Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

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Gluten Free Sourdough Pumpkin Bread

Friday, February 25th, 2011

This was an experiment I did one day.
The starter consisted of about 3/4 brown rice flour, 1/8 quinoa flour, and 1/8 millet flour.
The night before I fed 2 cups of starter with a total of 3/4 cup flour (1/2c brown rice, 1/4c millet).
The next morning I used 1 cup of this starter (very active). Here’s the recipe I came up with.

Start chia seed gel using 2 tbsp chia seed and about 1/4c filtered water. Let sit for 20 min or so, stirring ocassionally.

1 cup starter
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 c filtered water
Dissolve salt into water and add starter and mix well to combine.

To this mixture add:
3/4 c Libby’s canned pumpkin
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1/8 c cane sugar (stir in to make sure it is all dissolved)
chia seed gel as prepared above

In a separate bowl prepare a sifted flour mixture:
1/2 c brown rice flour
1/2 c buckwheat flour (from raw groats)
1/2 c quinoa flour
1/2 c tapioca flour
1/2 c sweet rice flour
Mix this together until uniform.

Now add the flour mixture to the starter mixture and mix until combined. The final product has the texture of extremely stiff & dense & moist oatmeal but not as stiff or dense as cookie batter.

Put this into a glass bread pan greased with high quality palm shortening and take time to smooth the top with a spatula. Set in unheated oven and let rise. I shoot for a 16-24 hour rise but this was ready to go at 10 hours. It had actually risen quite a bit after only 2 hours. Maybe too much sugar, or maybe I would flatten it after 2-3 hours and let it rise again, maybe this would work. I thought it was going to fall when I cooked it but it only did a little, so the result was pretty airy for a gluten free, yeast free, baking powder/soda free, xantham gum free bread. Finished bread is very moist, cuts well once refrigerated and holds together well. When you cut it warm, it is very doughy, almost un-cooked like, but this goes away when it is cooled.

Cook on 325. I had to cook for 1 hour 25 minutes at 4000′ elevation. Remove from oven and let cool at least 30 min before removing from pan. Leave out to cool, then put in fridge. Result is slightly sour with nice pumpkin background. I would have liked it slightly more sour.

Before cooking:

After cooking:

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Nonprofits and stability in webhosting

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

As a web developer I get a lot of inquires from business owners who are trying to find a stable, reliable, and affordable webhost. I have spent the last 12 years dealing with different hosting companies on a daily basis and I’m in a position to offer sound advice regarding at least my various experiences with some of the companies offerings and services. I have seen some hosts that get better over time and some that get worse. One of the most frustrating things are companies that seem to offer a lot of storage space and bandwidth for a low price but put severe limits on CPU usage which can in some cases cause severe and sometimes completely disabling downtime to an ordinary website.  Clients of mine want stable webhosts, at the same time they want to know that they’re getting a competitive price.

Delving more into the issue of stability, further stability comes from a webhost that does not overload it’s servers. An overloaded server simply does not perform well. It may have programs that die due to the server being overloaded. At first glance this might not seem critical but it is very critical. For example, suppose that program that dies is the MySQL server. I bring this up because it has been a common problem I have seen over the years. When MySQL dies, any database driven website will die with it. This has been critical for some of my e-commerce customers who simply cannot operate without a database. Consider alternatively if the web server (e.g. Apache) dies. Then the website doesn’t function at all, it’s as if the DNS is sending the potential customer directly into a roadblock the cause of which is an overloaded server. The only solution is for the host to restart the server. This can all be avoided by selecting a quality host that does not overload it’s servers and has the measures in place to correct a problem should it occur.

A few months ago, I had a friend of mine who manages a 501(c)(3) nonprofit contact me regarding hosting for her website. Initially she wanted me to host the site for her, when I told her that is not something I do I began to explore hosting options for her. One main requirement in her situation was for the hosting company to be as affordable as possible as her nonprofit funds are limited. I explained to her the problem of sometimes ridiculous CPU usage limits of low cost companies and overloaded server problems as I explained above. I also wanted to find her a cPanel-based hosting platform as I’ve found that clients prefer this system over other web-based control panels. After looking into it, I found a Nevada based company McKremie, LLC which offers their business hosting plan free to any US-based registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit or to public schools including all the features of their paid plan.

