Author Archives: David J. Pryke

About David J. Pryke

David J. Pryke: Husband | Father | Techie: A SysAdmin living and working in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Girls, please do <whatever> “Like a Girl”

Doing something “Like a Girl” is not an insult in my mind, and it shouldn’t be one in the public consciousness, either. If someone tells my daughter, Abby, that she does something “like a girl,” I want her to reply with the attitude “Heck yeah, I do!” and show them how a girl can kick butt at whatever it is…. Read more »

Flash plugin crashing in Firefox on Windows 8 with StackHash_fa66 error

As of today, 2014-01-07, I am running Firefox 26.0 on Windows 8 with the Adobe Flash Plugin 11,9,900,170. For the past few weeks, whenever I attempted to load a site that utilizes the flash plugin, I would receive an application crash error with the following details: Problem signature:   Problem Event Name:                        APPCRASH   Application Name:                             FlashPlayerPlugin_11_9_900_170.exe   Application Version:                          … Read more »

AutoMySQLBackup authentication error

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Note: If using automysqlbackup to backup all your MySQL databases on a Linux host, and you are getting the error: ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘automysqlbackup’@’localhost’ (using password: YES) even though you test it on the command line and can successfully login as the automysqlbackup user (or whichever user you are using for backups), make certain that the… Read more »

Serving static content through the ASP.NET handler on Windows 2003 / IIS 6.0

I recently had the need to process static file types (particularly *.html and *.pdf files) through the .NET processor/Framework on a Windows 2003 / IIS 6.0 server for the purpose of redirecting certain URLs. Having done this in the past, I knew I simply needed to add an application mapping for each file extension to the .NET processor. (Read more… Read more »

What’s the worst that could happen?

Watch this. Regardless of how you feel about global climate change, this video could help you choose a path of action to the future. Watch it and decide for yourself how you should live. Greg Craven’s website For people citing the whole “Climategate” issue where it was thought that data was falsified by scientists, read the Wikipedia article on the… Read more »

Crunchy Peanut Butter Cookies

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I made these cookies as travel food for a long car trip we made recently.  They are high in protein, and relatively low in simple carbs, at least compared to many other cookies and car snacks.  They were tasty and provided great energy in the car without causing that dreaded sleepiness that comes from snacking on too many simple carbohydrates…. Read more »

Almond Biscotti

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Original recipe is in normal text, with my adjustments and notes in italics between the curly braces after each line. 2 sticks butter, room temp 1 3/4 cup sugar 6 eggs 2 tsp. vanilla 1 tsp. almond flavoring 1 tsp. baking powder 1 cup sliced almonds 6 cups flour Cream butter and gradually add sugar.  Mix well. Add one egg… Read more »

QuickBooks Pro 2008 Unrecoverable Error upon start

I just rebuilt a computer at work due to a motherboard failure, and upon reinstallation, had a problem with QuickBooks Pro 2008.  When I tried to run the program, all I got was: “QuickBooks unrecoverable error” as the title of a message box, with contents indicating that the program couldn’t start and asking if I would like to send an… Read more »

su: invalid script: /usr/libexec/auth/login_passwd (OpenBSD)

I had to replace a host-based firewall, based on OpenBSD, that had some failing hardware this week.  I managed to get the failing system up and running and made a full back up of the system using tar over SSH to a remote computer.  (Thanks to Trinity Rescue Kit for the help! I ran TRK on a Windows laptop I… Read more »

Major WordPress blog performance problem solved

In a previous post, WordPress woes, I went through the procedure I used to solve some performance problems related to how the IP address on this server is NATed.  Well, there was another problem somewhere that caused the WordPress admin to be incredibly slow most of the time, caused Akismet to not work at all, and a variety of other… Read more »