HTNet - A Notepad of Tech, Business, Science and Self Improvement

From last Friday to Sunday, PIKOM PC Fair came to town. On Saturday, I decided to check out the wares on sale. It wasn’t a case of casual booth-hopping. I was actually looking for a specific equipment; a fan and heatsink combo for my aging (but still useful) Athlon Thunderbird processor. The processor may be old, but it runs on the still pretty common Socket A architecture.

So there I was, just in time to see the doors open for the 100 or so early birds (not really that early since the fair starts at 11:00 am). Surely I can find the heatsink of my dreams, right?

Read the rest of Malaysian PC Fairs Are Not For Techies »

I know my posting frequency has been less frequent than normal. The reason for this is that I’ve been packing some stuff at the office. We’re moving. It’s so tiring that the last thing I want to do is to type on a computer.

I’m compiling a list of interesting things that I would like to write about when I’m not so tired. I guarantee you that it will get posted… just not now.

I’ve upgraded several of my blogs to WordPress 2.5. However, I noticed that two of them didn’t handle 404 (Page Not Found) errors properly after the upgrade. Every invalid URL gets redirected to the index page; worse still, they returned a 200 server response code which tells the browser that the URL is valid!

Another bad outcome of this bug is that your sites won’t get verified in Google Webmaster Tools.

This problem only occurs on WordPress blogs that uses a page (instead of the more common latest posts listing) as the front page. So how can we fix this?

Read the rest of Improper 404 Error Handling Fix For WordPress 2.5 »

I’ve been using rsnapshot to backup the /home partition on our Samba server since God knows how long. rsnapshot takes the pain out of backup maintenance on Linux systems and is very easy to set up.

rsnapshot is one of those tools that you just need to configure once and once working as expected, there will be no more tinkering with it ever.

To help you get started with minimal problems, go through the documentation. It’s written systematically and should give you more than sufficient information.

If you’re hosting your WordPress blog on a mod_rewrite-enabled Apache web server, you can use this feature to make your post URLs prettier.

By default, WordPress uses an ugly format like http://yoursite/?p=795 (this URL is for post #795, just in case you’re wondering). If your server has mod_rewrite enabled, you can also use more descriptive URLs as suggested by WordPress:

Read the rest of Better Permalink URLs For Your WordPress Blog »