Chaos Laboratory

Offices who employ IBM AS/400, iSeries and i5 hardware may find solace in the fact that they don’t have suffer headaches anymore over the replacement of damaged but hard-to-find hardware.

Performance Data Resources or PDR Inc. is an authorised IBM Business Partner, who’ve been around since 1991 and is a leading solutions provider for IBM’s High-Availability (HA) series of hardware and software. PDR is a…

reliable source for diverse, hard to find, new and refurbished midrange hardware and to assist with issues ranging from simple device address & cabling problems to complex system tuning & troubleshooting assistance.

Apart from the server components PDR has an extensive product range that covers tape drives, modems, printer spares, routers/hubs, remote controllers, terminals, UPS-es etc. The software offerings include Web/Spam filter, POS & Barcode etc.

PDR maintains highly-trained technical staff certified to handle all issues pertaining to the e-Server series who provides you with a wide variety of solutions and services to meet your ever changing business requirements.

The listed prices for the spares are quite decent and they offer free shipping anywhere within the U.S. for packages under 50 lbs.

Next time your router goes for a toss you know where to head to.

Sep 25th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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FeedBurner Email Subscriptions are a great way to spread your blog’s content far & wide – by sending your post feeds directly to the inbox of your subscribers. It’s a particularly viable option for the subscribers who don’t want to get into the hassle of firing up their feed reader every day. Quite a few of my regular subscribers utilise this method.

I’ve always kept a tab on each my feeds using a standard feed reader (FeedReader) and since they appeared fine to me I never really bothered to check on the email based feeds. Recently, I received a bunch of complaints from the email subscribers regarding “broken images” in the emails. Doing a quick check confirmed the reports – the images embedded in the posts were indeed missing. Instead they are replaced by the standard “broken image” icon. It took me a while to figure out the real problem – since the same feed(s) turned up just fine in any given feed reader.

The Problem

The root of the problem lies in how one embeds images and/or links in the posts – i.e. in the absolute or relative URL formats. To save up on typing, I’ve always resorted to relative URLs when specifying the source of the images in my posts. This actually is a good practise since this enables you to transfer your site to another domain without any ensuing hiccups over broken links and images. However, this doesn’t always translate properly in case of RSS/Atom feeds. The best thing to do in such cases is to use absolute URLs – so that the images in the feeds get displayed properly when they are viewed independently of the site or even when incorporated in someone else’s site.

As for me, I don’t follow the standardised WordPress approach of uploading all the images under the /wp-content/uploads/ directory. I have my own folder called /postimage/ where I manually upload the pictures and then link them in the relative format. For example, /postimage/image_file.jpg.

When my site is viewed directly in a browser or through a feed reader, the images are automatically located in relation to the site root, i.e. http://chaos-laboratory.com and thus displayed properly. For emailed feeds, the image source attributes get converted to http://postimage/image_file.jpg – which naturally doesn’t make any sense to your browser.

The Solution

Your best bet out here, is to device some mechanism where you can still use the relative URLs in your posts – but they automatically get translated to the absolute form (inclusion of your domain name before the folder and file information) in case of feeds.

The first method involves some messy editing of the WordPress feed publishing files (found in the /wp-includes/ folder). In any standard WordPress installation, they’re the PHP files starting with the word feed (feed-atom.php, feed-rss2.php etc). You can edit these files and implement Regular Expression matching routines to replace any relative links with the absolute form. This is more of a pro-coder approach.

The second method is to use a readily available WordPress plug-in named URL Absolutifier which works in a similar way – but translates all your relative URLs to their absolute forms for both your site and feeds. This is the approach I’ve taken up for the time being. Currently I am testing out this plug-in and will report my findings shortly. If it manages to fix my problem, I’ll try and implement the code directly into the feed publishing engine (mentioned in the first method).

Any thoughts on this ?

