Steve McCabe: from island to island

Thursday, August 02, 2012

WordPress: permalinks on IIS

Trying to provide pretty permalinks on a IIS install of WordPress is something of a problem. The solution is a bit of a hack, but works.

1) Create a custom 404 page as per these instructions: http://dotnetcodebytes.blogspot.com/2011/11/remove-indexphp-from-wordpress-on.html

2) Specify the 404-error.php created in step 1 as your custom 404 page (you'll need access to an IIS admin console).

3) In WordPress, define your permalinks as: /index.php/%postname%/

Monday, May 14, 2012

Scheduling automatic startup (and shutdown) in Ubuntu

I liked the idea of having my Ubuntu machine startup in time for my arrival at the office. Here's how it's done:

1) Enable your RTC in the BIOS, setting your desired wake-up time
2) Use the rtcwake command to tell the machine when to wake up. Two variants of this:

sudo rtcwake -s 54000 -m disk

will wake the PC in 15 hours, after immediately doing a hibernate, or

sudo rtcwake -s 54000 -m no

will do a wake in 15 hours but nothing more. I like this latter way since I can then also schedule a shutdown using a package such as qshutdown

I did toy with nvram-wakeup, which is useful for setting the RTC while you're running Ubuntu.

More here http://askubuntu.com/questions/61708/automatically-sleep-and-wake-up-at-specific-times

And if you get the Grub menu after resuming, the fix is here.

Friday, April 27, 2012

A Hardware Week

It's been a busy hardware-oriented week. This is what I've learned.

1. When your Windows PC gets the blue-screen of death (BSOD) that says 'memory_management', your memory really is fried. I was lucky to get the memory I need from the nearest store, and before you know it I'd not only resolved the problem, but got an extra 1Gb of RAM that makes my laptop noticeably faster.

2. If you've got a old PC with an Intel Socket 775 CPU, do consider swapping out the old 1.3Ghz single core processor for a dual-core 2.6Ghz CPU. For a few quid, I've got a blindingly fast PC I was previously thinking of dumping. Then to make things sweeter I overclocked it to almost 4Ghz! And it took just 10 minutes to install.

3. If your Ubuntu PC won't come back from hibernation, it'll probably be due to a conflict with your NVidia card. Here's the solution.

4. If you can't log into your Ubuntu Samba-shared folder, make sure you're logging-in with the hostname specified, e.g. user@hostname !

Liam's Pearl of Wisdom for the week: "The spacebar does nothing!"

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

"Inga Ringa Roses"

Liam tries for the Tin Man look

Barely a day goes by without Liam coming home from school singing a new nursery rhyme. I did introduce him to that classic of the 1870's, Ring a Ring o' Roses, and a tune allegedly about the Bubonic Plague went down well - beats this wishy-washy 'I love you, you love me' stuff they feed the kids these days.

But by far his favourite is 'Three Blind Mice', and he sings the line 'who CUT off their tails with a carving knife' with an impressive gusto!