I directed her to the webhosting for nonprofits form and she was up and running with her website shortly thereafter. She has been happy with her hosting, I have done some work on the site and have also been delighted to deal with a quality webhost. Uptime has been fantastic as well as server availability and stability with quick access times of the pages on her website.

 

Posted in Internet, Web Development | No Comments »

Trojan.Vundo – removing the virus

Thursday, June 7th, 2007

Below is my account of getting the Trojan.Vundo virus. Here’s what I did to get rid of it. Use this info at your own risk. 

Recently while browsing the internet with MSIE version 7 on Windows XP SP 2, fully updated I got a bunch of windows suddenly popping up and things started downloading onto my computer. AVG antivirus said I had a virus but couldn’t do anything about it. The virus seemed to install a number of crap software on my computer and imbedded into winlogon.exe process. Some things I saw were think-adz search assistant, zenosearch, twink, yazzle, outerinfo. Keep in mind I was just browsing the internet, I did not download anything.

The first thing I did when processes and things started going crazy was start killing processes, then disconnected my internet connection. I delete whatever I could out of my temp folders, windows/temp and each users temp folder in documents&settings/localsettings/temp. I deleted all my internet browsers cache/history/cookes. I downloaded a uninstall for outerinfo from outerinfo website which I will not link to here. In short I deleted everything I could that I could find and that the system would let me delete. I also tried to delete things in safe mode but still could not remove the apparent virus file sstqp.dll. When using MSIE, search windows would pop open and windows to other websites, some of them are think-adz, searchhound, mysearchlive, hollywood, canceriq, jack9, and a few other ip address, all of which I blocked with norton internet security. I also changed my browser settings. In internet explorer -> tools->internet options->security->trusted sites, set the slider to high and click ok, delete every site that was there which were added by the viruses because I never use this feature. These viruses exploit the trusted sites feature by injecting urls in there, having another program visit them, which becuase they are trusted, download more viruses with ease because of the slacker active x default settings of the trusted sites.

AVG antivirus couldn’t do anything about it. I installed norton internet security including the firewall and antivirus and it also couldn’t do anything about it. I downloaded fixvundo.exe from Norton, followed the instructions and after a long scan of the computer it could not even find the virus…. yet Norton Antivirus is showing me the problem file seems to be in WINDOWS/system32/sstqp.dll

I downloaded a VundoFix.exe file by atribune.org. It found a list of files that were problems but couldn’t delete 3 of them:

cbxvsst.dll

ddcbcyw.dll

pmnljii.dll

pmnnono.dll – could not be deleted

pqtss.bak1

pqtss.ini – could not be deleted

sstqp.dll – could not be deleted

 

Seeing how all these programs had been downloaded and installed on my computer without my knowledge during this time, I was limiting my internet connection, I’d just turn it off. Checking my running processes with windows task manager (ctrl+alt+del) I observed winlogon.exe using tons of resources, about every second it would flicker on then off, then on then off…… it was really slowing the computer down. I found that by using process explorer and suspending winlogon.exe which is where the virus was hiding, the resource usage went back to normal and I could still use the computer normally. I connected to the internet only when winlogon.exe was suspended thinking that if the resources aren’t being used, possibly nothing more is being downloaded. I would un-suspend winlogon.exe only when I was not connected to the internet and I also set internet explorer to work-offline and was using netscape instead which the virus didn’t seem to be involved with. When the virus would try to pop open an IE window, I would just click tell IE to stay offline.

