Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Link: http://lawrencechen.net/index.php/2008/03/30/today_might_be_a_good_day_to_upgrade_to

Thought I should mention the latest in start times for MS Money.

Now that some time has past, and I have all my bills reentered again.... I've found that the slow start and it taking 100% of my CPU for a long time when starting problem has returned.

The normal repair of the file didn't yield any problems or do any help. And, I wasn't going to delete all my bills again.

So, figuring it was something related to my upcoming bills, I made a guess that it might be the bills that are estimates of previous bills. Like having it estimate my electric bill (or natural gas) based on the previous 12. Or other bills that vary. I tried reducing the windows on these to see if it would help.

Didn't notice any help.

Recalling that budget was attributed to a slow down...and that the old budget was pretty much meaningless, since it was largely based on a previous life where I had much more means than I do now. I decided to nuke the budget (and try the saving and spending budget)....

There's still a spike in CPU and some lag at start...but it doesn't drag on as long. But, it might be too early to tell if this is the 'fix'.

Now the problem is sticking to this budget.....

Link: http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?p=75053#75053

I discovered that I couldn't send trackbacks from my blog.

I had previously turned it off, because I was getting too much trackback spam...but the new version of b2evolution offers more control to reduce trackback spamming, so I thought I would give it a try.

So far since my site's upgrade, no trackback spam....actually no trackbacks at all.

It did make me wonder if there was a problem with my site accepting trackbacks, but that seemed to work. Eventually, I found that the trackback sending code using fopen(), which is disabled on Dreamhost. Then I had better keywords to search b2evolution forum...and found a post on the subject.

I found a simple class that encapsulated curl, and used that to fix the part of the sending of trackbacks that wasn't working for me.

See my reply to the forum post for details....

I didn't touch the other part (POST method), because I hadn't encountered it yet....so I didn't have a simple test case to play with.

I have previous noted that the reason my Brookstone Weather Forecaster had stopped working was because of this:

I've just received word from our tower providers that the signal coverage in your area has shifted slightly. This change was made by our wireless provider in order to improve signal coverage for the majority of our customers, but unfortunately, this has left you further away from the nearest point of transmission. This means that the device will most likely not receive a stronger signal than it is currently. I'm so sorry for the disappointing news; it is never our intention to inconvenience our customers.

Last weekend, I popped batteries into the Forecaster in the grim hope that it would start working. It didn't. I decided that I would take it into work (Kansas State University), wondering if their idea of majority of customers in my area would be the University.

Well, not there either. Guess what they really mean is Manhattan, KS is not considered of any concern to them.

Guess I'll put searching for some other weather gadget back on my list....