I always forget this, and I forget that it applies to routers too. I’ve been having some weird problems lately: I couldn’t connect to my bank’s website, my son couldn’t connect to the AppStore from his iPod, and I couldn’t view my favourite forum, Lampworketc.com (LE). Actually that’s not entirely true about LE, you could see the page partially loaded (all the ads) but then it just hung. But if I turned off the wireless connection, bam, all of a sudden the page would finish loading. Lots of subtle, weird problems. Anyway, after puzzling about this for a few days I finally thought about restarting the router, and my computer too, for good measure. Ha! Problem solved!
Archive for the 'Geekery' Category
I was getting a bit fed up with apologising for my website because it hadn’t been updated in eons. Part of the problem was that my photo organisation was out of control. So I finally sat down and did something about it.
I purchased Adobe Lightroom 2 a few months ago and have been figuring out how to use this rather powerful beast. It’s a neat program, I’m really impressed with it. I use it to catalogue, process and output my photos.
Lightroom is modular and it’s pretty easy to add in third-party engines. There are five modules: Library, Develop, Slide, Print and Web. If you have used Camera Raw and Adobe Bridge, then Lightroom will feel familiar.
I purchased the SlimBox “web engine” from The Turning Gate. After messing around for a while I managed to output different galleries and seamlessly integrate them into my website. So now I finally have galleries of my most recent work: lapel pins and stud earrings, and drawing pins (aka push pins).
I love Lightroom. I’m gonna be writing more about it…
I made an accidental discovery while typing in a form field in Safari: Typing control-B moves the cursor backwards in the field. By experimenting around I discovered that this key combination works in other programs too, and that control-F moves the cursor forwards.
This has a whiff of Unix-ness to it, so I googled “html form fields mac backwards” and found this useful page showing the “Default Mac OS X System Key Bindings”.
So I was finally irritated enough to investigate the Case of the Missing Sidebar.
I think the google gods must have been looking out for me. Y’know? Sometimes you have to enter the perfect search terms to get the information you need. I have done a search before, of course, but my search terms were probably too vague. Anyway this time I googled “wordpress sidebar at bottom of page” which brought up two informative posts, this one and this one. Both of these suggest that the culprit is disagreeable HTML somewhere in one of the posts that displays on the front page of the blog.
Mmm, that’s quite a few posts. At first I tried scanning the post content, but this felt a bit hit and miss, and prone to human error. So what I did then was to “disable” each post one-by-one working backwards starting with the second most-recent post. It helps to open 3 separate windows:
- one to display the front page;
- one to display the list of posts;
- and one to display the post itself.
Drag a post from window 2 to window 3. Change the publication status from “published” to “pending”. Don’t forget to “Update Post”. Refresh the front page in window 1. Has the sidebar reappeared? No, so go to window 2 and drag the next post to window 3. Rinse, and repeat.
I finally found the offending post. It was one in which I had used HTML comment characters to comment out a chunk of text at the end of the post. On the one hand this worked insofar as the text didn’t display (ie, the HTML comment worked) but it confused someone (safari? wordpress?). The sidebar displayed in the correct place once I removed the commented-out text.
Probably one of the morals of this story is to avoid using HTML comment characters in a wordpress blog. Possibly another one is that the old programmer’s trick of slowly excluding sections of code can be used to track down problems in a blog.
This is irritating. Can you see the sidebar on the right (the thing that shows the Recent Posts etc)? It should be situated at the top of the window. Chances are if you are using Firefox then you can see it correctly. Irritatingly it shows up at the bottom of the window in Safari (my normal browser) when you are viewing multiple posts on the front page. And I dunno why. Updating to the latest version of Safari hasn’t helped.
I thought maybe the problem was my Wordpress theme, but I changed the theme to the Wordpress default theme with the same result, yet the Wordpress “classic” theme displayed the sidebar correctly. It’s a puzzle.
