Techwizguy

Replacing RAM in Inspiron 2600/2650

2010-02-08T11:27:00.002-07:00

My Girlfriend's computer died. It was sad. We cried. Then I started troubleshooting. It would sort of boot up....ahhh, I can't remember. I need to write these darn blog posts right after the incident. Anyhow, I thought maybe bad RAM. I used the Ultimate Boot CD to do a memtest and yeah, bad RAM. ("BAD RAM! Get back under the trailer!" ) Luckily I just happened to have a

Palm 755p Error Log

2009-08-18T11:37:00.003-06:00

Dial #*#377# to see the Palm 755p Error Log. Helps with troubleshooting spontaneous restarting of the palm device. My palm started rebooting when I accessed a certain item in the Memos. Then this problem got worse, and it started rebooting when I accessed ANY Memos. I see on teh intarwebs that people experience this sort of problem with restarting from corrupted txt messages, corrupt downloads

Jammie Thomas-Rasset verdict: 1.92 million?!?

2009-06-22T21:18:00.003-06:00

Heh heh, like they will ever see that money. It's ridiculous. If I were in her position I would just laugh. What are they going to do? They can't take her car, they can't keep her from renting a house. They can garnish 25% of her wages. They will never see more than a few thousand dollars of this award and the obvious overkill in the award just makes them look horrible in the public eye. I wish

Problems with Vista 64bit

2009-06-21T13:05:00.004-06:00

Problem number 1: there is no 64 bit version of Adobe Flash to use in 64bit IE. Solution? Use Firefox. Why the heck are you using IE anyhow? Problem number 2: Verizon and Palm do not make drivers for 64 bit windows for the 755p Treo. So you can not hotsync via USB cord, nor can you use VZ access manager to connect to the internet. Solution? Use USBmodem. Problem number 3: Not sure if this is a

My chat session with Dell sales

2009-06-17T20:45:00.000-06:00

Horrible salesmanship. Neither agent greeted me. Neither tried to see what they needed to do to close the sale, or offered to take my order. Neither had a sense of humor. They both missed questions in my text and didn't answer them. Neither said goodbye-have a nice day when our session ended. I am literally sitting here with my credit card in hand and their doofus agents couldn't close the sale.

Eternal Silence is a Kick Ass HL2 Mod

2009-03-24T20:47:00.002-06:00

Eternal Silence is a kick ass mod. It's a space and shipboard combat game. Each match starts out with both teams boarding ships to go bomb the other side's defensive corvettes, and defending their own corvettes. When one team succeeds in blowing up all three of the other team's corvettes, then the game mode changes, and the successful attackers invade the enemy capship and attempt to capture all

Chinese Character Problems in Zen Cart

2009-03-10T19:34:00.004-06:00

I needed to put some links with Chinese, Thai and Japanese characters in a header on a Zen Cart home page. I had a hard time finding the place in the templates and php files where I needed to specify the utf-8 character encoding. Eventually I stumbled on the /includes/languages/your-template/english.php file which is where the magic happens. // charset for web pages and emails define('CHARSET

Phone eats my photos

2009-02-03T19:50:00.006-07:00

And Blogger eats blog postings... Let me see if I can reconstitute this post. My Razor v3m ate some of my cell phone pics tonight. I was transferring pics to my microSD card when the phone decided to erase all but two of the pictures on the card. And no, I did not accidentally choose to erase the card. Otherwise it would have gotten the two that it left behind, eh? So I went looking for

Google vs Facebook? I don't think so.

2009-02-03T19:47:00.002-07:00

Just finished reading this article on the internal economy of Facebook. Mostly it is about Facebook's growth struggles and how recent changes in layout have hurt the businesses of lots of Facebook App Developers. But one small part was about Facebook's place in the larger web ecosystem. The Article maintained that Facebook aims to be the OS of the Web, "making the web fundamentally social

Easy polaroid image generator

2009-01-15T13:17:00.003-07:00

While looking for a way to create a polaroid image effect for a website, I ran across this easy polaroid image generator. It even has fancy shaped drop shadows. Beats all the photoshop tutorials about polaroid frames all to heck. Need to do some Fireworks work on it to give it a transparent background, though.

Dreamweaver DOES mess with your code

2008-12-07T12:55:00.002-07:00

I just discovered that if you edit text in design view, DW will delete comments. I had some server side code stored in a page inside a comment (an add to cart button for Miva Merchant) and while I was editing the text that comes before the commented code, I removed what I thought were extraneous trailing spaces. But when I went back to code view, I found that all my commented add to cart code

Antivirus 2009 email going around

2008-11-13T15:56:00.005-07:00

I thought it was an email hoax at first...you know, like the one about the 190 pound cougar that someone supposedly shot in Iowa...but I guess it's real. Here's the email I received: Another one, actually a malware, is called Anti-Virus 2009. It is a seriously obnoxious problem. You will go to a website that looks innocuous, and suddently this fake anti-virus program takes over your screen and

Left4Dead demo has a virus in it?