Now to actually fixing the problem. I found my answer at spywareinfo forums. I had before downloaded some software while reading in other forums about the problem. Software I downloaded included HiJackThis, which is vitally useful for this problem, brute force uninstaller, which I didn’t end up using and some other files at the suggestions of different forum threads that I read. I used hijackthis and delete registry entries that didn’t look right to me, but only ones I was sure about. I followed the suggestions from spywareinfo forums, downloaded their software called VundoFix.exe. Their instructions were basically to do the following, run VundoFix.exe to unzip the files:

restart in safemode:

run killvundo.bat

at the first screen type: C:\WINDOWS\system32\sstqp.dll

enter 

at the second screen type C:\WINDOWS\system32\sstqp.*

enter, and the program does its magic.

Place the hijackthis file in the root C folder (do this to begin with). After typing the second string I got an error that the hijackthis file couldn’t be found and the whole safemode desktop screen went black and all my desktop icons disappeared. I got worried.

I manually turned the computer off by holding the power button. Turned it back on and it started normally. First thing I noticed is that when norton antivirus loaded it no longer gave me a popup that could not be turned off saying I had the trojan.vundo virus in file sstqp.dll. That was nice. Then I opened hijack this and deleted the two entries pertaining to sstqp.dll, one a BHO and one a winlogon notify which now said (file missing) next to them. I also noticed my system resources seemed normal.

Looking good……. I was still not connected to the internet. I then deleted every possible thing I could think of, all the temp folders, internet cache…. etc…. Installed Spybot, Spywareblaster, and Ad-aware SE personal, ran them without updating the definitions and deleted everything they found that was a problem.

Then connected to the internet, update the definitions of all 3 programs and ran them all again. Deleting everything found.

System seems fine. Resources and usage is normal and no apparent virus.

I do still have the pmnnono.dll file and it runs as a winlogon notify according to hijackthis. The main infection is gone, but there is still cleaning up to do.

I found this page, which is very useful: http://forums.spywareinfo.com/lofiversion/index.php/t96702.html

I followed all the directions there. The program VirtumundoBeGone managed to get rid of pmnnono.dll, and also gave me the blue screen of death which was a bit heart stopping for a moment… but all is well, reboot by holding the power button and it booted fine.

Then I ran Dr. Web CureIt. It found a few more files with problems that I took care of. This program scan takes a long time but seems very thorough.

The next program SDfix found a few hidden files which shouldn’t have been there and I manually reviewed them and deleted them. One of them was C:\Program Files\Common Files\Yazzle1281OinUninstaller.exe. The other 4 belonged to GTek, which it seems from a Google search is not a good thing, so I deleted that entire folder also. C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\GTek\GTUpdate\AUpdate\Channels\ch1\lock.tmp

Back in non-safe-mode….. I removed my older version of Java via add/remove and downloaded the latest version from sun java and installed it. I also replaced my hosts file in windows/system32/drivers/etc with one from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm ….. there were a few entries that I omitted in the file because I need them turned on, but it is nice to have this level of definite security from these sites, most of which are no good.

System seems good and may even be running better than before all of this. HiJackThis log file shows no apparent problems to me, one file it shows that I can’t figure out what it is for is named mjdsregl.exe in windows/system32. Google search for this turns up nothing.

The hijackthis entry is O4 – HKLM\..\Run: [{F4-4A-A9-9E-ZN}] C:\windows\system32\mjdsregl.exe CHD003

The file does not even exist on my computer, so I guess it is fine.All in all, I lost about 2 days productivity due to this virus.

–end

 

 

 

 

Posted in Internet, Windows XP | No Comments »

How to add DIGG buttons to WordPress Blog post

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

The first time I tried to add DIGG buttons to my wordpress blog post I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I looked at DIGG and found the various image buttons but not how to link to the page. Of course I am fairly new to using DIGG on a regular basis, so this might be more evident for someone with more experience with DIGG. Here’s what I did:

Digg!  

(You’ll have to view the source of the page to see the proper code……. as I still have not found a good way to display code in wordpress).

For the button above I use the anchor url as http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattgregg.com%2FFileName.html … Note that the url= portion of this url is urlencoded where a / becomes %2F and colon becomes %3A.

