It’s been down for about 30 mins now.. 

Haven’t heard any news as to why, though I do see there was a similar episode last year.

Opening it up I was a little surprised at the lightness.. after reviews of “sturdy” and “solid”. Ultimately, it feels adequate to bounce around in my laptop case though not quite as sturdy as the Lacie “rugged” drive (btw after using the Lacie, personally I would term that drive “sturdy” not “rugged”).

Setup took me about 10-15 minutes including box opening. More on the setup below. I’ll specifically talk about formatting the drive as NTFS under Windows 7 64-bit. Note the software doesn’t want to run on a 64-bit OS natively which I understood when I purchased it, but there is a work around to both that and formatting in NTFS (the included software only formats in Fat32).

Pros

• “sturdy” enough to get tossed into a laptop case
• BioMetric / Encrypted
• Easy Setup
• cheap for biometric security

Cons

• Pricy per MB
• Included software doesn’t want to run on 64-bit Windows
• Software won’t format NTFS
• Not “rugged”

Using APRICORN Software on Windows 7 64-bit

Installation Steps

1. Insert included software disk – If it tries to auto-run just cancel
2. Open Explorer and navigate to the disk. Right click either Auto-run.exe or the exe under /pstoken3.0/ that you want.
3. 
4. In the sub-menu click “Troubleshoot compatibility” then click “Use Recommended Settings”
5. After it’s done thinking click Start the program
6. When the Installer appears, select Install.. It will give you the option to Install to the hard-drive or Run from the CD at this point. Select Run. (I believe when I tried to install it failed).
7. 
8. The Software will start and let you add fingerprints and a master password.
9. When you are done it will tell you it wants to format the drive and give a little format window. Just leave that window there and skip to the steps below.
10. Close the installer and Click “Next” on the Program Compatibility window. It will give you a screen like this. Save the settings for future use.
11. 

Formatting APRICORN AGIS BioMetric with NTFS

1. If the Agis drive is plugged in and biometric data saved. Open Disk Management. You can find disk manager in Windows 7 by opening control panel and searching for “Disk Management”.
2. Right-click on the Agis drive and select format. Note: If format is not available here; format first with the software provided on the disk.
3. On the format screen select NTFS from the drop down and click Format.
4. When you get the Format Complete message close all windows and start using your great new drive.

Other Thoughts

Several reviews noted “slow” performance on this and other secure / encrypted drives. This is to be expected because of the hardware encryption, but I ran some rather non-scientific tests to see how the drive acted for me in the real-world. I was expecting to be underwhelmed, however on two Windows 7 systems, one 32-bit one 64-bit I got average transfer speeds of 24 MBs and 15 MBs. In fairness the 15MBs was actually coming from my NAS over a Gigabit LAN so to me that doesn’t sound bad at all for a little drive that only boasts USB 2.0 and a 5400 speed drive. Ones who want faster transfer could always throw down for the SSD version.. but USB 2 will be limiting things at that point. There is also a version with eSata, if I remember correctly that model did not have Biometric Security, only the keypad.

My only other note would be on price. The drive isn’t to pricy in my opinion for biometric. There is a cheaper option which has a number pad on the exterior of the case.. That might work well in a business situation when you need many individuals to be able to access the drive. In my case, I just needed a couple users and ease of access was important.

I am not affiliated with APRICORN in any way.

To the best of my knowledge this information applies to these models:

APRICORN 500GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

APRICORN 500GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive A25-BIO-500

APRICORN Aegis Padlock 500GB USB 2.0 Secure 128-bit AES Hardware Encrypted Portable Hard Drive A25-PL128-500
APRICORN Aegis Padlock 500GB Secure 128-bit AES Hardware Encrypted Portable Hard Drive

