by WebKeyDesign | Oct 2, 2006 | WebKeyDesign
WebKeyDesign now accepts Google Checkout as payment. If you have not heard of Google Checkout yet, it is somewhat similar to PayPal. It allows you to make purchases through a credit card without giving your credit card number to the merchant. In this case, WebKeyDesign. Google will collect payment and then deposit the amount (minus their fee or course) into the merchant’s bank account. This way customers can trust their credit card information to only Google and have less risk when purchasing items from the Internet. You must setup a Google Checkout account in order to use it.
You can still purchase web hosting with PayPal if you prefer. Google Checkout is just another option now when you order web hosting.
by WebKeyDesign | Sep 27, 2006 | Mac OS X
As usual, last Sunday night, my Powerbook decided to come down with a really strange problem. It slowed to a crawl and for a moment I thought my hard drive was dying a slow death. However Disk Utility, showed no problems at all, so I was a bit puzzled by the problem. Eventually after deleting cache files with Cache Out X and rebuilding Prebindings and Spotlight databases, everything was back to normal. Apparantly it does not matter if I run Windows or OS X, I still end up doing computer maintenance at late hours of the night, when I could be sleeping.
I found these terminal commands handy. Unlike third party utilities, you can run these on any up-to-date OS X system.
To update Prebindings manually:
sudo update_prebinding -root / -force
To delete the Spotlight database from the boot volume:
sudo mdutil -E /
To run Software Update from terminal:
softwareupdate -l
To install Software Updates found:
sudo softwareupdate -i -a
Notes: Prebindings usually do not have to be redone, as OS X does this automatically, but if you are having a strange problem; rebuilding might help. Deleting the Spotlight database forces OS X to rebuild it right away, so it is best to let the computer sit overnight while it indexes the vloume. Spotlight is a feature of Mac OS X 10.4. For Software Update, terminal will not prompt for restart, so you must remember to do this after the updates are installed.
To Disable DMG File Verification:
defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify true
by WebKeyDesign | Sep 18, 2006 | Networking
This week I have been looking at how to detect TCP/IP ports on a local area network to see if an application was setup correctly. And while using ping and tracert from a DOS prompt works well for somethings, I was looking at what else I could use. For Mac OS X users, the Network Utility tool features ping and traceroute options, or you can always use a terminal window directly to ping and traceroute. To verify that you have a listening port, the command line utility netstat -a comes in handy on both Windows and Mac OS X. With this you can verify that a particular port number is listening. You can still use the website CanYouSeeMe.org, if you want to verify that your particular computer is open to the Internet, but this only works if your router is setup to forward requests for this port. In the case where you want to run a VNC or some other service for only local network connections, netstat works much better to verify that the port is in fact listening.
Another tool which Windows users might find handy is Microsoft’s PortQryUI tool. This utility reports the port status of TCP and UDP ports on a computer that you select.
