Vista x64 Displays Wrong Physical Memory Size

This is a crazy little problem in Windows Vista x64 that shows the wrong information when the System Information (msinfo32.exe) is run. This issue occurred on a computer that was upgraded from 4GB of DDR3 (4x1GB) ram to 8GB (4x2GB) of DDR3, running Windows Vista Ultimate x64.

What happened is the Installed Physical Memory displayed correctly at 8.00GB, but the Total Physical Memory only reported as 4.00GB and Available Physical Memory reported as 5.22GB. View the screenshot of this output below.

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Mongrel Gem and Paperclip Plugin Problems

This problem occurred when setting up a site using mongrel along with the paperclip rails plugin. After about a week of normal operation we started having lots of problems with the automated image resizing required by the rails application.

It was running along and generating all the images just fine, then all of a sudden it stopped processing the ‘large’ images or made them blurry, and we started seeing the following in the application logs:

Paperclip::NotIdentifiedByImageMagickError: /folder/stream.####.# is not recognized by the 'indentify' command.

This is a very strange problem since the development environments work just fine and the developers were insistent that the server was the problem and not the code, as they usually do.
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Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent…

When moving a PHP application between servers or hosts, or updating your PHP, you may run into an error similar to something like this:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /path/to/site/public_html/config.php:517) in /path/to/application/public_html/somepage.php on line 153

This is often referred to as a PHP whitespace problem, meaning somewhere in the PHP file there is an empty space, usually at the beginning or end of the file.
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Problem Installing Typo Gem

We have a rails server that we wanted to install the typo gem onto.  Alas, our attempts to install the gem kept failing with the following error:

Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing typo:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install typo
checking for fdatasync() in -lrt... yes
checking for sqlite3.h... no

make
make: *** No rule to make target `ruby.h', needed by `sqlite3_api_wrap.o'.  Stop.
 

If you are seeing this error, it means you are likely missing a SQLite3 library or 2. We always use MYSQL, so we did not have any SQLite3 packages installed. Since it was failing on a build, we installed the libsqlite3-dev package. This was all we needed to do and the typo gem installed perfectly with all its dependencies.

On Ubuntu, do the following to install:

sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev

Redhat\Centos will be different (for us, substitute apt-get for yum)
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Ichat User Unable to Receive Messages

A co-worker was having a very strange problem in that they were not able to communicate with anyone via Ichat.  They were able to send messages, but they could not receive responses and they also could not see their own messages that they were sending.  However, screen sharing and voice chat was working for them.  After confirming that the problem was isolated to the user account on the MAC (this was done by signing in as a different user profile on the Mac Book Pro), then connecting to Ichat from that new profile to verify if it was still working on the machine itself.  Once it was confirmed that Ichat was not the problem, we decided that there must be something wrong with the user preferences.

Logging back in as the affected user, we opened the following location and deleted all com.apple.Ichat.*.plist files:

/Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/

Upon deleting those files, once Ichat was relaunched, we were stepped through the setup process as if we had not used Ichat before. Once the user filled in their information, everything started working just as it should once they connected.  Very strange little problem.