Force Nextgen Gallery To Crop Thumbnails From The Top Of The Image... **Updated**

In our orig­i­nal post, we sim­ply deleted a line to change the start­ing posi­tion of NextGEN’s thumb­nail crop. With the most recent ver­sion of NextGEN Gallery,1.4.3 as of this post­ings date, this was gen­er­at­ing errors. So we dug around in the code a bit, and here’s our fix.

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Dec 18, 2009 | Wordpress | 2 Comments »

Utilizing GZip with WordPress, Finally a Fast Blog...

The first half of this arti­cle will be taken directly from our pre­vi­ous post, as the need for a sin­gle default php.ini is nec­es­sary to con­fig­ure gzip. If read­ing our Magento post is what brought you to the site, and you’ve already con­fig­ured your default php.ini, than skip to the .htac­cess por­tion of the post. Oth­er­wise, were off...

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Nov 30, 2009 | Magento, Web Design, Wordpress | Leave A Comment »

The Correct Way To Set Up gzip with Magento

We wrote this arti­cle in response to post­ings offer­ing advice to users of Magento, an open source ecom­merce sys­tem. The advice is being given with good inten­tions, and the intent is only to assist their fel­low Magento users. But the advice being give may actu­ally have the poten­tial cause harm to the users site, or at the least a good deal of down time. The advice being offered is to help speed up Magento by enabling a server side caching sys­tem called gzip. What peo­ple don’t real­ize is that their being told to enable two sep­a­rate caching sys­tems. These two sys­tems tend not to play well together, and could cause harm to your install. While most peo­ple see pos­i­tive results, there are a rare few see­ing server side errors, data­base errors, and are stumped as to why.

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Nov 30, 2009 | Magento, Server 2003, Wordpress | 1 Comment »

Protect Magento Pages

We recently built a site with a whole­sale area, uti­liz­ing the “Login Only Cat­a­log Exten­sion” and the “Cus­tomer Acti­va­tion Exten­sion”. While this did pro­tect our whole­sale inven­tory from pry­ing eyes, it still left a few pages vis­i­ble to the gen­eral pub­lic. For­tu­nately we found a fix that addressed this issue, and allowed us to secure the rest of the site, in a manor that was intu­itive, and easy to implement.

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Nov 05, 2009 | Magento | 2 Comments »

Magento Terms and Conditions Missing

This was an inter­est­ing issue we ran into recently while build­ing an E-commerce site for one of our clients. Typ­i­cally “Terms and Con­di­tions” is eas­ily enable in the admin­is­tra­tive sec­tion by first going to Con­fig­u­ra­tion -> Sys­tem -> Check­out ->Check­out Options and choos­ing yes to enable “Terms and Con­di­tions”. Then going to Sales -> Terms and con­di­tions and typ­ing in your terms. With our setup, we were able to choose yes to enable “Terms and Con­di­tions”, but we were not able to see the option under sales to fill in a list of terms.

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Oct 31, 2009 | Magento, Web Design | 2 Comments »

Enabling HTML in Magento Terms and Conditions

We’ve recently been work­ing with a new E-commerce plat­form called Magento. Its a very pow­er­ful open source prod­uct, with tons of fea­tures, and open source good­ness. We recently ran into an issue where we needed to enable HTML con­tent in the “Terms and Con­di­tions”. The fix was actu­ally quite simple.

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Oct 31, 2009 | Magento, Web Design | 1 Comment »

AT&T U-verse 2wire Gateway and DD-WRT Router in DMZ Mode...

We’ve recently upgraded our ISP to AT&T U-verse. With this switch AT&T pro­vided a 2wire gate­way. So far the ser­vice has been excel­lent. Recently we setup a live chat sup­port fea­ture on the web­site, as you can see to the right. With this fea­ture we also plan to inte­grate a remote desk­top fea­ture, to allow us to pro­vide our clients with live and instant support.

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Sep 04, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks | 7 Comments »

MySQL Server on Windows Vista x64 Setup Guide, An Install That Works!!!

After hours of beat­ing our heads against a wall, we’ve finally come up with a solid MySQL install guide. It wasn’t easy, but it’s some­thing we needed, and obvi­ously some­thing our fel­low devel­op­ers needed. We spent hours read­ing through end­less threads with errors such as;

Can­not Cre­ate Win­dows Ser­vice for MySQL. Error:0,
Vista x64 could not start the ser­vice mysql,
Win­dows could not start the mysql ser­vice on local com­puter error 1067,
Can’t create/write to file,
Can’t con­nect to [local] MySQL server,
Table ‘tbl_name’ doesn’t exist,

Yet even after read­ing through what seemed like hun­dreds of cries for help, and just as many sup­posed fixes, we were still no closer to resolv­ing this issue. So after com­ing to the real­iza­tion that there was lit­tle help to be had online, we just attacked our install, and dealt with the issues one by one. After repeated failed installs, and botched setups, we were able to get MySQL loaded prop­erly. The setup instruc­tions you see below were repeat­able on 4 dif­fer­ent machines, when fol­lowed prop­erly. If you run into an issue, please let us know. Good luck with your setup.

