You know how the expression says that problems come in 3’s ? I get 3 lots of 3’s most of time but this week I think I have managed to get rid of 3 problems.

I was posting about my woes at Comluv and just a few days later I finally managed to track down the random freezes on my AsRock M3A790GXH – 128M motherboard and OCZ DDR3 Gold Series RAM

Random crashes on Vista/7 – AsRock M3A790GXH/128M with OCZ DDR3 Gold RAM – Solved

The crashes were driving me crazy, I could never repeat the action that caused the crash and there was never any entry in the event log except for after the reboot. I tried removing one stick and running it with that one to see if it was a faulty stick, it crashed on the first try so I thought that was it but after swapping it with the other stick, the pc crashed within a day.

It turns out that OCZ DDR3 RAM needs 1.9v instead of the regular 1.5v that it would get from the motherboard. A quick visit to the bios and I switched the DRAM voltage to 2.0v and the pc has been up and running for days without a problem. yey!

Dedicated server non responsive after high traffic – solved

Another problem was my server, it is fast and a nice bit of kit but it was getting overloaded at times with so many requests to the CommentLuv API. I had a word with UKFast explaining to them that I expected my server to be able to stay up if a lot of traffic came in. They did their utmost to help and sent me a very nicely priced invoice to beef up my server with an extra 1 GB of RAM.

It’s been up for 7 days and the CTM graphs are showing me that my CPU usage and system load are down a lot from what they’ve been.

My last issue was my laptop charger, it went poof! I did a search online for a universal charger and the best price I could see was over 60 quid! luckily, I was able to buy a Toshiba charger from ebay for 9.99 for next day delivery.

sorted! (for now)

I’ve got so many bloody projects on the go that they’ve all stopped!

Here’s a list for future me to read to feel the future shame..

06 Nov *edit* made some progress!

1. Intense Debate Commentluv
   • I need to split up the css so it’s in a separate file
   • I need to add a check for existence of jquery at the start and load it if not already loaded
   • I need to pretty up the extra url field
   • I need to hide the existing url field on a logged out form and populate it with the value in the one I added with the script
2. Premium Support page
   • Create the different charge bands
   • Create paypal buttons with IPN url
   • Create said IPN receiving script
   • Integrate it with the comluv affiliate plugin for paying referral site
3. Premium Extras
   • Create different charge groups
   • Create paypal buttons
   • Create IPN receiving script
   • Integrate said script with affiliate payment
4. Referral contest
   • Work out the prizes
   • Type up the description post
   • Set up a single area for entries

That’ll do for now, there’s more but I’m getting depressed

I noticed that all my images on the posts here weren’t showing and it was because the url to their location was still pointing at the sub blog on The Comluv Network so I needed a way to edit the database to update the url to point to the files held here.

Easy with a REPLACE function on the wp_posts table.

You just need 3 things for the replace command :

1. The row you’re altering
2. The string you’re searching for
3. The string you’re replacing with

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `post_content` = REPLACE( `post_content` , "fiddyp.comluv.com/files/", "fiddyp.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/" )

It did the whole table of posts in less than a second. Sweet, now all my images are back to normal on this site.

I was invited down to Manchester by UKFast some weeks ago to talk about CommentLuv and answer a few questions about the site and why their server is so bloody awesome (it really is!).

Here’s the vid

Some of my soundbytes got included in another video too, must have said some good things

Some of you may know that I run a Chinese takeaway and delivery shop in Lancaster, UK with my partner and her brother. My role is strictly ‘front-of-house’, customer service, chief geekster and go-and-get-stuff-from-Preston’er (among other things like doing the weekly books and tracking the cost of goods sold etc)

I can’t for the life of me go in the kitchen where it’s all fire and wok but, I can do all the other great things like come up with great marketing ideas, develop online solutions for advertising, answer the phone and understand the myriad of different accents you get when you run a delivery orientated business in a two University town.

Pretty Vs Useful

One of the things that was inevitable for me to do was, The Website.

Now, I class myself as a developer not a designer. The difference? read more… »

Version 1.0 (updated 11 Feb 09)
Requires: Wordpress 2.6 (could work with lesser)
Tested up to : Wordpress 2.7b3

This plugin is no longer supported, please download TwitterLink-Comments which will do a much better job and will still be able to use the existing database table and labels.

