FettesPS » Miscellaneous

Converting ACSM files to ePub for the Sony eReader

FettesPS — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 03:40:19 +0000

I was fortunate to be gifted a Sony eReader (PRS-T01) for the holiday season and have so far spent much more time playing with the damn thing than I have reading books on it. I have been plugging away at the first Game of Thrones book as well but today I decided to buy another one for more casual reading. Unfortunately this book did not come as an ePub file or even a PDF, as I am used to, but rather a ACSM file. I did not realize this until after I had paid for it and downloaded it. Now the file did launch the Sony eReader software when double clicked but I don’t use that software, rather Calibre, and wanted to import it there. It would not recognize the file so I was forced to find a method to convert it.

After some research I was told to first install Adobe’s Digital Edition. This is not ideal as it involves yet another program, and a crappy flash one at that, but it was my only option. Once installed I was able to open the ACSM file which then downloaded the book. It turns out that this file is not really the eBook itself, but rather a voucher for the actual book which you can only redeem using Adobe’s software. After it has been downloaded I suggest you close the program and never revisit it unless to fetch another ACSM as it is terrible. It will reveal to you no method to access the ePub file it just downloaded, but alas it has done just that. You will now find an ePub file in your My Documents folder under My Digital Editions. Take that file and import it to Calibre, and go ahead and delete Adobe Digital Editions after that.

Ajax – Post Multiple Select Values

FettesPS — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:12:41 +0000

So this form is pretty basic, it has a select box (list box) filled with possible values. You can select all or some of the values and then submit it to the server via Ajax. The problem was when I grabbed the value from the select box I only got the last value selected, not each. Regardless of if I was using POST or GET I still had to build the parameter list since that’s how XMLHttpRequest works. So I looped through the list and tried using the same parameter name for each, then on the PHP end I had the same result — each parameter overwrote the previous one and I saw only the last result. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon this post that someone gave a decent suggestion, which was to put a [] at the end of each parameter name when building the query string and PHP would automatically interpret it as an array. Since his code was somewhat over complicated I thought I’d share my version of it:

test-utility.php



    Test Utility
    


    Test Utility



    ">
        
            Error: 
        
    

    
    
    
        
            Listbox(s):


            (Hold CTRL to
select multiple)

test-utility.js

function select_all() {
    var d = document.getElementById("listbox");
        for(var i=0;i

    // For modern browsers
    if(window.XMLHttpRequest) {
        xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();

    // for IE 5/6
    } else {
        xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
    }

    //  Rebuild the array of selected option boxes
    lb = document.getElementById("listbox");
    for(var i=0; i < lb.length; i++) {
        if(lb[i].selected) {
            // Note the [] after the name
            url += "&lb[]=" + lb[i].value;
        }
    }

    xmlhttp.open("GET","test-utility-ajax.php" + url, false);
    xmlhttp.send();

    if (xmlhttp.status == 200) {
        document.getElementById("ajax_results").innerHTML = xmlhttp.responseText;
    } else {
        return false;
    }

    return false;
}

test-utility-ajax.phpbr>

Fixing WordPress’ “W3 Total Cache Error: some files appear to be missing or out of place” Error

FettesPS — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 02:25:43 +0000

Today I used the automated plug-in installer to install W3 Total Cache which resulted in my page doing nothing but spitting out a nasty error. Since I did not want to spend time debugging their plug-in and had immediately lost faith in them for not properly handling their errors I went ahead and nuked the folder in the plugins directory. That left me staring at this nasty error:

W3 Total Cache Error: some files appear to be missing or out of place [...]

Hmmm… “Not cool,” I thought to myself. At least it seemed to be confined to the admin panel and my site was now back up and running from the user’s perspective I still had to try and fix this error without taking down the site again.

The initial suggestion made by the error description was to delete advanced-cache.php from your wp-content folder. I went ahead and renamed it to advanced-cache.php.bak and was then told by the next error that I should delete db.php. At this point I decided to do some more research and see what my best options were, and for hte time being I reinstated the advanced-cache.php file from it’s backup.

My search results on disabling a plug-in through the database all told me to look in the wp_options table and under the active_plugins field. In there was a serialized array containing each of the active plugins. I searched for “w3″ and removed everything between the semi-colons for that plugin:

Remove:

i:12;s:33:"w3-total-cache/w3-total-cache.php";

At the start of the active_plugins field is an a: with a number beside it, this is your total number of enabled plugins. None of the sites I had dug up on disabling a plugin from this table mentioned this and the typically suggested wiping the entire line out to just a:0:{} which is not necessary.

After updating that field I was still presented with a message suggesting I delete the cache file. So I did the same and backed up each file it told me to (instead of deleting, as it suggested). In the end three files needed to be backed up.

Disable and Backup Some Files:

mv advanced-cache.php mv advanced-cache.php.bak
mv db.php db.php.bak
mv object-cache.php object-cache.php.bak

After refreshing my admin panel I once was able to log in to manage the site. Crisis averted! After a few days when I’m confident my site is stable I will delete the backups.

Fixing IIS’s “Failed to start monitoring changes to [...] because access is denied” Error

FettesPS — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 01:01:51 +0000

Ran into a weird error today. I had IIS serving pages on my devel machine and after working out the kinks in my code I went to FTP them to the production server. Since that machine didn’t have FTP I shared the folder and uploaded them from another machine that was on my desk. After that I went to reload the page and got the following error:

Failed to start monitoring changes to [...] because access is denied

I figured it was because I had shared the page and IIS must not like that, so I unshared it expecting that to resolve the issue — it did not. From there I dug through many pages of Google results all telling me to make sure the files weren’t marked Read Only and to make sure the ASPNET user had permissions. Interestingly enough such a user did not exist on my machine, possibly due to a different version of IIS or the fact that I do not have Visual Studio.net installed on that system.

