Category: 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 computer’s RAM. That is to say, that the data stored in memory tells the computer… Continue reading Basic Diagnostics for Hibernate and Sleep

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 called a partition. A physical drive refers to the actual, tangible device, while logical drives refer… Continue reading Partitioning Basics

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 appeared, and reinstalling the program did not resolve the issue. In order to continue using… Continue reading VirtualBox fails to start

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 Disabling it has stopped the errors, I will be trying out a newer version of the module shortly. Additional info:… Continue reading Apache: Not GET Request

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 ))); } ?>

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 and often still fail to grasp the concept, for a computer, the elementary operations with… Continue reading Fractions

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’ setting, which requires registry access. Disabling this setting stops displaying the UAC dialog. Steps: Open… Continue reading WinAmp UAC

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 completely froze the machine. At this point, the hard drive light was consistently on (not… Continue reading Invalid MS DOS Function

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 service named stop ec2-bundle-vol {options}

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, with no delimiter at the end, for example: date.timezone = “Continent/City” The location of the… Continue reading Setting the timezone on PHP

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 the problem. For some problems, the symptoms will direct one’s focus to likely causes, but… Continue reading A Procedural Methodology for Diagnosing (Home) Internet Issues

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: ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT /etc/localtime To make the change persist through updates, it is necessary to… Continue reading Time on AWS Linux AMI