Sep 17th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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Loss of critical data can prove to be one of the most horrifying nightmares specially if it involves official documents. Worst case scenario could lead to one getting sacked. And even if it’s only personal documents, who would ever want to see years of fond memories (photographs, videos etc.) disappear overnight due to some silly hardware malfunction ! The importance of having a proper backup mechanism cannot be stressed on enough.

Home computer backups are usually consist of burning a couple of folders onto a CD/DVD – but more often than not we burn our data once in a blue moon and maintain an oblivious stance for the rest of the time. Very few of us are able to follow a stringent weekly backup schedule. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have some sort of mechanism which would carry out this job for you all on it’s own ? Something on the lines of Click-Once and Forget-It ? Well, there IS.

Just today I came across this automated online backup system named IDrive-E. This service comes with a pretty intuitive backup software which you’ve to install on your computer. Once done, simply point it to your critical data which needs to be backed-up on a regular basis and that’s about it. Periodic continuous backups (with intervals as low as 10mins.) keep happening on their own. Incremental backups are possible too – and the backup mechanism fires up the moment you modify a file on your computer. The backup account doubles up as a file-sharing and collaboration system too. You can grant access to any file / folder stored on the IDrive-E servers to anyone you wish to. The storage space is also mapped onto your computer as another drive, giving you drag-and-drop restore functionality in Windows Explorer. Incidentally, IDrive-E gives you a rudimentary version control system too, in the sense that you can revert back to any of 30 prior versions of a document.

As for the free part – you heard it right! This service is available free of cost to personal / home users albeit with a 2GB space limit. Unlimited storage quota can be acquired by upgrading your account to one of the paid plans which start around $49.50 annually (about $4.95 a month). A pretty inexpensive deal I’d say.

But is it safe to transmit all your personal documents to a remote storage location like this? Absolutely ! All communication with the backup server at IDrive-E are done through an 128-bit encrypted channel and on the server a 256-bit AES encryption routine secures your files with a key that is generated by you.

With IDrive-E, forgetfulness isn’t a vice anymore.

Get rolling with your free account today…

Sep 02nd by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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Online storage has come to be synonymous with mobility these days and there are a horde of sites offering such solutions. However, when it comes to features, performance & security none come close to IBackup.

Though a paid storage solution, IBackup has a wide variety of pricing plans that can satisfy almost anyone. For example, in the Economy plan, 5GB storage is offered for as low as $9.95 per month. That may sound a bit pricey to some, but if you consider the features and services offered – it all begins to look good. IDrive – which is a small piece of code that maps your online drive right to your desktop is just one of them. IDrive gives you the ability to drag-n-drop, open, edit and save files using literally any application by making your online storage account behave like just another folder on your computer.

Now a major drawback in this regard is the latency of such online drives. However, the advanced compression algorithms silently working behind the IBackup’s desktop applications cause them to outperform the rest by a factor of at least 30-50% (in many cases). This could mean significant boost in productivity.

Apart from desktop based folder access, the Web-Manager mode enables to to access your files through a browser too. Offered in this mode are extensive file searching, sharing and collaboration utilities along with streaming tools which allow you to catch-up with your multimedia content from anywhere in the world. Sub-accounts are an integral part of the IBackup accounts, letting you create sub-sections within your main account with fine grained access control.

What more – IDrive is not just limited to Windows. It comes in Mac and Mobile Device (PocketPC, Blackberry, Treo etc.) flavours too.

In the enterprise category, they offer storage and backup solutions for a plethora of platforms (Windows / Linux, Oracle / MS-SQL / Exchange etc.).

As for security of your data, the servers on which IBackup’s accounts reside are continuously monitored for attempted network attacks on a 24×7 basis using sophisticated software tools. Moreover, industry leading NAS/SAN storage devices with multiple levels of redundancy safeguard your data in case of storage device failure.

IBackup has won numerous awards in the online storage category including PC Magazine Editors Choice (2003-2005), Webuser Gold Award (Webuser Magazine) and PCPro Lab’s Best Online Storage Solution.

Still not convinced? Experience it first hand by enrolling for a free trial.

Aug 29th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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