It wasn’t until I compared permissions with another web folder that still worked that I spotted the difference. One had permission granted access to “Authenticated Users” and given it Modify permissions. After following these steps I was once again able to serve pages:

Right Click the Virtual Directory in IIS
Click “Edit Permissions…”
Select the Security Tab
Click the Edit button
Click the Add button
Type “Authenticated Users” †
Click the Check Names button to ensure that it recognizes the name
Click OK
Ensure the Modify checkbox is checked
Click OK until all remaining popup windows are closed

† If a name is not recognized it will pop up a “Name Not Found” box, whereas if it is recognized it will prefix it with your computer name and underline it (e.g.: fettesps\username).
If Authenicated Users is not recognized as a user, try ASPNET instead, which is what most guides suggested (but did not work for me).

After making these changes you should now be able to access your site again. If not, please consult Microsoft’s Knowledge Base article for more possible solutions.

VNC – How to Exit Full Screen

FettesPS — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:02:11 +0000

More than once I’ve right clicked the title bar in VNC and hit Full Screen only to realize I have no idea how to get back out of full screen. Since the menu bar is then suppressed I’m forced to use a hot key, and if you don’t know ahead of time what that is you’re stuck Googling for it. Unfortunately, it is not F11 like in most applications so if you mash F11 you’ll maximize the top window in your VNC session. To exit full screen in VNC Viewer just press F8.

Clearing the DynDNS Updater Log

FettesPS — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:14:25 +0000

DynDNS’s updater utility keeps a log of every time it has pushed a new IP to their servers. Since I have a shoddy internet connection I use this to log how many times I’ve disconnected each day and when it happened. Occasionally I need to access these logs and reset them after making tweaks to my connection. Here’s where these logs can be found if you need to erase them or back them up:

Windows XP:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\DynDNS\Updater

Windows Vista / Windows 7:

C:\Users\yourusername\Application Data\DynDNS\Updater

How to Stop Emacs from Opening a New Daemon

FettesPS — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:05:14 +0000

I finally got around to upgrading to the the newest stable release of Emacs. There were a few things I wanted to be able to do and rather than use outdated methods I decided it was time to upgrade to Emacs 23. I ran into a few hitches along the way but after getting them resolved I went about setting up the Emacs daemon to load quietly in the background and start using multiple emacs clients under different GNU Screen windows. I had a bit of a time figuring out how to make it so it wouldn’t try to start up another server each time I logged in via SSH or created a new Screen. I never really found a one stop answer for this, rather it was a combination of several suggestions I saw. So here’s what I came up with for my ~/.bashrc:

# Boot up the Emacs Daemon
function emacs_is_running() {
    ps -ef | grep "emacs --daemon" | grep -v grep > /dev/null
}                                                                                                                                                                                                          

# Debug
if emacs_is_running; then
    echo Emacs daemon already running
else
    echo Launching emacs daemon
    emacs --daemon
fi                                                                                                                                                                                                         

# Fix Typos, Add Shortcuts...
alias e="emacsclient -c -a nano"
alias emac="emacsclient -c -a nano"
alias emacs="emacsclient -c -a nano"
alias emasc="emacsclient -c -a nano"
alias pico="emacsclient -c"
EDITOR="emacsclient -c -a nano"
VISUAL="emacsclient -c -a nano"

Happy One Million!

FettesPS — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 01:55:07 +0000

Was reviewing my site stats on StatCounter and noticed I’d broken the 1 million visits threshold. Although it’s not my first site to pass 1 million page loads it is still exciting news none the less.

iTunes – Deauthorize Computers

FettesPS — Tue, 03 May 2011 03:21:35 +0000

Somehow I managed to use up all of my authorizations for iTunes, and I couldn’t authorize my main PC to transfer my iTunes purchases after reinstalling Windows 7. Since one of the authorizations would have been from my previous OS install I had no way to deauthorize it directly through iTunes. It turns out, when you find yourself in this situation, that the only option is to deauthorize all 5 computers and then manually reauthorize them the next time you need to use them. Why do we even bother authorizing in the first place?

Launch iTunes
On the left menu go to iTunes Store
Click Sign In on the top right and enter your account information
Again, click the Account button (your e-mail address appears as the button), re-enter your password
Click View Account
Click Deauthorize All

Now you can reauthorize your account and finally get around to transferring those purchases or downloading some podcats on your iPhone.

Disable Magic Jack’s Auto Run

FettesPS — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 03:59:24 +0000

If you do not want the Magic Jack software to auto run each time you plug in the device here are a few methods that may give you the desired result:

Method One:

Click Start
Type autorun and hit Enter
Uncheck Use AutoPlay for all media and devices
Click Save

Note: This method will have the side effect of disabling autorun system wide.

Method Two:

Open My Computer
Look for the second Magic Jack drive (labeled Phone) and Open it
Right Click autorun.inf and ensure Read Only is unchecked
Rename autorun.inf to autorun.inf.bak
Close the drive

Now when you want to launch the software just double click the icon for the first Magic Jack drive in your My Computer or make a shortcut to it on your desktop.