Canfield Research Group LLC

The startup sound for my Q9c from Sprint is annoying, especially when it occurs after a late night automated backup. While the startup sound respects the volume and silent modes, turning the phone to silent every night and remembering to reset it in the morning is silly. The steps needed are: ... Click to read more

Quicktime seemed to have gotten very confused on my XP box. It seemed to be only partially installed and would not work nor uninstall. The uninstall failed trying to locate a file in my personal temp directory (which had been cleaned). CCleaner failed to remove it and instead generated an MSI Installer error. The solution was to download and install MS Installer Cleanup utility. Run it and select Quicktime. Then re-install QuickTime.

It appears that OpenVZ and CentOS can have some issues regarding udev. After installing the “Development tools” yum package I found myself unable to do anything in the container. It generated an error on ssh, vzctl enter,etc.

Unable to open pty: No such file or directory

There are numerous posts on fixing the problem. most remove the udev package but that can be problematic as some packages (ImageMagick for example) seem to require udev. For those packages it seems best to leave udev present but disabled. ... Click to read more

My XM Radio (in my GPS) died a number of weeks ago. I kept thinking of getting it fixed but all the GPS units I am looking at use FM/Cellular for traffic reports and paying for radio only just didn’t make a lot of sense for someone who drives 7-10K miles a year, I do have an MP3 player after all. Traffic updates on a GPS on the other hand are a nice luxury I enjoy in my traffic riddled area.

I went to xmradio.com to press the big-red CANCEL button, but no such button could be found. The FAQ online indicates how to cancel but the directions did not reveal a magic link to me. ... Click to read more

On occasion /dev/null on one of my virtual servers goes bad. It becomes:

-rw-r--r--  root root

Which causes all kinds of horrible issues, The quick correction for this is to re-create the device. This should work on most environments including native, OpenVZ, Parallels (Virtuozza), etc.).

sudo rm /dev/null
sudo mknod /dev/null c 1 3
sudo chmod 0666 /dev/null

If all worked correctly then /dev/null will be (as seen with ls -la /dev/null):

crw-rw-rw-  1 root root 1, 3 

I have not found out why this is happening. ... Click to read more

I often need to run multiple browser sessions simultaneously where each session is isolated from the other.

• Testing a web page design for multiple logins (Admin, registered, privileged, etc. users)

• Running a page that tends to crash FireFox (like Flash pages).

Under Linux (Ubuntu in this example) you can do this one of two ways:

1. Create a new user, open a terminal and ssh to that account and firefiox &. This creates a fully isolated session but is a bit tedious.

• This is the best method for 100% isolation.

2. Create multiple Firefox profiles. ... Click to read more

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

I wanted an automated way to display the site content in a block and the tag clouds module seemed a good fit. ... Click to read more

Long time ago, in the world of Drupal 4.6 and 4.7 I had a module named L2. This was never hosted at Drupal, as I considered it an experiment and released it via the web site as such. I tried to use the various linking modules available for Drupal 6, but for one reason or another they did not fulfill my needs or made the conversion of my content to difficult. L2 is alive and well and has been improved for Drupal 6. If you were a user of L2 please drop me a note and I will add you to the list of BETA testers.

L2 is a general purpose linking system that acts as an input filter. ... Click to read more

Canfield.com is a live test bed of various Drupal modules and custom code. I try to test it on my site after we do some limited QA before we roll out the code to customers site. Nothing like a live BETA! Today I added Google Analytics and Google AdSense to the site. ... Click to read more