Richard & Stephanie Sipe

Problem: A classic Contribute 3 Unknown Error message mysteriously disables a connection that was previously working.

“Contribute has disabled your connection to this website because an unknown error occurred. For more information contact this website’s administrator.”

Solution: According to Adobe’s Contribute Knowledge Base (Macromedia was bought by Adobe recently which can be a bit confusing) the error is caused by a corrupt hub file that resides on the server. Nifty huh? To fix this error you need to remove that hub file.

IMPORTANT: Removing this file is necessary BUT it will remove you as an administrator and all other users from the server’s master list. This is not a huge issue because all of their settings remain valid and they merely need to click “Connect” and then “Next” to reconfirm all of their settings and recreate their entry in the server’s hub file. This is important to remember, though, because if you are in a larger organization; you will need to do some preemptive education so your users do not panic.

To remove this file:
1) Connect to the server (through FTP, local, etc)
2) Browse to /_mm/
3) Locate the cthubXXXXX.csi (XXXXX is a random string unique for each installation) and back it up to your local drive
4) Now that you have a safe copy, Delete the hub file

This should take care of your “Contribute has disabled your connection to this website because an unknown error occurred. For more information contact this website’s administrator.” Contribute error.

              

TMobile is currently offering a free trial of their HotSpot WIFI service for Windows Vista customers until April 30th. What! you say. Where is the Mac OSX love? Well it tourns out TMobile really doesn’t mean their trial is for Microsoft Vista users only…

Here is how to take advantage of the TMobile Vista Free Trial on your Mac running Firefox.

First we need to make TMobile think we are on a Vista PC running IE 7 instead of on a Mac running Firefox Here are the steps to go incognito.

1. Download the Firefox User Agent Switcher extension.
2. Restart firefox
3. Select: Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options…
3. Click “User Agents” and then “Add”
4. Fill out the window with following info:
Description: Internet Explorer 7 (Windows Vista)
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
App Name: Microsoft Internet Explorer
App Version: 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
Platform: Win32
5. Click OK to save this new User Agent

Second lets put on our disguise and sign up for that trial.

1. Select Tools > User Agent Switcher > Internet Explorer 7 (Windows Vista)
2. Browse to http://hotspot.t-mobile.com/vista/
3. Sign-up at the page and enjoy your free WiFi until April while sipping a cappucino at Starbucks or browsing your favorite periodical at Barnes & Noble.

Technorati Tags: TMobile, Vista, WIFI, Free Trial, Mac

              

I have been a fan of micro brews ever since I moved to the Northwest about 9 years ago. Before I moved out to Washington state I had an experience with a home brew in North Carolina when a friend attempted his first brew, and it was terrible. About two years ago I brewed beer with a friend in Hillsboro, Oregon at his house and it was great. He made a Corona clone and it came out excellent. He had setup a pressurized CO2 system in a fridge with a pony keg. It was such a fun experience with a great result that I decided I wanted to brew my own beer sometime.

Turns out that our neighbor here in Battle Ground is a chemist and has been brewing beer for 10 years. I went over to their place for a brew day a while back and he made a great beer. I also had more of his home brews at their yearly Oktoberfest and they were equally great.

This past Christmas we decided to split a batch. We brewed a batch of Nut Brown Ale at our place. It was a rainy day but we were able to have a pretty good time under one of our covered patios. We had one little issue when we didn’t have enough light malt so we had to add some dark. We bottled the beer around the 21st of December. Of course we tried some when we were racking it and, although it wasn’t carbonated yet, it was really good.

I gave my mom and sister a 6 pack of our home brewed nut brown ale and it was a big hit. The taste, color, and quality came out amazing. I made a label to put on the beer (see the image that starts this post) and called it Sunshine Brewing.

Overall the process was a ton of fun and I can see why people get so into the process. I am looking forward to when we brew our next batch. Stay tuned to see what we come up with.

              

The Problem: Lightbox Prev and Next Navigation being visible onMouseOver is not obvious enough
After enabling Lightbox on my picture gallery I quickly realized that the onMouseOver Prev and Next on the Lightbox were way to confusing for my viewers The problem with the design it the Prev and Next links on the Lightbox pop-up are mystery navigation. If you don’t know to mouse over the right or left side of the image in order to get the links to appear, you don’t.

The Solution: Change lightbox.css to make the navigation graphics always visible
My solution was to change the stylesheet (lightbox.css) to fix the display of the prev and next links to always be visible. I am OK with the prevLabel.gif and nextLabel.gif always showing on top of the image because it makes the navigation so much more obvious.

I know this fix is pretty obvious to the coder types but since many people who use the LightBox Library on their website are not so savvy I hope to take the mystery out of this fix. Simply:
1) Download the new Lightbox CSS File.
2) Remove the .txt from the end of the filename.
3) Make sure the nextLabel.gif and prevLabel.gif and blank.gif are pointed to in the right directory (if they are not in the ./img/ directory you need to change anywhere it says img/ to your directory name, for example images/)
4) Upload the new lightbox.css file to replace the old one

              

Today Digg.com has been “Out of Service” quite a few times. Websites generally are prone to hardware and software issues but it surprising in this case because of the scale of Digg and its past stability.

I wonder if they have something brewing there in the way of changes or if some apocoliptic battle rages between then and some evil hacker! Well … that or the Magic Bullet keeps tripping the circuit breaker.

The crazy thing is all you have to do is hit refresh and you get digg instead of the unavailable graphic. Weird.