Gibni - The Prime » 2009

Get $30 ThinkHost Coupon code NOW!

Gi — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:22:35 +0000

I’ve been working with the best web hosting geek on website optimization, speeding up pages, securing data… He’s become also one of my advertisers and bought an ad spot on Gibni.

Just now, I got a $30 web hosting coupon from the best web hosting site !

If you doubt buying a web hosting plan, this could help you make the right decision. Here’s a ThinkHost coupon, giving you $30 off your bill! So no more hesitation please!

ThinkHost Coupon Code: oak_ah98

Why choose ThinkHost?

It’s a “perfect” host,
It runs on renewable energy (wind and solar)
Gives you 100% uptime guarantee
Gives LOTS of unlimiteds ( Space, Bandwidth, Websites, Databases…)
AND FREE SITE BUILDER FOR BEGINNERS
It’s not expensive at all, and also becomes very cheap after the coupon code!
And above all, just because I recommend it!

Windows 7 Installation Error – Solved

Gi — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:18:38 +0000

Trying to install Windows 7 Ultimate (build 7600), I got the “Windows could not prepare the computer to boot into the next phase of installation” error message. I tried the installation once again, but the error kept appearing.

The problem was that I had deleted my old Windows XP, and though I had no operating system on the PC. Fortunately I did burn a copy of ” The Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows” and it saved me a lot of time throught the process.

After searching for the possible solutions, I came to the conclusion that this error did appear regularly on Vista but as the Windows 7 is quite new, there where no clear documentation on how to resolve this problem.

Possible solutions are:

Disk Errors:

Run a “CHKDSK X: /F” on your target disk (by replacing X with the proper drive letter)
Format the installation target partition with tools like Ultimate Boot CD
(WORKING SOLUTION FOR MY CASE) Using the Windows 7 installation wizard, firstly “DELETE” the installation target partition, then “CREATE A NEW” partition, and then with the same wizard, “FORMAT” the partition.

Unattend Setup:

If you run an unattended setup, you might face the “Windows could not prepare the computer to boot into the next phase of installation” error message, and this is most probably because of improper partitioning information in the “unattend.xml” file.
Check “Windows could not prepare the computer to boot into the next phase of installation” error on Microsoft knowledge base for details on this scenario.
You can also try to remove the “unattend.xml” file and re-burn the source, to proceed with an attended install.

System incompatibility:

To make sure that your hardware is not causing this error, I would recommend you remove all uneccessary connected devices, and keep only the strict minimum.
Check for the minimum system requirements for Windows 7 on Microsoft’s ”Windows 7 minimum system requirements“

Installation Source:

It might be possible that the DVD you’re using for the installation be corrupt, so check it once, and if possible, get yourself another installation source.

Windows Delayed Write Failed Error – Solutions

Gi — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:22:18 +0000

Window Delayed Write Failed ? Solutions are here!

This topic is researched, tested and written by Amir Hossein Moradi.

This is the third article on the Windows Delayed Write Failed error occurring with hard drives (mostly external ones with USB/Firewire/Network connections). On 28th December 2007, I wrote the Windows – Delayed Write Failed – Solved! article which had more than 190,000 views, and helped many users till date. On 9th June 2008, the second article on this topic – Windows Delayed Write Failed – Latest Solution – which had more than 34,000 views till date, was out and is still getting many users out of trouble.

Now, it’s time to write the 3rd article and sum up all possible solutions for the Windows Delayed Write Failed error.

About Delayed Write:

Windows uses a special subsystem for certain disk functions, which caches write operations and performs them when the system is idle. This can improve system performance, but it’s typically turned off by default. The term for this kind of operation is “delayed writing”.

You can see how write-caching is handled for a particular volume by right-clicking on the icon for the drive in the “Disk drives” subtree of the Device Manager and selecting the Policies tabs. The options typically are “Optimize for quick removal” (everything is written to the drive immediately) and “Optimize for performance” (writes are cached).

About the error:

“Windows Delayed Write Failed” error occurs usually when the caching process gets interrupted or the files to be cached get corrupted, either because of a drive failure, a cable failure, or a USB interface fail!

This error might happen to brand new drives as well as good working old ones.

Cause:

This error might be caused by several factors:

Cache settings
System Restore settings
Device drivers
Media error, drive failure
USB/Firewire host controllers
Drive overheating
Mis-configured BIOS settings
Ultra Direct Memory Access (UDMA) mis-configuration
Unmatched cables
Faulty cables
Memory parity conflict
Power management drivers

On the next page(s) I’ll discuss all the working and possible solutions to this issue.

Mark Gibni.com's History

Gi — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:20:21 +0000

Have you found an article, post or comment useful on this site and it saved you time or/and money?

Many people have visited Gibni.com since its first day and the number grows everyday. Do you want to mark the history of this site by bringing some help to it?

