stuartandnicola.com

I am doing some work on a new Drupal module at the moment that will add my flash node functions to the content constructor kit (CCK) (see the FlashField project page for details). It had all been working well until today when I installed the Flash Player 10 update, and then the content no longer appeared in Firefox or Safari.

A bit of fault finding pinned it down to using the private file system, and then only private files associated with the FileField module (which my new FlashField module relies on).

When developing modules it can be useful to increase the level of error reporting within Drupal. To do this (in D6) edit common.inc and change the line

to

This will report all errors, including notices, whereas normally they are suppressed.

Dad's computer wouldn't connect to our desktop machine, but it would connect to our laptop (Vista to Vista), so I knew it wasn't the router or NAT or similar that was blocking access.

Both machines run McAfee and it turned out that on the laptop the firewall had been configured to give Windows Remote Assistance (msra.exe) Full Access, while on the desktop it was set to Outbound Only.

Changing the firewall settings for the program on the desktop to Full Access fixed it!

I don't use the Vista Help and Support tool very often, but when I opened it today there were no graphics or images, only red crosses in the placeholders where they were supposed to be.

It seems some registry settings are corrupted or missing (as described on this page). That page includes a registry file that repairs the settings.

Not sure how I managed to do it, but somehow the Windows Update link on my start menu dropped down and was in with all the other programs, instead of being above the little divider bar. In fact, the divider disappeared completely. It's been bugging me for a while and I finally discovered the trick to restoring it here.

I have a program at work that, by default, ships with an American English dictionary when I prefer to use British English. I found this page that provides instructions and a link to the appropriate files to correct this.

To get the software to use the UK dictionaries you have to over-write the American files with the British files.

So replace ssceam2.clx by renaming sscebr2.clx, and ssceam.tlx by renaming sscebr.tlx.

I was struggling to get PHP to send email, even though I had correctly set up my php.ini file.

For some reason the config files was being read from /Xampp/apache/bin, and any changes I made to php.ini in there were not respected. I thought the file should be being read from /Xampp/php, and by adding the line

PHPIniDir "C:/Xampp/php/php.ini"

to Apache's httpd.conf file it now seems to be working!

As part of setting up my Vista PC I decided to overhaul my music library. I wanted to sync things in to my iPod, but I had most of my stuff ripped as WMA files. That means iTunes wants to convert everything to its own format, so I get two copies of everything.

iTunes native format is .m4a, which won't play in WMA, so to have the choice of WMP or iTunes means having everything twice (and I quite like the new media player in Vista).

A few more hiccups in getting Vista to play nicely with my existing hardware. This time it was refusing to connect to folders on my Maxtor Shared Storage NAS device if they had a password set (public folders were fine).

It seems that this is to with Vista defaulting to a different type of authentication when communicating with networked devices, and the version of Linux on the Maxtor doesn't know how to respond.

I've been having some hiccups with setting up network shares under Vista. The trick (for my set up anyway!) seems to be to make sure to not only create the share using the Advanced Sharing button on the Sharing tab (for some reason the Share... button is greyed out and I can't use it!), but to also make sure to give users the required access rights by using the Security tab.

If you grant access to the share via the Sharing tab, but don't assign access rights on the Security tab, then access is denied as they don't have the right permissions.