Does this look familiar? If so, I may have your answer - read on…
I recently had to view an application being built by one of my company’s partners and it uses Shockwave to render images/media. Upon trying to view the application, the “missing plugin” icon was displaying and could not find a suitable plug-in to play the application.

Given I am on an Intel-based Mac, I learned that for Shockwave to run, you have to exit out of your browser, configure the Application (Firefox) to run in Rosetta Emulation Mode, then download Shockwave, install and you’re good to go. Come on Adobe! Let’s get Shockwave running in Universal Binary - after all, it’s Universal right?

Instructions From Adobe

Upon launching our new website, we wanted to enable a keyword availability checker so people can check the availability of keywords before ordering. To make it more convenient, I wanted the keyword they were checking to automatically populate the “Desired Keyword” field on the order form. Given the keyword checker was running on a different server and pulled in using IFRAME, due to security restrictions on browsers, it could not trigger events on the parent page.

SOLUTION: URL Hash (#)

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At long last, my “wish list” of things I wanted in our company website have been delivered. The beauty is in its simplicity. The snapshot below shows our new Flash demo movie, illustrating how Goomzee Text Marketing For Real Estate works. We also launched an affiliate program. Approved applicants can earn commission for every visitor they refer to Goomzee.com who places an order. Check it out!

As we roll on towards Thanksgiving holiday, we are looking to update the holiday graphic for goomzee.com and found this funny turkey photo.  We won’t be using it but I thought it was still worth sharing.

Perhaps there is a domain name you want to find the owner, or perhaps just check the nameservers, status, domain expiration date or other information about a domain name.  You can look in a variety of places but my favorite is the following:

http://www.whois.sc

Click the link above and enter your website address.  You may learn more than you knew about your site, including similar sites, Alexa search ranking, SEO plain text, etc.

It happens to us all.  Your website is not accessible and you need to know if it’s just your computer, your ISP or if it’s a serious problem.  Usually this is a DNS issue with your ISP or internal network but there is a tool you can use to view the responsiveness of your domain from servers around the world.

http://internetsupervision.com

Click the link above and on the right-hand side, enter the website address in question.  You can leave the email field blank.  Click the submit button and wait for the results.

I am reprinting recommended startup sequences from a Mac forum for my personal reference. Thanks to MOFS for the original post:

Keywords: OS X; startup; won’t; boot; screen; funky; help…

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There used to be a deer crossing sign down the road but they took it down because people kept hitting the deer. 

After installing the new thermocouple, the hot water heater worked and heated the water in the tank. Thereafter, the pilot went out yet again. I contacted the retailer and they warrantied the gas valve but would have to charge me for labor to install. I decided to remove and replace the part myself and learned a few tricks along the way.

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While I was traveling last week, my wife ran into issues with our 15-month-old hot water heater; the pilot light would not stay lit. She managed to re-light it and got hot water for a single use but it went out again. Upon my return, we once again faced cold water. We turned to the Internet to try and diagnose the issue and found that if a pilot would light, but not stay lit, it could be 3 potential issues:

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We were invited to attend the Austin Board of Realty annual tradeshow, the Realty Round Up. Goomzee Connect was VERY well received and we have some partners interested in working with us to promote our services throughout Texas. Here is a photo of our booth the day before the show (without all the table props).

My fortune from lunch yesterday.  I’ve never seen one like this and ironically, I’m a computer guy. I had to share - enjoy!

We layed out the boards on two 2×4s held up by cinder blocks so we could stain them. After about 30-45 minutes, we flipped over the boards and stained the opposite site. Another 45 minutes and although still damp, I proceeded to install the first batch and get the fence started. The original fence was out of plumb so it will take a little finesse for a couple custom pieces to tie it all together. See below.

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In my last post (below) I upgraded the electrical service to the house to support a hot tub and any other needs in the future. Prior to the delivery of the hot tub, I decided to install a 6-foot cedar privacy fence using the existing chain link fence posts. Given my neighbor has a dog, we thought it would be best to leave the chain link side towards his yard to protect our fence.

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To support the new hot tub, and any other upgrades to home appliances and amenities, we decided to upgrade the electrical service to the house from 100 amp to 200 amp. This requires collaboration with the carpenter (me), city (building permits/inspectors), electrician and power company. You first get your permits, then schedule w/ the utilities (24 hours notice) to shut the power off to the house, then have the electricians install the new service so inspectors will pass it and “green tag” the job, otherwise the power company will not hook the power back up. See below:

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Jamie and I had to pose for photos at her parents’ house the other day and we really liked one.  Given we don’t take too many photos, I decided to publish.

I’m not the most photogenic person so have to take advantage when they turn out okay. 

I visited iStock Photo today and it was inaccessible but their error message was pleasantly humorous.  I reckon if every system had error messages like this, people would be a much better mood when calling tech support.  Enjoy!

Ahhh… the application made a boo boo. 

Mine was fantastic, obviously!    Have a great day and remember, things could be worse.

I recently ran across an issue where emails were being rejected from one server as it did not resolve reverse DNS. It was sending email alerts for certain events and we had no way to tell if mails were failing as spam filters were dumping them into a black hole somewhere. The solution was to modify our system to publish alert emails to a database table instead, then have a separate application check for unsent mail in the database and send it using SMTP authentication from our standard mail server. This is likely a common need for various systems so I thought I’d share the design/source to help others.

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I always forget because it’s infrequent that I actually have to maintain servers but from time to time I have to match our in-house dev box with production environments. This is primarily for my recollection but hopefully it helps others too:

Checking if package exists:

rpm -q package-name

Downloading RPMs from remote site:

wget http://www.site.com/path/to/file-with-long.name.i386.rpm

Installing new package:

rpm -ivh file-with-long.name.i386.rpm

Removing package:

rpm -e file-with-long

Updating existing package:

rpm -UvH file-with-long.name.i386.rpm