The icon type shown below is a bit more difficult.

 

In the wordpress wysiwyg editor, </iframe> does not seem to get carried over (from the html edit box) after saving. So what I do is manually add </iframe> directly after this icon within the wysiwyg editor each time before resaving the blog post.

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Qwest.com not responding

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

Qwest has a problem with their website and doesn’t seem to know about it.

Something is evidently wrong with there server setup and it is not outputting a HTTP header termination string. This causes MSIE version 7 to not be able to display the website whatsoever.

My first thought was they had banned my IP for some crazy reason…. but not the case. I tried accessing from multiple IPs before trying a different browser to discover that Mozilla renders the website just fine.

Maybe it’s just me and my version of Internet Explorer 7. But I doubt it. 

I’ve also tested it with scripts and they too cannot render the page as they tend to be strictly written. Mozilla, in this case, appears to be a bit more robust than Internet Explorer.

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More on installing Godaddy Turbo SSL Certificate w/ WHM

Friday, March 9th, 2007

I had to install another Godaddy turbl ssl certificate today and I thought I’d take some screen shots of the process.

First purchase the certificate here: SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

Next login to WHM to Generate a SSL Certificate and Signing Request:

Fill out the form with the appropriate values and click “create”. Next you will see the crt and key information:

 

Leave this WHM window open and go back to Godaddy.

Next go to the SSL certificate section of your Godaddy account. You will see something like this:

Click on “Set up certificate”. Then you will see this:

Then you will need to create an SSL account or login if you already have one:

Select the ssl certificate to use:

STEP 1: Fill out the form:

STEP 2: PASTE THE CSR (certificate signing request) THAT YOU PREVIOUSLY GENERATED IN WHM:

Review and confirm the information

Check your email for the notice. Click on the link in this email to download the bundle and crt:

When you click the email link you will arrive at this page, select the server and contine:

Then you can download the zip file containing the crt and bundle

This shows the contents of the zip file:

Now Open a NEW Window and go to WHM again and click on Install a SSL Certificate and Setup the Domain. Paste the CRT from the www.—.com file in the zip file downloaded from Godaddy. Enter the domain, account username, and dedicated IP address for the domain. The next box for Key is the same one generated earlier from the “Generate a SSL Certificate and Signing Request” process in WHM and begins with “—–BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY—–“. The last one, CA Bundle, is the other file in the zip file from Godaddy. Copy and paste the entire contents of the file here, click Do it and if all goes well you will receive a success message and are done. Scroll down to see a screen shot of the WHM form.

If you found this useful, please Digg it by clicking below:

Digg!

For the first part of this article, see here: Godaddy SSL Turbo Certificates

If you haven’t already purchased the SSL certificate, you can do so here:  SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

If you haven’t already purchased the SSL certificate, you can do so here:  SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

 

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Review of Multi Domain Web Hosting offers

Thursday, March 8th, 2007
 

Review of Multi Domain Web Hosting offers from Charles Leighton

I’m an avid photographer and sell my photographic prints via my three websites. When I look for a webhost I only choose ones that offer multiple domain hosting so that I can easily host my 3 websites at one place, with one control panel, 1 ftp and 1 bill. There are a number of compaines that offer multiple domain hosting, some have better features than others and some are cheaper, some faster, some more stable. In the review below I attempt to qualify these factors with my review of these three webhosting companies.

The most recent hosting company I’ve tried is Host Gator. This was tried after having experience with both Blue host and Lunar Pages along with a number of other hosts that I have since dropped in the past due to one issue or another. Host Gator does not limit the number of domains that I can host on my account. If I choose to add more sites, I just register the domain and add it in the control panel. I have all the features I need here and I just have the baby plan. While it offers less space and bandwidth than some of the other plans Host Gator has been a good company to deal with. They also feature the swamp plan which offers twice the space and bandwidth. One thing I really like is that they have no setup fees and I pay the same price whether I pay by the month or by the year.

