Fix MBR for an Old MS-DOS System

Posted in Technical Issues on December 26th, 2008 by Ryan

I accidentally installed grub and couldn’t figure out how to uninstall or override it with another boot loader. The others just weren’t working. Running fdisk /mbr didn’t work for me either. What I had to do was insert and boot the XP CD, then go to the repair console and type fixmbr. I just rebooted and it went straight into DOS like it was supposed to.

Acronis 2009 Breaks Dynamic Windows Raid Array

Posted in Technical Issues on December 26th, 2008 by Ryan

I just tried installing Acronis True Image Home 2009 and ended up having to use system restore twice now because it would disable my dynamic windows raid array I have setup on my pc after the next reboot. The only way I was able to fix the problem was to do a system restore. I’m on Vista x64 Ultimate edition.

My Telus Tech Support Story

Posted in Rants on December 10th, 2008 by Ryan

One day, many years ago I spent an entire day on the phone with numerous Telus tech support people. Our internet was down and we needed it up because we were hosting a couple websites and email servers that needed to be up in order to do business.

I spent the whole day listening to them tell me to do things like reset the modem (each tech ran me through the same steps), and then go to this one site on their network to set our MAC addresses to our IP (or something like that). Every tech basically told me to click the submit (or refresh) button on the site to send the info to Telus. The techs themselves did it every 5 minutes or so themselves.

I call again near the end of the day and I finally get ahold of a young guy with some brains. He tells me that I was supposed to click the button and then just wait – up to 15-20 minutes and then the internet just starts to work. Apparently none of the other techs knew this, even though it is the first step to getting someone online.

So in short, I spent the whole day without the internet and losing business, on the phone with tech support because the techs didn’t know about one specific, simple feature. I switched from Telus to Radiant immediately the next day.

Edit the Magento Invoice PDF Templates

Posted in Programming on December 2nd, 2008 by Ryan

Code Location

  • /app/code/core/Mage/Sales/Model/Order/Pdf/Invoice.php
  • /app/code/core/Mage/Sales/Model/Order/Pdf/Abstract.php

Changing the font size

Change the font size in the two files:

  • /app/code/core/Mage/Sales/Model/Order/Pdf/Abstract.php (line 487-507)
  • /app/code/core/Mage/Sales/Model/Order/Pdf/Items/Abstract.php (line 255-274)

Change the invoice logo

  • Admin -> Configuration -> Sales -> Invoice and Packing Slip Design

More info

  • Changing the invoice size from A4 to letter
  • Changing the font from Libertine to Helvetica
  • Read up here.