Just made a few minor tweaks to the layout and design. I’ve given the sections on the right-hand side some more prominent headings and moved the Twitter section nearer the top instead of the bottom.
I’ve always taken issue with “social networking” sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitter seems to be full of useless posts about people taking their dogs for a walk or telling us what they had for dinner and Facebook is for people desperate to be in a group of any kind and is mostly used for self-promotion and ego-stroking.
Wile I maintain my stance that I will never have a facebook account, I have decided to dabble with Twitter a little to see if I can make any use out of it at all. You can see my latest tweets at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar or on twitter under the name AMindLost. It may be a short-lived experiment and be either deleted or left to slowly rot into oblivion but I’ll try to post some meaningful content to it which is not substantial enough to warrant a full blog post.
We will see…… 
I’ve noticed a big spike today in traffic to my earlier post regarding a connection failure on the Playstation network. The cause appears to be a large number of older-style PS3 consoles being shut off the network due to a calendar problem. The problem is global and widespread it seems. More details here.
I’ve just had a problem with an XP machine not letting users log in. It loaded to the user selection screen at which point you can log-in but it only flashed the screen and told you it was saving personal settings and returned to the user selection screen. Booting in safe mode gave the same result. It was impossible to actually get into windows to attempt to fix the problem.
A bit of research pointed towards a malware infection which was unusual in that malware normally wants something from you in the form of advertising revenue, money for dummy spyware removal or personal information. The days of the old Chernobyl viruses which would literally try to take your hardware out appear to be gone. However in this case it looked like malware at work. I found reference to some malware which changed the registry entry for userinit.exe, a key component of the windows startup procedure, pointing it to an alternative, infected process. I therefore needed a way to access the registry to change this entry back to the correct executable.
Continue reading ‘Windows XP Won’t Login, Logs Straight Back Out’
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me to look at his daughter’s laptop. She had changed her vista password and then managed to forget not only the new password but what the hint she had set even meant! So she had a laptop she couldn’t access with her school project work needed in three days and no backup. I didn’t hold out much hope apart from reinstalling Vista. There was no recovery disk for the Sony laptop so it would have been a fresh install and a case of hunt-the-driver to get it all working again, hopefully leaving her data intact.
However, I found a solution in the ‘Offline NT Password and Registry Editor’…
Since a lot of my posts have sections of commands or code in, I wanted an easy means of highlighting a block of text within a post without using the quote block which I want to reserve for actual quotes. I found Stephen Cronin’s post which seems to do what I want with a simple css edit. I’m using his settings for now while I play about with it a bit.
You simply find the .css file for your theme or style (I’m using the K2 theme so my .css is NOT the K2 style.css but the .css file in the styles/amindlost sub-directory of the K2 theme) and add the following entry to the bottom:
.textbox {padding: 2px 6px 4px 6px; color: #555555; background-color: #eeeeee; border: #dddddd 2px solid}
When you want to highlight a block simply type the text in, go to the HTML design tab instead of the Visual design tab and put <p class=”textbox”> in front and </p> at the end.
I was trying to install Microsoft SQL Server Express onto a Windows 7 machine today and when I got to installing the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express package I kept being prompted with the following error message:
After trying to download the package again and installing with the same result, I discovered that this error is actually due to Windows 7 (and Vista) having User Account Control, or UAC. What we need to do is to install it as administrator and the easiest way to do this is as follows:
1. Goto Start Menu >> Accessories >> All Programs
2. Right-Click the Command Prompt ans select ‘Run as Administrator.
3. Accept the UAC warning which comes up.
4. Go to your downloads folder (eg. cd \users\admin\downloads)
5. Run ‘SQLServer2005_SSMSEE_x64.msi’ and the installation will complete as normal
One of our companies is a reasonably heavy user of Sage Line 50 and I’m amazed how much it has slowed down in the last year and the key seems to be it’s database back-end. I don’t know what Sage use but I wrote a Management Information System for the company to give salesmen a history of a quotes, orders and invoices which accesses the Sage files through Sage’s own ODBC connector. When I first installed the system at the beginning of last year, it took 2-3 seconds to load a customer’s history. It now takes over 20s!
Having exhausted any straight-forward ways to speed Sage up, such as excluding it’s files from Anti-Virus scans and so on, I decided that I would take a snapshot of the Sage data twice a day into a MySQL database since the MIS doesn’t need live data, a few hours old is absolutely fine. The performance against the MySQL database is at least 100 times quicker than against the Sage data. The difference is staggering! Both Sage and the MySQL server on are the same physical machine and they are operating through the same network infrastructure yet MySQL stamps all over Sage in performance terms.
Anyone know what Sage’s database back-end is? Is it bespoke or just carefully disguised? Either way, it’s performance is pretty poor.
If you do regular backups of your servers, when you come to restore you nearly always find something you didn’t realise you should have backed up. One thing that can slip through the net on Linux mail servers is the spamassassin database. If you use a cron job to analyse your spam messages everyday and learn from them, spamassassinwill have created a database of identifiers and tokens which can be lost if not backed up.
To create a backup of the database simply issue the following command (ideally in a daily cron job):
sa-learn –backup /etc/spamassassin/db-backup.txt
This will create a text file called db-backup.txt which is easy to backup in your regular routine and can be restored by:
sa-learn –restore=/etc/spamassassin/db-backup.txt
A friend of mine had problems all through last week connecting to the Playstation Network with his PS3 even though he had had no problems since buying the console over a year ago. Not having a PS3 myself I know very little about them, but, assuming is was a networking problem, I offered to have a look. It turns out it is a common problem with numerous solutions which work for some and not others.
The problem presents itself by allowing your PS3 to connect to anything on the internet including browsing the Sony store and using the BBC iPlayer. If you try to connect to the Playstation Network though in order to play online, it reports that it is taking too long and you should check your network connection. If you do a network test it will report success for the IP address and internet tests and then a fail for the Playstation Network test.
To cure the problem there are a few things which have worked for one of more people:
1) Give the PS3 a static IP address and put it into the DMZ on your router.
2) Change the MTU setting in the PS3 network settings to 1492 (this appears to be the most common solution)
3) Change the DNS settings to the OpenDNS servers (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220)
4) Some have reported that they cannot connect with a signal strength on their wireless connection of less than 70%
5) The most extreme fix after people got no help from Sony, their router manufacturer or their ISP? Buying a new PS3!
None of the above worked in this case, however. But after an hour of searching I found a single report where someone had tried the MTU setting of 1492 and it didn’t cure their problem but they discovered that a value of 1400 did work and this is what worked in this case as well.
I don’t know why it worked but setting the MTU to 1400 on the pS3 did the trick. I am curious as to why the Playstation Network connection is so fussy about it’s settings and what changed to make this fix necessary.
Update: 01/03/2010
I’ve noticed a big spike today in traffic to this post today. The cause appears to be a large number of older-style PS3 consoles being shut off the network due to a calendar problem. The problem is global and widespread it seems. More details here.
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