Next I will review Lunar Pages which offers 10 domains in their multi domain hosting package. The basic plan at Lunar Pages is advertised as being the largest space and bandwidth of the plans reviewed on this page.

What I especially like about LunarPages:

  • Solid company
  • Good customer experience
  • Excellent tech support
  • Good price for a full featured plan
  • Largest space/bandwidth of any plan on this page

I have also tried Bluehost. Bluehost was one of the first companies that I tried. They are always upgrading their service with better servers, faster speeds, more features, more bandwidth and hosting space. They are a good company based in Orem, Utah.

The reason I left Bluehost was thier shared ssl was shared by all the users. This is only a problem if you are taking secure information from your customers such as credit card information. If you are not taking sensitive customer information you do not need to use the SSL feature. Bluehost offers a great full featured plan and website response and uptime was great. Their 24 hour phone support is top notch. If there is a problem they don’t try to deny it like some companies. They will tell you what the problem is and will actually give an eta when it should be fixed. I like Bluehost, if they’d put a little more into their SSL service I’d go back. Their plan offers a total of 6 domains which is the least of any on this page but for me it is fine because I only have 3 sites with no plans to have more than 6 in the near feature.

In the table below I’ve summarized the offerings of these 3 multiple domain hosting companies and their respective packages.

company # of domains price space bandwidth refunds cpanel domain
Bluehost Web Hosting $6.95
Bluehost		 6 Domains $6.95/mo/2 year – $7.95/mo/1 year 200 GB 2000 GB/Month not advertised yes free domain and domain privacy
250 GB and 2500 GB for $6.95 a month!
Lunarpages basic hosting		 10 Domains $6.95/mo/2 year $7.95/mo/1 year 250 GB 2500 GB/Month 30 day money back yes free domain

HostGator Baby plan		 Unlimited Domains $9.95/mo 100 GB 1000 GB/Month 30 day money back yes $15/year

HostGator Swamp plan		 Unlimited Domains $14.95/mo 200 GB 2000 GB/Month 30 day money back yes $15/year

Other things to condider are the CPU usage allotment of the hosting plan. It is possible that a user may never be able to use all the advertised bandwidth because the hosting company has set the cpu usage limit too low. CPU usage refers to the amount of activity that your site performs on the server. A simple html page will not have much CPU activity even if it is heavily accessed. But a complex php sofware package with a backend mysql database with possibly complicated queries or a large database size or inefficient scripts will put a much heavier demand on the cpu. In this case it is common for anything more than a handful of users accessing the site at the same time to cause your hosting account to temporarily exceed it’s cpu allotment. This may cause your account to be temporarily suspended. If it happens too much the web host may drop you depending on their terms of use but all web hosts will protect themselves against high cpu users.

Next we discuss shared ssl. Shared ssl is nice if you have a small business and do not want to pay a yearly fee of about $70-$300 for a private ssl certificate. Because I sell my photo prints online, I make sure the account I purchase offers shared ssl. Bluehost shares the ssl certificate among all it’s users so it can be slow at times. For a private ssl, in addition to the annual fee, you may have to pay an installation fee and will have to have a dedicated IP address for your website. This usually adds $2-$4 per month to your web hosting bill. Some web hosts do not offer this option, so if it is important to you, you’ll want to check with the webhost before purchasing the hosting package. Lunar Pages offers a dedicated IP for $2.50 additional per month. The cheapest private ssl certificates are usually through Comodo and they are a quality certificate recognized by all the popular browsers. HostGator does not offer the best shared SSL service either. Their SSL certificates are privately generated so they will show your customer a security warning. HostGator claims this is because your domain is not the same as the one on the SSL certificate, but that is not the issue, because we are not accessing it through the domain, rather the shared ssl domain which can easily be secured without errors if HostGator would spend the money on browser recognized certs and not just generate their own private ones.

