Category Archives: Technology

After the recent iTunes update (10.5) I noticed the

AppleMobileDeviceService.exe

was suddenly chewing up CPU – everything still seemed to be working, I could still sync devices, it was just grinding the PC towards an early grave.

A bit of Googling suggested it’s a common problem and previously a reinstall of iTunes was the suggested fix – unfortunately this didn’t work for me, nor it would seem for a lot of people at version 10.5.

What did work for me was doing a

netsh winsock reset

from a command prompt (as Administrator) followed by a reboot.

Apparently the Windows TCP/IP stack can get corrupted and this will reset the Winsock Catalog to its default state – i.e. one that works properly.

It certainly fixed my iTunes problem and as a bonus the PC now boots faster and general network performance seems to be improved – one to remember!

Not been paying much attention to the blogs recently, just realised we should have upgraded to WordPress 3.2.1 some time ago. Unfortunately that was predicated on an upgrade of the MySQL database from 4 to 5 so took a bit longer than it should have.

However all blogs hosted here have now been migrated to MySQL 5 and WordPress 3.2.1 so hopefully that’s us all up to date.

If you do spot any problems let us know – and maybe I’ll post a more interesting update on here at some point…

There’s a new version out with many bug fixes including (but not limited to)

• Some security hardening to media uploads
• Performance improvements
• Fixes for IIS6 support
• Fixes for taxonomy and PATHINFO (/index.php/) permalinks
• Fixes for various query and taxonomy edge cases that caused some plugin compatibility issues

You should upgrade as soon as you can – this sites been done, and of course that’s broken the access via the iPad application again.

I could just reapply the bodge below to get it working (kudos to NamesCo btw for commenting on the post) but not sure I’ll bother just now.

There is an application for the iPad that allows you to manage your WordPress blogs directly, its actually a bit basic but hopefully that will improve over time. However I simply could not get it to talk to this blog – it would just keep throwing a ‘Blog returned invalid data’ error.

Turns out in their infinite wisdom NamesCo (our web hosts) have decided xml-rpc is bad

The standard xmlrpc.php script is quite commonly installed with many free blogging. Unfortunately, it is quite easy to exploit and often abused by amateur ‘hackers’ and spamming groups for malicious purposes.

However, most users that have the script on their sites don’t actually use it, therefore we have decided to block access to that filename to protect those users.

If you wish to use an XMLRPC service, simply rename the file to something like ‘xmlrpc_post.php’ and reference that script instead in your posting service.

Which seems a bit like saying SkyDiving is dangerous so you cant do it – but its ok to put on a parachute and jump out of plane as long as you call it PlaneJumping instead.

So in order to get it the iPad application to work we first have to rename the xmlrpc.php script to e.g. planejumping.php – you can call it anything you like NamesCo have just blocked access to files called xmlrpc.php.

But that’s not enough because clearly wordpress expects this file to be called xmlrpc.php and the file name is unfortunately not configurable.

Instead you have to hack the wordpress php scripts by hand at the current release (3.1) that means updating these files

planejumping.php (previously known as xmlrpc.php)
wp-includes/class-wp-xmlrpc-server.php
wp-includes/general-template.php

Simply replace all references to xmlrpc.php in these files to planejumping.php instead and you should be good to go.

I’ve never been a big fan of Google Calendar, mostly because the user interface is a bit ordinary – I really don’t like the Arial font that a lot of the Google applications seem to force on you.

Recently stumbled across the Google Redesigned plugin for Firefox though, which does a very good job of prettying up Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader.

I’m sure its subjective but I find it preferable to the default Google look and feel – well worth a look in my book.

Been busy travelling again, but thought we were overdue an update on the great broadand switchover of 2009. It was actually pretty much a non-event, I was away in Alderley Edge on the day we switched over and by the time I got back the phones were already with the Post Office (1571 message had changed) but Virgin broadband was still working via the Netgear router. That was just because it had been connected for days though, a bounce of the router and it would no longer reconnect.

So far so good then, broadband had switched over to the Post Office but unfortunately they hadn’t supplied the username and password for the router. Instead they provide a preconfigured Zyxel router for you to use, so we plugged that in and it worked first time. Unfortunately as a router its rubbish, and as pre-configured by the Post Office its a positive menace.

Using the default admin password of 1234 and leaving the configuration ports open to the internet is not a good combination, so plan was to extract the username and password from the router and plug them into the Netgear. Logging into the router clearly wasn’t a problem with the default password, and the ADSL admin screens showed the username in the clear (annoyingly similar to the broadband account name but not quite the same) and the password as a row of blobs.

Fortunately in keeping with the general naffness of the Zyxel router to see what the password actually was you just needed to do ‘View Source’ in your browser, so we plugged the details into the Netgear and the switch over was complete.

Its been working flawlessly for the last couple of weeks, and we’re getting about 25% faster downloads than we did from Virgin – and for half the price.

I’ve used 30 Boxes to store my calendar for a few years now, simple interface and accessible from wherever I happen to be. The only minor annoyance has been the inability to work with Evolution the integrated mail/calendar app for the Gnome desktop.

Evolution allows you to subscribe to web calendars, but subscribing to a 30boxes web calendar just used to crash the backend (Bug# 429317). It’s taken a while but thanks to Petr we’ve discovered its down to the way Evolution handled a redirection to a relative URI. He’s written a patch for 2.25.3 which seems to fix the problem, so it should hopefully be included in 2.26 which is due around March.

For anyone that can’t wait, and who might find it useful, I’ve written an ebuild for Gentoo that will patch the current stable version (2.22.3) which you can download here. I’ll probably do another ebuild for 2.24.x as soon as that goes stable in Gentoo, as I’ve now got used to having my 30boxes appointments appearing on my desktop…