Christopher Theunissen



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Welcome to the Christopher Theunissen Chapters (my interpretation of the .cc top level domain).

Feel free to browse the site using the menu above or the Site Map. I can be contacted via guest book before you leave or email me at christopher_theunissen@hotmail.com.

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News

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DateSorted DescendingTitleNews
17/03/2005 13:56:17Photographs of Finlay and Nathan on Grandma's Rocking ChairPhotographs of Finlay and Nathan on Grandma's rocking chair can be found at http://gallery.theunissen.cc/?name=family/theunissen_nathan/2005.
17/03/2005 13:56:15Nathan's Third Birthday PhotographsPhotographs of Nathans' birthday can be found at http://gallery.theunissen.cc/?name=family/theunissen_nathan/2005/birthday.
28/12/2004 00:43:13New Photographs of Rollright StonesThere are new photographs of the Rollright Stones with frost on them at http://gallery.theunissen.cc/?name=places/rollright_stones.
26/12/2004 17:27:00Christmas Photographs

Merry Christmas and all the best for the year to come!

Here are photographs of the recent festivities at our home in Wellesbourne:
07/12/2004 12:31:08Life is GoodAs of 05/12/2004, life is good. :-)
24/11/2004 17:08:05AVG 7.0 Free Edition Added to the Software GuideAs of 31 December 2004, AVG 6.0 Free Edition won't be supported, so I have added some instructions on how to download, install, set up and use the new AVG 7.0 Free Edition on http://theunissen.cc/christopher/guides/computing/software/#anti-virus.
21/11/2004 16:54:3431st Birthday Photographs from JulyHere are the photographs I took at my 31st birthday party way back in July.
21/11/2004 14:48:49Father Christ-mas/opherI played Father Christ-mas/opher in aid of Shakespeare Hospice at Santas Grotto at the local Wyevale Garden Centre for two hours today. Photographs can be found at http://gallery.theunissen.cc/?name=christmas/2004/20041121_santas_grotto. Unfortunately, due to the early start of 10:30, only two families visited before my replacement arrived, so I didn't manage to get into the flow of it and overcome the self-conscious sound in my voice. Maybe next year. "Thanks" to Kate and Tom for coming to take the photographs.
22/10/2004 14:00:00The Web Server Wastes More Time

At last, I thought I could relax, as everything was running smoothly, but someone closed the lid on the laptop I use as a webserver and it overheated during the night, causing an INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE error on the NTFS system partition. The suggested solution was to run CHKDSK /F, but you can only do that to an NTFS partition from within Windows and it would bluescreen before reaching the stage where it would do automatic CHKDSK's. I don't have an adapter to connect the laptop hard drive to a normal IDE cable, so the only option open to me was to create a Ghost image and hope I could access the log and configuration files to restore later using Ghost Explorer.

It took eight hours to strip everything down, remove the LCD, which doesn't work anyway, run diagnostics to make sure everything was still okay, restore the system partition from a Ghost backup, upgrade Apache and PHP, make a new Ghost backup, try for an hour to restore the backup only for Ghost to tell me there wasn't enough room to restore the image even though I was restoring to the same partition I backed up from! It turns out Ghost won't let you restore a partition that was near capacity, as detailed in "Not enough disk space on the destination drive", so you have to pass it the -OR switch to override its size checking and hope everything fits, which it should, as it is the same partition.

Thankfully it worked, so I was able to spend some time today implementing Last-Modified headers in all documents and the Gallery's image script, which means photographs should now cache correctly on your hard disk.

20/10/2004 17:00:00Web Server Stable Again

The web server is stable again. The problem turned out to be the free version of ZoneAlarm, which has a problem handling some services. It was correctly configured, so it is a limitation of the free version.

The problem wasn't obvious, as it manifested itself as failed PHP scripts, thereby leading to many red herrings and downgrades and upgrades of PHP versions.

I originally wrote my website in server-side JavaScript on IIS 5, so rather than rewriting it all in PHP, I still have IIS running on port 8080 and use mod_proxy to forward requests for a particular subfolder to port 8080. That way I can also do .NET development on the same server in the future if I wanted. Disabling mod_proxy has no effect, so it is not a problem.

I tried 100 simultaneous requests to IIS by using "ab -n 100 http://webserver:8080/26kb.jpg" and the same thing happened, but this time it was after 9 requests so it looks like it might not have anything to do with Apache. I thought it might have something to do with Windows 2000 Professional's 10 client restriction but the licence agreement says it doesn't apply to third party products.

I have URLScan installed, but nothing appears in its log files, so that is not a problem.

I thought it might have something to do with ZoneAlarm, so shut it down, but the problem still occurred.

I then remembered that IIS has a 10 user limit so I thought the fact that it is running at the same time, albeit on a separate port might be restricting TCP connection to Apache, but it made not difference when I disabled it.

It was at this point that I decided to uninstall ZoneAlarm completely and the problem has now disappeared! It even works up to 1000 requests and 100 concurrent connections. I guess I should have tried uninstalling the firewall to begin with, but it didn't make any difference when I disabled it and many of the related bug reports said that it didn't make any difference either, so I didn't bother trying it.

I have a hardware firewall on my router, so it should be okay to run the webserver without a software firewall.

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Currently Reading


"Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation", Lynne Truss


"Change the World for a Fiver: We Are What We Do", Tim Ashton, et al.


"Web Usability for Dummies", Richard Mander PhD and Bud Smith

"MCSD: Analyzing Requirements and Defining Solution Architectures Study Guide", Ben Ezzell

"Search the Scriptures", Alan M. Stibbs

"Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", Stephen R Covey

"Complete Time Management System, The", Christian H. Godefroy, John Clark

See more...

Microsoft Certified Professional Last modified: Tue, 3 Jun 2025 16:38:41 GMT
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