Another Tuesday technical tip.

I use 3′s mobile internet service – which works well for me (although I’ve never ventured much out side a city conurbation with it.)

Maybe their offering is aimed at the mass market of Hotmail users – but if you are a traditional e-mail client user it’s worth noting they don’t (appear) to have their own SMTP (outgoing email) server.

Furthermore they appear to block all traffic on Port 25 – thus when I tried to connect to a particular SMTP server, which uses authenticated SMTP I couldn’t. This confused me – as the last time I’d used this “laptop and email client not on regular network” combo was via the free wi-fi in McDonalds (yes I know but in my defence I was meeting someone*) it had worked.

The solution was to connect via a secure connection which uses a different port. Also made me think not necessarily a bad thing using secure connections.

* I’m generally not a big fan of fast food, but in this case the drive through next to the Motorway exit made for a convenient no sat-nav required congregation point.

Well for this weeks Tuesday Technical Tip I’m opting to mention something that is actually referred to on countless web pages (thus already further drifting away from my concept of uncommon problems.)

I’m mentioning this as a rather annoying bug in WordPress that has lost me a number of drafts of posts which I was working on.

The issue – which has had me banging my head against the proverbial wall half the evening – you come to save or publish a post you are editing and you get an error:

Your attempt to edit this post: foobar has failed. Please try again.


I have seen this quite a bit – and foolish I thought I’d have my ‘auto-saves’ to save me, but this proved not to be the case.

The well documented fix is to edit the wp-admin/post-new.php file and commenting out this line of code

//wp_enqueue_script('autosave');


This turns of auto-save – so remember to save them drafts.

Tuesday Technical Tip

I want to automate generation of MP3 files on a linux box- so I need to install LAME so I can do this via a command line.

So this is what I did

1 – First grab from the DAG repository the rpm for your distro:

http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/lame/

2 – Switch to the directory you’ve saved the file

3 – Install the rpm – replacing the package name with the relevant file

rpm -ivh lame-3.96.1-2.2.el4.rf.x86_64.rpm

Tis done.

My first real “Tuesday Technical Tip”:

I’m currently using Microsoft Security Essentials on some machines on one site, with quite favourable results so far.

From the GUI there is no way to exclude network paths from real time scanning. On these machines I want to exclude certain network files which hold my playout system audio and databases.

The answer lies on this Microsoft page

You can do this via the registry, by editing this registry key :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Antimalware\Exclusions\Paths

Right click > New DWord value

Set the value to be 0
Set the name to be the share you are trying to exclude.

\\server\share : 0

Also here you’ll find the file type exclusions. I set up exclusions as per my playout system vendors recommendations.

The Microsoft page states you may have to change the permissions on the key by taking the ownership of the key from advanced tab and give write permissions to yourself.

This appears true – I exported the relevant keys to a reg file to import into other workstations, but had to first use regedit to edit the permissions to give me write access.

One aim of this blog is to share small little tips or solutions to issues that I’ve found. I’ve got a few in draft form already, so I’m going to try and make Tuesdays “Technical Tips” day. Where each Tuesday I’ll post a tip or solution to (mainly computing) problems.

My idea being where I have encountered something where I couldn’t find the complete answer by googling (other search engines are available) I’ll post it up here for the benefit of others.