I felt like I was going nuts! Starting last Wednesday I could not access Google directly from Safari or Firefox. If I typed a search term in the browser’s search box, or if I entered www.google.com in the address field then I got:
Safari can’t open the page “http://www.google.com/” because it can’t find the server “www.google.com”.
Huh? Google unavailable? How is that possible? It was a very weird feeling. It made me realise how dependent I am on Google. How do you find things on the net without Google?! Yeah, I know there are other search engines, but they are, let’s face it, less useful.
At first I thought it was just a temporary glitch which would solve itself in a few hours. But no, a day later it was still unavailable. Okay, now if it was true that google was offline for more than a day then it would hit the headlines, but checking a few news sites revealed no unrest.
After talking to my son I realised that I could get there indirectly by going to google.nl, click on the link “Google.com in English”, which led me to google.com and then I could do my search. While I was grateful at being able to perform searches again it was a bit irritating, indirect, and confusing. Okay, then the problem wasn’t with the google servers.
So then I tried to find out if anyone else had the same problem, by doing a, you guessed it, search in Google by googling “google inaccessible safari firefox” but nothing relevant showed up. (How many times can you say “google” in one sentence?) I was starting to come to the conclusion that I was the only one in the world with this problem.
Then I thought of searching on “Safari can’t find the server ‘www.google.com’”. Ahh. After trawling through a few forum postings it seemed like the problem was that I hadn’t specified my DNS servers. This is an optional setting in the System Preferences > Network panel, under the TCP/IP tab, and I have always left them empty. Now I have entered my ISP’s DNS servers and ta-dah! I can direct access to Google again. I don’t think I understand why this problem suddenly appeared (although I suspect a recent system update), but I’m happy to have solved it.
So I learnt several things, the most interesting is how much I rely on Google. I rant and rave about how they are sucking up all the world’s best (programming) brains, but I’ll rant a little softer now.
BTW, did you know that Google hates it when people use the word google as a verb?
Ugh. This makes me feel a bit creepy. I was idly perusing my web server’s access logs and discovered that every few days a different server starts a probe on my server. Looking for shopping carts, blogs, database admin tools, anything. Yuck.
Over the last few days my IP address has been changed. Most of the domain names that I have registered (and there are a few of them) seem to work again, but I had problems yesterday with the sub-domain name that I have been using to test my website dev.icedmoments.com. After some cursing, I realised that I could add another sub-domain name, test.icedmoments.com, and then I could continue working.
Well, that was all well and good, until I realised that I could no longer access my blog. Regardless of the fact that the blog was physically located at the new sub-domain, actually accessing it was problematic because the blog’s url (within wordpress) was set to the old sub-domain. So how can you change the url, when you can’t get into wordpress?
Thinking cap on. Oh, okay, I figured that I could change the values in the database but changing a single url (siteurl) didn’t seem to help. More grumbling and puzzling around until I came across this post describing which database values need changing. Taking the advice of one of the comments this is what I did:
- Using phpMyAdmin, select the wordpress database and Export it to a text file.
- Use a text editor, find and replace all occurrences of old-domain-name with new-domain-name. Save the file.
- Back in phpMyAdmin, import the modified file:
- select the database
- click on the “SQL” button
- click on the “Choose file” button and select the file
- click on “Go”
Phew! blog is back…
Well, I gotta admit that I feel a bit silly having a blog. Sorta like talking to yourself. Anyway, to calm my nerves, here’s a little post about the blog software that I am using: WordPress, of course, and the theme is unwakeable by Tyler Longren.
I have made some minor changes to the colour scheme. A rather clunky method to work out what to change:
- Load the wordpress page in your browser, view the source and hunt for the tag that you want to change.
- Search wp-content/themes/unwakeable/css/core.css.php for that tag. Copy the tag to the clipboard.
- Edit wp-content/themes/unwakeable/style.ccs. Paste the copied text. Modify. Save. Test
