TechnowledgeBase

Some wordpress themes downloaded from a popular site have been infected with adware/malware.

1. Click the link.
2. Read the page.
3. Check your themes.
4. Go back to sleep.

More details later.

Popularity: 20% [?]

A fellow helpful blogger over at Contents Magic has an excellent tip: Make a copy of your existing blog in a test system. Save yourself the heartache of breaking your blog with a single well-meaning tweak. TEST those tweaks in a separate system first. Otherwise, you might end up here at Technowledgebase, searching for answers on how to fix it!

Popularity: 17% [?]

You have a named instance of SQL2005 and need to find its port number. Maybe you’re trying to connect to it with Java and JTDS or maybe you’ve got something else going on. Whatever the reason, you need that number. Here’s how to get it.
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Popularity: 30% [?]

The Problem:
At my day job, we use Microsoft Visio 2002 for… whatever the hell people use Visio for. A client emails a Visio file to me, but when I try to open it, instead of a nice pretty diagram, I get this:

Upgrade information? No thanks. I don’t want to upgrade, I want to view the friggin document! My next logical step is to go to Microsoft.com and download the latest Visio viewer. That happens to be the Visio 2007 viewer. I install it, but I am STILL presented with error/upgrade bullsh-t messages when I try to view my document. When I try to open the file with my web browser (more on that at the bottom of the post), I get “Page Cannot Be Displayed”

WTF?

The Cause:
Microsoft. Nuff said.

Oh, you want more? Okay: If you have Visio 2002 installed, then the Visio 2007 Viewer just doesn’t f’ing work. How ‘bout that?

The Solution:
UNINSTALL the Visio 2007 viewer. (I would suggest uninstalling ALL your Microsoft apps, but somebody might get mad at me. Even though it would save you headaches in the long run). Okay, now that the 2007 viewer is out of there… install the Visio 2003 viewer. Huh?

You mean, you have to install the Visio 2003 Viewer so you can view a Visio 2007 file on a computer with Visio 2002?

That… Does Not… Make… Sense…

This is Microsoft; It’s not supposed to make sense. Just do it.

NOW you can view your document.

I should point out that the Visio viewer is implemented as an ActiveX component, which means it uses Internet Explorer to display the content. In my case, I had to drag my visio file onto an IE window to get it to work. Double-clicking on the file in Outlook still tries to open the file in Visio 2002, which produces the upgrade message. So now you have to open your Visio 2007 files with IE… with the Visio 2003 viewer installed.

There IS no logic left in the world, because this crap has just neutralized all of it. As long as Microsoft is in business, I will never run out of content for this site.

Popularity: 23% [?]

The Problem
You’ve installed and activated the WP-Shortstats plugin according to the instructions. You see the link on your Dashboard, but it doesn’t register any traffic on your blog. It just doesn’t work.
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Popularity: 11% [?]

FlashVars

If you have a Flash applet that must behave differently in different situations, but is still essentially the same animation, you should use parameters to tell your animation what you want it to do in each case. A parameter is some piece of information… a background color for instance… that is passed into the Flash animation from somewhere else (typically, from the web page in which it is hosted). The Flash file uses that information just like any normal variable that was declared inside the file.

There’s a trick to using parameters in Flash… but fortunately, it’s an easy trick:
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Popularity: 8% [?]

Cannot Load Kramer

The Kramer plugin is a nice tool that can display inbound links to blog posts. In other words, you can find out who’s linking to you.

I downloaded the plugin and installed it. When I tried to configure it with Options->Kramer menu, I got an error. Wordpress promptly told me that it:

Cannot load Kramer.php

When I tried to save my options. Okay, NOW what?

The Problem:
The “cannot load Kramer.php” error message when trying to configure the plugin’s options.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Perhaps changing the icon that appears next to your website’s address in the address bar isn’t your top priority when you set up a new site… but its definitely on the list. If not, it should be. If you spend ANY amount of time customizing your site, then the default “folded paper” icon just won’t cut it. Here’s how to change it.

Old and Busted

First, you’ll need an icon. This is simply a graphic image like a jpg or a gif… unfortunately, whatever graphics application you use may not be able to handle it. I’ve done this lots of times, and I’ve always used some kind of special icon-making software to produce these images. And by “special”, I mean “free”.

One such software is the Favicon Editor that allows you to create the icon right in your web browser… and, more importantly, it allows you to convert an existing image into an icon. The restriction here is that the image has to be a PNG image that is 16×16 in size. These icons have to fit in your browser’s address bar, remember…. so they have to be tiny. Other icon creator tools can read other formats besides PNG, so if you have some problem with PNGs… wtf is wrong with you? use another tool. A google search for “Favicon Generator” or something similar will return plenty for you to choose from. Not all of them are free, however.
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Popularity: 25% [?]

You’ve downloaded a CD image of… whatever… only to discover that it has a weird .BIN extension that your software won’t recognize. When you try opening it, you just get error messages, or the file open window won’t even recognize it as a valid CD image format.

The Problem:
Your computer doesn’t know what the hell a .BIN file is. And neither do you.

The Cause
Actually, the REAL problem is that you only downloaded part of what you need. CD images come in a lot of different formats. You find them with the ever-popular .ISO extension, but also with .NRG extensions and several others. .BIN files are just part of the crowd. But unlike ISO’s, they not complete images all by themselves. Sure, the BIN file contains all the data, but you need ANOTHER file… a CUE file… to tell your software just what data is in that BIN. Think of a BIN file as a book. The CUE file is the table of contents. In this case, however, the table of contents is stored separately from the actual…umm… content. So you should have downloaded TWO files… a CUE and a BIN… instead of just the BIN.

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Popularity: 8% [?]