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Just noting this for future reference, but I finally got iTunes working properly on a Windows PC that would at random:
- transfer some songs to iPod Touch devices successfully,
- transfer some other songs, then crash, then the device reports no music on it, or
- corrupt the device so badly it needed fresh firmware restored.

And the the culprit turned out to be…. Zone Alarm. No kidding. Turn off Zone Alarm and everything worked instantly.

iTunes is still a god-awful PoS though, but at least it’ll now transfer music and apps. If you’re getting “app could not be installed because it is not signed” issues with iTunes, and you’re installing legit apps, chances are that turning off Zone Alarm will fix it right up. Amazing.

I love Linux, but sometimes you have to wonder just what was going through the minds of some of the developers. Take, for example the following error message that appeared when I (for all intents and purposes) clicked on my DVD drive:

Can you figure out what the problem was? No? Neither could I. And then I looked at the DVD drive, which was open…

Ah.

Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution – and I can see that it’s trying (it’s trying real hard) – but I really still would have preferred “No disc in drive. Please insert a disc.”

I added a couple of WordPress plugins the other day to tack on a little bit of extended functionality to the site, but things went badly, and some bizarre interactions between plugins meant that I couldn’t log in to the WordPress administration interface – it would just throw me back to the main site without even having the option to log in… As such, I couldn’t disable the plugins (because you need to be in the administration interface to do that!), so what the heck to do?

You might think to ssh in to the box and remove the plugins from the …/wp-content/plugins/ folder to disable them (as I did) – only this won’t work. What we really need to do is disable the plugins directly from the database – and luckily for us it’s a pretty simple process as long as we can ssh into the box!

Note: If you dont’ have ssh access to your server, you could always take the phpMyAdmin route to achieve the same goal through a web interface, but if the problem you have is related to being redirected all the time (like mine was) then the direct DB access way is really the only way to go!

Gaining SSH Access

If you’re running linux you’ve already got a ssh client built in, if you’re on Windows then you’ll probably want to get yourself a copy of PuTTY or such.

Assuming the IP address of your server is 1.2.3.4, then you can ssh to the box with:

ssh 1.2.3.4 -l <YOUR-USER-NAME>

In the above command the switch is “minus lower-case-L”, not “minus pipe-symbol” or anything, and if you’ve changed your ssh port away from the default of 22, then you can just add the switch -p , so if my ssh daemon was running on port 2233, and I wanted to log in as the user bob, I’d use:

ssh 1.2.3.4 -l bob -p 2233

Connect to MySQL

Once you’ve got a ssh connection to the server, the next thing you’ll want to do is connect to your database, with the following command:

mysql -u <MYSQL-USER-NAME> -p

So if I had a MySQL administrator called dbAdmin I’d use:

mysql -u dbAdmin -p

The -p switch on the end will prompt you to enter the password for your MySQL admin user account – don’t worry if you’ve forgotten the credentials you should use – they’ll be in your WordPress wp-config.php file, which is usually located in your www or htdocs root folder (on Linux this is usually /var/www).

Quick Tip: By placing your wp-config.php file in the web root it’s possible for it to be accessed by malicious types, but you don’t have to place it here! You can, in fact, move the file one level up so that it’s outside of the web-root and WordPress will still be able to find it, but scoundrels won’t! So if you’re running WordPress with all your files in /var/www/ just move the wp-config.php file up to /var/ and it’ll still work and be safer! You can do this from the ssh terminal with:

cd /var/www
mv wp-config.php ..

Manipulate the Database

Once you’ve got administrator access to MySQL you need to connect to your database (again, the database name will be in your wp-config.php file), so if we’d called our database myWebDB then we could connect to it through the MySQL command line interface with:

CONNECT myWebDB;

Once this has connected successfully, all you have to do to disable all plugins is issue the following command:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'a:0:{}' WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins';

That’s it! Attempt to access your site! Any plugins which were causing mayhem will now be disabled, and you can then add them back one-by-one until you find the combination that’s stuffing things up!

Cheers!

Props: Many thanks to Jeff Star of PerishablePress for his article Quickly Disable or Enable All WordPress Plugins via the Database which saved my bacon, and prompted me to write this quick guide.

Update: See the bottom of the post for another method of performing a upgrade install as a fresh install which only needs a single copy of your Windows 7 upgrade disc and nothing else!

