When you first install VMWare Server, you’ll find the administration area in Firefox or Internet Explorer has a security certificate error. This is because the certificate that ships with VMWare is self-signed (untrusted). One solution is to use a trusted certificate from a third party (Verisign, GoDaddy, etc) but that has costs associated with it and is not actually necessary. If you want your computer to properly trust the certificate, add it to the Trusted Root list.

1. Navigate to the SSL folder where VMWare Server is installed (ex. C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server\SSL).
2. Double-click on RUI.crt.
3. Click “Install Certificate” on the Certificate Information window that pops up.
4. Click “Next” to start the Certificate Import Wizard.
5. Select “Place all certificates in the following store” and click “Browse”.
6. Select “Trusted Root Certification Authorities” and click “OK”.
7. Click “Next” and “Finished”.
8. A Security Warning box will pop up, click “Yes” and then “OK”.
9. Close the Certificate Information window.
10. The SSL warning will no longer show on the VMWare Server login screen.

I’ve also been playing around with some screen capture stuff, so here’s a quick video detailing the steps (silverlight required).

(average: 5.00 out of 5)

No Comments |  Print This Post |

I just found out the hard way that VMWare Server 2.0’s Console plug-in does not work with Firefox 3.6.

Perhaps in the future VMWare will release a compatible plugin, but for now the fix is to use the console plugin for Internet Explorer, Firefox 3.5x or use VMWare Player 3.0.

The following error is what comes up in Firefox 3.6 or any other unsupported browser.

“Cannot access virtual machine console. The request timed out. The attempt to acquire a valid session ticket for MACHINE_NAME took longer than expected. If this problem persists, contact your system administrator.”

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/252218

(average: 4.50 out of 5)

1 Comment |  Print This Post |

Many content management systems and forums were originally created using the latin1 character set and the latin1_swedish_ci collation in MySQL. The problem many of these systems are facing today is the growing demand for multi-language content using special characters that cannot be accurately represented in the latin1 character set. This is where utf8 comes in.

The problem with simply converting a database from latin1 to utf8 is in the data itself. When you convert a database or table to a different character set or collation, it does not convert the content held within the tables. What happens is users end up with ‘strange’ characters in their data.

You can prevent this by taking steps to protect the data before you convert the database or tables.

An overview of the steps:

1. Backup the database. No, really, do it.
2. Alter the string field types to their binary equivalents in all tables. This will protect the data during conversion.
   • VARCHAR to VARBINARY
   • CHAR to BINARY
   • LONGTEXT to LONGBLOB
   • MEDIUMTEXT to MEDIUMBLOB
   • TEXT to BLOB
   • TINYTEXT to TINYBLOB
3. Convert the database and tables from latin1 to utf8 character set and latin1_swedish_ci to utf8_general_ci collation.
4. Convert the binary field types back to their original string field types.
5. Backup the resulting database.
6. Finished

Ex. Generic convert column to BLOB from TEXT

Ex. Generic convert table to new character set

Ex. Generic convert database to new character set utf8

(average: 5.00 out of 5)

No Comments |  Print This Post |

When marking comments as “spam” in Wordpress, it doesn’t actually remove them from the database.

From my own experience, most Wordpress installations have thousands of spam comments in their databases, taking up valuable space.

In the wp_comments table the comment_approved column will show a value of “spam” on any comment marked as spam – and a value of “1″ for any approved comment.

To quickly delete ALL spam comments, execute the following query on your MySQL database:

You can expand the SQL command to delete from multiple databases and multiple tables, quickly and effectively.

(No Ratings Yet)

1 Comment |  Print This Post |

Wordpress has long had a feature that dynamically replaces standard characters with their more visually appealing (and perhaps more accurate) symbols. In some cases the formatting may not be desirable.

Last year I wrote a few articles on Exchange Server errors. The errors typically follow the form of 0xNumber, ex. 0x8000000F. What wordpress was doing was replacing the “x” in the error with a “times” or multiplication symbol. So 0x0 would show up as 0×0.

Dynamic Replace Active

Dynamic Replace Inactive

My concern was that search engines DO distinguish between “x” and the symbol for multiplication. So when people were searching for 0x8004011D my posts did not show up, but when searching for 0×8004011D or 8004011D they did. If you do a google search with the “times” symbol instead of an “x” for exchange errors, you will find many posts otherwise hidden from the world.

The last string of the regular expression below represents a case for when there is a character followed by an x and by another character without spaces. The x will be replaced with the special character for “times” or &# 215 ;

The characters in the image below are the symbols for replacement. Generally the quotes are not misleading to search engines.

The following dynamic string variable is found in the \wp-includes\formatting.php file. If you wish to remove all dynamic characters, simply delete both lines and your wordpress posts will render correctly.

$dynamic_characters = array
('/\'(\d\d(?:’|\')?s)/', '/(\s|\A|")\'/',
'/(\d+)"/', '/(\d+)\'/', '/(\S)\'([^\'\s])/', '/(\s|\A)"(?!\s)/',
'/"(\s|\S|\Z)/', '/\'([\s.]|\Z)/', '/(\d+)x(\d+)/');

 $dynamic_replacements = array
('’$1','$1‘', '$1″',
'$1′', '$1’$2', '$1“$2',
'”$1', '’$1', '$1×$2');

If you only want to remove the “x” replacement symbol ( × ) use the following lines in formatting.php in place of the originals.

(No Ratings Yet)

1 Comment |  Print This Post |