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Katy Perry’s appearance on Sesame Street with Elmo has generated quite a stir, about her breasts. After an outcry from concerned parents the producers pulled the segment.
Katy Perry sings with Elmo
Get the Flash Player to see this player.Perhaps it was the running scene that caused the little kids excitement?
Way to go Jose!
Jose Bautista hits 50th HR
Get the Flash Player to see this player.A collection of Keely’s fav cat videos.
Super Fast Cat Strikes
Get the Flash Player to see this player.More will be added in the future.
This is great news for Small Business owners.
We have more good news to help keep your Windows 7 Professional PC secure. If you haven’t already seen it, today we announced that small businesses will be able to download and install Microsoft Security Essentials on up to 10 PCs for free. Microsoft Security Essentials is a no-cost antimalware service that provides real-time protection to address the ongoing security needs of genuine Windows PCs, helping to protect from viruses, spyware and other malicious threats.
I’ve been using Microsoft Security Essentials on my home systems and as my free AV installation of choice for all client PCs needing anti-virus protection. Now I can recommend it to Small Business owners too. Kudos to Microsoft for this decision.
I’ve been having issues with the automatic update of plugins and the WordPress core files for some time now and I could never quite track it down until today.
I was at my wits end with the updater and was contemplating exporting the WordPress MySQL database and installing it on to a new install folder. My best guess was that the issue was related to a core file that wasn’t overwriting correctly from my FTP upload, as it has happened before but with other side effects. After I exported my SQL file I noticed it was 6.3MB, which is huge. I dug into the SQL table and noticed that wp_options was about 6MB alone. Further inspection showed a bunch of RSS files that turn out to be cache files that are supposed to be purged. There were also lots of references to old plugins that I no longer used. My initial thought was to manually delete these entries but there were 300+ of them and that would have taken way too long. It could have also lead to me deleting an entry that was needed. A quick Google search turned up this plugin. I deactivated my current plugins so I could activate the Clean Options Plugin (internal server errors after enabling plugins were another symptom I was seeing) and ended up cleaning up over 350 orphaned entries! The wp_options table is now down to 50KB.
Now my plugin and core updates all work correctly. My dashboard also is able to load more than just a couple widgets and in general the admin interface just works better.
A friend asked me to take a look at their Acer Aspire One as it wouldn`t boot for them. They would press the power button and it would light up but nothing would happen after that. I haven`t had too many net books in the shop, and I dislike the form factor so I don`t own one of my own, so I was light on ideas. A quick search lead me to a post that had the same issue my friend was seeing.
The Fix:
The Aspire One has a built-in BIOS recovery routine, making it possible to flash the BIOS even if the system doesn’t boot anymore. It’s only meant for emergencies and may void your warranty, so use at your own risk.
- First format an USB stick with FAT.
- Download the latest BIOS, and put both FLASHIT.EXE and the BIOS file in the root directory of the stick. Rename the BIOS file to ZG5IA32.FD, that’s important.
- Insert the USB stick into the net book.
- Turn the Aspire One off, make sure both battery and AC adapter are connected.
- Press Fn+Esc, keep it pressed and press the power button to turn the AA1 on.
- Release Fn+Esc after a few seconds, the power button will be blinking.
- Press the power button once. The Aspire One will now initiate the BIOS flash, do not interrupt it under any circumstances. After a while the power button will stop blinking, and the AA1 will reboot shortly after.
- The BIOS has been flashed and all settings reset to default.
I followed the process and the Aspire One did exactly what it was supposed to do. I`d day the entire fix took 20min, from beginning the search to finishing the boot into XP.
This guide would have been good to find about a week ago. I’ll have to readjust my storage repositories to have 1 iSCSI LUN for each VM instead of 1 large storage repository for my resource pool. I wonder if I’ll be able to copy directly from the old LUN to each of the new LUNs?
Now that I read the title of this post, it sounds a touch dirty…
I had created a couple generic Win2k8 R2 VMs last week with 25GB OS drives. I hadn’t decided which services would be running on the boxes and 25GB would be more than enough for most applications. The only problem was that I had decided to install Sharepoint 2010 Foundation on one and SQL 2008 R2 on the other and both require 80GB of disk space. Good thing XenServer 5.6 and Window Server 2008 R2 make it easy to increase the disk size.
In XenCenter 5.6 select the virtual disk from the storage tab of the virtual machine, click Properties, select Size and Location, then increase the size of the disk.
Super simple, eh? This feature has been available for quite some time, v4.1 I believe, via the CLI but was exposed to the GUI in v5.6.
Now you need to extend the partition in Windows. Right click My Computer select Manage, select Disk Management, right click on the disk you want to extend, and select Extend. This starts the Extend Volume Wizard. Follow the prompts to complete the process. By default Win2k8 R2 extends the partition to the maximum available space available. So this wizard is just about clicking next, next, finish.
Take a look at the Citrix KB article for more info and additional instructions for the CLI procedure and how to extend a partition in Linux operating systems.
Note: Windows 2003 and XP are not able to extend the partition while the OS is running. You need to attach the disk to another VM and use DiskPart to extend the volume.
When you work with virtual machines, either converting physical or working with new builds, you often have issues with hidden devices. Most often the hidden device that gives the most grief is old physical network cards. Thankfully the issues easily resolved.
To work around this behavior and display devices when you click Show hidden devices (source):
- Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt.
- At a command prompt, type the following command , and then press ENTER:
- set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
- Type the following command a command prompt, and then press ENTER:
- start devmgmt.msc
- Troubleshoot the devices and drivers in Device Manager.
- When you finish troubleshooting, close Device Manager.
- Type exit at the command prompt.
NOTE: Click Show hidden devices on the View menu in Device Managers before you can see devices that are not connected to the computer.
Note that when you close the command prompt window, Window clears the devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 variable that you set in step 2 and prevents ghosted devices from being displayed when you click Show hidden devices.
