Just last month, Microsoft announced that their Windows Azure Virtual Machines were no longer considered a pre-release service. In other words, that was the official notification from Microsoft that they feel their Virtual Machines offering is ready for enterprise class deployments. In fact they even offer uptime guarantees if you employ certain round-robin and/or [...]
08
Apr
Hosting WordPress
I get a lot of questions about where to host a WordPress site. While I’ve not found the “perfect host for all people”, I have learned a few things about who NOT to use , who I use, and who I *think* will be good to use based on your needs. Let’s start with [...]
20
Mar
Building A Site for Digital Content Sales
Today I received an email from a friend asking if I could help someone he knows in building a website. The request is simple, help build a website that connects to social media and allows for registered users to download a paper he has written, keeping track of these registrations as leads. The immediate [...]
19
Mar
Back Up Google Drive with CrashPlan
Today, as I put another spreadsheet with Store Locator Plus and Enhanced Results features onto Google Drive, I realized something. If Google Drive crashes, very unlikely but stranger things have happened, I don’t have a backup copy of ANY of my Google Drive documents. There are a lot of things I have out there [...]
26
Apr
Linux : Find All Files Older Than…
I recently needed to clean up a directory on my Linux box that included hundreds of files. I wanted to get rid of all the files that hadn’t been updated in over a year. At first I decided just to list the files by date: ls -lt This will list the files in long format by time [...]
24
Apr
Apache Not Following Symlinks
SElinux will prevent Apache from following symbolic links. You will find that no matter how often you define the options to allow you to FollowSymlink’s it will fail. The issue is that you will need to put SELINUX into permissive. This is done in /etc/selinux/config
13
Apr
Hackers Redirecting Websites (.htaccess)
A quick note to fellow webmasters out there as well as business owners running websites. We have seen a recent rash of brute force hacking attempts on our servers and our client’s servers. There have been several successful brute force break-ins in the past 3 months. Below are a couple of things [...]
27
Dec
VMWare Mounting Windows Host Folder On CentOS Guest
After a failed upgrade of VMWare-Tools on VMWare Workstation 7.1.5, I ended up with a shared folder that would not mount automatically. After a bit of digging on the Internet I found the solution. Here are my brief notes on how to manually mount a shared Windows host folder. Make sure you have the host [...]
17
Dec
Is Comcast Playing “Big Brother” With Your Internet?
The Symptom This morning I spent over an hour trying to publish a new update of Store Locator Plus to the public WordPress extensions directory. It failed, multiple times. I assumed it was something wrong with our repository so I decided to move on to something else until the remote server was fixed. My [...]
13
Oct
Where Is This Website Hosted?
When I come across one of the many staging or development servers that have not been active in a while I use the following techniques to locate where the website is living. It can be on any one of our servers, a server owned by the client, or a temporary virtual machine. I always do [...]
26
Jul
Diagnosing “savemail: cannot save rejected email anywhere”
We recently ran into this message on one of our development servers. There are a number of reasons this may happen and finding the right solution means finding the cause of the error. These steps will help you isolate the cause of the error so you can start tracking down the proper solution. In [...]
05
Jun
web.config Inheritance in IIS
A couple of notes on IIS and how it works for virtual directories/applications and web.config inheritance and ASP.Net. There is a configuration file that will automatically be inherited by an asp.net application’s web.config. This configuration file is machine.config and it defines the servers/computers asp.net schema for all of its web applications. The root web.config [...]
16
Dec
Custom Ubuntu Keyboard Layouts
Sometimes a programmer just has to have certain keys in certain places. For instance, I like my number keys and symbol key switched, so I don’t have to press shift to type symbols. Here’s how I created a custom keyboard layout in Ubuntu: In the file /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us, I added the following section, thus modifying my [...]
16
Nov
Restaurant Apps with The Table Tap
Cyber Sprocket Labs started a fun and exciting relationship that is the perfect cross section of two of our favorite things, programming and beer. While we’ve worked on many exciting projects over the years, this is definitely in the top two. None of our esteemed programmers ever thought they’d be working on an application that [...]
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