Dan’s Web Spot

Introduction

WD MyPassport Essential 500GB USB Hard Drive

If you've ever used disk cloning software such as Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, you know that you can usually boot your computer from the product CD for backup (except Ghost) and restore operations. With an external hard drive attached (USB), you can typically back up a complete disk image to this destination as long as the product you are using has drivers that support external USB drives.

My favorite backup software is Acronis True Image, which I use to create periodic drive images so that in the event of a catastrophic drive failure, I can partition a new drive, restore the latest image, and be up and running in a couple of hours with little user interaction. This sure beats reloading Windows and all the applications and settings I have already invested the time into setting-up (at least one day, maybe two initially, and then countless moments spent tweaking from there).

The Acronis media disk lets you create a bootable USB flash drive or a CD image that you can use to burn a CD for booting your computer. My preferred method for backups is running automatically as a background process to a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. While this does work, network backups over wireless-G can be painfully slow... » More...

I found a link recently to an article about using your cell phone with your laptop (or desktop PC in a pinch) to get on the Internet. Maybe you're traveling and you can't find a Wi-Fi hotspot nearby, or you don't want to pay extra for Wi-Fi access somewhere, or maybe you can't afford to drop the money on a new wireless broadband card and services fees for your laptop.

If this sounds like you, then check out this article: How-To Roundup: Modem Tethering. Scroll to the bottom to select your phone type and download the appropriate software for free. (Note that you need to have a data plan with your cell service provider.)

The instructions worked out great for me and my Motorola V3m phone...

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Introduction:

In my last post, I outlined the XAMPP program and what it can do. Unfortunately, I hit a bit of a bump in the road, and wanted to share with others how I got around it.

Once I installed XAMPP, set up a new local database for testing, extracted a fresh copy of WordPress in the new c:/xampp/htdocs/wordpress folder I created, I opened wp-config-example.php to add my database and account info, and then saved it as wp-config.php.

All good so far, right? Well, not exactly. To begin the WordPress installation, I pointed my browser to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php
I entered my user name and email address and clicked on the next button.

At this point is where the snag came in: normally a randomly-generated initial blog password is displayed and/or sent to the email address you provided at initial setup for you to use when logging in for the first time. After you log in, you can change your password to whatever you like. However, when running your blog on your hard drive as localhost, you may not ever get that initial email, and worse yet, you can't access your blog's admin panel to change anything. If your email service is not set up, or if your firewall is blocking such communication, there is still a way to get in. Note that this applies to a locally-running XAMPP-powered test blog as well as a live, web host-powered blog. » More...

While I was performing some extensive WordPress plugin compatibility testing, I was getting frustrated with having to wait for what seemed like an eternity for page refreshes to occur. I did a little Google-ing and found an excellent open-source software package called XAMPP that runs on Windows.

XAMPP screen shot

It lets you run Apache (a web server program), PHP5 (a server programming language), MySql (a database program), FileZilla (an FTP program), and Mercury (an e-mail server program) on your local hard drive running a 32-bit version of Windows. You can manually start the programs/servers or run them as installed services. Here is a good XAMPP installation tutorial.

The XAMPP program lets you install a test blog locally on your hard drive, which greatly speeds up development and testing. » More...

This article saved me a lot of headaches when trying to upgrade my WordPress blog database from MySQL4 to MySQL5:

Restore your WordPress Database From MySQL4 to MySQL5

Follow these easy-to-implement, non-destructive instructions and your blog's posts and pages will load faster than ever. Bye-bye pokey MySQL4! » More...