Articles like TOP N95 Applications, Symbian S60 Applications – Part 1 , 2 , 3 brought a lot of people to this site, and gave them useful information on mobile phones applications.
Articles on the Delayed Write Failed error message or the second version, helped a lot of people solve their hard drive issue and get their data back with no data loss!
About 20 000 people read the article on MSN Messenger and its conflict with NOD32 and got connected back again with friends and familly.
The Conficker removal article, is getting a lot of attention as it helped many people to delete the virus and protect themselves from conficker’s infection.

Currently I am writing the 3rd article on the Delayed Write Failed error message which will hopefully help people with this issue to get their hardware work properly as expected.

The 4th part of TOP Symbian Applications is on the way too.

I expect an increase in my unique visitors by 7 000/month. Which will lead to about 30 000 unique visitors per month.

My first goal is to provide information for free, and make it accessible to everyone. All of this takes time, a lot of time.

Many visitors wanted to say “Thanks” for the information I provided here and that helped them in some way, so I recently started a new section, which you might have already seen, it’s the Donations page. Here you can donate any amount of money to help me continue the developpement of Gibni and if you donate more than 10 USD, you can show a name and a link of your choice on the Donators list.

Go ahead and Buy me a drink (Coffee: 3.5 USD, Beer: 4.5 USD or Fresh soda: 2.5 USD) at least if you can’t donate a larger amount.

Thanks for your great support.

Posts and comments in “any” language in WordPress!

Gi — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 01:52:50 +0000

Have you ever thought of writing your blog posts in a language other than English? or even let your visitors leave comments in another language!?

Well, some may answer with “Yes! in French!” (or Portuguese, or Italian…), but, what I mean is in other languages like Arabic, Farsi (Persian), Urdu, Chinese…, languages which have characters other than the basic “A,B,C…”

Basically, when you write a blog post on your blog, it is stored in a database, and what characters that database supports, defines the characters you can use for writting your post.

Well discuss about the two general types of WordPress, the WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted WordPress installations.

WordPress.com blogs:

Typing other languages such as Farsi or Russian or Arabic should be supported by default and you should be able to write in almost any language without problem.

But if it’s not enabled on your account, according to Fatih Syuhud [1], you should:

- Login to your administration area on WordPress.com

- Go to “Settings” > “Reading”

- and set the encoding for “Pages and Feeds” to “UTF-8″

This procedure gives you the possibility of writing all kind of characters on your pages and posts and feeds.

Encoding for other specific character:

Latin/Hebrew: ISO-8859-8
Hebrew: windows-1255
Latin/Arabic: ISO-8859-6
Arabic: windows-1256

Self-hosted WordPress installations:

Remember that you take full responsability for the modifications and actions you do on your blogs/sites! Proceed at your own risk.

The contents of posts are stored in a table called wp_post (by default) inside your WordPress main database.

What defines the type of characters supported by a table, are the charset and collation of the table.

By default, all installations of WordPress (prior to 2.3.1), use the latin1_general_ci (or latin1_swedish_ci) encoding for their rows and tables.

To post articles in Arabic or Farsi (Persian) (or Urdu, Chinese, Russian…), you should change the encodings of specific tables and respective rows to utf8_general_ci.

Step One: Backup

You should first of all, backup your files and database! use Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan’s WP-DBManager plugin, or do it manually by following the procedure from this article: WordPress Backups.

Step Two: Convert

First Solution proposed by Fatih and Mukhlas Rowi [3] ( 70% success rate , maybe some data loss) is:

- Open your WordPress database in phpMyAdmin (in cPanel),

- Click on the “wp_post” table and then click on “Operations”,

- Change the collation to “utf8_general_ci”,

- Save.

- Now, browse to the “wp_post” table, and check all rows with a collation attribute,

- Click on “Edit” bellow the list of selected rows,

- Change all collations to “utf8_general_ci”,

- Save.

That’ it.

Second solution: Use a plugin to do the conversion! I’ve tested the bbwp2UTF8 plugin and it works great (at least with WordPress 2.7.1), you can download it from my Downloads Page or from WordPress.org home page: bbwp2UTF8 Home page. ( 30% success rate, big data loss)

- Install the bbwp2UTF8 plugin by extracting its content in your plugins directory (usually /wp-content/plugins ),

- Go to the plugin’s page (link is below the “Plugins” section on the left side of the page in WordPress 2.7) .

- Check the desired tables to convert ( I recomment you convert all tables),

- Proceed with the steps to complete the conversion procedure.

That’s all! Your database and tables have been converted in the right manner, and you should not face any loss of data.

(In case you don’t like the plugin suggested above, or it doesn’t work for you, you may try: UTF-8 Database Converter by g30rg3_x ( I haven’t tried this out!) )

Geeks’ solution: Follow the guide at WordPress.org : Converting Database Character Sets