller. The Novell machine was intended to be gone months ago and supposedly was there only because it still contained relevant data not ported off it yet. Most of the machines were built by a previous computer guy they now despise, and it showed.
We saved the NT server for last. I had to reboot that to find out everything I needed to know. Not a problem; they periodically have to reboot it anyway.
Not this time.
It kept getting to the blue screen that displays the amount of memory and chugs for a minute before moving on, then rebooting itself.
VGA mode was no good. The additional instances of regular and VGA mode on the boot screen were artifacts in the boot.ini that had no connection with reality.
I ended up going into SCSI utilities and having it check the two drives. Nope. Disconnected from the network in case, as they thought, Novell was interfering. Nope.
We ended up leaving, with the server off, and in the morning they will try again. If it’s not sane then, they will try to get the evil computer guy who built the machine and knows it and, apparently, didn’t leave them with the NT disk that goes with it. Thus I couldn’t try recovery with that. I didn’t dare to use Last Known Good to take it back to original configuration.
What an awful end to the day! And in the middle of it, another new client called to report when his office would be ready and stuff would be moving in there, and to ask progress on the document management software he will beta for us if I can wrestle it into creating an installable distribution. Even though the beta is free, I would like to have it ready on time when he needs it.
I don’t remember ever leaving someone with things that completely down. In the morning they will be in “send people home because they can’t do anything” mode until the server is back. All I did was reboot it an have it by sheer coincidence fail at that time. When I came home and looked up the problem, I found one possibility involves doing a new install of NT to a new folder, using that to change settings in the original install, then going back to the original when fixed. Ugh.
I hope tomorrow is better. Today I heard from or dealt with most of my clients, and got called by a guy I help free as a favor who naturally is the most demanding “client” of all. Which is why I developed a habit of ignoring him for the most part. It must have been one of those crazy days for computers.
Busy Begets Busy
Or so it always seems.
I did resolve the previously mentioned Access problem, and feel rather silly now that I have. Most of the troubleshooting had been done by my partner, who wrote the program, but one of us ought have realized what was going on.
We created the billing app, delivered it, urged them to make regular backups, if only by copying the MDB across the network to their kid’s computer periodically. That got a “huh, I am clueless about computers, so yeah right, like that’ll ever happen” response. So we suggested having their son do it.
As it turned out, there was a problem with the subreport for materials repeating itself. After much stress and gnashing of teeth and such, my partner figured that out and told me what to do, as it was a minor fix.
I went over there and did it. Eventually their computer crashed. They had a friend set things back up for them, since I am too expensive, then had to have me fix what the friend did and finish things off. I retrieved the most recent copy of the MDB they had and went on my merry way. I thought that was the fixed version, but apparently the fixed version was never anywhere but on their ill-fated hard drive. We totally forgot this little detail.
Then when they had the problem of material description repeating, it appeared to be different from last time. When I finally took over troubleshooting in earnest this morning, I stripped it down to essentials and figured out it happened to more than just lime, and the number of repetitions matched the number of instances of that value in the field. That led me to find the old mail with the fix, try it, and find it worked. Which got my partner off the hook his last available day to work on it before he goes for surgery.
That done, I got ready to do stuff at the office and prepare to go to the new client later, and arrange to visit the above people to give them the fix. Then my father called with a problem on his work computer in Vermont.
Ultimately the problem is the software the franchiser provides having brain dead tendencies, but their support eventually gave up and referred him to me. The problem is that software that has absolutely nothing to do with the network and does not or should not be doing anything across the internet won’t run unless he dials and goes online. Then it works. At the same time, his machine is claiming a network cable is unplugged. Not true. And apparently whatever is making it think that is what is freaking out the software, which apparently does somehow check for a network connection in order to work.
The plan was to fetch my nephew tomorrow or Thursday, let him stay with us through Saturday, and on Saturday do a major project (or part of it) with his help. Now I find myself asking Deb what she thinks of joining me on a whirlwind visit to Vermont this weekend.
On that note, I need to go again. I should note before I do that I was amused to receive in the mail yesterday a solicitation for Google AdSense. My business site doesn’t get enough traffic for that, though part of it could if I breathed life back into it. Maybe the blog. I notice they disapprove of “personal” sites and you have to get special permission to have the Google ads there. Can’t be that hard though, since many blogs have them…