It’s been in a coma for quite a while but I think I’ll get it back rolling again sometime later this year.

So for all of you who aren’t out there, make sure and come back when you aren’t in the neighborhood!

-Scott

Search WordPress plugins for “LibXML2 Fix”. Install and activate. Was using WP 8.2 and when I tried posting from my Droid using wpToGo, images would not post correctly. All < and > characters were being stripped out. All fixed now!

The cake is *not* a lie.

Seriously, Syfy?

I watch your channel for Science Fiction. I love the magazine for news about Science Fiction.

And your slogan? Imagine Greater? It would not have been my first choice, but hey, it could have been okay. Paired up with “Syfy” though, it just shouts, “Geez guys, practice what you preach!” You sound like “syphilis” now. Imagine *that*.

I hope someone got paid off well for whatever under the table money went to the idiot marketing wonks who came up with this terrible branding strategy for you. You do realize they only care about getting your money, right? Actually, I hope there was some under the table deal because anyone who cared about science fiction in any form would not mock it like this.

Sincerely,

Scott Cramer, “Sci Fi Fan”

p.s. – This was also posted to ransackery.com blog so the opinion can live on – hopefully longer than this horrible branding decision!

I gotta sweep more.

I was modifying the Vader.css for a site. I could not figure out how to change the text color for the posts. The style “right out of the box” has a gray text color on a black background which, in my opinion, is uncomfortable to read. I’m not a big fan of light text on a dark background anyway, but the default text color in Vader is really bad.

As it turns out, the text color is coming from style.css and not being changed by vader.css at all.

Add this to vader.css to change the text color:

.entry-content {
color: #999999;
}

“#999999″ works well or you can go lighter yet – just play with it. Hope this helps if you are exasperated and out searching. Leave me a comment if you found this post helpful.

I moved the site using VDaemon to a new server and started getting the error message.

Old Server:
VDaemon: 2.3.0
OS (from command “cat /etc/issue”): CentOS release 4.5 (Final)
Apache: 2.0.46 (Red Hat)
PHP: 4.4.2

New Server:
VDaemon: 2.30
OS (from command “cat /etc/issue”): Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon Update 9)
Apache: 2.0.63 (Unix)
PHP: 5.25

The problem was in the vdaemon.php file in the function VDValidate().

There are two specific instances in the function where the line “$sErrMsg = VD_E_UNSERIALIZE;” is setting the error message.

There is a string comparison on the “if” statements before each line. From old server to new server the value being returned by the PHP “get_class” function in the “if” statement is returning a different case. My old server was returning a strictly lower case value and my new server is not.

The surest way to handle this error no matter what case your environment delivers the results is to force a comparison of same case to same case. I used the PHP “strtolower” function to convert the “get_class” result to lower case and *then* compare it to the string listed in the “if” statement. The text strings being compared (“cvdvalruntime” and “xmlnode”) were already in lower case on my distribution of VDaemon but if they are not strictly lower case in your code, change them to lower case.

Here are the two lines that I changed:

Before: if (!$oRuntime || get_class($oRuntime) != ‘cvdvalruntime’ || !is_array($oRuntime->aNodes))
After: if (!$oRuntime || strtolower(get_class($oRuntime)) != ‘cvdvalruntime’ || !is_array($oRuntime->aNodes))

Before: if (get_class($oRuntime->aNodes[$nIdx]) != ‘xmlnode’)
After: if (strtolower(get_class($oRuntime->aNodes[$nIdx])) != ‘xmlnode’)

This fixed it for me.

If this helped you out, leave a comment!

Configuration:
As of this writing, I am using WordPress 2.3.3 with release 4 of the K2 theme. I have the following active plugins: Akismet 2.1.3, Gravatars2 2.7.0, Gravatars2 WP-Cron 1.1, Subscribe To Comments 2.1.2, WordPress Database Backup 1.7.

Background:
I was configuring the K2 Sidebar Manager with the modules I wanted displayed and the order in which I wanted them displayed. I was working with three columns and also had one custom “Text, HTML, and PHP” module that I was using for Google Adwords. As I made changes, I was flipping over to another browser tab to take a look at my site. I think I had just removed a sidebar module and changed the order of existing modules – to tell the truth, I don’t remember the last change made. However, the site stopped displaying correctly. In Firefox you could see the top header and the three column format and the text on the page. The page background behind the text had disappeared displaying the site’s black color background throughout everything. I run a three column format with the posts in column 1, site navigation modules in column 2, and Google Adwords in column 3. Everything but the site search had disappeared.

What I tried that failed (not necessarily in this order):

• Going back to the K2 sidebar manager and adding and removing modules to reflect some kind of change in the page.
• Changing from 3 to 2 columns and back again. It didn’t work either way.
• Under K2 Options, deactivating the K2 sidebar manager. It worked without it! When I activated it again, it didn’t work anymore.
• Changing themes to my previous non-K2 theme. The site worked with the old theme! When I changed back to K2, it didn’t work anymore.
• Cleared all cache, cookies (pretty much everything) in the Firefox browser. Nope.
• Changed to Internet Explorer. Same problems except the interpretation of the CSS left me with the white page background so it looked better but the sidebar manager modules were still not working.

