January 21st, 2010

What to do when eSata doesn’t work on a Dell Latitude E6500 – Win7 or Vista

I ran into an interested problem with my month-old Dell Latitude E6500. It comes with an eSata connection which i was eager to take advantage of for high speed backups and disk cloning. I discovered that there is a lot more to getting this port working with an external drive (in my case a 1.5TB Western Digital MyBook).

There are a few things you’ll need to conquer to get eSata functionality out of the E6500. Although quite annoying, the 50+megabytes per seconds you’ll be able to transfer at are worth the wait.

1) Intel Matrix driver and software must be updated.
The SiL5744 chipset requires updated software from the dell support site. Download the software here.

2) You must make a registry change (YIKES)
Microsoft has directions to make a registry change necessary to run eSata.

3) You must enable the correct SATA support in the BIOS
The E6500′s BIOS is initially set to use IRRT. The likely reason for this is that IRRT supports RAID1 setups, which in my opinion aren’t going to be widely used even in corporate environments. Tt must be changed to AHCI for an external drive to successfully connect. Some registry changes are needed to keep the system able to boot. (if you make a mistake you can switch back to IRRT to boot again.

4) CHECK TO MAKE SURE YOUR CABLE FITS THE CONNECTIONS – MODIFICATIONS MAY BE NEEDED.
I bought a standard Belkin eSata cable at Staples for around 20 bucks. Turns out the plastic molded around each of the male ends goes too far down the plug, causing it to not actually make a connection. I cut about 5mm off with a razor blade and it made all the difference. This problem is well known (toms hardware article) and not too obvious to the average consumer.

I put a lot of the blame on Western Digital for making the case on their MyBook so damn thick over the ports. They’re no way most cables will fit into this drives without some modification. I would also recommend looking into other eSata drives, as I was less impressed that a $175 external drive came with demo/trial software. Disappointing considering how much great open source software they could have bundled with it.

Some Additional Resources

• WD My Book Home not showing up on eSATA
• Info on Msachi.sys and the registry
• How to switch from IRRT to AHCI mode – E6400/E6500

September 8th, 2009

A fix for Eaccelerator filling up /tmp folder – WHM & CPanel

I just found a fix for the /tmp folder filling up with session files from Eaccelerator.

The trick is to move the cache folder to a larger partition. In our case our /tmp folder is 1GB and it was hitting 90% full regularly.

Login as root :

#service httpd start

July 14th, 2009

A great night out with Keith Ferrazzi and the Greenlight Community

Some of the CampusLIVE team and I rode the T into Boston last night for a Keynote by Keith Ferrazzi, by far the favorite author of our staff. He was speaking about his new book titled “Who’s Got Your Back“. If you haven’t read Ferrazzi – now is the time.

The CampusLIVE team with Keith Ferrazzi

I knew the night was going to be great after Keith ended up in our elevator. We introduced ourselves and he showed a genuine interest in what we were doing. We all headed into the keynote at this point.

Keith is incredibly inspiring and the exercises he had the audience go through clearly resonated with the crowd. After discussing how we all needed to go home and really put his ideas to work he pointed out our company to the entire audience. He said we looked like a “Group of Mormons” which everyone got a chuckle out of.

After the talk almost everyone took off – not us. Anyone who has read “Never Eat Alone” knows one of Keith’s big lessons is to plan your attack and to be audacious – Get out there and find a way to meet the people you want to meet. We knew Keith would appreciate us staking out his entourage after the evening.

We stuck at the exit of the room and like clockwork Keith walked by us and invited us to drinks after his dinner with the governor (Deval Patrick). I was impressed – I’ve never heard someone say so matter of fact that they were having dinner with the governor.

Keith Ferrazzi's Birthday Cake

It turned out that it was Keith’s b-day and the governor was having dinner with him and about 25 of his close friends. After the dinner we were invited into the party and had a great time with Keith and a lot of the Greenlight crew. We bounced some questions off him and got some great feedback. The even invited Mark to play some guitar for the guests – we couldn’t believe it.

Lesson learned: Always dress well and be ready for anything. You just may see the governor, sip champagne and cut birthday with your favorite author – all without expecting it.

We told Keith we’d get back to him in a few weeks after trying to implement some of his strategies. I have a really good feeling that his feedback is going to make a big difference.

June 20th, 2009

Duplex Printing on HP 2605dn in Windows 7

I made the swtich from XP to Windows 7 because I was really impressed with the stability and new features in the OS. The only issue I ran into was that duplexing was not working with my HP2605dn Color Laser printer. I stumbled upon Phillip Blanton’s solution which thankfully saved the day.

