menu.

Tonight I was attempting to rip a DVD to an AVI-XviD file thinking it would be easy - unfortunately not. It’s not a copy-protected DVD or anything, just a plain old DVD-R.

First I tried VirtualDub MPEG or whatever it’s called. It seemed to be either taking ages or not responding so I gave up and ended it. Next I downloaded DVDx and tried to use it to rip the files from the DVD. Still painstakingly slow (to the point I wasn’t sure it was still doing anything) and eventually gave up with a message about a CRC error. So, I decided to copy the VOB files (actually the whole TS_VIDEO directory) to hard drive and work from there.

It was then I realised the problem wasn’t with the aforementioned programs but with Vista itself. There were two 1 GB VOB files and the first of these refused to be copied. Vista was throwing up an error which advised me it “Cannot read from the source file or disk”. Bugger. Thinking it might be a problem with either Vista or the DVD drive I tried it in my trusty laptop (still running Windows XP Pro). It worked!

So how do I know Vista’s the problem? Well I tried to copy the file over my network back to the Vista PC and got a similar looking error dialogue, this time saying “Network Error: There is a problem accessing \\laptop\directory. Make sure you are connected to the network and try again.”

By this stage I gave up and just downloaded DVDx to my laptop, which I was able to use to copy the video to an Xvid AVI file.  Nice work Micro$oft.  Now all I have to do is successfully convert it to NTSC format and I’m flying - unfortunately that’s as much fun as pulling teeth, and much more painful.

Immediately after I upgraded (using Fantastico) from Wordpress 2.1.x to 2.2.1 I noticed the Dashboard in the admin was giving me problems. I was getting 404 pages displaying in the middle of the page (even though the source code was fine and there actually aren’t any iframes there). I’ll get to the solution in a minute (so read on) but first I want to tell my story (just because I can).

Initially I thought this was because there had been a problem writing some of the files so I downloaded a clean copy of wordpress and uploaded the files manually over FTP. This didn’t help. Having eliminated browser problems by testing in IE as well as FireFox, I noticed that the page seemed to be loading fine and these 404s were appearing after the page loaded. Guessing Javascript I disabled this feature and tried again. It worked!

It was about this time that I stumbled across some information in the Wordpress support forums pointing to a AJAX issue. It seems to be something to do with displaying the dynamic information like notices from Wordpress (and incoming links?) and, more specifically, with the Content-type HTTP header being returned having a newly-added character encoding field.

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