Backstory

I’d had enough of fighting with OpenOffice 3.2 today and finally cracked: I bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Academic edition for $49AUD through Microsoft’s It’s Not Cheating program.

However, since I run Linux I thought I’d just get a copy of CrossOver and I’d be laughing, but this was not to be. I ponied up for Office, set it downloading, then went to get CrossOver only to find it only supports up to Office 2007 – and I don’t mean that Office 2010 won’t work 100%, or will be a little eratic – it won’t work at all. Feck!

Okay, so I can always run it through virtualisation (i.e. a VirtualBox or VMWare instance running some variety of Windows), but I didn’t fancy running the latest, greatest Office on a shonky old copy of XP, so I ponied up (again) for a copy of Windows 7 64-Bit Upgrade (that’s another $49AUD through It’s Not Cheating) and created a new virtual machine, installed Windows 7, entered the key at the end of the install, and it told me it wasn’t valid! Double feck!

At this point I’m $150AUD out of pocket with nothing to show for it, and am starting to furrow my brow.

Trying to deal with the key issue later – I just left the key out to get 7 up and running (it’ll go for 30 days without activation) and tried the key again from within the OS rather than from the installer; this time instead of just key invalid I got an error message stating that this key is not valid for a clean install of Windows… Okay.. now we’re getting somewhere – let’s fix this bad boy.

The Fix

There’s a bunch of stuff on the Web about forcing Windows 7 to accept a clean install from an upgrade disc by creating registry keys, running arcane commands (slmgr -rearm etc.), removing config files from the ISO before install etc. – and to be perfectly honest I didn’t fancy re-installing so I had a quick whirl at all of ‘em. And guess what? They didn’t work, so I’m not going to post them here. Instead I’ll tell you what worked for me [drumroll please....]:

Installing another version of Windows first.

No, really.

It doesn’t have to be 64-bit if you’re migrating 32-bit to 64, it doesn’t have to be one step below Windows 7 (i.e. Vista), it doesn’t even have to be a legal, valid version of Windows! It just has to be some incarnation of Bill’s Marvelous Blue-Screen Machine, and then when you install Windows 7 on top of the existing install, it’ll recognise a prior version of Windows existed, and your “upgrade” key will work perfectly.

Ba-da-bing Ba-da-BOOM! Shamone! =P

So in my case, this just meant slapping a copy of XP onto a new virtual machine, then the instant that’s finished installing, just changing over the ISO image mounted on the virtual DVD drive from XP to 7, rebooting, and letting this second version of Windows install.

Once you’ve got Windows 7 up and running, your “old” copy of windows will be sitting in C:\Windows.old, and you can either use the built-in Disk Cleanup tool to remove it or just delete that folder and you’re as good as new*.

* = If you’re doing a native Windows 7 install, once you’ve removed the old install then you’re quite literally good as new. If you’re installing on a virtual box using a hard drive which uses dynamic storage (i.e. you allocate, say, 60GB for the HD, but it doesn’t take up any space to begin with, it only takes up space when data is added to the drive) then the space allocated for the old Windows install can’t be fully recovered because dynamic disks can take up more space, but do not resize back down to take up less space when you remove data! But you’re going to put more than 700MB of additional stuff on it anyway, right? So just remove the old Windows install before installing new apps and the like and you’ll break even!

It’s not a glamorous hack or sneaky workaround, but it does work, and who doesn’t have an old copy of Windows sitting around somewhere? If you’re feeling particularly cheeky you could try it with a copy of Windows 3.1 or 95 installed and see if it still upgrades clean

Update: I was discussing this with some colleagues the other day who clued me in to the following rather sneaky (but perfectly legitimate) method of installing Windows 7 Upgrade as a “fresh install”:

1. Install Windows 7 as a fresh install and do not enter your key while installing.
2. From within your installed and running (but not activated) version of Windows 7, go to your Windows 7 disc and install it again!
3. If your Windows 7 Update disc doesn’t show setup type stuff (because it’s UDF and there’s all sorts of issues), just reboot the machine and install Windows 7 over Windows 7, um, dawg

Cheers!!

If you happen to turn your softmodded Wii on today (the 1st of April) you’ll notice it comes up with an error saying:

Now repairing…
DO NOT POWER OFF

It turns out it’s just an April Fools Day joke by the Preloader people – it’s not repairing anything! Just press the A button on your Wiimote for it to go away!

Those cheeky preloader scamps!