The fix:
Looking at the database tables for WordPress, under the table “wp-options” there is a record with an “option_name” of “k2sbm_modules_active”. When you look at the MEMO field under “option_value” this is where all of the K2 sidebar manager settings are stored. Mine was fubar’d somehow. I have several WordPress blogs that I  administrate. I was initially leery of just deleting the field so I copied the contents from the field of a newly installed WordPress with K2. This fixed the site. So, afterwards – now that I was comfortable I could fix things – I deleted the contents of the field. This worked fine. Afterwards I went back into my K2 sidebar manager and set everything back up the way I wanted. Everything worked fine.

What to do in the future:
There is a  “restore” and “backup” button at the top of the K2 sidebar manager. Once you have made changes in your sidebar manager, click the “backup” button. This will save a data file to your computer with – guess what? – the value of the “k2sbm_modules_active” field. To test, I saved my setup, went into the database and deleted the value manually, and then restored. Everything worked great.

Hope this helps somebody out! Leave me a comment if you find it helpful.

Actual ad for Carrie Underwood concert.

1958 B-Movie “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” Poster.

Right?

Wrong!

You don’t have to take it for a walk or clean it’s litter box, but a home aquarium still requires effort. I knew this going in (I used to have a salt water tank many years ago *oh the horror*) but it’s been just long enough that I’ve been boning up on my fish knowledge the past few weeks.

Cycling your new tank is as important to moving forward with your aquarium as building the proper foundation for your new house. If you don’t do it right, the whole thing is going to come crashing down. Cost aside, I feel more guilty about dead fish than broken lumber. But hey, I’m wacky like that. Remember I mentioned the salt water aquarium from years ago? I was like the Nazi Third Reich of the salt water fish world. In the end, when I finally gave up, I had one small Damsel fish living in a 75 gallon fish tank (note, that I do not call it an “aquarium” at this point). Of course, as Karma is wont to do, that one fish lived the next year without benefit of cleaning or feeding because I refused to take an active part in his demise. But anyway, I digress…

Cycling the tank… There is good information all over the ‘net or available by talking to your local fish stores. Here’s an article I liked (time will tell if it’s any good): http://www.bestfish.com/breakin.html

My personal opinion, something to remember about *any* information you get, whether it be from fish store, friend, or internet – there is no cut and dried set of rules for everything with your aquarium. There are some basic truisms and from there everyone starts going in slightly different directions for exactly what you “need” to do to be a successful fish owner (and not a salt water killer, mentioning no names, ah-hem). My suggestion is to talk to as many people and read as much as you can and then pick a course, stay consistent, pay attention to what’s going on with your aquarium, and be willing to modify your course as needed. Status quo doesn’t work really well when fish are going belly up; that’s just taking “stay consistent” to an absurd level. Buy books, you ask? If that’s your comfort zone, but local shops and the internet are free (save your money for that next tank, you know you’ll want one) and provide a much broader amount of information (and take up a lot less room in your living room). Internet is great, but remember that just because someone can publish a web page, it doesn’t mean they know what they are talking about. “Joe Bob’s Rules for Keeping Fish Health with Tabasco Sauce”? Probably not wise. Use common sense and look for a depth of knowledge and some consistency in what’s being side from one source of information to another.

Here’s an example of differing information you can get, from what I recently went through cycling my new tank. I purchased my initial fish from Petco, and the gentleman there – who has an aquarium of his own, lending at least some to his credibility – suggested 5 to 8 fish maximum to start out my new 55 gallon tank. So, I purchased 8 fish (I fight being impatient so I went with the upper limit – be cautious of these impatient feelings). The day after I added my first fish, my nephew and his wife gave me 7 more Wal-Mart (I mention the store because I’d really like to research the quality of fish from the store that also sells generic cola, diapers, and anything else you can think of at 2am) for my birthday. Oops! Suddenly I was up to 15 fish and freaking out just a little that everyone was going to be dead by morning. Had I read a little more (I was also impatient in that I just talked to the fish store guy and solely went on that opinion in setting up the new tank with fish) I would have learned there are other rules of thumb for number of fish in a new tank.

The link I provided above for cycling the tank says 2 to 5 inches of fish initially per 10 gallons of water. So, in my case 8 to 20 inches of fish (see a couple posts back where I cover how 55 gallon capacity can equate to only 40 gallon actual capacity). So, considering a bit more than one inch per fish on average, I was probably right at the limit (by the above article, at least)! Other articles on the ‘net range anywhere between the pet store guy and the above article, but all of them are pretty close. Other factors such as temperature, oxygen in the water, type of fish, live plants, adding gravel/rock/wood from an established tank, etc., all come into play too. Pick a path that makes sense to you and for the type of aquarium you envision and move forward. So far so good for me. I lost two fish within the first week but they were also the two smallest fish out of the initial 15 (and from Petco rather than the Wal-Mart fish, go figure). So perhaps a slight case of overcrowding during the initial cycling phase or a combination of maxing out the number of fish to go through the cycling phase *and* two of them not being hardy enough to survive regardless. For the progression I’ve had with my tank thus far, I’m voting these two would not have had a tough time whether there were 8 or 15 fish.

And with this… I become another one of those “articles” floating around the ‘net. So take it at face value and do more reading. Comments? Experiences of your own? Bring ‘em on! Would love to hear them!