Schonhose

Every once in a while I take a break from the computer to watch some television. Some of the shows I like to watch are “CSI”, “My name is Earl” and “House, M.D.”.

I really love the character Gregory House, played by the wonderful Hugh Laurie. Funny thing is that House and myself share some similarities. The most notable similarity between us is best captured in words by House’s best friend in the show, Wilson.

Some doctors have the messiah complex — they need to save the world”, House has “a Rubik’s complex” — he needs “to solve the puzzle”

“Rubik’s complex”, now I finally have a name for it. “Solving puzzles” is what I love doing. And that doesn’t mean the puzzles like Sudoku or the actual Rubik’s cube, but puzzles in programs. Why a program isn’t working or producing the expected results, that really interest me. When something is actually working right all the time it is kind of boring.

Well, some of you might remember October 16th and the backup scheme I installed following that dreadful day. I set up cronjobs and mailed the zipfiles to a Gmail account. Pretty slick and I was quite happy with it.

That was right up until the day Gmail started bouncing my mails. After an investigation it seems Gmail flagged my zipfiles as a virus. The reason: a high compression rate and somehow that is considered to be related to a virus.

So last night it got me thinking. I had a fairly decent zip-class, perhaps I could throw in a mailer-class and a database backup class (written for my old CMS). That way I could build my own backup software and drop the other script that was sending unaccepted zip-files.

Well, today was the day of the initial tries and after some startup errors (paths are really different when started as a cronjob) all seems to be working well. The size is only 120KB while the other script was a mere 2000KB. So that is a drop of a whopping 94% in size.

Now I can clean some things up and install it on all my subdomains. Now for a question to the readers of this blog: What would you consider to be a good backup scheme? Every 56 hours? (That would make it three times a week: 7 days times 24 hours equals 168 hours in a week. 168 hours divided by three would make it every 56 hours). Let me know alright?

It has been a hectic week. The user ‘solar-flare’ over at the Pixelpost forum informed us that an exploit has been found for Pixelpost. Further investigation by the development team confirmed this exploit and the fact it has been around since at least version 1.5.

We have released an immediate security update in the form of version 1.7.1 at the Pixelpost homepage. Everybody running an older version is strongly advised to upgrade since the exploit actively tries to get both the admin username and the password (the latter still being in the encrypted format). We also strongly suggest changing the password or the username (or both) after upgrading just to make sure since we don’t know how many blogs have been targeted with this exploit.

The second part of the title, ‘system restore’ is more lighthearted. Normally I would disable system restore right after a new install. Two years ago, the date of my last clean install I did this for all the drives except the C:\ drive which hosts Windows XP. A decision I was quite happy with today. I finally setup my computer to use Activesync and connected my HTC Touch.

Windows detects a new device and starts making registry changes all of a sudden. This makes Kaspersky very nervous and several pop-ups come up asking me to confirm the change. They just kept on coming and then I clicked ‘Deny change’ instead of the wanted ‘Allow change’. So needless to say the mobile device wasn’t installed properly so I decided it was time for a reboot.

Once rebooted my system didn’t display the taskbar anymore and came to a grinding stop, pretty much showing only the wallpapers. So, wanting to remove the new Activesync I loaded up the safe mode and guess what? I could do a system restore.

After going back one day and another reboot, the system was back up again. I never thought I might say this but today Microsoft has saved my ass.

I have been so busy with the new Googlemap addon for Pixelpost so I completely forgot to mention some things. Therefore I decided to put them all in this post in random order:

• Yesterday we released the final 1.7 version of Pixelpost. Grab it from the Pixelpost homepage.
• You can now subscribe to comments on this blog (by popular demand).
• I found this cool site called ajaxrain.com with loads of AJAX examples for Prototype and Mootools.
• Some minor templates changes were done, none really noticeable really. But somehow they were bugging me.

Well, that is it for now. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Most pages I visit have it in one form or another. Heck, it is even on this page you’re visiting right now. But somehow it is the hardest thing to find for most users. Those of you thinking that I’m talking about the Paypal button are wrong (although I wouldn’t mind if you hit that button if you’ve downloaded something nice from this site). I’m actually talking about the search button.

For those of you who are not aware of this wonderful feature, let me explain. Allow me to get theoretical for just one second here. Suppose you got a question or a problem. Wouldn’t it be great if you could ask other people for help? Well, your dreams have come true, these days the internet is full of useful community places were people meet online to discuss a certain subject. Let’s call these places forums. Pretty exiting thus far right?

On these forums you can ask your question and people will come up with suggestions or fixes. Pretty neat huh? So the easiest way to get a fix for your problem would be to drop the question on the forum and wait. WRONG!!

Let me elaborate. What if someone else has had almost the same problem you have. For sake of argument, lets assume the solution for the problem is a well known fact in the community. See were this is heading? If you had used the search to see if someone else had the same problem and got it fixed, you wouldn’t have to wait several hours,days,weeks for an answer.

So using the search actually saves you time. Not to mention it will save the time of other people answering the same question over and over and over and over (well, you get the point) again, so they can focus on the ones which haven’t been answered.

There you have it, the tip of today: Saving time by using the search.