I just took less than five minutes to get X11 forwarding through SSH working from my laptop. I’ve always meant to look in to making it work, but never got around to it. I’d have done it years ago if I’d known it would be this easy.
Check out Xming if you’re interested.
It’s the magic number! Yay! I haven’t been to alt.2600 in many years…
I haven’t posted much for the last two days—things have been busy around here. I’ve got a lot going on at work, which isn’t unusual, but things are hopping a bit more than they normally are. We’re nearing the end of a development cycle and I’ve spent much of today in various meetings, some to discuss additional development on “feature frozen” software. Typically you don’t want to do that, but in this case I believe it may be justified. I can’t go into much detail about it, but I think we’d solve a lot of customer service issues with some of the changes we’ve been discussing.
I’m posting this from my new phone. Yes, Scurvy Jake is now officially an Apple customer now.
Now I just have to figure out how this iPhone works…
Last night my wife’s cousin came over with her new computer. It just arrived yesterday, but the wireless functionality was missing (it’s a desktop, HP Pavilion s3500z). I took a look at the Device Manager but it only showed the wired NIC. I then thought perhaps it was disabled in BIOS (the antenna comes out of the back where the motherboard is, it’s not a PCI card or anything). The BIOS was the most sparse I think I’ve seen in ten years. There were hardly any settings available to change, and nothing about the wireless adapter.
Turns out it’s a USB device, and it’s screwed in to the back plate where the other motherboard connectors are for PS/2, video, LAN, etc. The device was either never connected, or had come loose during shipping, because it wasn’t plugged in. After getting their support on the phone to try to track it down, we finally figured it out. The guy said I have the record for taking one of their cases apart. I told him I’ve done it a few times before. Probably before he was even in High School (I didn’t tell him that part).
Anyway, once I popped out the optical drive (the internal USB connection was obscured by the drive), got the device plugged in good, put everything back together, things were shiny.
I had a laptop in the office that had some weird problems on it.
PowerPoint 2007 was extremely slow. I did a lot of research online, most of which suggested an issue with the default printer driver. This was not the case. Even other users on the laptop could run PP07 and edit the same file with no issue. It was specific to one logon account on the machine. I ended up fixing it by removing the user, copying all the profile data from the \Users directory, then recreating the user.
That seemed to work, until he took the laptop home and could no longer log in to it. He always got the error
The group policy client service failed the logon. Access is denied.
After some searching around, I found only a little help with this problem, but one thing got it fixed up just fine.
Open the HKLM/Software/Microsoft/WindowsNT/CurrentVersion/ProfileList registry key. Under this key, there is an entry for each user on the machine, they look like long GUIDs if they’re domain users. Find the one with an entry under it called ProfileImagePath that points to the user directory that has the problem. Rename the key (the parent of ProfileImagePath, directly under ProfileList) for this user to anything other than what it is. Log in as that user.
This created a new user directory (in my case, user.domain instead of just user as it was already present) and completely solved the login issue.
Today is bad server mojo day or something. I’ve been having a weird connectivity problem on the network, pings are timing out when I try to reach several machines, and one of the servers lost all its IP address settings. Things seem to be working now, but it makes me wonder what’s going to bork out next…
I’ve been fighting this weird routing issue in the office today. Apparently our web developer was seeing it since he started working this morning, but I didn’t notice it until he brought it up with me. I didn’t notice because I hadn’t yet ssh‘d into one of our servers yet today.
What I saw was about a 20 second lag, every minute or two. I could work for a while, then all of a sudden I get no response from the server for about 20 seconds (but don’t lose the connection) then everything catches up and I’m good for another couple minutes.
I ran a traceroute while the “outage” was happening and when I got to the router before my server, I didn’t get any reverse DNS name resolution, and I got 6 hops of timeouts before it reached my server (server ping time: 3.301ms, 2.825ms, and 2.803ms—yes, I have a fast connection there). As soon as the problem resolved itself, a subsequent traceroute showed a resolved router and direct hop to my server, but with higher (80+ms) latency.
My gut reaction was a problem with our Colocation facility’s router, so I called them about it. They weren’t seeing anything on their network. The technician tried from another connection outside their normal network and it worked fine, too. He never saw the latency issue.