APRICORN Aegis Padlock 320GB Secure 256-bit AES Hardware Encrypted Portable Hard Drive
APRICORN Aegis Padlock 250GB Secure 256-bit AES Hardware Encrypted Portable Hard Drive
APRICORN Aegis Padlock 500GB External Hard Drive A25-PL256-V500
APRICORN Aegis Padlock 640GB Secure 256-bit AES Hardware Encrypted Portable Hard Drive
APRICORN Aegis Padlock 750GB Secure 256-bit AES Hardware Encrypted Portable Hard Drive
APRICORN Aegis Padlock 1TB External Hard Drive A25-PL128-1000

APRICORN Aegis Padlock 1TB External Hard Drive A25-PLe256-1000
APRICORN Aegis Padlock 250GB Secure 128-bit AES Hardware Encrypted Portable Hard Drive
APRICORN Aegis Padlock 320GB Secure 128-bit AES Hardware Encrypted Portable Hard Drive
APRICORN Aegis Padlock 500GB Secure 128-bit AES Hardware Encrypted Portable Hard Drive
APRICORN Aegis Padlock 750GB Secure 128-bit AES Hardware Encrypted Portable Hard Drive

APRICORN Aegis Padlock Pro 250GB 256-bit Hardware Encryption Portable Hard Drive A25-PLe256-250
APRICORN Aegis Padlock Pro 500GB 256-bit Hardware Encryption Portable Hard Drive A25-PLe256-500
APRICORN Aegis Padlock Pro 640GB 256-bit Hardware Encryption Portable Hard Drive A25-PLe256-640
APRICORN Aegis Padlock Pro 750GB 256-bit Hardware Encryption Portable Hard Drive A25-Ple256-750

The page was still set properly in WP Settings..  I changed the name of the offending page. Horrors- it still redirected now to the new page..  This pointed towards a plugin issue in the extreme since I know I hadn’t added any redirects, coded or otherwise.

No change in redirects, no host change, no .htaccess, or new plugins.. just one new page created and my site is gone to the dogs. Suddenly, it occured to me that I’d updated my plugins recently.  Bingo!  The Redirection plugin had been updated and I found my issue:

The feature “URL Monitoring” was causing a redirect to be created whenever a new page (or post?) was created.  Joys..  Would have been easily noticeable, but for some reason they did not appear in the redirects list.  I found them in database however and a couple clicks of phpMyAdmin action kunfu’d their site decimating posteriors into thin air.

To fix:

1. In your Dashboard:  Go to Tools -> Redirection -> Options.  Under ‘URL Monitoring’ set ‘Post & Page URLS’ to ‘Don’t Monitor’
2. Open phpMyAdmin and login to your WP database: You will find the redirects under the ‘redirection_items’ table in your wordpress database. Delete all the new redirects you created while trying to figure out what the heck was happening.

I’m using the plugin: Redirection by John Godley it can be found here: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

There’s some php to modify the plugins obnoxious redirect behaviour, in leu of posting it myself you can see a example here:

http://urbangiraffe.com/support/topic/home-page-is-redirecting-to-another-wp-page-without-my-instruction-to-do-so

Well it did aford me the pleasure of learning something about Google Chrome and Dreamweaver CS4 that I didn’t know before. Anyway, I overwrote my page. I was working with a proprietary system that forces you to write code in a text box on the website.  Just a lowly barren text box, when you save it refreshes the page.. etc. Yes, the dark ages. Anyhow, I did a copy paste operation from a copy of the code I had on my computer and Saved.  Refreshed the end product in my handy Google Chrome and HORROR.. an ancient version of the page. With the exception of the snippet of code I’d meant to get.. I was lazy and did a select All paste all instead of grabbing just the snippet. Some quick looking confirmed I’d indeed managed to overwrite several copies of new code with an old version.

My brother suggested checking Chromes cache. Which you can easily do by typing: about:cache in the url bar. This returned a host of pages including a few that could be a version of mine. Unfortunately, Chrome keeps the pages in a hex type format.

Google Chrome cache of an HTML page I need to recover

I’m sure there’s some hex editor that could read the real text back, but in this case I decided to use a feature of Dreamweaver I enjoy but don’t get to use often. I pasted the text into DW CS4 into a blank html page and pulled up teh trusty Search and Replace window and switch on the Use Regulat Expression checkbox. This allows the use of -you guessed it- regular expressions.

