DaVe’s Musings

Here is a great site to check if your web server is sending pages in compressed format:
http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php
This is definitely something you want to have turned on as it saves on bandwidth and download times.

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CNET has an interesting article about Hyperic going open source. The Hyperic HQ software monitors what’s happening on company networks and reports events to administrators. This is the type of software that no one who is managing servers should be without, and now the solution is completely open source. Hyperic HQ allows you to:

Auto-Discover all your [...]

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Are the latest four Microsoft security patches not installing for you?  Is KB917537 one of the fixes? Well, it seems that this patch will not install unless you shut down the IIS Admin service and its dependent services manually (thanks Microsoft!).  My suggestion is to uncheck this patch from the list of four new security [...]

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Microsoft just released a neat little utility called Private Folder 1.0. It’s unsupported and will only run on “genuine” Windows XP.  What it does is give you a new folder called “My Private Folder” that is password protected to prevent anyone who may be sharing your computer from accessing the files in that folder.  From [...]

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Here’s the code to add a timestamp to your vBulletin message board for ad code such as DoubleClick:
 
 

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Dell installs all their servers with an annoying Dell background image (1.8MB!!!) on the main logon screen. This image slows down terminal service connections because you have to wait for this high color image to load. The first thing I do is remove this background from any new Dell server.  To do this, edit the [...]

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Need to make complete copy of a web site but don’t have direct access to the files? I’ve had this happen for several clients whose web developer would no longer give them access, or who wanted a copy before they terminated their relationship with the web designer. Well, HTTrack is a free utility that [...]

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The FLVPlayer WordPress plugin is a nice utility to add Flash videos to your WordPress site, but it has not been updated by the author in numerous months and does not completely work as described in the installation instructions.  Here are the steps I had to take to get it to work:

Download the latest version [...]

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So, I’ve been looking for a WordPress event calendar plugin, and while I found the Event Calendar 3 plug-in, I wasn’t happy with it. It does not support multiple day events, recurring events, etc. I found PHPiCalendar, but that only reads in iCal files, and is not integrated into WordPress, except through a plugin which [...]

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Have users who are seeing the message “Click to activate and use this control” on some web sites?
Microsoft’s most recent Windows Update including a “patch” to Internet Explorer, that disabled some of the functionality it had for automatically running embedded controls (ActiveX, Flash, etc.). This is due to a patent dispute that Microsoft lost (is [...]

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