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Sep 01, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks | 4 Comments »

We’ve Added A Live Support Function...

If you look to your right, you may have noticed a live chat but­ton. If we’re online and avail­able to chat, feel free to try it out. We strive to pro­vide our clients with the high­est level of IT sup­port and ser­vice. When it comes to inno­v­a­tive design, lead­ing edge cus­tomer sup­port, and guar­an­teed sat­is­fac­tion, the Gurus are the lead­ers of the pack.

Do you have a web­site your inter­ested in devel­op­ing? If so, let us give you free quote. We’ll uti­lize the lat­est tools and appli­ca­tions to make your dream site a real­ity. Thanks for read­ing our post. Feel free to leave a comment.

Aug 25, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks, Windows Vista, Windows XP | 2 Comments »

How Do I Specify a Class For IMG Inserted With Visual Editor...

The fol­low­ing is in response to a ques­tion on WordPress.org. We’ve become extremely pro­fi­cient with word­press in the past few years, and we’re always com­ing up with inno­v­a­tive ways of using this amaz­ing prod­uct. We try to post most all our fixes, hacks, and tricks, in the hopes that it will prove use­ful to some­one. Hope­fully this will be no different.

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Aug 24, 2009 | Web Browsers, Web Design, Wordpress | Leave A Comment »

WordPress, Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted

Dur­ing a rou­tine update to a Word­Press site we received the fol­low­ing error: Fatal error: Allowed mem­ory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allo­cate 7680 bytes) in /home/website/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1342 Scary stuff, but no need to panic. Chances are your Word­Press install is quite well used with lots pages, posts, and plu­g­ins. First off, don’t start dis­abling plu­g­ins and hack­ing code. Fol­low these sim­ple steps and you’ll be updated in no time.

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Aug 03, 2009 | Wordpress | 4 Comments »

I Don’t Have Outlook, Is There a Similar Product I can Download?

The short answer is, Yes.

Listed below you’ll find a vari­ety of free Email clients avail­able for down­load. But be aware, not all mail providers allow you to use a mail client such as Out­look. Both Yahoo and Hot­mail require their users to upgrade to a paid ser­vice in order to access their Email via a mail client. How­ever, if you’re ISP pro­vid­eds you with an Email account, ie. pacbell.net, sbcglobal.net, att.com, comcast.net, etc., You’ll more than likely be able to access your Email using a mail client.

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Aug 03, 2009 | Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave A Comment »

Media Player Skips When My Browser Loads a Page..

I had this very same prob­lem with my brand new Microsoft Vista X64 machine. At first I though it was the fact that I was using the newest ver­sion of Fire­fox. But after a bit of research we came to the con­clu­sion that it wasn’t actu­ally the browser caus­ing the sys­tem lag, it was the audio codec. Most peo­ple are hav­ing this issue with Sig­ma­tel HD Audio Codec. In my case it was Real­tek HD Audio. Luck­ily for every­one read­ing this, the fix is quite simple.

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Jul 26, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks, Windows Vista | Leave A Comment »

Vista Won’t Remember My Folder Views

*** Update ***
This fix is no longer valid. After a month of smooth sail­ing, we’re back to the same prob­lem. To our knowl­edge, there is cur­rently no fix that lasts longer than a month. This fix will last at least that long, but you’ll be back to the same prob­lem a month later. If you’ve tried some­thing that seems to show promise, please let us know with a com­ment. Thanks for reading.

Vista has made huge strides in becom­ing a bet­ter OS. If you’ve read any­thing we’ve writ­ten to date about Vista, it’s all bad. But since the release of Ser­vice Pack 1 and 2, Vista has really come into its own. Rarely do you see the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. This due to Vista’s abil­ity to selec­tively shut down and restart ser­vices before caus­ing crit­i­cal errors. The user inter­face is beau­ti­ful and some­what famil­iar to XP users. The abil­ity of Vista to repair itself has made leaps and bounds. But there is still one thing that is an absolute annoy­ance and frus­tra­tion, and that is Vista’s abil­ity to remem­ber folder views.

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Jul 10, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks, Windows Vista | Leave A Comment »

I can’t Find My Firefox Bookmarks After a Recovery

Fire­fox has changed the default loca­tion of its book­mark store in Fire­fox 3. It used to be that you could find your book­marks located at

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Documents and Settings\ (name of the user) \Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ (name of the profile) bookmarks.html

This has now been changed to

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Documents and Settings\ (name of the user) \Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ (name of the profile) places.sqlite

Jul 06, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks, Web Browsers | Leave A Comment »

What’s a good Anti-Virus to use?

We wrote this post in response to a com­ment on another post. We most often rec­om­mend Avast, AVG, and Zone Alarm. Our choices are based on prod­ucts that are effi­cient in pre­vent­ing virus infec­tions, semi trans­par­ent, unob­tru­sive, and user friendly. And FYI. if you see the image below when copy­ing files, you may have a virus.

