Troubleshooting

No sooner than I fixed my problem with a new cable and it happened again.  This time, however, I got to the source of the issue; faulty capacitor in the power adapter; a relatively simple issue.  So, send back the adaptor and get a replacement, simple.

Here's the problem.  I write for three different blogs, if you count my own and I do a ton of medical editing.  Best case scenario, I send the adaptor back and I am down a week.  Worst case scenario I am down two weeks.  That is an enormous amount of productivity to lose over a simple adaptor.  I don't have a spare monitor, nor do I have a laptop with the software set that I need.

Weighing up all of the options I decided to do something a little drastic.  I am upgrading to a sweet 22-inch LG with a 2 m/s response time.  The price is about $360, but I would lose a lot more than that in the downtime so it is kinda worth it.  Once I have the new monitor, I will get to work replacing the faulty adaptor and finally have the dual display setup that I have long wanted.

I had this problem a while ago and found that it took me some time to hunt for the fix.  It came out of nowhere.  All of a sudden the mouse cursor stopped working in MS Word 2007.  Sure the cursor would move around, but that was all that it did.  Clicking anywhere within the document did absolutely nothing.  It was as if MS Word 2007 was not recognizing my mouse.  At first I thought it was related to my mouse drivers.  I use a Razer Lachesis, so I checked for driver updates.  Then I googled the problem and went through pages of different problems; still no joy.  Somewhere in the mix though was a thread at the bottom of a conversation in the Lockergnome forum.  I tried it out and it worked:

1. Exit all Office programs.

2. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.

3. Locate the following registry subkey, as appropriate for the version of Word that you are running:

• Word 2002:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Word\Data

• Word 2003:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Data

• Word 2007:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data

4. Click Data, and then click Export on the File menu.

5. Name the file Wddata.reg, and then save the file to the desktop.

6. Click Delete on the Edit menu, and then click Yes.

7. Exit Registry Editor.

8. Start Word.

If Word starts and works correctly, you have resolved the problem. The
problem was a damaged Word Data registry key. You may have to change
several settings to restore your favorite options in Word.

After deleting the registry values, everything worked as it should have.  It was the first and only time I have ever encountered the problem.

Here is something annoying that happened to me of late.  I was messing around with a template file trying to validate a feed for a particular newsreader.  All seemed to be going well until I made a blog post.  I wrote the post, clicked submit and then... WHITE SCREEN.  This was some time after I had made the modification so I failed to see the connection.

Everything worked as it was supposed to except for the post submit screen.  Never one to let things sit broken for two long, I went hunting for the source of my problem.  As it turns out, invalid characters including spaces where they shouldn't be are the frequent cause of Drupal white screens.  I checked my template file and sure enough I had some.  Once they were removed, everything worked as it was supposed to.

If you are having problems with white screens, check your template file located in the folder of the theme that you are using.  It just might have been corrupted somewhere along the line.

Source: ContractWebDevelopment

I was having tremendous problems with absolute and relative domain URLs on my site. It is is an enormous problem for RSS feeds. If your images are showing up on your site then you are probably having the same problem I was. There is an easy solution, however, that solution has been incredibly difficult to find. As with most Drupal troubleshooting issues, you have to search through pages and pages and then you have to hunt through the page that it is covered on in order to find a solution. It is very frustrating, so I figured that I would document the process and save everyone the trouble.

How to Switch TinyMCE from Relative URLS to Absolute URLs

You are going to need to edit a little code here. It can be done so from notepad if you need to, but if you have Dreamweaver, that is the program for it.

Just in case anyone out there is having the same problem that I am!  Drupal is a great blogging platform and CMS; the trouble is that there are lots of clashes with third party software that can make getting a site up and running a real chore.  The latest problem I have encountered was with the Image_Assist module.  Image_Assist makes uploading a file into your blog content really easy.  The trouble is that it does not save files so that they are compatible with RSS.  If you test out your RSS feed, you will find that it is missing any images.  This has the potential to really cut down on your site traffic.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, I scoured the WWW and came across this patch.  If you are unable to get your images pumping into your feed, check out the patch and the explanation.

Image_Assist Absolute URL Patch