PHPMailer and smtp on 1and1 shared hosting
I use phpMailer on my 1and1 shared hosting account. Recently, I could not send email anymore.
I tried debugging and this is the error that phpMailer throws:
Language string failed to load: connect_host
After googling for a solution and trying different smtp servers, accounts and smtp ports, I decided to switch to sendmail and it worked like a charm! All I needed to do was replace $mail->isSmtp() with:
$mail->isSendMail()
sendMail is located in its default location on 1and1 servers : /usr/sbin/sendmail, so no change of settings was required.
Conclusion: 1and1 probably closed its outgoing smtp ports on its shared hosting servers. Consequently, if you use PhpMailer, don’t use smtp mode anymore.
Getting Hover to work on IE7 with other tags than anchor
Before IE7, hover used to exclusively work with the anchor tag. On IE7, unless you make your HTML page follow a strict html4/xHTml1.0/1.1 dtd it will still not work… So you actually need to add this to the top of your html page:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>
a more detailed post regarding this is in:
http://www.bernzilla.com/item.php?id=762
Voila!
reading docx files using openoffice
Found this today… I tried using OpenOffice to open a docx file (which is a Microsoft xml format of their doc files) and this was of a great help. It basically tells you how to enable OpenOffice to support docx files. Pretty neat:
Conversion d’une valeur numerique en texte francais (code for converting a numerical value to french text)
Pour ceux qui en auraient eventuellement besoin, j’ai uploade un snippet pour la conversion d’une valeur numerique/monetaire en texte. C’est un snippet que j’ai developpe il y a une dixaine d’annees (le temps passe vite!) et que j’ai decouvert en faisant le tour de mes vieux fichiers.
Je ne sais pas si ce sera d’aucune utilite pour qui que ce soit maintenant avec toutes les librairies qui existent, mais bon le voici tout de meme. Notez qu’il est ecrit en Basic (et le niveau de sa programmation est basique aussi 
) donc il peut etre mis dans une macro VBA.
Installing Windows XP using a non bootable CD and no floppy disks
Yesterday, a friend of mine asked me to install windows XP for him and take care of finding and downloading all the necessary drivers to his machine.
He provided me with a copy of Winxp Pro Cd. However, the CD was not bootable and there were no boot floppy disks with it.. So I found a pretty simple way to do this. It took me a while to find the solution, so I feel compelled to share it with those who might run into the same problem: (you need another working computer with a CD burner to do this by the way)
1: Get bootcd . Boot CD lets you create a bootable CD that has the necessary utlities to get your computer up and running for a windows install. It also allows you (among other cool things) to make your C: drive bootable so you can later on launch the windows install from the CD.
2. Uncompress the .zip file. The file contains an ISO file that you can use to create the Boot CD using your preferred CD burning tool. (I used Roxio)
3. Boot up with the CD you created (don’t forget to activate booting from the CDROM on your BIOS settings)
4. You will be given several options as to what CD driver you want to use.. press enter (first option offers support to most CDROM drivers)
5. Switch to the R: drive (all the utilities provided on the CD can be accessed from there)
6. Now depending on the state of your OS installation, you might wanna play around with fdisk or some other utilities to create a FAT32 partition, or format an existing one (refer to the README file that comes with Boot CD for the list of utilities and what they do). let’s assume for simplicity that you need a fresh install, call fdisk to create a new partition (and delete the existing one(s) if any), then format it using “format”.
7: Execute a utility called setuphd so all the basic system files are transferred to the C: drive. This will make C: bootable and make the CDROM recognizable from the start.
8. We’re almost there. Reboot your computer (remove the CD now or change your BIOS settings to boot up from the Hard disk)
9. Insert the Windows XP installation CD and type R: to switch the CDROM.
10. Go to directory R:\i386, then type “winnt” to launch the install.
11. At this point windows installation will take over.
Quick note: You might wanna convert the FAT32 partition (if you formatted the whole disk as FAT32) to an NTFS one. The Windows installation program will prompt you regarding this. Or you can keep it until all is installed and use the NTFS conversion utility that comes with your XP.
Ok, so here is my quick and sloppy guide to installing a non bootable Win XP CD on a computer with a defective or no OS. Hope it’ll help someone out there.
