Belfry Images

I’ve added my tool list to the sidebar. This is a collection of free tools and software that I absolutely have to have on all my computers (there’s a few of them).

OK so I’ve recently moved my blog to a subdomain and noticed that this broke all of the Google search results that I’ve got (dude it’s like 3 hits a month!). No really, search for subversion comments (in Australian pages only) and I’m the sixth result. So to set up the subdomain on my shared host I just used cPanel. That part worked fine, but it meant that all requests to http://www.belfryimages.com.au/2008/03/18/editing-past-log-comments-in-subversion/ got redirected to http://blog.belfryimages.com.au. This was due to the generic .htaccess file that was generated.

To get the old links working I had to rewrite the .htaccess file. This lives where the blog used to be (at belfryimages.com.au/.htaccess):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^belfryimages.com.au$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.belfryimages.com.au$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://blog.belfryimages.com.au/$1 [R=301,L]

The joy is made in the last line. The ^(.*)$ part is a simple regex that just copies the entire request part, and the $1 in the http… part copies the request into the address of the new redirect.

– fixed the google assert

I’ve added a super simple tool that just returns the requester’s external IP, which is useful when debugging and for tech support. No biggie, there’s a heap of other tools around the place, but I can never remember the right variation.

The tool is at myip.belfryimages.com.au.

I’m trying Ubuntu again, as I’m sick of Vista and Windows 7 doesn’t look much better (although I am dual-booting for games). It still just doesn’t seem suitable for a user with advanced Windows knowledge but only intermediate Linux experience. Some things just don’t work out of the box, which is fine except that finding the solution usually involves googling the answer rather than searching through the config menus or hitting F1.

Case in point is auto-mounting NTFS partitions. I know that Ubuntu automatically mounts the partitions in the Places menu when you select them, but I’ve set /var/www to be a symlink to a folder in /media/sda4 (an NTFS partition that I also use in Windows) which means that Apache fails until /media/sda4 is manually mounted. Ubuntu’s built-in help system isn’t any help, searching for ‘automount’ yields a page about Gnome Display Manager and some date format thingy.

Make Tech Easier – How To Auto-mount Your NTFS Partition In Ubuntu contains the correct instructions but basically you need the Storage Device Manager. Open a terminal:

sudo apt-get install pysdm

Once that’s installed, under System/Administration is the Storage Device Manager. It’s not the nicest app (the UI could use some work, like adding the type and partition size to the list of partitions) but it gets the job done and is much easier than editing .init files or whatever.

I’ll leave the Ubuntu vs Windows rant for another day… till then sticking to Ubuntu…

Finding out what ports are open on a machine is something I often need to do, and I usually stuff around for ages trying to figure out whether a particular port is open. The fastest way I’ve (just) found is by opening a console and running netstat -a, or netstat -an to show IP and port numbers rather than machine and service names.

Now that I know that the port’s definitely open, I’ve just got to figure out why the service still isn’t working…

If you can’t get your contact list coming up in Outlook, here’s a how-to that works well. Two things to look out for are Outlook not closing properly (it may run as a notification button, open Task Manager and kill the Outlook process off just to make sure) which seems to stop the fix from working, and the fact that right-clicking on the Outlook icon to get to mail settings doesn’t work if the Outlook icon is a shortcut (ie 99% of the time). To get into mail settings, open Control Panel then Mail once Outlook is shut down.

I just had a spanking new Dell start crashing. svchost.exe kept giving an application error on bootup:

svchost.exe … the instruction at “0x???” … the memory could not be ‘read’

In the application log & finding the error report for svchost.exe it reports that msi.exe (the Windows installer) was faulting.

This is an issue with an automatic update breaking the Windows installer. There is an update available from microsoft (I think it’s this one) but the page I found (Tech Blender: Windows Update Broke My Machine (svchost.exe — application error), and How to Fix It) gives a solution that works:

1. Turn off automatic updates (right-click on My Computer & go to the Automatic Updates tab)
2. Reset the computer
3. Go to Windows Update (in the Start menu or go to update.microsoft.com), use Express Updates and install the fix
4. Reset your computer again once the update is installed

From the looks the machine is working now. Thanks, Microsoft