A student came into my office today and wondered if I could assist him with replacing the BIOS battery on his HP Compaq Presario CQ56 laptop. Sure, I said, not knowing what a daunting task I soon would be facing.

Read More → Replacing the BIOS battery on a HP Compaq Presario CQ56 – a complete disaster from an engineering standpoint

The latest Oracle Java RE 7u51 at its normal level of “High” security causes the Dell iDRAC6 virtual console (version 1.95 (Build 05)) to die with this Java trace: java.lang.SecurityException: Missing required Permissions manifest attribute in main jar: https://hostname.some.domain:443/software/avctKVM.jar at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source) at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source) at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.doLaunchApp(Unknown Source) at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) Simply […]

Read More → Dell iDRAC6 and Oracle Java RE 7u51

I find it curious as to why most, if not all, SSD manufacturers are unwilling to disclose the physical disk, the page, and the erase block sizes selected for their SSD products. Such crucial information should be readily available to guide us, the more advanced users, to properly align our partitions and configure efficiency in […]

Read More → SSD manufacturers: Wake up!

Here’s a writeup of how I managed to persuade Subversion‘s svnserve running on FreeBSD to authenticate using SASL, Cyrus’ saslauthd, and LDAP on Novell eDirectory.

Read More → LDAP authentication for Subversion’s svnserve on FreeBSD using SASL, saslauthd, and Novell eDirectory

I wanted to prevent automatic linebreaks in pre-tags in the “Twenty Fourteen” theme. I followed WordPress’ description on how to create child themes. In the /usr/local/www/wordpress/wp-content/themes directory, I created the twentyfourteen_local directory. In this directory I created the style.css file. The file was given the contents shown below. In the Dashboard, I clicked on Appearance. […]

Read More → Creating WordPress child themes and preventing automatic linebreaks in pre-tags