Peter's Useful Crap

Ah, nothing like 12pm in downtown Vancouver. Well, there’s nothing that special about it, but if you forget what time it is, don’t worry — the first 4 notes of our national anthem are played every day at noon by a horn sitting on top of Canada Place.

Curious about the who and what of the horn? I found another blog post that explores the history of the horn.

Anyway, I’m posting about this because I recorded the sound for an ex co-worker of mine who moved back to Norway and missed the daily O Canada reminder! My cheapo mp3 player isn’t the best sound recorder, so it’s not the best quality…

Listen to the horn

According to Nielsen online (as reported on Yahoo! News), Google had a 54% share of the online search market in September 2007. Yahoo! was second with a 19.5% share.

The statistics from this site (using AWStats) for September 2007 showed 21,042 hits or 85% from Google searches (not counting hits from Google Images) and 1,089 hits or 4.4% from Yahoo! searches.

I wonder what’s the definition of “online search market share” and whether Google has 2.75 or 19 times the search dominance of Yahoo!. Of course, many factors come in to play, such as location and type of site…

As I previously reported, I recently switched web hosts for this blog. Transferring files from a cPanel host to another cPanel host is easy as there is a built-in backup feature where you can transfer a backup file directly from the old server to the new server.

After transferring the backup file, I asked the tech support people at the new host to restore the backup. Poof — all my files, domain information, and e-mail addresses were there! The one problem was that my disk usage was three times the amount that it should have been. Of course, one of the causes for that was that the backup file was still sitting in the home folder for my user account. But after I deleted that file, the space taken up was still two times the proper amount (it should have been around 1400 M):

The Disk Usage Viewer page in cPanel showed the correct usage at about 1400 M, but of course the actual disk usage metre was showing 2801 M, way over my quota. This meant that the file in question was under my user account, but outside of my /home/myaccount folder (which was outside of my access permissions). The friendly tech support people told me to delete some ZIP and PDF files that were taking up all the space… needless to say, that wasn’t very helpful.

After some repeated attempts to convince the tech support people to look again, they found the backup file in the /home/cprestore folder, which I’m guessing is the normal place to restore backups from.

Next time you are transferring cPanel hosts and need the host to restore a backup for you, tell them to delete the backup file from both your user’s home folder and the /home/cprestore folder.

Send a Facebook gift, respect the environment, possibly win some prizes (until November 14, 2007)! Unlike TELUS’s “we’ll plant a tree for you if you bring in this flyer” campaign, BC Hydro Power Smart‘s Green Gifts Facebook application is an example of an organization’s green initiative done right.

Green Gifts encourages you to send silly (but very fun) Facebook gifts (essentially, images on a screen) to your friends for free in order to be entered to win cool prizes like a self-sufficient, hand-cranked LED lantern; a solar-powered battery/phone charger; an electricity consumption monitor; and an iPod Nano with solar charger. Along the way, it gives you tips on sustainability and promotes the Power Smart program. Did you know that if you switch from hot water to cold when doing laundry, you’ll use one-sixteenth as much electricity?

It’s great to see the useful projects that have been created ever since Facebook opened up its platform to outside applications. See, Facebook isn’t evil.

Add Green Gifts and have fun learning about sustainability and sharing the message with your friends. You must be a BC resident to be eligible to win prizes, but if you live outside of BC, add the application anyway!

Recently, I switched web hosts for this blog. The new server has both PHP 4 and PHP 5 installed, with PHP 4 running by default. I’ve had some painful experiences in the past where web hosts upgraded to PHP 5 without telling clients, but now I am fully convinced that PHP 5 is the way to go. Unfortunately, when I enabled PHP 5 on the server, things weren’t as peachy as I would have liked:

• The blog displayed properly, but whenever someone posted a comment, they would get a blank page.
• Whenever I tried to log in to the WordPress admin interface, the login page would simply reload.
• I created a simple form that submitted to itself and I discovered (using print_r($_POST)) that $_POST variables weren’t being sent.

All of the above worked fine with PHP 4… so I went back and forth with the nice support people, trying to figure out the problem. I found some other reports that sounded similar to my situation, but they never posted a solution!

Eventually, the technical support guy switched off mod_bandwidth in the Apache configuration file and now everything works magically again PHP 5 it is!

I don’t really know what mod_bandwidth does (maybe it was actually a problem with memory limits?), but if you are having a similar problem, try looking there…