Download TwitterLink Comments

So, I was like

later that night

A good friend said..

3 minutes later… (at 4:49am my time)

about a femto second later..

All while I was asleep in bed…

I’m not crying (much) but I would have loved to get an invite, I watched the looong google wave video last week recorded at IO and was totally impressed by the ability to collaborate with others without having to say, “hey, lets collaborate on something” . I’d love to get an account just to connect with other plugin authors, imagine the awesomes that we could produce for Wordpress if we put our heads together?

If you have an invite and want me to bear your children to better the world by giving one to me, I’d love it andrewgbailey (at) gmail.com

I won a free premium membership to WPMU Premium with the 2.0 version of Commentluv and let me tell you, it was one of the best prizes I have ever received! The plugins, themes and support forum were pivotal to getting The ComLuv Network up and running.

Having an account there is pretty much a must-have for anyone considering starting their own blog network on the WPMU platform, the support is first rate and the extra plugin and themes are what makes WPMu such a great platform to work with. My favorite plugin is the Supporters plugin which opens up the ability for you to create your own Typepad style blog network with users becoming “supporters” for your set price subscription which will allow them to have access to premium plugins using the premium plugins plugin (try saying that with a mouthfull of cheese!) and the premium themes plugin.

I’ve got all three (and more) running on The ComLuv Network and they’re already getting me subscription payments that are sent to my Paypal account every month, all I have to do is keep the site growing and provide the things that people want and it should start paying for itself and maybe make some profit before Christmas!

If you’re familiar with Wordpress then it’s just a small hop, skip and jump to upgrade to WPMu so you should take a ganders at their site and enter their contest to be in with a chance to win a years premium membership worth $419

All you have to do is visit this page and follow the instructions. Simple!

No, I don’t mean what you (Americans) think I mean.

I mean, I haven’t smoked an analogue cigarette for over 14 days. I have, however, been sucking on an e-cig instead which is much tastier, (farrrr) less smelly and a whole lot cheaper.

For those that don’t know, this is an ecig

They work by atomizing a liquid made of PG (Propylene Glycerol), nicotine and flavor on a heated element that is activated by sucking on the end of the filter. The atomized liquid looks and feels just like the smoke from a real cigarette and it’s the reason I haven’t needed to stuff a cancer stick in my mouth every half hour for the past two weeks.

I ordered one because I wanted to be able to smoke inside at work, they’re not illegal like the smokey cigs because they don’t use any combustible material or produce any tar or ‘real’ smoke toxins. I was pretty impressed by their performance and with some cherry flavor e-liquid, they taste really nice! So nice in fact that I can’t stomach the smell and taste of a ‘real’ cigarette!

I’m so impressed by them that I am seriously considering starting a blog about them (on the ComLuv network of course) and making a few videos for reviews and to show everyone the things I have learned that make them perform better.

Problem is, I have so much to do that starting another blog would really add more weight to my shoulders which are currently carrying the comluv network, commentluv plugin, takeaway website, commercial projects etc etc.

still, I think I might have to put what I’ve learned about them somewhere on the internets.

I am getting seriously behind schedule, well, if I had a schedule, I’d be seriously behind it.

why?

this is why

and a little closer

It seems Vista or my M3A790GXH motherboard or it’s Radeon HD3300 integrated graphics card or in fact, all three are conspiring to wait until I modify some code in some awesome way and just before I can save it, send the screen in to spaz mode.

I can’t even listen to music or watch movies on my pc now for fear of it crashing completely and destroying any code or blog posts that I have open. It’s really really starting to piss me off!

It looks like it’s a graphics card problem because of the corruption on the screen and also because it seems to happen more often when playing a movie. That’s not exclusive though, it can happen when the pc has been on for a few hours and my blog post/ forum post/ code addition/ research is reaching a critical point. It even happened when there was nothing running except vista sat on the desktop.

I hate it.

new bios, no joy
new gfx card drivers. no joy
new all in one drivers. no joy at all.

Has anyone out there in internet land seen this happen to them? any hardware guru’s know what to do?

I am thinking of buying a new graphics card and disabling the onboard one. Do you think that could help?

Oh, the event log says nothing (except kernel processor power errors at around the time of the crash). I can’t find anything remotely similar from my searches and no amount of driver/bios updates has made a difference. hate it hate it hate it!

please help if you can..