Carbonized Blog

Ok I was woke up this morning by my better half saying that the computer was taking ages to log in and when it did it was popping up error messages. The main error message/problem was:

Failed to connect to a windows service
Windows could not connect to the System Event Notification Service service. This problem prevents limited users from logging on to the system. As an administrative user, you can review the System Event Log for details about why the service didn't respond."

So I booted up the laptop and began Googling for fixes. I found multiple fixes (changing Remote Registry setting, manually setting network IP addres etc), none of which sorted my problem out

Anyway I finally found a solution that worked (for me anyway).

1 - Click Start then click Computer (or open it from your desktop if thats where it is).
2 - Go to your C drive (or whatever drive you have Windows installed on)
3 - Open up the Windows folder
4 - Find and open the System32 folder.
5 - Find the file cmd (might be shows as cmd.exe).
6 - Right click on it and select 'Run as administrator'.
7 - In the window that opens type 'NETSH WINSOCK RESET CATALOG'.

It then says you have to reboot and after that my computer was working fine

Now I'm not saying this will work for you but it definately fixed my problem.

And please remember I am on Windows Vista not XP nor 2000.

Ok I've been playing with Javascript frameworks like Jquery and Prototype. Now by default Jquery is 54KB and Prototype is 130KB (at the time of writing this). As you can see these are not small files. Now this is where gzip comes in. An easy way to describe gzip is that your server zips up the file before sending it to the web browser and the web browser then unzips it. Anyway by gzipping these two files using some PHP I have got Jquery down to 19KB and prototype down to 30KB!!!!

So we have Jquery:
Original Size: 54 KB
Gzipped Size: 19 KB
Data Savings: 64.81%

and prototype:
Original Size: 131 KB
Gzipped Size: 30 KB
Data Savings: 77.1%

All testing done using mod_zip test.

Anyway on to the code.

Ok to send something gzipped we need to use PHP's buffer and so one of the first things we need to do is turn it on. But we tell PHP to gzip a file when starting the buffer so first we check if the web browser actually supports gzip. The browser tells the server that it supports gzip by sending it as part of it's HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING header. So use a simple stripos will tell us if the browser supports gzip. I use stripos and not strpos just in case a browser uses Gzip instead of gzip.



And so if the browser supports gzip we turn the buffer on with ob_gzhandler for the callback otherwise we just want a normal buffer.



We would then just put our Javascript (or normal HTML) after the ?>

Finally we tell PHP that we are done with the buffer and we want it to flush the buffer. Flush just means it sends the contents of the buffer to the browser and then closes the buffering.



And that's it. So in a nutshell.

You a child of the 80s? Yeah I know makes you feel old

Anyway go check out Once Upon A Win and remember the good times!

I got there by a post on I Can Haz Cheez Burger which contained a link to a video of the opening credits to "The Greatest American Hero" which I used to watch on Saturdays. Ah to be young and bill free.

One for all you arachnophobes - http://www.onemotion.com/flash/spider/.

Now these are the sort of smileys messengers should use:

Ok so Google has released their own web browser that uses Apples rendering engine and promises some serious code. I wont give you the sales pitch as you can find that anywhere. Anyway so i downloaded it to test and boy does it fly. Web pages load really fast. But then they do on my Firefox 3 once I tweaked the settings a little. I'm assuming Google has set Chrome to use the maximum allowed number of connections to a server and not wait for the page to finish loading until it starys displaying. Thing is you can do this in Firefox but Firefox keep things slower as some users are on slower machines and connections.

I know Chrome is in beta but it has no RSS support at present and very few options. It's bookmarking system sucks and in my opinion it's ugly. Also it's fully skinned and always looks like a Vista window, even on XP.

BUT .. none of that compares to the fact that the licence you agree to when installing it says that you give all rights for anything you upload share etc to Google.



Don't believe me? Then READ THIS.




LOOKS LIKE GOOGLES HAD A CHANGE OF HEART READ.

I recently decided to add the ability for guests to request a new captcha image (or refresh the captcha image) in my guestbook script for when it was to hard for visitors to read. As usual trying to find some instructions to do this proved useless so I had to figure it out myself. I thought I would explain how it's done here for anyone else wanting to do this and believe me it's very very simple.

Ok first thing we need to do is give a name to the image we are going to by replacing/changing so we add a name. For the guestbook script I added added name="lazCaptcha" to the image tag.

eg:


Next we need to create the link that the viewer clicks on to replace/change the image and for that I used this bit of code:



Notice how I put the name of the image into the Javascript? Thats so we can use this code multiple times on a single page.

Next we need the Javascript and it is very simple. We just create a random number to add to the image url to prevent it showing the cached image and then tell the browser to change the image. I'll show two examples. The first is just when we want to display a random image and the second is how I display a new captcha image with the same code.

I just read this news story.

Microsoft is trying to improve the image of Vista (I personally have no problems with it) and they decided to get a load of XP users together who had all said they didn't like Vista. They filmed them giving their opinions on Vista and then let them try a new operating system codenamed Mojave. More than 90% of them gave positive feedback on Mojave.

Then Microsoft told them that Mojave is actually just Vista.

Remember that life is full of new experiences and you have to give things a chance before you can honestly say you don't like them. Be it food, people or even operating systems.

Apparently there is a virus email going around which claims to be from UPS. It contains a zip file which contains an executable (.exe) claiming to be an invoice. I'm sorry but I feel you have to be a bit stupid to open any attachment from someone you don't know let alone run a file which claims to be an invoice but is in fact a program. Also haven't these people heard of anti virus software? I personally run Anti Vir which is free and one of the better anti virus programs out there.

Apparently in 2003 Bill Gates sent an internal email complaining that the userability of Windows was actually going backwards. He comments that it took to many steps to install Windows Movie Maker. You can read the email at http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp.