For the past few days, I’ve been unable to dump anything from phpMyAdmin. The host told me it was because my DB was large (wasn’t) and another suggested I try another browser.

I use FF for everything, but I tried it in IE7 and voila, it worked.

Doing a bit more investigating I found a forum where someone was having a similar issue and the suggestion was ‘toss your cookies.’

I tossed mine, and suddenly FF is exporting again in phpMyAdmin. Lesson learned (and recorded here for future reference).

REVISED 3/20/08

Actually this turned out to be a FF profile issue. Here’s what Mozilla told me:

Occasionally a Firefox profile will get gummed up in a way that is very difficult to track down.

As a diagnostic, you could try using a “clean” Firefox profile: Creating a new Firefox profile on Windows @ MozillaZine Knowledge Base. If that works, then one of your extensions may be at fault, or a bad setting, or a corrupted file. If the cure isn’t obvious, you can move your bookmarks and (selectively) your other settings to the new profile: Migrating settings to a new profile @ MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

Well, a few hours after the previous post, I returned home to find a message from Mozy’s Vice President of Support. I called him back and did get a sincere apology as well as a promise to provide me with a download link to my two backup sets so I could get them without having to go through the usual file listing screen.

I did appreciate the call and have downloaded the first backup set without incident, the second one’s underway. However, they’ve already refunded my last payment and I will still be closing my account - I just don’t feel like I can trust that I’ll be able to access my data in a hurry if I need it in an emergency. I’ve got two external drives now for my new computer, and I think I’ll be relying on those rather than online backups from now on.

In a previous post I related an issue going on with my XP Pro-based machine yesterday, where the system font used in most app dialogs was suddenly larger and bolder. I posted a message on a group I belong to and got a great reference that helped me fix my XP font problem.

I followed the author’s Approach 3 and it worked like a charm. Here it is in shorthand:

1. Right-click on the desktop then click on Properties.
2. Go to the Settings tab and click on Advanced.
3. On the General tab, click the dropdown menu for DPI Setting and change it to 75% in the dialog box that pops up.
4. Restart the computer when prompted.
5. After restarting, do the same sequence of tasks and reset the DPI Setting to 100%.
6. Restart again when prompted.

This worked perfectly and thank God I didn’t have to reinstall XP Pro.

I’m using an old (2002-2003?) Dell Dimension 2400 as my main work machine in lieu of my laptop. About a month ago, something started making a lot of noise, and through some investigation it seemed to be the PSU.

I bought a new one, a Thermaltake that was highly recommended on Newegg. I installed it and all was blissful silence - everything was nice and quiet.

The old PSU was the stock Dell, I think 250w, while the new one was 430w. Now I’m wondering if the new generated more heat than the old one? The 2400 case is very tight with little room for anything, and I have all the PCI slots (all three of them) filled with a wireless network card, NVidia GeForce 5200 graphics card, and Soundblaster Audigy card that I added about two months ago.

I also have two hard drives running in this case. It has 1g of RAM (also maxed out).

Monday the PSU (the new one) started making noise. All of my apps started really slowing down. Yesterday my computer shut down and checking the error log, I had a ‘thermal event’ associated with the CPU fan.

So… I have to get a new fan from Dell (which takes a week to ship). I put the old PSU back in this machine, it’s at least quieter than the new one, which I suspect is fried.

But I don’t know what’s going on. The CPU fan I’m replacing sounds fine, no bearing issues. A local computer guy checked it and said so too, but the only alternatives are (1) fried leads, requiring a new motherboard or (2) a fried processor.

Is the case overheating from the components I’ve installed? Could the extra heat from the bigger PSU caused the CPU fan to die? I just don’t know… I’m so tempted to just cancel the fan order, purchase a case and new motherboard with processors and have done with this machine. But I don’t know… I hate having to wait a week.

I’m now sitting here with the case open and a floor fan blowing air through it. It sounds like a wind tunnel in here; I’m just backing off the work I’ve done this week so I can restore it on my laptop while I wait for the fan that I don’t think is going to solve the problem.

I just wish I knew whether it’s the motherboard or not - that would save me at least the wondering about it until next week.

This happened to me this morning and I found a neat little trick on the Microsoft site to fix it: on the desktop rightclick and go to Properties> Settings. Change the color quality/color depth to any other setting, wait for it to do its thing, click No to go back to the original color setting and the icons should be back to normal.

I don’t know if this always works but it’s better than editing the registry if it’s an isolated incident.

I wrote earlier about purchasing WHMCS for my hosting reseller site. Well, I finished my integration, my hosting site launched on Sunday and I thought I would share my final thoughts about this first experience with WHMCS.

Nothing’s changed - I still love it. I learned that there about 30 template files that have to be edited for CSS to make it fit in nicely with the rest of the site, but the edits are easy and in most cases it’s very obvious what needs to be done.

I’m pretty happy with the way the whole thing turned out except for the icons that came with the package - I think they look a little cartoonish for my site and I plan to replace them at some point when I find something I like better. My WHMCS section is under Support on the top menu bar.

The control panel for running this thing is easy to understand. We ran about six test orders through the system looking for bugs and errors and I think we found most of them. I still won’t be too surprised if someone runs across something when they try to sign up, but for the most part it’s done.

I’m really happy with WHMCS and will purchase it in a few days when the trial license runs out. On second thought maybe I should go do that right now in case I forget…

I’m a newish reseller for a certain hosting company that offers WHM AutoPilot as a free automated services center for hosts. This program is pretty cool - basically it’s a tool that exists on your site and lets people sign up for hosting and other services automatically. They sign up for what they want, pay, their account is set up and they get billed for it periodically all without the reseller’s input.

The control panel for WHMAP is pretty well done, it makes sense and is easy to get synchronized with the data you’ve entered in WHM (the hosting manager that integrates with cPanel). However, I found that integrating it into my site proved harder than first thought. My host is not using the latest version of WHMAP, but I’m not sure if that’s a factor here or not…

You create a header and footer template that matches the rest of your site and WHMAP feeds its data into the central area of the page, however you’ve defined that in a div or a (shudder) table cell. That went fine - it popped in nicely.

However, the problems started when I wasn’t happy with the way lines of text ran together. There are many spacing and formatting issues right out of the box, and applying CSS styles to some of these was just agonizing for me.

I probably spent a good 5-6 hours playing with just the first step of the order process and still wasn’t even close to making it pretty on the page. I knew that WHMAP has a big brother named WHM Complete Solution. I knew it wasn’t free, but I’d heard from other resellers that it was much easier to deal with.

I told my husband of my coding woes and asked him what he thought about me buying WHMCS rather than continuing to struggle with WHMAP. He shook his head and told me ‘go get it.’ Why waste so much time, he said, when I could probably be cruising along with the better product?

I downloaded the 15-day trial of WHMCS and had the thing loaded and running in about an hour. I’m not quite done with the integration, but it certainly was a heck of a lot easier than WHMAP and looks 100% better. I’m really happy with it, and the price tag ($166 I think if you buy a copy outright) is in my opinion extremely reasonable. It makes my hosting site look pretty professional, IMHO, and I hope to have it up and running by this weekend.

My business site was back up at 9:00 tonight - 13 hours after the DNS change began. That’s about 4 times longer than it took when I set up the account, and the techs for my host told me that there was a mistake in the DNS when they switched it back this morning.

This is the first problem I’ve had with them, but it could have been a costly one, say, if I was a retailer. I’ll remember not to go changing any master domain names from now on.