Rant: WordPress.com Stats Broken, Makes Me Sad

18. March 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", Meta, Rants, Support, Troubleshooting · Tags: , , , ,

Update: WordPress.com finally fixed the Stats issue, however Jetpack (despite the version bump to 1.1.1) still errors out, this time with “register_http_request_failed“.The issue appears to be with LigHTTPD, as if I switch back to Apache everything works. Might finally break down and switch to NGINX, as Apache is too big of a memory hog for my liking.

The other day, the WordPress.com Stats plugin I use to spy on you monitor this blog stopped working. Then I started getting this error from Stats:

Your WordPress.com account [Redacted] is not authorized to view the stats of this blog. Currently access to stats is broken for some users and we are working on fixing this. Your stats are still being counted and will be visible once we restore access for your account.

Fair enough. I waited. And waited. And waited some more. When it became apparent that this wasn’t a temporary problem, I removed and re-added the plugin, and was then greeted with this new, more exciting error:

“The owner of that API Key ([Redacted]) is not on the access list for this blog ([Redacted]). Stats was installed using a different API key. The owner of the original key can add users to the access list, or you can contact WordPress.com support.”

Huh. Well, since that didn’t do it, I did some Google’ing and found out that Automattic just released Jetpack, a collection of plugins that replaces a good chunk of the standalone plugins out there that work with WordPress.com services. People who were getting the above errors reported that the Stats plugin provided with Jetpack worked, so I switched. And immediately received yet another error:

Your Jetpack has a glitch. Connecting this site with WordPress.com is not possible. This usually means your site is not publicly accessible (localhost).

Fantastic. Google once again helped me to find a bunch of other users with the same problem, but sadly, none of the fixes (most of them found in this thread) worked for me. I broke down and contacted Automattic support, and their reply was the following:

It might be the SSL cert that is preventing Jetpack from connecting. Is the site also behind any sort of firewall?

Which, of course, the site is. However, that was the first thing I checked, as my IPTABLES rules are just north of Insanely Restrictive. Sadly, disabling IPTABLES did nothing to help. Additionally, I was able to confirm that outbound SSL access was working by using CURL from an SSH session to grab pages from https://wordpress.com, so that’s not the issue either. I replied back to let him know this, and I’m waiting on a response. Through all of this, the normal WordPress.com Stats Plugin still doesn’t work. So,

WORDPRESS! Y U NO FIX STATS API?

My new favourite meme.

Short: Mopier HP Printers Make Me Sad

15. March 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: "It's a Feature", Short, Troubleshooting · Tags: , , ,

After setting up a few users on yet another HP Laserjet P4015dn, one person complained that when they told Microsoft Word to print 10 copies (or any number, really) only 1 copy would actually print. The printer wouldn’t report any errors, and neither would the computer – everything would just report normal.

A closer look revealed that the printer driver had Mopier Mode enabled. As per HP, this mode is used when the printer has an EIO hard disk installed. If the printer doesn’t have one, it will only print one copy. To disable Mopier Mode, do the following:

  1. Open the (Devices and) Printers Control Panel.
  2. Right-click on the printer, and choose (Printer) Properties.
  3. Click the Device Settings tab.
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the list, and change “Mopier Mode” to “Disabled”, then click OK.

Easy, right?

TL;DR Version: If your HP Printer is only printing one copy when told to do more, make sure Mopier Mode is disabled in the Printer Properties.

Short: A Small Problem with TrueCrypt and Toshiba Fastboot

15. March 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: "It's a Feature", Hardware, Makes Sense, Short, Troubleshooting · Tags: , , , ,

Yesterday, I decided to encrypt my Toshiba Satellite C650D laptop with TrueCrypt – I opted for Full System Drive encryption, which involves TrueCrypt adding its own bootloader. After answering the usual questions from the setup wizard, it prompted me to reboot to test the settings. After Windows restarted, I was prompted to enter the password I had specified earlier. The only problem was, when I started typing, nothing happened – I also couldn’t use ESC to bypass the password prompt, or CTRL+ALT+DEL to reboot. My only option was to power off. When I turned the laptop back on, though, I was able to enter the password without issue.

After the encryption process finished, I rebooted the laptop again, only to find that keyboard input still wasn’t working when I needed to enter the bootloader password. Again, though, after powering it off and back on everything worked fine. On a hunch, I shut down the laptop completely, then turned it back on, and was able to enter the password without issue.

