Valters Bože

Just had a very irritating problem at work. Since I changed my corporate windows network password (it’s a must on regular basis) I need to use the new password for web browser proxy servers. AFAIK the Google Chrome browser was asking for credentials when I installed it. I probably checked “save password” because it never shows up again. Now after changing my windows password Google Chrome wouldnt work – it just shows “This webpage is not available.” for every page or tab. I tried disabling/enabling proxy, used “chrome://net-internals/#tests” to check whats wrong and in the EVENTS section i found that PROXY_AUTH was returning “Access Denied” so I knew it was the new password that didn’t work. After long trial&error tinkering and googling, this is what worked for me:
1. for the Google Chrome shortcut Right-Click (in Windows) and click Properties.
2. Find the Target section (it should end with ..chrome.exe” )
3. append to Target: “–proxy-server=PROXY-SERVER-IP:PORT”
4. it should end like this: \Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” “–proxy-server=10.10.2.2:3128″ (example ip)
Thats it! Worked for me, it even didn’t ask for the new password!

Currently a lot of users are confused – Google Adsense monthly balance shows more money than you receive in next month`s payment. When payment is issued you probably wonder “ok, maybe the rest of the money will be paid some time later”. But it won`t happen. You might see something like this:

Balance at end of April €223.74
May 24 Payment issued (€98.10)

There is a problem in Google Adsense payments page and they`re trying to fix it. The montly balance is shown incorrectly. To show correct values – go to payments page and change the “view: Last 3 months” dropdown to “View: All time“. Now you should see tha real monthly balance at the end of each month, unfortunately it`s smaller than you hoped ;)

If you`re using drupal, you might encounter this error, when upgrading to Drupal 6.16:
Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in path_to_drupal/includes/common.inc on line 1426
It happened to me when I tried to create a node that is unpublished (“Published” checkbox is unchecked) or trying to unpublish a published node.
There various modules that conflict with the 6.16 drupal core common.inc file which is changed in 6.16.
This is a fast fix of core file and it works for me.
Open up the includes/common.inc file, search for:

function url($path = NULL, $options = array()) {
(around line 1418)

Replace this code:

Recently finished another website in Flash. It is for a nice hotel in Latvia with SPA & restaurant.
I have switched back to Actionscript 2.0 in Flash, because AS 3.0 is a bit too much headache and tough learning curve.
Website is based on SWFAddress deep-linking structure and uses other free Actionscript libraries. Database is MySQL driven, connected in simple XML loadData manner. All text data can be edited with WYSIWYG type editor.

Visit: http://www.annashotel.com

Just made a simple page for product “TurboXS KnockLite“, an engine knock (detonation / pre-ignition) warning light. Simple 3-page website, the domain was available, so I just made and informative page with description, installation instructions and links to online shops. If Google will like my site, I`ll add some AdSense banners and put referral links to online shops..

If you`re using some kind of CMS, usually its normal that each URL works with or without trailing slash, e.g. these URLs would be the same:

http://example.org/about

http://example.org/about/

Still Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines treat them as different urls and gives penalty as they are dupliate URLs with identical content.
You have two options – to add or to remove the trailing slash. After a bit of reading I chose to remove the slash from my celica site, because I`m using Drupal CMS that removes trailing slashes for new content and I don`t really want to hack the CMS plugins. To alter the URLs, you need to edit .htaccess file at the root directory of your website ( http://example.org/.htaccess )
Add this code to your .htaccess file to remove trailing slashes:

I encountered problems for last 6 months to upload music on my dj site – www.djnet.lv . I have flash CMS admin on djnet.lv but the songs are uploaded to other site of mine, where HDD space is not a problem. about half year ago I couldnt upload songs from some computers, now its from all computers. It just stops. I had suspicion it had something to do with new Flash Player versions 9 and 10. So today I fixed it just by uploading simple file to my file hosting server: crossdomain.xml.
Flash player always looks for domain.com/crossdomain.xml file when it accesses its contents or uploads something. The is what my security policy file contains:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
<site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="all"/>
<allow-access-from domain="www.djnet.lv"/>
<allow-access-from domain="djnet.lv"/>
<allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="*"/>
</cross-domain-policy>

Today i discovered a very stupid configuration in Imagecache module for Drupal. Imagecache saves all presets (thumbs, big images, etc) in subdirectory /sites/default/files/imagecache/[presetname]/. Of course this is conflicting with robots.txt, which says “Disallow: /sites/”. I created a few sites that really are targeted for Google`s image search, but I couldn`t find a single pic in google. This is so annoying to find out. I just removed the deriative in robots.txt and will update this post with results soon.

Just created a page for my car: Toyota Celica ST185 (AWD Turbo). (Go google, fetch it nicely)
Since i`m taking a lot of pics while doing repairs and tuning, it could work out good for SEO when people search for images through Google. For now its pretty basic site, but i will spread it into different sections – articles on repairs, tuning, photo galleries by tags, etc. Well, just because.
Site is based on drupal. I love it!

After a quick search I didn`t find how to simply switch off new user registration in Drupal. But it has even better feature – access roles. You can specify what usernames/emails/hostnames can access the members area or even register as user.
To disable new user registration, you have to add access rules for existing users. Go to yoursite.com/admin/user/rules/ and add a new rule. For example, first add an allow rule for user “admin“. Then for other existing users. After you have finished, add a deny rule and write “%” in the username field. This will allow to login only the allowed usernames and deny everything else. If the username is not defined it cannot be also registered.
You can even make private site and say to your friends add e.g. “-foo” to their usernames. So you make an allow rule with “%-foo” in username field.
The reason I need to block new user registration is spam. New users register everyday with random spam usernames.