Ask Virgil

I had the misfortune recently of installing XP SP2 onto a good friend's Dell Inspiron 1150. I call it mistfortunate because immediately after having done this and rebooting, the whole thing ended up being incredibly slow, taking about 5 times longer to do anything than would be normally expected. In...

I just had this happen to me, and came across the following bit of advice from Google: This probably won't help the routing issue, but try running the following commands at startup: echo 1024 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/neigh/default/gc_thresh1 echo 2048 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/neigh/default/gc_thresh2 echo 409...

For a couple of months now, I'd been experiencing a really annoying problem which is slighly hard to describe in general terms but which I can relay by way of an example. Let's say I double-clicked on filename.extension - and this is an extension that I don't yet have associated with anything. I'd g...

It's actually a known Microsoft XP bug that they cover in Knowledge Base Article 822430 . But, although they have a fix, it's not publicly available. In order to get it, you have to phone them and somehow convince them that you're worthy of receiving it. (Plus pay for the phone support.) However, th...

This board lets you send message (like email) to other board members. (The menu item at the top that, if you have no messages, reads "You have no new messages" .) These are messages that only you have access to - except that they are stored in the server's database in plain text. This migh...

Also, there's a really good set of additional smilies that I've installed here. Aside from actually composing something and clicking on the "Add Smilies" link, you can get a preview of them here , and download them from here . To fix things so that they all fit into the popup window, you n...

I recently realised that the phpBB forum I go to most often ( MozillaZine ) while not having the smiley "control panel" that's part of a default install (I don't have it here either) does have a little link underneath "Message body" titled "Add Smilies" - which you see ...

This one is less obvious that it should be. Even though there is help on the "mysqlimport" command (which is the tool to use for this) there is no clear example that helped me figure it out the first time I wanted to try this. Let's say that you have the following text, where the fields ar...

The following will make "Announcement" appear as dark red, "Sticky" appear as dark green, and "Moved" appear as light grey. (If you use a different colour scheme, just edit the colours used in the stylesheet in the last step.) With all of the following steps, it's assum...

Okay, problem solved. I re-installed the older version of the module and checked the code there. Then I reinstalled the new version again and simply replaced the new code with the old code which looked like this: # create a 'blank' dbh my($this, $privateAttrHash); $privateAttrHash = { 'Name' => $dsn...

Oops - not so fast. While this fixed Webmin, it broke Movable Type (my blog software). With this change, when I try to access the administrative portion of MT, I get an error message about a "bare def". Changing it back again (to "undef") allows Movable Type to work again. So - e...

I recently upgraded to the latest Perl module of DBD::mysql (2.9002). After having done so, I discovered that I was unable to access the "Permission" sub-modules of Webmin's MySQL interface. When trying to do so, I got some kind of error message involving Perl, a hash, and not being able t...

I'm talking about building a Web page using CSS here. I fought with this one for several days until I hit on the solution. Essentially, I wanted a way of having the bottom box's height be "100% - X pixels", and give it an overflow scrollbar. But you can't mix percentages and unit measureme...

If you're running Linux and don't want your ISP to automatically change the contents of your resolv.conf file every time you receive a new IP address via DHCP, then do the following. Assuming that you're using eth0 for your external connection, add the directive "PEERDNS=no" to your /etc/s...

Right - I've just finished pulling out all of my hair figuring this one out. (Or I would have if I had any hair to start with...) Take the following PHP snippet: if ($id) { do something } else { printf("<a href=\"%s?id=1\">click</a>", $PHP_SELF); } This is a very simplified examp...