Sciencefeed

Gestern ist Sciencefeed gestartet, ein neuer Microblogging-Dienst, speziell für Wissenschaftler.  TechCrunch berichtete darüber. Auf Sciencefeed kann man kurze Nachrichten eingeben und in der wissenschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit in Echtzeit verbreiten. Man kann nicht nur Bilder etc. an die Posts anhängen, sondern auch Artikel aus Fachzeitschriften (aus der umfangreichen ResearchGATE-Literaturdatenbank). Alles sehr übersichtlich und einfach. Noch sind natürlich nicht alle Fächer und Themen mit guten Feeds besetzt, aber das kommt bestimmt noch.

Nicht sehr vielsagend, aber toll gemacht ist übrigens der Trailer auf der Startseite. Hinter dem Bostoner Betreiber stecken übrigens auch mehrere deutsche Köpfe. Ein Interessantes Projekt.

But after installation, I had an error message whenever I tried to access any album settings:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 30720 bytes) in [...]/wp-content/plugins/WPshowroom/inc.thumb.php on line 1370

I commented out parts of the inc.thumb.php, but then the error message “moved” to another file.

My WordPress installation consumes pretty much memory, so I’ve set 64M as PHP memory limit in my Apache web server config for this site. I set it even to 512M for testing, but the error message remained.

At the end, I figured out a line in WP Showroom’s request.ajax.php file:

@ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ‘32M’);

This line is at the beginning. It overwrites the PHP memory limit set in the Apache config and lowers it to – in my case, insufficient – 32M. I think, the line is in there to make more memory available, but if the setting is already above 32M, it has the opposite effect. I just commented out that one line, and now, it works fine.

I’ll upload pictures for my albums soon, so all pictures that have been there before (and some new) will be available.

There is a tr.im “plugin plugin” for Twitter Tools by John Girvin, but this did not work for me, don’t know why.

So I did it by editing the Twitter Tools original bit.ly Plugin:

• Open twitter-tools-bitly.php in your WordPress plugin editor
• Find the function aktt_bitly_shorten_url() and comment it out (or delete it, if you are sure)
• Replace it by this function:

function aktt_bitly_shorten_url($url) {
$parts = parse_url($url);
if (!in_array($parts['host'], array(‘j.mp’, ‘bit.ly’, ‘tr.im’, ‘u.nu’, ‘is.gd’, ‘sn.im’, ‘tinyurl.com’))) {
$short = file_get_contents(‘http://api.tr.im/api/trim_simple?url=’ . urlencode($url));
$sparts = @parse_url($short);
if ($sparts['host'] == ‘tr.im’) $url = $short;
}
return $url;
}

• Activate the Twitter Tools bit.ly Plugin
• Enter any bit.ly API account information in the Twitter Tools configuration (don’t know whether that’s necessary, I just entered a ’0′ in all fields)
• Enjoy

No, it’s not that easy. I got an “file or directory corrupted” error. I tried twice, then I installed a clean Vista to perform all kinds of checks to the backup drive, everything was fine, but not working. Then I found out that the Complete Backup is a .vhd file and that other software is capable of restoring from vhd. So I installed some commercial software, burned a rescue CD, booted from that. Same result: It finds the backup and knows what to do with it, but can’t write.

There are some other threads on the net on this issue. I doubt that this damn Vista feature works on RAID drives at all. After hours of trying and internet research, I found a solution:

1. Install a clean Vista on the broken array and switch off “user account control”.
2. Install the Vhdmount feature of MS Virtual Server 2005 (downloadable at no cost). See these instructions in German (I didn’t manage extracting the msi out of setup.exe, but you can choose the vhd function only in regular setup) or google for it in English.
3. Install xxcopy freeware edition.
4. Find the .vhd file under the “WindowsImageBackup” folder and mount it using vhdmount.
5. Xxcopy all content from the newly mounted drive to a directory (either on the backup drive or on the formerly broken array) using the /backup parameter. This will show some errors, don’t care.
6. Reboot from your Vista DVD, go in repair mode and open a command line.
7. Xxcopy everything from the folder mentioned before to C:\, use parameters /backup and /y.
8. Reboot from hard disk and enjoy your new old Vista installation

My system is fully functional. The only thing I recognized is that Vista lost information about the Vista updates I chose not to install and offered those to me again. But that’s not too bad.

Now, this took me almost the whole day. Why does Mandriva not ask before formatting a harddisk? Why does Vista not check whether the backup can be restored to the drive that is backed up? And does anyone have a good recommendation for a backup tool that works with RAID drives?

So I went through dozens of websites related to Vista bootloader fails after BSD or Linux installations. I came closer and closer, but at some point, information became very rare – as usual, my problem seemed to be more complicated than the average problem of the same kind Here’s how I did it:

First of all: This article is for people having a problem with booting Vista, while the Vista partition and all files on it are still there. If you chose to use the whole (and same as Vista) hard disk for your BSD or Linux or whatever other operating system, and therefore the Vista disk partition was deleted, there’s most probably nothing you can do (maybe apart from calling and paying a professional data recovery service).

Step 1: Vista Automatic Repair
This is said to work in many cases. Take your Vista DVD (or, if you don’t have one because Vista was preinstalled and your PC manufacturer didn’t deliver a DVD, get a Recovery CD image from here). Choose “Repair your Computer” and then “Startup Repair“. If that works for you, fine, don’t read on. It didn’t work out on my computer.

Step 2: Repair MBR and BCD
Now, open a command line from the repair options menu and enter:

del c:\boot\ /f /s
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /rebuildbcd


This is said to work out for the very most people where step 1 didn’t help. Again, if that works for you, fine, don’t read on. It didn’t help me.

Step 3: Repair the Start Sector
Now, what websites say is that most probably this works out for the rest:
Enter
bootrec /fixboot
at the command line.

If you get a success message, go back to step 2, which should really work now.
Again, I got no success message but an error message: “The volume does not contain a recognized file system“. Information on the net is rare on this specific problem. But at the very end, I managed it:

Step 4: Using diskpart
Diskpart is the Vista partition manager and it is the most unhandy partition manager I’ve ever seen. You’ll love good old fdisk after using diskpart.
Anyway, enter
diskpart
to open the diskpart console.

There, enter help to get an overview. Our goal is to activate the Vista boot partition. This is usually done by

select disk 0
select volume 1
select partition 0

if the Vista boot partition is the first partition on your first hard drive. If you have to search for the right partition, use

detail disk
detail volume
detail partition

to see information about the selected object. If you’ve selected the right partition, enter

active
exit

to activate that partition and go back to the command line. Then follow steps 3 and 2. This helped me and – according to the rare information on the net – also a few others. If this doesn’t help, I can’t help you either, sorry.

Thanks to the authors of information that I found here, here and here.