Today my Nintendo Wii returned. Nintendo could not reproduce the error I was getting (the “disc read error”) so what they ended up doing was replacing the whole cdrom drive unit. I put in Super Smash Bros Brawl and noticed its doing a lot better. The work they did is warrantied for a year starting after the repair and not when I bought it which I thought was nice.

The thing that impresses me more than anything is the fact that my Wii was in the possession of UPS longer than Nintendo’s. Nintendo had it in and out within 2 days and the Wii was gone a total of 8 days (2 being the weekend). Thats good in my book.

Thanks Nintendo.

Nintendo Nintendo, What can I say but Nintendo. I sent in my Wii this week to fix that nasty “Disc Read Error” it has always had. I believe it was Monday that UPS picked it up but it may have been Tuesday. This morning I see that the tracking says it was delivered so I check the Nintendo website. It showed that it was still not in their system but it can take up to 2-3 days before it shows. They could be busy so it was no big deal. With my troubles with HP lately I am tracking the progress of my Wii quite a bit. So this afternoon when I checked to see if it was in the system it was. YAY! However it gets better. Not only was it in their system, but it was fixed and is being sent back to me. No way! Oh, yes way!!

While I figured Nintendo would do a really good job from reviews I read online there is always that part that worries me. Will it get lost? Will the UPS truck flip over into a river? etc. However so good so far. I am definitely impressed at how fast they got it in and sent it out. It kind of makes you wish Nintendo was a PC manufacturer with that kind of support.

Go Nintendo!

So my dad is coming home for a couple days before he has to go back to New Jersey and then eventually over to Iraq. The bad part is the days he will be home I will be up in Camp Grayling doing the first half of my Annual Training. I will be leaving Thursday afternoon of that period and he will be getting home Friday night. If you haven’t already checked it out, go take a look at http://www.kreitsoft.com/iraq/. I have pictures up there of my dad currently doing some extra training at Ft. Dix. It sucks I won’t be home to see him however somethings we cannot control and this is one of them.

So I was doing some PHP work for a company and another programmer they used mentioned turning off directory indexing. This was a good observation as there are files we don’t want to be seen. I have a ton of them on the web server at my house. However, for a server that hosts one companies files (several websites) what is the best way to accomplish this? I had my thoughts and then, I read through the httpd.conf file and found my solution.

My Thoughts:
- .htaccess file. Put in “Options -Indexes” : Good idea however would require quite a bit of working hitting all the sites / sub domains they run.

- Put an index.html file in every folder. Loop through as bash script : While plausable, it would be a pain as there is a bunch of extra files added. Plus everytime you add a new website you have run the script on that folder, along with any other time you add new folders to the website you would have to make sure to put the files in there. In the end, not something I wanted to do.

- cPanel/WHM option : Great idea. However if they implemented this option I sure as hell couldn’t find it. The most I could find regarding indexes was the priority of say “index.php” and “index.html” but not to turn off indexing.

The Solution:
I did some playing around in the httpd.conf file on my home webserver and found the solution. To turn off indexing by default across an entire server find the like. It might not match exact however it must be <Directory />

 <Directory />
  Options All
  AllowOverride All
 </Directory>

If you see Options All replace it with Options -Indexes . If you don’t see a line with Options add it. So it should look like

 <Directory />
  Options -Indexes
  AllowOverride All
 </Directory>

cPanel servers are a little bit different. The files are split up a bit more than other servers. The file you are looking for is located at “/usr/local/apache/conf/access.conf”

This was a public service announcement brought to you by me

As you can see there has been a design overhaul on the site. I thought things needed to be lightened up a bit. There are several pages that have updated content on it. I have even added a new section called “Iraq“. It contains pictures of my dads training at Ft. Dix as well as when he goes overseas in a few weeks. Most things are working now, however there may be a few quirks that need to be worked out.

As I mentioned on the front page (before the design switch), this site except for the blog is built on CodeIgniter an awesome open source PHP framework.