As it turns out, if you have Toshiba’s ‘Fastboot’ feature enabled in BIOS (allows for < 1 second from power button to bootloader, bypassing the BIOS splash screen and, apparently, some hardware initialization steps), TrueCrypt won’t recognize your internal keyboard (unfortunately, I didn’t have a USB keyboard handy to see if that would work) – but only on a reboot. From a cold boot, the keyboard is apparently initialized differently and works fine.

TL;DR Version: If you use TrueCrypt to encrypt your System Drive and have Toshiba Laptop, don’t use the Fastboot option in BIOS or you will not be able to enter your bootloader password when you reboot and will be force to cold boot every time.

Folder Redirection to Mapped Network Drives: Frakking Stupid

08. March 2011 · 1 comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", howto, Makes Sense, Microsoft, Networking, Servers, Troubleshooting, Windows · Tags: , , ,

While updating a set of public computers to have private file shares (making use the Home Directory account property in AD to automagically map the drive), I ran in to an issue with folder redirection. I wanted to redirect all of the standard personal folders (Documents, Pictures, Music, et al…) to the same share, so I setup folder redirection in a Group Policy Object to point those folders to the users home drive (for this example, we’ll say drive Z: was mapped to \serversharefolder).

I gave the user full rights to the share, and assigned it Owner status as well (all through the Security tab, as standard), and then configured the GPO as appropriate. After rebooting the client computer, however, I checked the Documents folder only to find that it was still pointing at the default location. A quick peek in to Event Viewer revealed the following error:

Failed to apply policy and redirect folder “Documents” to “\serversharefolder”.

Redirection options=0×80009211.

The following error occurred: “Can not create folder “\serversharefolder”".

Error details: “Access is denied.”.

Which was very strange indeed, as a brief check confirmed that yes, the domain user did in fact have full access to both the folder and the share.

Then, something I saw (and stupidly, ignored) when setting up the GPO came back to me. I fired up the GPO editor and and browsed back to the Documents folder redirection section (User ConfigurationPoliciesWindows SettingsFolder Redirection). After double-clicking the Documents option, and then switching to the Settings tab (shown below), I noticed the top two boxes (“Grant User Exclusive Rights to Documents” and “Move the Contents of Documents to the New Location”) were selected by default. Given that this was an ‘Access Denied’ error, I figured one of these two settings must be at fault, so I unchecked them.

Folder Redirection StupidityAfter rebooting the client computer, the Documents folder redirected to the Home Drive as expected.

Here’s where it gets stupid, though. On the ‘Target’ tab in the Documents properties window (visible in the screenshot above), if you have the ‘Target folder location’ set to ‘Redirect to the users home directory’, it explicitly adds a note that says “This settings ignores the value of the ‘Grant User Exclusive Rights to Documents’  option on the settings page.

Apparently not, Microsoft. Apparently not.

TL;DR Version: If Folder Redirections aren’t applying correctly, Event Viewer is showing ‘Access Denied’ messages, and you’re using Home Folders specified in the user account, disable ‘Grant User Exclusive Rights to Documents’  option on the settings page of the GPO.

Solved: X-FI Xtreme Audio PCI-E, Windows 7 x64, and a Microphone == No Love

08. February 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: "It's a Feature", Hardware, Microsoft, Troubleshooting, Windows · Tags: ,

My Realtek HD Audio onboard sound card died the other day, and as my motherboard was out of warranty, I opted to do the laziest thing and simply bought a PCI-Express sound card instead (which was a challenge, as none of the stores where I live that were open on Sundays sold sound cards. Go figure).

Being cheap (and considering that the onboard card did just fine), I opted for a Soundblaster X-FI Xtreme Audio PCI-E (SB1040). I didn’t do a lot of research before making the purchase, which I probably should have, because the ‘X-FI’ in the name of the card is an out-right lie. As it turns out, this is the only card in the X-FI line to use a legacy Audigy-series processor instead of an X-FI one.

As such, there’s a rather large issue with driver support. I was able to install the latest driver from Creative’s website (Web Update 2), and the audio-out worked fine, however I couldn’t get my microphone to work. At all.

On the back of the card, there’s a blue port for Line In which doubles as the Mic port (known, apparently, as a FlexiJack or Flexi-Jack). By default, Windows 7 detects it as only a Line In port with no option to change it. There’s supposed to be an option in the Creative Console Launcher, however the driver update from the website doesn’t install that. No matter, there was a separate download for that. Unfortunately, even after installing it there wasn’t an option to change the Line In jack to a Mic jack.

As it turns out, there’s a specific way to get it working that no one blog or forum post out there has managed to nail down. Here’s the trick.

