Subnet Mask Information

Have you taken a TCP/IP class? Yes, I did a long time ago. Learning TCP/IP and the OSI Model has been the eye-opener for me that really took my consulting career to the next level. I spent a week in class and learned all the binary math to figure out which subnet mask to use that would be most efficient for a network. This was great knowledge and I am good at math, but who wants to write all that math down?

That’s why we have calculators and cheat sheets!

Sometimes I just need to know quickly what a /18 is. I mean, I know most of the standard network codes by heart, but when working on a big project it helps to know all of them. Here is a quick Subnet Mask Cheat Sheet so I don’t have to go to some other website anymore.

Subnet Mask Cheat Sheet

Click the link below for more information on IP Subnet Mask Numbers

IP Subnet Mask Numbers

Subnet Mask Calculator

I use an Online Subnet Mask Calculator when I want a quick list of the networks included within a subnet. Check it out below;

Subnet Mask Info

Site Speed is now Important

I have always thought that my site speed was important, but that was only for my users experience. But now, we as web developers need to make sure our sites don’t get too slow. First thing this means is;

Make sure you have a good web host!

If you are using a shared host for your website, you could have issues. Try to make sure your web host allows you control of your .htaccess file allowing you to speed up your site with caching. There are some hosts that do not provide that option, so check it out.

If you are using WordPress or any other content management system then you will most likely be using plugins. This can be a problem when you are trying to speed up your site since multiple DNS requests ( grabbing files from all the different plugins websites ) can be a major issue. For this reason I suggest checking out each plugin before you use it and see if you can use your own CSS/Javascript code.

SEO Tools for Site Speed

From the Official Google Blog

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.

Photo Source: Thanks Danny Sullivan

Tomorrow I will be flying back to the US for some business and will not be back to my home in Costa Rica for at least 3 months. I have been wanting to work on the WordPress Gallery feature and I found an easy solution.

The Solution involves using the image.php file. Here’s how to create the image.php file, for WordPress 2.5 and above.

Costa Rica Photos (click on the photo for a larger version)

Video to MP3

Sometimes you just want to listen to your YouTube videos, right?

Video2mp3.net

Video2mp3 is a free YouTube, MyVideo, Clipfish, Sevenload, Dailymotion, MySpace to MP3 Converter and allows you to convert and download a video to MP3 file online. This service is fast, free, and requires no signup. All you need is a Video URL, and our software will transfer the video to our server, extract the MP3, and give you a link to download the audio file. So you are able to listen to your favorite YouTube tracks on every MP3 player.

How To Convert YouTube Videos into MP3s

Pretty simple, just click on the photo above for Video2mp3.net and follow the easy instructions. It is all totally free. Be sure to check out his terms of service, remember some files are not meant to be copied…

CRON Jobs

From WikiPedia

Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. The name cron comes from the word chronograph (a time-piece).[citation needed] Cron enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run automatically at a certain time or date. It is commonly used to automate system maintenance or administration.

Custom Help Desk Web Application

I have mentioned before that I am an IT consultant and have clients up and down the east coast, mainly in Massachusetts. However I now have clients all over the world and need a better way to manage my tasks for them.

So I created the Client Corner

I am not 100 percent finished, but that’s not uncommon for me when I am working on projects for myself. I always have a good system but am never satisfied with the design (not unlike this site). Anyway lets get to the point; I created an automatic system to keep track of my maintenance contracts. Basically, I have a schedule of work to accomplish and I don’t want to forget about it, plus I want to keep track of all the work I do.

Configuring CRON Jobs

The concept here is simple. I have an order of things I need to accomplish and I want it done automatically.

1. Check daily to see if there is any work for me
2. If so, create the help desk ticket automatically
3. Notify requester and myself by email

This is pretty simple and I do it with one PHP file. My maintenance plans account for daily, weekly, biweekly and monthly. To keep this short I will only show you my daily maintenance.

<?php
// Add code to Connect to Database and for Security
// 1 - Grab all Maintenance Plans that are enabled and active within date span...
    $sql = "SELECT * FROM maintenance WHERE enabled = 1 AND DATE(CURDATE()) BETWEEN datestart AND dateend;";
// 2 - Create help desk ticket
    $qryDaily = "INSERT INTO tickets (member_id, ticketstatus, dtcreate, priority, problem, summary)
// 3 - Add code to Send notification emails I use phpMailer
?>

CRON Manager

Depending on your hosting provider, there may be different ways to do this. I use GoDaddy.com Grid Hosting so there is a control panel and it is very simple to configure.

