Month: April 2008

What’re you lookin’ at?

Well I thought it was interesting so here’s the top 10 posts on nerd. by number of views (based on the last 500 page hits courtesy of Statcounter.com).

  1. Review: Why the Netgear WG311 v3 Sucks (72)
    Slightly dodgy network card that Netgear don’t seem that fussed about fixing. Bad on XP, it got worse on Vista (see number 4).
  2. Playing iPod Video on Your TV (45)
    Seems to be a lot of people looking for instructions for the iPod Classic. Here’s a tip: sell it.
  3. Server application unavailable: installing IIS on .NET 2.0 (44)
    Seems to be a common problem. Sadly Microsoft’s error message is about as relevant as ever.
  4. Installing Vista (AKA More Netgear WG311 Misery) (31)
    Even more messed up. Thank goodness for Linksys!
  5. Thunderbird/Outlook/Google Calendar Integration (25)
    How to integrate your Thunderbird calendar at home with your Outlook in work, via Google Calendar.
  6. Orange Answerphone (Voicemail) Number for PAYG (23)
    Such a simple problem. Who knew it would be so hard to find?
  7. Stop Monitor.exe Hogging CPU (20)
    Why can’t people just give you a standard installation instead of trying to do everything for you? Help sounds good, until their useful tools start killing your PC.
  8. How to run IIS Web Server in Windows XP Home (20)
    Microsoft’s official line is it can’t be done, but it’s not that tricky.
  9. Making Firefox Scroll With Syanptics TouchPad (19)
    Discovering the solution to making Firefox scroll on my Acer Aspire laptop.
  10. NAS or Home Server (17)
    I deliberate over whether I can justify spending the extra to build or buy a home server before eventually deciding that a Linkstation Live will meet my needs for less than half the price.

I Can Has Vista Sidebar Gadget?

O hai!

I hart lolcatz.

I hart lolcatz so much dat wun dai I thoughted “I can has lolcatz wen I makes teh pooter turn on?” So I maded a Vista gadjit an now I has new lolcatz every dai.

If u hart lolcatz liek mee an wants lolcatz in ur pooter makin u laff, downlodes mah gadjit. I has tested it 4 liek rly long time. It rly works, srsly. An evry1 needses moar lolcatz.

Kthxbai.

Continue reading “I Can Has Vista Sidebar Gadget?”

"Poorly Judged and Tasteless"

It seems it’s the time for it. Queen’s University’s student newspaper, The Gown, published a story about the recent death of a man who they allege had a history of intimidating students.  Some seem to feel that it went a bit far in intimating that this death would be a source of relief to students in the area.

Then I get home on the same day and have an email from Flexicover, from whom I’ve previously bought travel insurance, using a news story about "The death of five girls involved in a tragic accident in Ecuador whilst on a gap-year" to highlight "the risks of travelling overseas" and sell me travel insurance.  They offer 6 helpful hints to people planning gap years and, unsurprisingly, number 6 is: yes, you guessed it, insurance.

A bit scummy, is it not?

More aspnet_regiis Goodness – this time on Vista

Some time ago I published a blog describing the use of a command line tool called aspnet_regiis.exe to overcome a “Server Application Unavailable” message when I was trying to get ASP.NET working on IIS 6 on Windows XP.

Just now I’ve used the same tool to fix a similar (I think) problem on IIS7 on Vista. I was trying to get some practice with ASP.NET. I’ve already got IIS7 and I’ve already got the .NET Framework 2.0 installed. However it seemed, again, that IIS wasn’t aware of the Framework’s existence. When I tried to browse to a simple Hello World page I was greeted with an HTTP 404 (404.3 to be precise) informing me that:

“The page you are requesting cannot be served because of the extension configuration. If the p age is a script, add a handler. If the file should be downloaded, add a MIME map.”

Despite the different error messages it appeared to be a similar problem. Apparently it was. That wonderful little solution again:

  1. Start -> Cmd
  2. Navigate to your .NET Framework directory (e.g. C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727)
  3. Run the command “aspnet_regiis.exe -i”
  4. Wait…

£169 iPhone Still £169 Too Expensive

O2 have slashed the cost of owning the Apple iPhone (8GB model only). It’s down from £269 to £169. The same deal is also available at the Carphone Warehouse. Good news I’m sure, but you’d still have to be mad to pay a penny for the damn thing on top of the £35 × 18 = £630 of a minimum contract when you can get Nokia’s N95 8GB (which I have been seriously coveting for months) for “free” at that price (then again, without any kind of data plan that’s extortionate too).

Maybe if my N73 breaks I’ll consider upgrading, but since I’m spending a tenner a month on pay-as-you-go I can’t really justify jumping to £35/month for the N95 8GB or to £44 a month for an iPhone.  Maybe if I hold out long enough…

Solved: WordPress Admin Images Missing

I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.5 today, and installed a new copy of WordPress on a subdomain too. Both these actions were carried out using cPanel & Fantastico.

When I logged into the backend of the new subdomain there were no images – including no buttons on the rich-text editor (TinyMCE) and no WordPress logo on the login screen.  I later noticed there were also background images missing on the public part of the new blog.  When I right clicked “View background image” on the missing image, it took me to an HTTP 403 (Forbidden) meaning there was a permissions problem. The strange thing was the problem didn’t occur in the nerd. backend.

And the solution…? In this instance it was because I’d enabled hotlink protection in my server to stop other people using images stored at steveferson.com on their sites, because this eats up precious bandwidth.  When I created this new subdomain, I had forgotten about the hotlink protection and so hadn’t added it to the list of sites allowed to link to images at SteveFerson.com.  When I added it everything went back to working as expected.