  1. Download and install the latest driver from Creative (1.04.0000)
  2. Reboot.
  3. Download and install the Creative Console Launcher (Beta – 2.61.49).
  4. Reboot.
  5. Open the Creative Console Launcher (should be in the Start Menu under All Programs -> Creative)
  6. Click on the last icon (shown below) called ‘Jacks’.
  7. On this screen you should be able to change the ‘FlexiJack’ mode to Microphone (also shown below).
Creative Console Launcher

The Two Missing Options

That should be it! If this doesn’t work, there’s one more thing to try. Remove all of the Creative software, then install Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (at the time of writing this, still in Release Candidate form) and try the above again – I already had the SP1 Release Candidate installed when I did this, so it may or may not be required.

Good luck!

Update: I ended up returning this card because it lacks some very basic features that even generic onboard Realtek audio chips have, like Stereo Mix and Microphone Boost support. If you’re thinking of buying this card, think again!

Windows Desktop Twitter Clients Suck (And Here’s Why)

17. January 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", Rants, Twitter · Tags: ,

I use Twitter semi-frequently. I’m more of a reader than a poster (in the 2+ years I’ve used the service I’ve only tweeted around 8,100 times), so it’s always struck me as odd that while mobile Twitter clients (such as Plume) do an amazing job working with the Twitter API, desktop clients never seem to live up to expectations.

Timeline Position

Mobile clients reign supreme in this, the seemingly hardest-to-master part of Twitter. I follow upwards of 170 people, and when they’re all actively tweeting my timeline fills up with sometimes ungodly numbers of tweets. These days, most mobile clients remember where you left off reading, and add new tweets above that point. Then, when you refresh the timeline, you just need to start scrolling up and you haven’t missed a thing.

Sadly, though, desktop Twitter clients still haven’t figured out that this is an important feature. I really love the look of MetroTwit, Seesmic Desktop 2, Blu, et al…, however it and every other desktop client I’ve tried will either scroll you up to the top of the timeline on refresh or do the same when you quit and reopen the application. This leaves a huge mess, and you need to remember the approximate time you stopped reading so you can scroll back through the mass of tweets that have collected since.

As a side note, a large number of desktop clients will scroll on refresh as you’re reading (I’m looking at you, MetroTwit). If I’ve just refreshed and scrolled back over 50 tweets, it really sucks to be scrolling up as I’m reading only to have the client force-scroll down as another 20 tweets come in.

View Conversation

A great feature in Twitter’s new website redesign is the ability to click on a tweet, and a tab will open up beside the timeline showing you the contents of the tweet, other tweets by the person, and most importantly, if the tweet was an @ reply to another tweet or series of tweets, it will show those as well. Mobile clients typically allow you to tab on a tweet and have the conversation show up inline, or in another view, but once again desktop clients have missed the boat on this one. MetroTwit requires you to right-click on the tweet and go through a few levels of context menus before you get to an option to show the conversation, and most lack this feature entirely, making it difficult, if not impossible, to find out what each of the 15 new @ replies are referencing. So far, Blu appears to be the only client to provide a quick-view of conversations similar to mobile clients.

Image Previews

Another feature of New Twitter is ability to click and tweet and Twitter will show you, in the pop-out tab, a preview of images linked to popular sharing sites like TwitPic. Mobile clients will typically add a small thumbnail (and some, like Plume, will allow you to view the image without leaving the client, as below).

Once again, the only desktop Twitter client to do this is Blu. The others still require you to click the link, switch to your browser, and then switch back to the client. Why not just use the Twitter website, then?

Your Retweets

Ever want to see which of your tweets have been natively retweeted? Unless you’re on twitter.com (or using Blu) you aren’t likely to find out. Even mobile clients fail at this one, despite the fact that native retweets have been around for over a year.

The Takeaway

So it might seem like Blu is the ultimate desktop Twitter client, seeing as it actually does most of the things listed here, right? Of course not! Much like other desktop clients, Blu lacks the option to configure most of it’s settings (there are exactly three options on its Settings page, and one is font size). Don’t want toast notifications? Screw you! Want to make the mouse scroll wheel scroll fewer than a page at a time? Up yours! Adjust the colour scheme? We’re blu(e)! Have more than one column, change the auto-refresh options, or tweak the font size (alright, they can do the last one)? Go to hell!

The TL;DR of the matter is, if you want a good desktop Twitter client, stick with http://www.twitter.com – it still has the most features, is less annoying, and doesn’t suck as hard.