Just as I was suspecting it may be something weird with our switch being overloaded and/or dropping packets, I get a call back from the technician and he tells me he just found out there is a known issue with a new router with incoming connections through XO Communications (our Internet provider here). I was relieved to know it wasn’t any of my equipment, and about 30 minutes later they discarded the route that was going through the router in question.
So now the problem is gone, and not many people on the outside world even experienced it, but on the down side my route is now 17 hops long instead of 7, and my latency is about 60ms. Still, I’ll take it over a broken route any day.
I love sloppy focus in a windowing environment. It makes me happy. I shouldn’t have to click on a window and bring it to the foreground for it to have focus and be able to accept input. I should just be able to slide the mouse over the window, and as long as it doesn’t exit that window and hit another one, the window I rolled over should get focus.
I am so used to this behavior after 10 years of desktop Linux usage that I’m always thinking it works the same way in Windows. But I was wrong—you have to click windows before they accept focus.
Except I’m wrong again. You can have sloppy focus in Windows. I just modified Vista to have sloppy focus!
In Regedit, add 0×1 to the key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask
In my case, the value was set to 9E 3E 07 80 12 00 00 00. This value is little-endian, which means the least-significant-bit is first. So in hex, this is 0×0000001280073E9E. Adding 0×1, we get 0×0000001280073E9F. Reverse the bits and you get the new value: 9F 3E 07 80 12 00 00 00.
It’s simpler to just increment the first bit in the sequence, but this is so you really understand what is going on.
Log off (no need to reboot) and log back in. You now have sloppy focus. This works in Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista.
I recently configured a WebDAV server and was having strange access errors. The client would report
Listing collection `/’: failed:
XML parse error at line 1: Extra content at the end of the document .
When I tried a directory listing.
On the server side, I was getting the error
Provider encountered an error while streaming a multistatus PROPFIND response. [404, #0]
Turns out the solution is one I don’t really even understand. Under my Apache config, I changed the <Directory> directives to <Location> directives and everything started working.
According to the Apache online manual, you should only use Location when you’re applying directives to directories outside the local (jailed) filesystem. These are simple, local directories I’m configuring.
Like I said, weird.
There are two obstacles in making WordPress, even the most current version, XHTML Strict compliant. Today I discovered the second one, when you use the relatively new Gallery feature.
To fix this problem, you need to eliminate an inserted style tag from the wp-includes/media.php file. The chunk looks like this (mine is found on line 426:
<style type='text/css'>
.gallery {
margin: auto;
}
.gallery-item {
float: left;
margin-top: 10px;
text-align: center;
width: {$itemwidth}%; }
.gallery img {
border: 2px solid #cfcfcf;
}
.gallery-caption {
margin-left: 0;
}
</style>
Copy this to your theme’s style.css stylesheet, replacing the call to $itemwidth with width: auto;. Delete the offending code from media.php.
Every time you upgrade, you’ll have to repeat this process. That is, until the WordPress developers make their code XHTML Strict compliant, which may never happen.
The second obstacle to a nice, XHTML Strict weblog is the link code. Get a copy of my strict_links.txt widget, rename it, and add it to your widgets directory. Use it instead of the normal links widget.
From Microsoft’s Partner Program today:
On August 27, 2008, Microsoft released Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 in English, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese. We will release Beta 2 in an additional 21 languages* within a month. Because you’re actively engaged in developing and maintaining websites, Microsoft wants to make you aware of a display issue related to Internet Explorer 8. Upon initial release, browsing in default Internet Explorer 8 Standards mode may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended. To enable existing content to display as expected, Microsoft is providing a compatibility tag that you can add to sites that might be affected. This tag instructs Internet Explorer 8 to display site content as if it were in Internet Explorer 7. This option helps ensure that existing content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8 without requiring any additional code changes.
A compatibility tag for IE 7? Wow, what a great idea.
How about sticking to published Internet standards, instead? Biznatches.
I just hit 21 consecutive hours working. The sad thing is this is not a record for me. I’m really starting to feel like crap, though.
The RAID repair is running well and it almost 60% now with no problems.
Well, the RAID repair utility backed up to 50% and got stuck in some kind of loop. It didn’t advance for over an hour. I took a wild guess and figured the drive is bad. I put in my spare (I have a spare for every server hard drive) and just restarted the repair process. Man I’m tired.
The repair on the RAID mirror is about 65% done. It’s getting to be a long night.