Disclaimer: You will need administrative privileges to run these commands. In addition you will need to open up a command prompt with those rights to make the changes. Last but not least we will be working with the entries regarding the boot loader. If the entries get fouled up for some reason and your computer no longer boots then I am not responsible. You have been warned.
Update: The following instructions were updated on 5/7/2010 because some of the directions were wrong. I found on my last cloning job that the entry that maps the recovery entry and the options for that entry are different by one character. Usually incremented up one it is the 8th character in most cases. I show it below in the examples but the actual command string examples fail to show that and I don’t indicate it in the base command lines. I have corrected that below.
After a drive clone (and possibly in other scenarios) you may end up being unable to boot that option. It may give you an error that it failed to locate the specified partition or device. Here is what you need to fix the issue. Just to show you what I am referring to I will give you a screen capture of the result when you try and use that option after a clone. The issue was replicated under a 2 drive scenario using vmware. One was a 40GB and the other was an 80GB.
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I just got my email for the new Norton 3.0 Beta. However I am going to have to pass on this one. I actually probably made a mistake on endorsing it previously (before this blog) but I won’t make it again. For starters it has a bad history of false positives. In my opinion false positives are actually worse than a negative because they can remove legitimate files if it is setup to automatically remove them. There is also no way to submit a false positive for analysis. Even corporate would not give me a proper response on this. For those that didn’t get the email here is a copy.
Ok. I found this great theme author on the internet. Stumbled upon one of his themes in action by pure chance. This theme is XHTML 1.1 and CSS 3 compliant right out of the box which is quite surprising. The theme is clean and works really well. I did check it on all browsers and it seems that the looks stays relatively consistent between browsers. I’m going keep tabs on his site because of that. Anyways enjoy. 
P.S. – If you find a bug feel free to email me or drop a bug report on the bug tracker and I’ll look into it.
Update: Switched up the title a bit. Changed the first line of text to an image since I don’t expect everyone to have the font available on your system. It looks better anyways
You might of seen a few changes around here…. (looks around)
Maybe not. None the less I have been making a bunch of changes. A biggie here is a commitment towards XHTML 1.1 compliance on this theme and all future ones. This site will work on all currently major browsers. This include Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5, Opera 10, Safari, and Google Chrome. Actually when I got this particular theme it was only rated for XHTML 1.0 compliance but has since been updated to be XHTML 1.1 compliant.
The other big change are various bugs with the theme. I made some adjustments to css code to make it align comments correctly and I have also changed the javascript loading so it uses wordpress native functions to load it and minimize conflicts. I think they will still happen but it should be less.
Update: To show the lack of conflicts I tested with a lightbox-light plugin to jquery (which this theme uses) and added it into the theme. It loads fine. I have only one image in here so I applied it to that and it worked fine.
It appears that Thawte will be discontinuing their Web of Trust program. At least that is what the email I got from them is indicating. As part of their appreciation they are providing me with a replacement 2 year certificate from Verisign. That is good and everything. I was also offered to get either an SSL certificate or code signing certificate of my choice. I’ll definitely be taking up on that. Specifically the SSL certificate with Extended Validation since it is so expensive and that will cover me for the next 2 years. I’ll have to make the call tomorrow to get it all set up if I remember to.
Ok. So as I already mentioned they did a server move on me. I found that they did a switch up on me and changed my plan a bit. Now it shows unlimited. This also means that I would likely be bound by the unlimited policy which I don’t want to be. This is why I never upgraded to a newer plan. I stayed on the legacy plan because then I had an actual “cap” and didn’t have to worry about it. When I discussed it with them previously they did state that there would be no plan or pricing changes but the limits are marked as unlimited now. See screenshot below.
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Well Dreamhost went ahead and did the server move I guess. It was going to happen eventually regardless. The impact isn’t too severe. For the most part it seems that php gracefully disabled the incompatible extensions. I will have to recompile all of them for the new architecture. Read more…
Hrmph! I had to do some changes to the https configuration to make it show properly in my hosting provider’s web panel. So https is going through a few cycles before it works again on both the main site (this one) and my subversion repository. The changes shouldn’t cause any downtime though since the ip isn’t changing this time. Actually there really wasn’t any downtime when I did add it.
I also made some changes to a cygwin mirror on my sister domain that should make it so that it won’t have issues with 404′s in the setup installer. I’ve never personally gotten any but I know there have been some so this should eliminate all the rest. Of course the ones for favicon.* and robots.txt will still happen since they don’t exist on that mirror.
I am turning on the https stuff. Initially it will be down due to the static ip address that will need to be configured. Afterwards you will have a self-signed certificate until the host can get the new certificate installed. You probably won’t see it unless you are logging in.
I am considering on having my websites moved to a new cluster within Dreamhost. I recently sent them an email concerning some high load on the server which caused some small disruptions on the speed that my site loaded. The initial email didn’t really mention that high of a load. It was reading something around 60 at the time. Later on I found it to be over 300. Now it could of been a really long compile task that someone wasn’t watching and it caused the server load to go up (it happens) or it could of been some rouge processes that the user managed to noticed and kill off. Either way it shows right around 6-10 at the moment which is good. That is also why the site is responsive right now.
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