Server 2008 x64 “Please wait for the Windows Modules Installer” and Boot Looping

29. December 2010 · 4 comments · Categories: "It's a Feature", Microsoft, Servers, Software, Troubleshooting, Virtualization, Windows · Tags: , , ,

Yesterday, while running a large lump of Windows Updates, one of my Windows Server 2008 x64 boxen decided to start boot-looping in the most annoying way. After applying a group of around ten updates and restarting, the server rebooted to the Welcome Screen and hung on the message “Please wait for the Windows Modules Installer” before eventually giving up and rebooting. After that, it booted back to the Welcome Screen and this time displayed the “Configuring Updates Stage 3 of 3 0%” message. All was well, I thought, until two minutes later when the screen went black and the server (gracefully) rebooted again, and then proceeded to loop under the same conditions, regardless of which startup mode is selected (Safe Mode, Last Known Good Configuration Mode, etc… will all produce the same results).

The news, unfortunately, isn’t good. Google was little help in the case, as most of the suggestions didn’t work. The only one that did was the suggestion to rename pending.xml in C:Windowswinsxs, however this comes with a

VERY BIG,
ALL-CAPS,
RED-LETTER WARNING:

By renaming said .xml file, your server will boot. It will still briefly display the Configuring Updates message, however the login screen will appear very shortly after. The problem is that, because there are updates that have been partially installed and aborted, Windows Update is now borked (attempts to run it will only result in a 0x8000FFFF error code, which is a generic code for “Something is broken, but we don’t know what”). Based on my own experience, and that of others, there is really no way to fix it. Sorry. Microsoft KB article 946414 that suggests that this error state can be fixed by deleting the PendingXmlIdentifier value from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINECOMPONENTS, however it doesn’t work in this case, as the entire Windows Update backend is full of half-completed operations that can’t be cleared or rolled back.

In short, if this has happened to you, I regret to inform you that your server is basically FUBAR – the only upshot of this is that as the server will now boot entirely to the desktop, and (unless something is really broken) all services should be working (note: I did have to reboot any Hyper-V virtual machines that were suspended during the reboot in order to regain network access to them). As such, you should be able to do whatever is needed to backup the server before reformatting it. Even in the event you could get Windows Update working again, I wouldn’t trust the server in a production environment.

TL;DR Version: If this happens to you, rename c:windowswinsxspending.xml using a Windows DVD to boot from, and then backup the server in prep for a reinstall.

Cheat: How to get Custom Routes on Google Maps for Android

16. December 2010 · 3 comments · Categories: "It's a Feature", Android, Google, Hack, howto, Short · Tags: , ,

One of my few complaints about the Maps app on Android, even the newly released 5.0 version, is that if you use the Directions feature there is no Alternate Route option. There isn’t even an option to manually re-draw the route, or to enter a second destination like in the web version.

So I found myself faced with an issue – I was about to go on a fairly long trip, however I was planning on taking a route different from the one Google had suggested. While I could use the web version of Google Maps on my phone, I wanted to use the actual app. The solution, as it turns out, is very simple.

The trick is to set everything up on the web version of Maps first. This gets tricky, depending on how sever the changes to the route are. I my case, I only needed to drag one route marker to change the route to go where I wanted it. Here’s the before route, and the after (not my real start and destination, just an example).

So the cheat is actually very straight forward – after finalizing your route in web Maps, copy the link for the map (don’t use the address bar – use the Link button in the top-right corner of the map) and paste it in to a URL shortener like Is.Gd, then enter that URL on your Android phone. The browser will ask if you want to open the link in Maps or another program, so just choose maps and your custom route will appear, with full directions, right before your eyes.

Edit: I should clarify that Google Navigation for Android has a ‘Recalculate Route’ option, however if you aren’t planning on using it, or it isn’t available in your area, this is the solution.

Short: Hide Twitter’s “Who To Follow” ‘Feature’

29. August 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", Short, Twitter · Tags: , ,

One of the reasons I deleted my Facebook accountTwitter Logo was because of all of the useless ‘features’ they threw in, one of which was a box suggesting who to be friends with. Well, Twitter recently added a similar feature called ‘Who To Follow” that suggest people you should follow based on people that are followed by the people you follow. Right.

Well, fortunately this ‘feature’ is easy to disable if you use Firefox or Google Chrome. Simply install the Adblock Plus extension for Firefox (or Adblock for Chrome), subscribe to a filter list, and then manually add the following filter:

twitter.com###wtf-inner

Done! No more “Who To Follow” box!

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