Part of my job entails working with multiple Excel spreadsheets simultaneously. You would think with four monitors I would have no trouble. For whatever reason, Microsoft decided that Excel will open all spreadsheets in the same instance of Excel, causing it to be nearly impossible to quickly glance back and forth between sheets.

Here’s the quick fix, thanks to Brian on Google Answers:

1. Open Windows Explorer (win + E)
2. Click on Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types -> XLSX -> Advanced -> “Open” -> Edit
   (note, if you’re using an older version of Excel it may be XLS instead of XLSX)
3. Change “Application used to perform action:” to \EXCEL.EXE” /e “%1″
   (note, you must have quotes around %1)
4. Uncheck “Use DDE”
5. Click “OK”

Voila! Now each time you open a spreadsheet from Windows Explorer it will open in an entirely new instance of Microsoft Excel that you can move to another monitor, minimize separately, etc.

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Connect to your box via ssh and run the following commands to create a backup of your site.


cd ~
mkdir Backup
nohup zip -r Backup/YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM.zip www/ > backup_log.txt &

(Replace YYYY with the 4-digit year, MM with the 2-digit month, HH with the 24-hour format of the hour, and MM with the 2-digit minute)

cd ~ navigates to your home folder

mkdir Backup creates the backup directory in which the backups will be stored

nohup is short for no hangup and allows processes started by users at the terminal to continue running even after the user logs out

zip is a program which combines many files into one and compresses them to make the end result even more portable

-r tells zip to burrow into all subdirectories in order to grab all of the files

Backup/YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM.zip is the path to the backup file

www/ is the directory to backup (it may be html, htdocs, httpdocs, etc. on your box)

> backup_log.txt redirects all output from zip to the backup_log.txt file so you can review the file later

& tells linux to run the zip program in the background so that you can logout or perform other tasks without killing the process

Now all you need to do is download that zipped file. Use your favorite SFTP client to login to your box and snag it. I recommend FileZilla Client for all platforms. If you’re looking for an FTP server, FileZilla Server is perfect.

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Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

It is simple. So simple.

• Sign up for an account.
• Download and install the awesome S3 Firefox Organizer (S3Fox) Firefox add-on.
• Upload the files you want to be served up like hotcakes.
• Update the links in your HTML files to point to the new location.
  Example: http://s3.amazonaws.com/jeremy/blog/images/large_bandwidth_sucking_header.jpg
  Note that the example is intended to show the format of the URL and does not point to a valid resource.

Too good to be true? Nope. The S3 files are served up lickety split and best of all it takes the load off of your cheap host which allows it to function much more efficiently. So far I have moved my site’s header and the LightBox JS file. Why didn’t I move the other JS files and images? Because Google hosts all of the popular JavaScript libraries for free.

How much does it cost?
Very little, unless your site becomes wildly popular. 1 million requests costs one dollar plus 17 cents per GB transfered. That’s right. 1,000,000 GET requests = $1.00 + $0.17/GB.

Let’s assume the average size of the elements being served from your Amazon S3 bucket is 10KB.
10KB = 0.01MB = 0.00001GB
1,000,000 requests x 0.00001GB = 10GB
10GB x $0.17/GB = $1.70
1,000,000 requests x $0.01/10,000 requests = $1.00
Total Download Cost: $2.70

Your cheap site can now support 1,000,000 requests per month for a whopping $9.65 ($6.95 for BlueHost and $2.70 for Amazon S3). And if your site gets Dugg or on the front page of Reddit, Amazon S3 will scale without sweating a drop.

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sudo apt-get install openssh-server

You’re done. Now you can use ssh to remotely connect to your Ubuntu box.

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This was the result:

It’s a DIY infinity mirror!

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Do you have recommendations? Show off in the comments.

Now I’m sure you’re wondering why there are six (6) hard drives in this system.

• This system would double as a storage server for me.
• The motherboard supports striping and mirroring (RAID 0+1), so I would setup the drives to mirror and stripe for redundancy and for performance benefits.
• As cheap as drives are, why not?

My guess is that this system should last for about 8 years which puts it at $520.10 per year. Not bad at all…

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Tonight I used Speakeasy’s speed test and the DD-WRT’s bandwidth monitor to determine if the QoS was obeying my settings. I think the results speak for themselves.