Avast free and Avast Pro:

Avast pro­vides a free Anti-Virus, how­ever we found it to be a lit­tle intru­sive and irri­tat­ing. Avast seems to pester its free users with con­stant pops and related to their paid product.

Their paid prod­uct how­ever is a dream to use. The only time Avast Pro will ever pester you or slow your flow of work and surf­ing, is if you encounter a mali­cious script from a web­page, down­load mali­cious soft­ware, a viruses, or any other prob­lem you may have.

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Jun 25, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave A Comment »

Can’t uninstall Java 1.6.0.11, Unable to locate jre1.6.0_11-c-l.msi

We’ve come across this issue on quite a few occa­sions. It seems that this issues arises after a botched unin­stall of Java prod­ucts. It seems to leave a reg­istry entry behind that makes it nearly impos­si­ble to rein­stall Java. We’re not exactly sure what the reg­istry entry is at this point, but we have found that run­ning the reg­istry cleaner in Ccleaner removes it. Ccleaner is an excel­lent prod­uct, and its totally free. But we do rec­om­mend mak­ing a dona­tion to them to keep their prod­uct free.

The process is sim­ple. Down­load Ccleaner, run the cleaner first, then run the reg­istry cleaner sec­ond. Restart you’re com­puter, and you should now be able to install the lat­est Java.

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Jun 23, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks | 3 Comments »

My WordPress Blog is Sending Mail With My Webhosts Address

Here’s our solu­tion. Be sure your work­ing with the most up to date file. Local copies can become out­dated with online updates. Edit the fol­low­ing file: wordpress-root-directory/wp-includes/class-phpmailer.php

On line 75 (valid on Word­Press 2.7.1 - 2.8.7) and edit, “root@localhost.com” to the address you’de like to appear in admin­is­tra­tive emails, ie. user@yourdomain.com. You’ll also want to change your From­Name, on line 81, and your email address on line 88. Sim­ply fill the empty quotes.

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  /**
   * Sets the From email address for the message.
   * @var string
   */
  var $From              = 'root@localhost';
 
  /**
   * Sets the From name of the message.
   * @var string
   */
  var $FromName          = 'Root User';
 
  /**
   * Sets the Sender email (Return-Path) of the message.  If not empty,
   * will be sent via -f to sendmail or as 'MAIL FROM' in smtp mode.
   * @var string
   */
  var $Sender            = '';

And that’s it. Your sever will now send admin­is­tra­tive Emails from your cho­sen name, and address. Let us know if this was helpful.

May 23, 2009 | Wordpress | 2 Comments »

UAA HD Audio Driver Missing, Can’t Update

This issues can be caused by an acci­den­tal unin­stall of the HD Audio dri­vers, or a bad install of the HD Audio dri­vers. Our fix is as follows.

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May 23, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks, Windows XP | Leave A Comment »

Putting the finishing touches on Monster Photography

Today we’re putting the fin­ish­ing touches on our good friend Mike’s web­site. He’s a pho­tog­ra­pher cur­rently located in Anti­och Ca. The pic­tures may be a bit racy, but the site is beau­ti­fully built, with tons of trick fea­tures and a beau­ti­ful gallery setup. The site is still a lit­tle buggy, but we’ve released it early in order for Mike to have exam­ples of his work for his upcom­ing Play­boy debut. Have a look and tell us what you think. Thanks for vis­it­ing the site.

Apr 27, 2009 | Web Design | 1 Comment »

Toshiba Satellite 1800 laptop, the display is blank but works when hooked up to an external monitor.

Here’s a ques­tion we recently received. My Toshiba Satel­lite 1800 lap­top dis­play is blank but it works when hooked up to an exter­nal mon­i­tor. There’s any num­ber of things that could cause this issue. So we’ll try to cover every­thing we think would cause this issue.

1. The first ques­tion we’d ask is, was the oper­at­ing sys­tem recently rein­stalled? If so do you have the cor­rect dri­vers installed for the system?

2. The sec­ond thing we would look at is the dis­play itself. While the screen may be blank it can still be dis­play­ing an image. Take a flash­light and shine it at an angle to the screen. If you can see the “shadow” of your screen, and your mouse mov­ing around, the prob­lem is most likely a LCD back­light prob­lem, or an LCD inverter prob­lem. If the back­light went out sud­denly, its typ­i­cally the inverter. If the light faded over time, its typ­i­cally the actual back­light. See­ing that an exter­nal mon­i­tor works, this is more than likely the answer to your problem.

3. If you can’t see a “shadow” of your dis­play and you haven’t taken your com­puter apart, and you haven’t rein­stalled your OS. Then it’s most likely not a dis­play issue. The next step is to diag­nose the video card. This is a lit­tle more in depth, but in most cases, if a video card is sus­pected to be the prob­lem, it should sim­ply be replaced. This doesn’t apply to all lap­tops. Most lap­top moth­er­boards use inte­grated video cards.

Hope­fully this was help­ful. If you have any fol­low up ques­tions, please feel free to ask.

Jan 11, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks | Leave A Comment »