Canfield Research Group LLC

On occasion it seems that jQuery and reCAPTCHA are not the best of friends. I encountered a problem on an Drupal 4.7 (with so many changes for performance it is almost a fork) installation using the reCAPTCHA 4.7.x-1.0 and CAPTCHA 4.7.x-1.2 modules. The user login/registration pages use reCAPTCHA and some custom jQuery module for doing rounded corners (single image, liquid layout). This combination caused the page to white-screen as soon as the jQuery modified the DOM. ... Click to read more

During routine maintenance I noticed that CPAN was failing operate properly and giving me an error I had not seen before.

Undefined subroutine &Compress::Zlib::gzopen called at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/CPAN.pm line 5721

This may have happened when I installed awstats on my CentOS5 VPS. It grabbed a yum for Compress::Zlib. I suspect something
odd happened and and now CPAN fails. I lack the time right now to track this down for sure.

The fix is to manually bring things into compliance. ... Click to read more

Spent the weekend a bit under the weather so I decided to take a crack at centralized administration to multiple Drupal sites. The task is in internal BETA and the documentation is pre-Alpha (being its incomplete, probably has errors and is otherwise very rough). You can see the notes so far at Drupal configurations. I am pretty pleased with the results, having learned quite a bit about Apache reverse proxies and yet more about some Drupal internals.

If during the upgrade to int_meta-6.x-1.0-beta2 you encounter:

user warning: You have an error in your SQL syntax;
check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax
to use near 'NOT NULL' at line 1 query:
   ALTER TABLE int_meta_fields ALTER combine SET NOT NULL ... 

Enter the following query into mySQL using whatever tool is available to you (I use the command line MySQL utility). ... Click to read more

A couple of “critical” updates I received on 7/11/2007 failed to install. The update is in regards to .net:

• KB92836

• KB92835

The following is the procedure I finally used to fix the problem. It is tedious and I am not alone in being adversely affected by this update. This is not the first time that a Microsoft update has bit me. I may have to turn off updates until they are proven to work. Having systems go down without notification due to a failed update is not acceptable. ... Click to read more

1. You may wish to clone your drive first.

I recently had a major problem installing the latest Nvidia drivers from my EVGA 7950 GT. The drivers appeared to install but did not. Uninstalling the Nvidia drivers, a recommended step, did not help. After much Internet searching I successfully installed the drivers. ... Click to read more

Drupal 5 changes the way the cookie domain is calculated. If you are using ports to direct traffic to systems behind a firewall (or for whatever reason) Drupal 5 will errantly add the port to the cookie domain. As far as I can tell the RFC that specifies how sessions are maintained (RFC 2109) does not allow port specifications. The PHP code used in Drupal 5 does NOT strip ports from the cookie_domain. The solutions I found are:

1. Comment or disable the code in session.php that modifies the cookie_domain. This makes it work somewhat like it did in Drupal 4.x from what I can tell.
2. ... Click to read more

The following error was repeated many times in a client’s event log: ... Click to read more

• The COM+ Event System attempted to fire the EventObjectChange::ChangedSubscription event but received a bad return code.

On a client’s system I could not get automatic updates to work. They would download but then fail to install.

I cleared the download cache first. Note that this does NOT solve the problem but does clean things up and that makes diagnosis easier.

• Services / Automatic Updates / Stop
• Delete the C:\windows\SoftwareDownloads directory

• Services / Automatic Updates / Start

I then restored the SensLogn registra settings. These were totally absent (Notufy/SensLogn was missing). I have yet to determin what and when these went missing. ... Click to read more