To enable Duplexing

• Use the HP Color LaserJet 2605/2605dn/2605dtn PS driver that comes with Vista.
• Right click on the printer and select “Properties” from the context menu.
• Select the Device Settings tab.
• Scroll down to the Installable Options section and click the setting next to Duplex Unit (for 2-Sided Printing) to switch it from
  Not Installed to Installed.
• Also in the Installed Options change the following Hard Drive options…
  Change “Printer Hard Disk” from Installed to Not Installed
  Change “Job Storage” from Enabled to Disabled.

Save the changes and the next time you print, the duplexing option will be available and you will still be able to print in color.

February 13th, 2009

Removing extra linebreaks and spaces in Dreamweaver

We use dreamweaver here at the office along with SVN for our source control. We couldn’t figure out for the life of us what what causing many, many extra lines to appear in our code after multiple commits/uploads. Finally a Google search provided the answer.

How to remove extra spaces

1. While the document is open in Dreamweaver, press CTRL+F to load the Find & Replace dialog box. Do the search on the source code view.
2. Check the box “Use regular expression” and uncheck any other boxes.
3. Find: [\r\n]{2,}
4. Replace: \n
5. The hit “replace all”

That’s it!

However, take note that this method will remove any existing white space on your code.

Another thing. When you download the file again, Dreamweaver will add another white space on your code. Messing it up again. This is because of encoding and server type.

This usually happens if you are using Dreamweaver CS3 and your are downloading a file from a Unix/Linux server to a Windows based local PC.

Change Your Dreamweaver Settings to Prevent it

1. Inside Dreamweaver, click Edit on the menu.
2. Then Preferences.
3. Then Code Format.
4. Then on the “Line Break Type” select “LF (unix)”
5. Click Ok. Done!

A thanks to Ryman from TechiBubble for the article.

January 19th, 2009

Photoshop Icon (.ico) plugin for photoshop – download

I was looking around today for a way to open up .ico (favicon files in my case) with Photoshop. Every tutorial or download page linked to a site called “Telegraphics” to download. Unfortunately they took down their site in protest of the Israeli conflict going on right now. I’m not sure of the impact thats going to have on the battle over there, but it sure makes it annoying for me.Fortunately I found a substitute download that worked just fine for me.Download Photoshop Icon Plugin  

September 27th, 2008

Find unread emails in GMail

Occasionally an email slips through the inbox and GMail continues to show (1) inbox even though I thought I read all of my mail. Instead of sifting through to find the unread mail, use this command in the search box:

“in: inbox label:Unread”

works like a charm.

August 8th, 2008

Using htaccess to remove / redirect a folder in a url

At CampusLIVE, we completely overhauled our codebase which resulted in all of our urls in Google to incorrectly go to our homepage. Here’s an example along with the solution

The Goal
The goal was to redirect any request to CampusLIVE.com/home/(anything) to CampusLIVE.com/(anything) so that all links in Google would work again.

Example of Old Url
http://www.campuslive.com/home/umass/restaurants

Example of New Url
http://www.campuslive.com/umass/restaurants

The Solution
Open up you .htaccess file in any text editor. My code can be substituted to work with your domain/folders.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^home/(.*)$ http://www.campuslive.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Summary

The above code will successfully redirect permanently any requested to /home/(anything) to /(anything).By using the 301 redirect, you are telling the search engines to permanently use the new address.

August 6th, 2008

How to disable clicking sound in Internet Exlplorer

At CampusLIVE we just begain using PhpLiveSupport to further engage our users. The Windows tray app that comes with it allows us to monitor chat requests right from the tray which is nice. The only downside is the annoying clicking sound that IE makes everytime the traffic monitor loads. Since I can’t figure out how to switch it to use FireFox, I’ve silenced it for the meantime.

Disabling Internet Explorer Sounds – Windows XP/NT/Server 2003

Open the Start Menu -> Settings -> Control Panel.

Open “Sounds” control panel. In this control panel, Scroll down in the events window until you reach “Windows Explorer” and under this you will find “Start Navigation.”

Click on “Start Navigation” and you will see a .wav file appear in the “Name:” box.

In the “Name:” drop down menu, select (None) and then hit “OK”. This will set no sound to be played when you’re navigating on the web.

Solution via Everything2.com

July 24th, 2008

Fixed: Errors printing PDF from Quickbooks, post script errors

I print all of our company invoices from QuickBooks and found recently that printing to Adobe PDF using the distiller didn’t work. Adobe would create a .log file on the desktop containing the following error:

%%[ ProductName: Distiller ]%%
%%[ Error: rangecheck; OffendingCommand: endcidrange ]%%(lots of misc. characters omitted here)

%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

Unfortunately it took two uninstalls for me to figure out the quick fix. The problem was due to using fonts in our Invoice Templates that apparently didn’t work with Adobe’s Postscript. Simple Fix: Go into your template and change your recently modified elements to use a popular font such as Arial.

For those who are sick of distiller, a free open source option is available and works great: PDFcreator via SourceForge