Basically you are creating the PHP file above and telling the server to run it using this schedule. By clicking on the Browse button you can easily select the your PHP file and wait for your emails.

If anyone wants a real example, I can create one for you.

Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0

Speeding up WordPress

More like cleaning up WordPress, but anyway. I see this code all the time and I use it,but I can see how some people may get confused by it. So I am going to try and tell you how to modify it for your own WP database.

The code below is pretty simple, but you cannot just copy and paste for it to work. You will need to be using PHPMyAdmin which you normally get from your hosting provider. Once inside here find your database on the left hand side and look for your WordPress tables.

Normally your tables will look something like wp_posts, but if you are a little more secure then you will have changed the prefix wp to something else.

The PREFIX is in red, make sure you change the red code below to your prefix.

DELETE a, b, c
FROM prefix_posts a
LEFT JOIN prefix_term_relationships b
ON a.ID = b.object_id
LEFT JOIN prefix_postmeta c
ON a.ID = c.post_id
WHERE a.post_type = 'revision'

Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nbachiyski/ / CC BY 2.0

1 Gigabit per Second

Google Fiber for Communities

Google is planning to launch an experiment that we hope will make Internet access better and faster for everyone. We plan to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. Our networks will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We’ll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

From now until March 26th, we’re asking interested municipalities to provide us with information about their communities through a Request for information (RFI), which we’ll use to determine where to build our network.

Consulting

As you may know already, my 9 to 5 job is a consultant (don’t laugh at the site, it’s not done yet!), but what you may not know is that most of my clients are municipalities or somehow part of the government. I even work for a wonderful Mayor who is a woman. By watching the video below it seems that governments will get the first go at it and we are sending our RFI now.

Not just for Governments

G has mentioned that they will be offering this “trial” service to at least 50,000 people and potentially 500,000. If you check out their site here, you can fill out a Request for Information for your community as well.

Good Luck!

Since I moved to Costa Rica I have been paying more attention to earthquakes, even ones that are not here. Early this morning an 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Chile and now the US government has issued a tsunami warning to Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador and Antarctica.

Monitoring Tsunamis

I already wrote about monitoring earthquakes and now I will tell you where you can monitor tsunamis, which happen when an earthquakes center is in the ocean.

So if you heard there was an earthquake in the ocean and you want to know if a tsunami is on the way, just go here;

NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center

Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/epugachev/ / CC BY 2.0

Failed Google Searches

• the application was unable to open the outlook express mailbox store
• 0x800C012E, 5 “outlook express could not be started”
• Outlook express could not be started login / startup

I spent way too much time trying to find the answer for this little problem. Basically, if a user connects to a machine connected to a Windows domain but is not an administrator of that machine, you get this error message. It doesn’t really hurt anything, but just a PitA.

Howto Fix Outlook Express Error: 0x800C012E, 5

After finding out that the problem is related to Windows Search, I decided to just uninstall it. Game over. I can tell you that I tried a bunch of configurations to try and keep Windows Search while removing the error, but it’s just not worth it. You really shouldn’t waste your time trying to get it to work, I even deselected all folders for indexing and the error was still there.

Solution: Uninstall Windows Search

I have said F@#k Internet Explorer and now I am saying F@#k Windows Search

My assumption is that Outlook Express was installed on the system (as is comes this way normally) and then Windows Search was installed before uninstalling OE. I have plenty of XP systems working with Windows Search installed and Outlook Express not installed. Although, I always remove all the programs I don’t want first, before getting updates.

Hope this helps :~D

Simple Solution

Unplug any external hard drives you may have and restart!

Hoping

I hope Google takes care of this and makes this post number one. After installing Ubuntu 9.10 and working for a day with no problems I restarted (not the first time) and received the error;

Initrd is too big

That’s it, nothing else. So of course I went to Google on another machine to search for a solution that error. There are way too many of these errors for different versions of Linux so I trimmed the search by adding “Ubuntu 9.10” at the end of the search. Keeping the quotes that way tells G that this term carries the most weight.

Still nothing! I was down to the third and forth pages, and now this was taking too much time. Luckily I came across an old post, when Karmic Koala was still in beta, that was related to an external USB hard drive problem. I thought to myself, no way,  but I tried anyway.

Unplug the external hard drive, restarted perfect!

I am not sure why, but now I have to unplug my hard drive to restart my computer. I can deal with that, but it’s weird that this just started and it didn’t happen yesterday.

Note: I have tested for hardware problems and there were none.

If anyone knows has a better solution, please let me know.