Nokia 520 - Consumer Cellular MMS and Internet

Moved to Consumer Cellular a year or so ago using Apple and Android phones. Recently switched to a Lumia 520 running Microsoft Phone 8.1 and was unable to send/receive group SMS messages and picture text messages.

The below settings resolved the issue on my 520, see this point for the solution for a Lumia 635.

To edit/add the settings perform the following:

1) Go to System Settings > cellular+SIM > SIM settings
2) Click [Add/Edit] internet APN

APN: ccdata
User name: [leave blank]
Password: [leave blank]
Proxy server (URL): [leave blank]
Proxy port: [leave blank]

 ...and click Disk icon to save

3) Click [Add/Edit] MMS APN

APN: att.mvno
User name: [leave blank]
Password: [leave blank]
WAP gateway (URL): proxy.mvno.ccmobileweb.com
WAP gateway port: 80
MMSC (URL): http://mmsc.cingular.com/
MMSC port: 80
Maximus MMS size: [leave blank] 

 ...and click Disk icon to save

Although it should work with other Windows Phone 8+ models it would be appreciated if you could post your model below and a go/no-go if it worked for you to benefit others on the web.

All the best!

Create Archive of Website

If you have a website that you're retiring but would like to copy it from your current registrar without having to sFTP/FTP the following command will copy it in Linux.

wget --recursive --domain [domain] --no-parent --page-requisites [location]

Force Verizon Galaxy S3 to CDMA Only

There are quite a few people searching for an old app that would force the S3 to CDMA only or maybe they are wanting a way to turn off 4g on an Android phone. In my case it was necessary because I had invested big $$ in a signal booster however it only handles the 800 MHz and 1900 MHz frequencies. Well guess what 4G uses, if you're with Verizon not those two frequencies.

The old app was named Phone Info and was in the Google Play store but has been removed/retired. After some search stumbling across a comment for this post which indicated there is a post here that explains the issue but it requires registration. However after registering it turns out it just refers to a Google Play store app.

Short answer, install the Battery Monitor Widget. Once installed click the Tests button on the bottom right, click the Device Info menu and Voilà scroll down and select under the 'Set preferred network type:' menu.

Nginx - Count of IP addresses in /var/log/nginx/access.log

Inspired by this post which supposedly works for Apache and also works for my Nginx installation. It seems however, some of the comments didn't work quite right on our Debian Lenny equipment.

Did away with grep (instead using cat) and tweaked to fix sorting not working correctly.

cat access.log | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg

If your log is big enough to scroll multiple pages when logged in remotely.

cat access.log | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg | less

Wordpress on Steriods

We have corporately started moving all of our clients which use a CMS from Drupal to Wordpress. There are a few reasons but we have been pleased with the functionality and performance of Wordpress on our hosted infrastructure. One of the primrary things we've done in our migration to Wordpress in buying some products which expedite our ability to take clients from concept to live site. We've done that using some of the below products. We will provide more in-depth reviews of the products as we have time.

All the best.

Catalyst Website Builder
Catalyst Dynamik Themes and Skins

We will also use this post as a place to keep some other helpful Wordpress links that we have referred back to during the migration process.
Changing Wordpress Site URL

Bulk File Rename

As usual there are command I use just often enough to forget them when the time cose. In our case we had a group of files that has the file extension in caps which was causing a problem with some 3rd party javascript so instead of modifying the .js files we change the extension to lower case (.JPG to .jpg).

for file in *.JPG ; do mv $file `echo $file | sed 's/\(.*\.\)JPG/\1jpg/'` ; done

Drupal 7 Painfully Slow Performance

We recently (yes, finally) started testing Drupal 7 and there is only one word for its performance....SLOW! It seemed to load quickly on the home page after the installation but once we logged back in it was as if we were attempting to run the site on a x86 with 512MB of RAM from a USB RAID array.

This server has a dev version of Drupal 6 that screams along without any issues but the defaul Drupal 7 installation was not performing well. After some research on the web it appears the performance issues are caused by modules that provide functionality to the server and client (a.k.a. browser).

To help with client speed disable the following modules (http://yoursite.com/admin/modules/list).
- Overlay module
- Toolbar module (Disclaimer: Make sure you have installed a module which replaces the admin functionality such as the Administration menu module before disabling this module.)

Server side:
- Update Manager Module

Disabling those three modules caused a significant increase in the response time and performance of our Drupal 7 sites.

All the best.