davegruen.com » Tech Problems

Wishing we had more sunspots…

HiddenVorlon — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 01:36:41 +0000

Since "global warming" is caused by sunspots… I am wishing we had more sunspots today…

The Most Useless Feature

HiddenVorlon — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 01:12:48 +0000

I went to help a friend of ours with their computer today. Somehow, her Windows screen was flipped 180 degrees.

This is the most worthless feature ever. I cannot think of one single use for this feature. This lady is in her 60’s and I know full well that she never went into her video display settings and rotated the screen 180 degrees. She has no idea how to get into that area – so somehow this setting turned itself on…

Just because you can build in a feature doesn’t mean that you really should build that feature. Even if you build in a feature like this – shouldn’t have have an "Are you sure?" prompt before it becomes a locked setting????

Search engine, index thyself…

HiddenVorlon — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:31:33 +0000

For those of you who don’t know, a group of ex-Google employees started their own search engine titled "cuil". So, some of my websites aren’t indexed by cuil – it’s a new search engine, so I don’t expect every site to be in there now. In order to fix that, I wanted to submit my sites to their crawlers. There isn’t an easy way to do this right off the homepage, so I did a very simple search "add url to cuil" thinking this would result in me finding my answer.

Whoops! I found FOUR, count them FOUR, results. Just to see the results, I went to Google and typed in the same search phase and found 75,800 results.

Search engine, index thyself…

Upgrade to WordPress 2.6

HiddenVorlon — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:40:08 +0000

I lost several hours today upgrading from WordPress 2.5 to 2.6. I followed all of the installation instructions to the letter, but kept getting the following error message:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by....

After installing the new files and then uploading the old wp-config.php file, I was beating my head into the wall.

Finally, after debugging through things, I found that the WP 2.5 wp-config file has an extra newline character (’\n’) at the end of the %> tag. Completely undetectable, I lost hours trying to solve the problem. It appears that 2.5 was either more forgiving or there was some extra code in 2.6 that caused a problem with the extra newline.

I’m just posting this just in case anyone else runs into trouble – check the end of the wp-config.php file for any extra newline characters.