Theres a Regular Expression reference here

Basically Regular Expressions is a power wildcard engine for searching that Dreamweaver supports. I was using CS4 I don’t know when Dreamweaver started supporting it, but from things said it appears it’s been supported for some time.

This is the Expression I came up with to kill the garbage on the left:

\r\n0{5}...:  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w  \d\w {2}

It’s possible to save your search with the  little disk icon just above the search box. So if you expect to do this again. You might save it.

This successfully netted me a mass of  non-linefeeded html. It appears there was also periods scattered through the code. But about that time I remembered another place I might have a copy of the page I was working on and- I did.  Happy day..

In the end I didn’t need to finish recovering my html this way. But I saved my Dreamweaver Expression for future use and found a fail safe (can’t have to many right?) for when I overwrite my hard work with equally hard work thats doesn’t get the job done.

But anyway, because of my setup I need to connect to the MIFI wirelessly and not plug it in via the USB. I also need to connect to my wonderful QNAP TS-659 Pro for backup and such important things. I connect to the QNAP through a Belkin router which has always worked painlessly.

So I connected the LAN cable to the belkin. Detected the network. Was able to run some backup stuff in minutes. All very nice.. until I realized the last web pages I navigated too never came up. They just sat there turning away and eventually produced a “Not Found” error.. Quite a bit of fiddling and connecting and reconnecting did nothing to help. My laptop is Vista 64bit at the moment and the TCP IP settings were all DHCP and pretty much automatic.

First I thought perhaps they both had a gateway set and it was somehow conflicting. This wasn’t the case and it left me stumped. Enter TCP-IP routing table..  This from Wikipedia: “The routing table stores the routes (and in some cases, metrics associated with those routes) to particular network destinations. This information contains the topologyof the network immediately around it.” Basically its a map showing how packets get from one place to another. The important property to me was the “Metric” property which was unobtrusivly set to “Auto”. For whatever reason (maybe because its normally faster and more reliable) it must have been favoring the LAN connection. Setting the number higher means it “costs more” to use that route.  As a quick test I set the Metrics on the LAN to 11 and on the WIFI adapter to 1.. Wala! Webpages and hand QNAP backup goodness.

Good simple directions for setting up multiple gateways / routers

Decent explanation of router tables

Directions from Microsoft

Perhaps not surprisingly it worked smoothly and I was able to check out my CSS changes before uploading them. My normal workflow is to design a site on a local server and then make minor update on the live site. I’ve wanted to test locally for a long time, but hadn’t gotten around to setting it up. Happy.. Dreamweaver CS5 comes through. Satisfied, I went to bed.. when I got up in the the morning I had a couple messags saying the blog wasn’t working.

A quick check netted this error on the blog page (www.domain.com/blog)

Warning: require(./wp-blog-header.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /domain/public_html/blog/index.php on line 17

With creeping suspicion I remembered the error message from the night before.. I checked the main folder and found that there was a new /blog/ folder under my WordPress install. With it’s own .htaccess and index.php.

Renaming this folder fixed the problem. No more error message, trusty blog back at my side.

I haven’t tracked down why it happened yet, subjectively it seems DW CS5 thought my domain.com/blog folder was the main folder and automatically created that folder. Perhaps it was caused by my messy conventions on my local machine.

Hopefully, this is a help to someone. If you know what caused this or have experienced a similar issue I’d like to hear about it.

If it hadn’t been 4am I probably wouldn’t have tried a new Dreamweaver download on a live site. But overall it did hel pme make some minor CSS changes quickly and I’m looking forward to the new CMS friendly functions.

Install process

A quick search netted this gem from WordPress: Conditional Tags

A little php

is_page()

returns true if  we are in a page as opposed to a post.

In this case I was just trying to get rid of the Sidebar in Pages and not in posts, so I simply commented out the SideBar() function in page.php, but I think the conditionals will come in handy in the future.

For a full list of WordPress Conditionals look here: Word Press Codex – Conditionals