Up: 300 kbps
Down: 5000 kbps

Down: 4809 kbps
Up: 292 kbps

Down: 4819 kbps
Up: 294 kbps

In this graph you can see both tests. The two pieces of each test are the download and upload portions which ended up being about 4815 down and 293 up. Not bad at all!

I really couldn’t ask for more from my $50 router. Thanks again, DD-WRT!

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Partitions:

1. 16MB – Dell Diagnostics
2. 10GB – Recovery
3. 137GB – OS
4. 2GB – MediaDirect
5. 34GB – Unallocated

For some reason, hard drives are limited to 4 primary partitions and the drive already had 4 primary partitions (1-4 above). Vista’s partition manager doesn’t support moving partitions, only resizing them. It wouldn’t let me create a 5th primary partition either.

I did some research and found a live CD called GParted which should have worked in my case but ended up failing miserably after 32 hours! When I left for work at 8AM on Monday morning the estimated remaining time was 3 hours. When I got back from work it was up to 9:47:05. Ut oh. I waited half an hour and watched the progress go from 10.4GB to 10.9GB copied and the time dropped to 9:44:14. I ended up having to cancel the process on stage 2 of 9 because it may have never finished and the screen was certain to have burn-in from the static “progress” window. Now that my hard drive was useless in its current state I used Acronis True Image Home 11 to restore the backup I had made before I attempted to repartition using GParted. Pheww…it worked!

Today when I got home from work I decided to try a different program. Several forums suggested Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 which features Vista compatibility (unlike GParted). I downloaded the trial, played around with the partitions, and was prompted with a lovely demo warning telling me to put out or shut up. Since Acronis offers a 30-day money back guarantee I decided to shell out some cash ($50) and give it a shot.

I installed the software, entered the serial, created a bootable CD, popped it in my laptop, and fiddled with the partitions until I had them just the way I wanted.

Commit!

“REEERRRREEEERRRRRRREEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR,” said my hard drive to my frightened ears. The hard drive was spinning so fast I was afraid it was going to shatter.

Operation 1 of 2: 40 seconds remaining.

30 seconds later…

Operation 2 of 2: 47 minutes remaining.

4 minutes later…

Vista was booting and everything was peachy! Windows updated a hard drive driver (no idea why) and told me I had to reboot. I rebooted and now have a 170GB+ OS partition!

Spectacular!

GParted – 0
Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 – 1

Thank you, Acronis!

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1. Caching With Zend Framework Using Zend_Cache

Requirements:

• The site must provide a free service that keeps visitors coming back on a regular basis.
• The provided service must not be illegal to provide (by me) in the United States (including any of the states).
• The provided service must not already exist (for free) on another website.

Good luck and check back on July 1st to see who won!

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Today I was faced with a difficult wireless networking scenario: looooong house, many thick walls.

The topography is as follows:
Comp A <--- 200 ft., 4 walls ---> Router <--- 150 ft., 3 walls ---> Comp B

The house is older so the walls are very, very solid and RF-absorbing. The old setup involved a Linksys WRT54GX (802.11 b/g) as the router in the middle, a Belkin Wireless-N PCMCIA card on computer A, and a Belkin Wireless-N PCI card on computer B. After many attempts to reposition the wireless adapter’s antennas on computer B with no success I suggested hooking up a WRT54G in client bridging mode (using DD-WRT) to act as the wireless adapter on computer B. Worked like a champ. The signal is now strong and the connection hasn’t dropped one single time.

The kicker is that the WRT54G I used is version 8.2 which has very little RAM and doesn’t support the standard method of upgrading the firmware to DD-WRT.

The Solution

1. Download TFTP.
2. Download the VX Work Killer firmware for the WRT54G v8.2
3. Download the dd-wrt.v24_micro_wrt54gv8.bin firmware for the WRT54G v8.2
4. Upload the vxworkskillerGv8-v3.bin firmware to the router.
5. Wait for the router to reboot.
6. Try to ping the router (192.168.1.1 by default).
7. When you can ping the router continue to the next step.
8. Open a command prompt and enter
   “tftp -i 192.168.1.1 put dd-wrt.v24_micro_wrt54gv8.bin“
9. If all went well, when the router reboots it will have DD-WRT on it and be accessible via 192.168.1.1.
10. Username: “root”
11. Password: “admin”

Source

The connection on computer A is also weak so I’ll be adding a WRT54G to the mix to fix it.

Thank you DD-WRT!

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