In summary, all three of these companies multiple domain hosting plans are good offers. For unlimited domains and month to month contract, go with Host Gator, for more space and bandwidth go with Lunar Pages and Bluehost is a great company as long as you are not using the shared SSL which is too slow, HostGator is also not a good choice for Shared SSL, but they will get you a private SSL for about $75/year which is very reasonable. 

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Installing GoDaddy Turbo SSL Certificate w/ WHM – How to

Thursday, March 8th, 2007

After looking for a SSL cert that was affordable and provided good browser recognition, I found the GoDaddy Turbo SSL certificate, check them out here: ” SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com .” I did some research online about this ssl certificate and although priced much lower than any other certificate it seemed to provide the same features, security, and browser recognition as higher priced certificates from other companies. I went for it at $17.99/year with a 2 year commitment. Other certificates such as Comodo or Rapid SSL which still aren’t brand name certs (these used to be the discount guys) run about $79.99/year. The turbo SSL cert from Godaddy provides a secure connection for your customer, and all the other standard browser security features that a browser will normally show (the closed lock icon, etc.) The certificate has 99% browser recognition, which basically means that only browsers that are years old will not recognize the cert and will show the website visitor a security warning. Since most people aren’t using these browsers anyway, this should not be a concern for most website owners.

SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

The installation of the godaddy turbo ssl certificate was pretty easy. I was waiting for an email from godaddy but one never came so I checked my godaddy account. Login to godaddy, click my account, click on “Manage Secure Certificates” from there it will show you your SSL certificate credits and allow you to proceed with setting up the certificate. Be sure when you set up the ssl certificate, if you want it for www., you must specify www., if you just put domain.com then www.domain.com will display a security error. If you want it for both, you must purchase 2 certificates or a more expensive wildcard certificate.

I use WHM on my servers and it makes it easy to install a SSL certificate. In WHM, first give the site a dedicated IP address if it doesn’t already have one by going to Change Site’s IP Address in the account functions section. If you don’t have an extra IP, you will need to purchase one from your web hosting provider. Note that this may cause your site to go down until the DNS propagates throughtout the internet. Next go to Generate a SSL Certificate and Signing Request enter the required info and click create. Save the important key data that is generated.

SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

Back at godaddy, you will need to download the key files. Once you have all this data, go back to WHM and click on Install a SSL Certificate and Setup the Domain and copy and paste the info, including the start and end line text. Save it and that should do it.

For more information or to purchase, visit Godaddy at SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

Below are some screen shots of the new secured site (domain name removed):

 

 

 

 

Posted in Internet, Web Development | No Comments »

awstats Error: Failed to write temporary history file

Monday, February 26th, 2007

Out of the blue I received this error tonight when looking at my awstats stats

“Failed to write temporary history file”

First I thought something happened with the permissions because I had recently been playing with the .htaccess file. After a few failed attempts with adjusting permissions and the htaccess file I looked elsewhere.  

The problem was I had run out of disk space. I added some disk space to the account and all is well.

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Bluehost Shared SSL Secure Server

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

Bluehost Review 

If you intend to use Bluehost for Shared SSL service, read this first:

All customers of bluehost are sharing 1 SSL cert on 1 server. All customers.

The secure address is https://secure.bluehost.com/

The massive amount of activity on this 1 server makes it unusable at times and very slow at the best of times.

Bluehost does offer ability to upgrade to a private SSL for a resonable price but I can’t see upgrading there because of the low limits they put on CPU usage before they 301 redirect your whole account to a CPU overuse message page that makes that sends a website visitor into la-la land. Since they are redirected, if they try to reload the page they will never get back to your site and using the back button will only further redirect every page to the same CPU overusage page. They can go all the way back and still never be able to just hit reload to bring the site back up. If they go all the way back they’ll have to type in the URL to try to reload the page or close the window and start over.  

Phone support at Bluehost is good but email support is horrible usually taking 3-5 days or more for a response if you get a response at all.

If they would just fix the shared SSL problem and the CPU overuse and allotment they would have darn good service.

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