When thinking of technology and the speed at which it becomes obsolete, it is amazing to consider that such technologies as Apache and PHP that were developed over a decade ago are still as reliable and commonly used as they are. Looking at the major releases, Apache 1.3.2 was released April 1998, and PHP 4.0.0 appeared in May, 2000. These have each had a number of updates straight up until now.

 Time moves forward, and in the computer world usually something comes to replace the old entirely. This has not been the case with these technologies, and they certainly are not going away any time soon unless the world implodes. What does come are new major releases, such as Apache 2.0 or Apache 2.2 and the series within the two branches of PHP 4 and PHP 5.

 PHP 5 was release in 2004, and although PHP 4 works for many, we have decided to abandon it in favor of running our hosting using Apache 2.x and PHP 5. What that means to our hosted customers is that some things may break. We have made sure that each account moved works as expected and found there are a few things that can help anyone doing the same.

#1. Running PHP in HTML files.

If you want to include PHP coding, but hide the fact it is PHP, you can place one line in your .htaccess file to make Apache aware it should parse PHP in the file type you specify. In PHP 5, it works the same, but the trick is that the name of the program running it changed slightly:

PHP 4 :
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html

PHP 5:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .html

 #2 To come later…

While trying to save a file out of Excel, clicking the parent directory button would cause a delayed reponse taking about 20 seconds to a few minutes before the file requestor would update. I immediately thought, could a virus have slipped through? Is spyware causing this?

After running some virus scans and running spyware searches, I determined that the problem only occured while accessing files. No other program had this delay, but it certainly existed and persisted even after a reboot. Going on the notion that it was file access related, I tried cleaning up my messy desktop. No help.

Finally, after disabling all network connected devices the problem went away. The network device which caused these problems for me was an HP printer’s Card Reader slot. I never wanted this installed on my system, but HP insists that I share and enjoy all their bulky device software. No doubt that I will post a solution for that in the future.

 For shame Microsoft! Every other program seems to understand how to handle a disconnected device better using your own OS than your own programs!

Are you a web developer and want to see real responses to your URLs that you enter? Did you know that often times typing a wrong URL may direct you to what it thinks you want or even to a search engine? This is thanks to AutoSearch.

I’ve had this problem once before, solved it, and subsequently forgot what I had done when I needed to remember it later. The quick way is to edit your systems registry which stores all sorts of important settings and information which Windows and all your programs rely upon. It goes without saying, use extreme caution when editing your system registry!

 Solution:

Step 1 - Click your Start bar and click on ‘Run…’

Step 2 - Enter ‘Regedit’ and hit enter

Step 3 - Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/Main/

Step 4 - Within the Main folder, double click on the REG_DWORD ‘AutoSearch’ and write this value down for safe keeping

Step 5 - Change the value to 0 (zero) and hit enter

Step 6 - Close RegEdit and Internet Explorer

Now when you type google.c9m in your browser, you should receive the familiar ‘The page cannot be displayed’ error.