My preferred FTP client has, for a long time, been FileZilla. To connect to a FTP account, I generally select the account from the Quickconnect menu, as I am sure many others do. However, I find that sometimes on connecting … Continue reading
Category Archives: Software
Basic Diagnostics for Hibernate and Sleep
(This article is written with particular reference to Windows operating systems, especially Windows 7, although, some points are applicable to other operating systems as well). The current state of a computer is almost entirely dependent on the state of the … Continue reading
Partitioning Basics
One of the necessities of a multi-boot setup is partitioning, but the uses of partitioning go far beyond its application to multi-boot setups. The act of splitting a drive into multiple logical parts is known as partitioning; each part is … Continue reading
VirtualBox fails to start
Some of my recent exploration of virtual machines in VirtualBox led me to using a beta version of version 4. After an unsuccessful removal of a virtual machine, VirtualBox continually crashed (error relates to qtcorevbox4.dll) as soon as the interface … Continue reading
Apache: Not GET Request
My error logs were recently filled with repetions of the the following line: [Date] [warn] [client IP] Not GET request: 2., referer: As it turned out this was caused by the mod_pagespeed module (from Google). Disabling it has stopped the … Continue reading
Decoding a Base64 Email Attachment
I had a few files containing email attachments that needed to be converted into usable files. The following code (which has no checks in it), did the trick: <?php function decode_email_attachment(){ $data= file_get_contents($inputfile); file_put_contents($outputfile, base64_decode(str_replace( “\r\n”, “”, $data ))); } … Continue reading
Fractions
For many people the mere mention of fractions elicits a wince, and while these lovely math constructs played a notable role in our early years of math, they are reasonably simple entities. While most humans revisit fractions over many years … Continue reading
WinAmp UAC
I am quite fond of WinAmp, but ever since I started using Windows 7, WinAmp would bring up a User Account Control dialog each time it was started. The cause of this was the ‘Restore file associations at WinAmp start-up’ … Continue reading
Website Optimizations, Part 1
I have recently been working on a few optimizations for this site. While there are many more to go, I thought I would note a few while they were still fresh. While I prefer Chrome as my daily browser, because … Continue reading
Invalid MS DOS Function
I came across an interesting oddity today. When I went to play a video file, after copying it between two partitions on the same hard drive, the first part played fine, but it reached a particular point where it almost … Continue reading
Bundle Error on AWS
On servers running certain forms of chroot, a file system loop is created (in /var/named/chroot), causing errors when attempting to bundle the volume. This occurs in particular when running BIND (named). To successfully bundle the volume, simply stop named: sudo … Continue reading
Setting the timezone on PHP
Versions of PHP after 5.10 include the date.timezone directive in php.ini. Many applications which reference time need this directive to be set. A list of accepted values can be found at: http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php The timezone is set as a quoted string, … Continue reading
A Procedural Methodology for Diagnosing (Home) Internet Issues
I recently had some internet problems, most pages wouldn’t load, my connections to servers (e.g. FTP, SSH) would quickly drop, but, yet, I was able to download a file at a reasonable rate. There are different approaches to narrowing down … Continue reading
Time on AWS Linux AMI
The time on the Amazon Linux AMI is set, by default to UTC. To change this, symlink one of the timezone files from /usr/share/zoneinfo/ to /etc/localtime. The change takes effect immediately (and will also affect most logs, etc). For example: … Continue reading