Karmona Pragmatic Blog

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.9 – Carmen (named in honor of the jazz vocalist Carmen McRae) in less than 3 minutes…

WordPress 2.9 Highlights

* Global undo/”trash” feature
* Built-in image editor
* Batch plugin update and compatibility checking
* Easier video embeds
* Over 500 tickets, bugs and enhancements

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.8 in less than 3 minutes…

WordPress 2.8 Highlights

* Speed!!!
* Theme Browser and Installer
* Ability to add Custom Headers
* New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new Widgets API
* New ways to customize dashboard widgets
* Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
* Configurable Views on Management Pages
* Faster Loading Admin Pages

S3 (Simple Storage Device ) Overview

“Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.” (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/)

What can I do with this S3 thingy?

Many things… but I will focus on a pragmatic and more common use case – You can use S3 as the ultimate network drive to share your music collection, backup your documents or to store your blog images (a.k.a. CDN for the masses) etc.

Is it free???

Almost…   $0.15 per Giga (+ you can estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Monthly Calculator)

How do I start?

To use Amazon S3 service, you’ll simply need to open an Amazon account and register to the S3.

Interesting tools to simplify your S3 experience:

• Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer – Simple Firefox add-on that provides an FTP like interface (Windows Explorer) to upload and manage files on S3 – “S3Fox Organizer helps you organize/manage/store your files on Amazon S3. It is easy to install and use as it is integrated into the browser…”

• Amazon S3 WordPress plugin – This plugin will help you to stores your files on Amazon S3.

• DropBox – New Amazon-S3-backed-storage service (thanks to Shlomo for the introduction) – Very simple to use and with 2GB storage limit on the default (free) account and paid upgrade to 50GB of space for $9.99 / month which is not that much above the $7.5 they need to pay to Amazon (before optimizations ;)

P.S. If you liked DropBox you might also like many others…

Warning: This post could be an interesting reading material only if you have windows system-files corruptions and as a real alternative to the expert exchange conspiracy ;)

This small vista saga started when I found myself unable to access domain assets (exchange, domain servers, shared storage etc.)

Browsing quickly throughout Event Viewer System logs I found out that Workstation, Netlogon and Computer Browser services were down due to rather long and frustrating service dependencies failures:

• The Netlogon service depends on the Workstation service which failed to start because of the following error: The dependency service or group failed to start. (Event ID 7001)
  
• The Computer Browser service depends on the Workstation service which failed to start because of the following error: The dependency service or group failed to start. (Event ID 7001)
  
• The Workstation service depends on the SMB 2.0 MiniRedirector service which failed to start because of the following error: The dependency service or group failed to start. (Event ID 7001)
  
• The SMB 2.0 MiniRedirector service depends on the SMB MiniRedirector Wrapper and Engine service which failed to start because of the following error: The dependency service or group failed to start. (Event ID 7001)
  
• The SMB 1.x MiniRedirector service depends on the SMB MiniRedirector Wrapper and Engine service which failed to start because of the following error: The dependency service or group failed to start. (Event ID 7001)
  
• The SMB MiniRedirector Wrapper and Engine service depends on the Redirected Buffering Sub Sysytem service which failed to start because of the following error: SMB MiniRedirector Wrapper and Engine is not a valid Win32 application. (Event ID 7001)
  
• The Redirected Buffering Sub Sysytem service failed to start due to the following error:  Redirected Buffering Sub Sysytem is not a valid Win32 application. (Event ID 7000)
• The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: CSC rdbss  (Event ID 7026)

As a real IT expert, I tried 5 restarts before trying anything else ;)

So… to resolve this unfortunate issue, I had to use the notorious System File Checker tool (SFC.exe) .

This poorly documented windows  utility will scan all protected system files and replaces incorrect (corrupted, changed or missing) versions with correct Microsoft versions and running this from the command prompt is much easier than booting off the DVD into repair mode.

Once you have an administrator command prompt open (click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator), you can run the utility by using the following syntax:

SFC [/SCANNOW] [/VERIFYONLY] [/SCANFILE=<file>] [/VERIFYFILE=<file>]

[/OFFWINDIR=<offline windows directory> /OFFBOOTDIR=<offline boot directory>]

The most useful command is just to scan immediately, which will scan and attempt to repair any files that are changed or corrupted using this command:

sfc /scannow

The scanning replaced the corrupted system file rdbss.sys and I was back to domain browsing business right after :)

Note: If SFC shouts he can’t repair the corrupted files, than you will have to drill down to the CBS.log to find what is corrupted and replace it yourself

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By the way, Marissa Mayer promised that Chrome Browser will be leaving Beta (while GMail is still in Beta…) and it just did yesterday and that Google Search Wiki would soon have a toggle button that allow people to turn it off (“early Q1.”) – I can’t wait… :)

WordPress 2.7 – “Coltrane” (named for John Coltrane) was released today and I have just finished a 25 minutes (including this post :) smooth upgrade using the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

Coltrane seems to have a very cool and much faster new inteface  (150 people contribution) and I didn’t have any issues until now…

Much more details (+ visual introduction) on the WordPress.org blog.

Enjoy.

Last weekend I was wasting time on my Blog performance and all I got is 10 sec. and this lousy post.

Quick profiling with FireBug and YSlow FireFox extensions have done great wonders with my amazingly slow, not-really-that-interesting, hosted (webhost4life) WordPress blog.

Main action items:

• I have removed the sitemeter performance penalty widget
• I have installed the WordPress Super Cache Plug-in which wasn’t that simple with my webhost4life hosting limitations.
• I have removed couple of images and reduce the blog top image size from 80k to 5k (!!!)

Results:

• Main blog page returns after ~1 sec.
• I am still getting a lousy grade with the YSlow tests (62) but it seems like the YSlow blog post announcement have failed too… (57 :)
• Post pages are still slow (~2-4 sec.) but I know what I have to do the next time more than 1 million readers will complain…

Have fun!

I am very “proud” to introduce the ultimate geek widget: Base 64 Encode / Decode Online Widget

Q. Where can I see this dark magic?

A. Here… :)

Q. How can I add this cool Base64 widget to my blog?

A. Simply copy-paste this little script:
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<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://blog.karmona.com/base64widget.js” ></script>

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Q. Does this blog widget support ALL blog platforms?

A. Sure… (including dasBlog :)

Please contact me if you have any issues / questions / suggestions,

Have fun!