Digital TV Transition....

Snow on your TV set?! Watch the outhouse.

The digital TV transition has come and gone. And just like Y2K, it wasn’t a big deal as some people put it out to be.

A response to: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,526141,00.html

If your set is now showing SNOW, then its about time to upgrade your TV set. You we’re warned. How could you ignore the commercials about this? TV Converters, you should have gotten it before the government ran out of coupons. Not wait until the last minute to start complainin.

Oh and by the way, once you get to the Digital TV Bandwagon. It is still the same shows pre-digital. The shows have more details but there is still nothing good to watch. You are not missing much.

As good as crack.

Some lists that might help:

• http://www.dtv.gov
• http://hulu.com
• http://www.dtv2009.gov

Dependency service or group failed to start...

The victim: HP Pavilion DV6000

Operating system: Windows Vista Home Premium

Software: Norton Internet Security, Office 2007

Problem: Dependency service or group failed to start, no internet connection, “connection unknown” on the wireless icon

Solution:  TCP/IP stack repair

1. Start > search for “cmd”.
2. On the search result on top labeled “cmd”, rightclick and select run as administrator.
3. A window with command prompt, type netsh winsock reset and hit enter.
4. Disregard the error message. Next type, netsh int ip reset.
5. Restart your computer. After that the internet connection should work again.

The solution given above might not work for everyone. Though the error message might be the same, the problem might be caused by several other software or OS issues. Nevertheless, this worked for my case. Thanks to sharkeymatei for the solution. Found this at http://forums.techarena.in/vista-help/870516.htm

Wordpress White Screen of Death...

Just experienced the white screen of death (WSOD) on one of our satellite (niche) sites today. So i trolled the web looking for answers. Here are some resources that could help:

• http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2008/07/08/solution-to-wordpress-blank-screen-of-death/
• http://www.servo-macs.com/blog/2008/07/26/we-lived-through-the-dreaded-white-screen-of-death/
• http://www.getfoundnow.com/internetmarketing/wordpress-white-screen-of-death.html

WSOD seems to be caused by several different factors thus the solutinos are varied and sometimes confusing. The best advice to approach this is to go about it from top to bottom. Easiest to most challenging (assuming one has limited knowledge of MySQL database access and PHP.

1. Check wp-config.php. look for the extra line at the end of the file. after the last “?>”. Delete the extra line.

2.FTP to your website and go to the themes folder. Rename the theme you are currently using. Load the site in a browser. If you saw your site without the theme, then you know whats causing it. Otherwise proceed to the next step.

3. Plug-ins. You can either rename each plug-in that is running and revisit the site to find out which one is causing the problem. Or rename them altogether then visit the site. See if that was what caused your problem.

4. Log-in to your control panel where you administer the domain where this wordpress installation is at (this is not domain.com/wp-admin). Sometimes its cpanel, or Plesk othertimes it is something else. Nevertheless, go to the database management icon and open the wordpress database and look for ??_option (the default is wp_option, where wp is the string you specified when you first installed WP, we’ll use wp_option as the example). Look for active_plugins on the wp_option table. Click the notepad icon to edit (Assuming you are using phpmyadmin) select all text on the field and paste into notepad. Now that it is empty, save then text your site again on a browser.

5. What actually was the cause for our installation was an incomplete update of the latest version of WP. How to fix it? Download the latest version of WP online. Make a backup of your current site, if you have not done so already, then step over the existing copy with the new one. After i did this, the website came back up like nothing happened before. It was not the database, nor the plugins nor a problemtaic theme. It was WP files itself.