2008-11-12T21:20:00.006-07:00

(Update: I was using an old, trial version of Nod32. Updated copies of Nod32 apparently did not make this mistake.) At least that's what Nod32 thought. I installed the demo via Steam and after it finished (2GB download!), I tried to launch the game. Steam told me, "This game is currently unavailable. Try again later." Weird. So I g-g-googled it, and the Steam knowledgebase told me to rename

Electromagnetic radiation is unlikely to cause cancer

2008-11-11T22:22:00.001-07:00

I think this is interesting... The proton precession magnetometer operates on the principal that the protons in all atoms are spinning on an axis aligned with the magnetic field. Ordinarily, protons tend to line up with the earth's magnetic field. When subjected to an artificially-induced magnetic field, the protons will align themselves with the new field. When this new field is

How to deal with Spam

2008-10-23T14:38:00.004-06:00

If you Don't Already Get Spam First and foremost, never put your email address anywhere out the internet where it will be visible on a page. If you do put it out there, you will get spam. Do not register a domain name without whois protection. If your registrar can't hide your email in the domain registration records, use a Gmail acct for your domain contact.(see below). Next, Have two email

Horribly Wrong: Adwords keyword tool advertiser competition

2008-10-22T18:20:00.004-06:00

Google's Adwords Keyword tool supposedly shows how much competition there is for a given keyword phrase, but sometimes when I perform a search on that keyword in Google, I see no ads whatsoever. Here is an example: According to Adwords there is a medium high degree of advertiser competition for the phrase "visa logo" Click for larger image Yet when I go to Google and do a search for "visa logo"

Letter to send to friends who FWD emails

2008-09-22T17:44:00.003-06:00

Hi xx, Like 99.9% of these forwarded emails, this one is also not true. [http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/missing/penny.asp] Snopes is a really good place to check the truth of FW[re:] fw: RE: type emails. Or, you can safely ignore ALL these types of emails. In 14 years of internet usage I have only ever seen two that were true. (One was the "uses of bounce sheets" email, which had a few

Funny, if you are a web developer, I guess

2008-09-22T17:39:00.001-06:00

"our extensive research has shown that failure in relationships is directly proportional to the number of Alt codes one has memorized" ~Author Unknown [How bad is it if I only know three? Well, maybe four.] "I spent a minute looking at my own code by accident. I was thinking 'What the hell is this guy doing?'" "I went on a 30-day diet, and lost 30 days" "How can you think you matter

Strange characters â€™ and Â in Wordpress posts

2008-09-08T23:53:00.007-06:00

After a wordpress upgrade we started to get all kinds of weird symbols in our posts, including Â and â€™. I figured it was a character encoding mismatch problem and a quick search on the Wordpress forums confirmed it. You have to comment out two lines in your wp-config.php file (found in your main blog directory). These are the two lines: define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8'); define('DB_COLLATE', '')

Changing the ordering of products in Zen Cart 1.3.7

2008-09-08T22:51:00.003-06:00

Here's a simple one, but I didn't know how to do it right away. If you want to feature the products on your main Zen Cart page in a certain order, you can do that by going into the admin and editing the sort order number at the bottom of each individual product. Lower sort order numbers show up first on the catalog page.

comctl32.dll and controls.man could not be copied from the xp cd

2008-05-30T14:52:00.000-06:00

Ok, so this is how I solved a problem with Win xp install. Problem presented itself as a file that could not be copied during file copy stage. Comctl32.dll and controls.man could not be copied from the xp cd.I got a copy of comctl file from my laptop's xp, and I was able to copy the controls.man file from the xp cd, using the cdrom drive in my laptop instead of the desktop I was trying to install

Hooking up the world's greatest spam filters

2008-05-16T22:05:00.002-06:00

Gmail has the world's greatest spam filters. They process billions of emails everyday and they own Postini. Today, I hooked up a client's website email to Google's spam filters using Google Apps. I had to change his MX records in his hosting account cPanel. The change over was instant, though they say it could take a couple of days to take effect. I know it was instant, because he was collecting

Be selective about who you show your ads to

2008-05-15T15:35:00.004-06:00

One more for today... I also found a couple interesting articles on adsense ads. Specifically, on who sees your adsense ads. Do you want to show them to all your visitors? Your regular readers have learned to tune them out by now, right? Ozh at Planet Ozh has written a nifty wordpress plugin that I can't wait to try out. Serve ads to just the visitors from search engines. They came to my site

The search for a secure, accessible, anti-spam form to email script

2008-05-15T13:00:00.006-06:00

Two of my clients are getting a lot of contact form spam. The spambots fill out the contact forms with their spammy links and submit them. The strange thing is that a lot of the time the forms are just full of random garbage: contact via: Phone, at this number: contact_at: tkvhmn@ohmodb.com time to contact: wfqpbwdwi addr1: 1 addr2: http://fbzmzdnszlkv.com/ city: YRGKofnQEDfSFlctLKZ state

Research on multi user blog platforms

2008-05-15T11:11:00.005-06:00

Yesterday I did a ton of research. One of my 'back burner' projects is to set up a multi blog for a bunch of hardcore outdoorsmen. yesterday I did a long power search on multiple blog systems. I found at least three promising paths: Wordpress Multi user or wpmu - The forums for WPMU, in a stickied post, indicates that it is not for tha faint of heart. Undeterred, I still think I could