• Windows Live Messenger > Pidgin or Empathy
• Microsoft Office > Google Docs
• Pinnacle Studio > OpenShot (although I am testing other packages still)
• Microsoft Money > Same, but in Virtualbox
• Winamp > Rhythmbox

Annoyingly Microsoft Money didn’t work in Wine, so I’m having to use a Virtualbox of XP for that. However, I’m looking at alternative solutions as personal accounting is important to me to keep on top of my finances.

Strictly speaking I don’t have a real alternative to Windows Live Messenger and Microsoft Money yet – Pidgin and Empathy don’t support webcam very well, and Microsoft Money is an ageing discontinued product anyway. Skype supports webcam just great, but I have privacy issues with Skype so I wouldn’t recommend my family using it*. I really need webcam to work perfectly as it does under Windows so my family can see my daughter growing up.

Getting the right video editing package is also difficult – I need one that takes advantage of my hardware. The KDE video editor Kdenlive crashed when I tried to drag an AVCHD file into the timeline, which wasn’t a good start. I have had a quick play around with OpenShot which seemed fairly smooth until two videos were playing at once, so I’m not sure whether that will be suitable in the end. Other software I’m going to look at are Cinelerra and PiTiVi, but so far I have not found a good enough equivalent to Pinnacle, so unfortunately I may still be tied to Windows for video editing. If anyone has any recommendations I’d love to hear them! Although I have heard that Linux may not have the licensing to use the AVCHD hardware decoder, which may be why I can’t get anything to work that well?

As for Winamp to Rhythmbox, truth be told I hardly use either these days. I mostly play music through my X-Box 360 which suits me for 99% of purposes.

There is a particular site called osalt.com which allows you to find a Windows package and find an alternative Windows or Linux similar application which can be quite handy for switching to Linux. The one thing that will plague Linux until it can get it’s act together is that there are no true alternatives to the popular packages (although some would argue otherwise), such as Photoshop. GIMP is nice, but I am too used to Photoshop and try as I might, I can’t get on with GIMP. The video acceleration (although supported by ATI) doesn’t seem too good for AVCHD editing, and that puts a spoke in my wheel too. Lack of a decent Windows Live Messenger has been a drawback for a long time. OpenOffice 3.2 still hasn’t made it into the Ubuntu repositories, which means my desktop office package is slow, so I use Google Docs instead.

As you might have guessed, I could go on for a while. This might all sound very negative, but there is many positives to Linux too. Community support can be excellent – so much better than calling a “tech support” centre in India to be told to restart my computer… More often than not I find community support is actually much better than paid support. Ubuntu is free, as is all of the software I use on it (apart from a few obvious exceptions mentioned above, but they are Windows software running in Ubuntu). I find the user interface much nicer. It’s faster than Windows on my laptop. The list could go on for a while.

I sometimes sit and think of reasons why I shouldn’t just go back to Windows, but I can never get out of my head the thought that – well Linux works just fine, why go through the transition back to Windows?

* The privacy issue I have, if you’re interested, is that when you open a new Skype account, by default anyone from anywhere can message/call you. Why you would want a random stranger contacting you by default is beyond me… It’s simple enough to turn it off, but I really think this option should be disabled by default.

In addition they have given me probably the best customer service satisfaction of any company I have ever used. Their ticket response time for me has been consistently under 4 minutes, which is hugely impressive. I’m not the only one who is praising them, they’ve received good praise all over Twitter, with response times of 4-6 minutes.

I highly recommend using Linode if you’re thinking of getting a VPS – and if you do decide to sign up, please use my referral link!

Or my code: 939c7865b8818f015533efae7b06cdb06f9b59be

And as a side note, as my IP has changed, it will take another 24 hours or so for the DNS to propogate probably, so hold fast until then everyone!

Let me quickly explain the top reason why you forwarding an e-mail is my problem.

• Have a look at the e-mail you’re forwarding. Chances are, you’ve included hundreds of people’s e-mail addresses. By forwarding to people and using the “To:” field of your e-mail client, you’re basically giving your e-mail address to everyone else you’re sending that e-mail to. And if that gets forwarded on, and not removing them, those e-mail addresses get sent around the internet. Would you give your telephone number or address to a complete stranger? No? Well STOP GIVING MY E-MAIL OUT. I’ve seen e-mails with literally thousands of e-mail addresses. Were it to fall into the hands of a certain sort of person, that list would make them money.
• You will not get a free laptop if you forward the e-mail on. Bill Gates will not give you any money at all. Your wishes will not magically come true. You will not get good luck. You will not suddenly fall in love. Fairies will not appear and grant you 3 wishes.
• You will piss people off.
• You think you’re being useful by sending on that “latest virus news”? You’re not – you’re fuelling spam which means YOU are just as bad as the VIRUS that you’re trying to warn people about. Protect yourself with anti-virus and anti-spyware software. If you don’t have some, get some here. It’s free, and better than Norton Antivirus Bloatware.
• Warning people about telephone scams? See above.
• Warning people about postal scams? See above.
• “Oh but my gran/mum/sister might not know and I wouldn’t want them to get scammed!!!” Your gran/mum/sister has common sense, and chances are they will have read the e-mail and forgotten about it anyway – scammers are clever and get you to do things like forwarding e-mails – oh whoops! You already did that…
• “I thought I’d send it just in case…” Again – YOU’RE SPAMMING, stop it. There is no reason to forward the e-mail you want to, so stop it.
• It wastes my time, which I could be spending doing something productive, or spending time with my daughter. It also wastes your time.

I’m fed up of it, so please, do me a favour and stop forwarding e-mails – not just to me, but to anyone. By forwarding e-mails, you are fuelling internet spam.

If you continue forwarding e-mails, then don’t you dare moan about how much spam you get.

Do yourself a favour, and if you recieve a forwarded e-mail from someone, send them a link to this article.

We are looking for a graduate who is passionate about the web

This sort of thing in job postings really annoy me. The notion that a degree makes a person better than someone with 3+ years of experience to me is a very narrow-minded way of thinking. Many employers use this sort of thing as a “first line of defence” tactic – to eliminate applicants that are clearly not suited to the job. However, there are many great developers out there with no degree, but many years of experience.

I asked an employee of Headscape about this, and he summarised that he expects they would consider those without degrees. Perhaps because I don’t have a degree it touches a raw nerve with me, because I’ve been very lucky to get where I am.

I got on the “software development ladder” through a good opportunity, because I had zero “years experience” and no degree, and from an employers perspective, a pretty risky option. Because I was given that chance, I now have over 6 years of professional development experience. Others in my 2003 situation might not be so lucky, and because employers require things like degrees, it makes those starter developers chances of getting even a junior job even harder.

It seems an odd concept to me that to get on that ladder, you must spend 4 years at university, wasting money and time, learning what you already know… In this industry* I would disagree that a degree is required, so why do employers still require that candidates have degrees? To me, all a degree does is prove that you can think analytically, but to even learn a programming language properly, you have to think analytically and logically anyway, so surely if you can prove you know the language, you therefore also prove that you can think analytically…

I’d like to see what other people think about this, maybe I’m a minority on this view?

* I specify in this industry because certain other professions, such as medical, I would say that a degree is required.

Looking at Firebug’s net monitoring, I thought “I wonder if Google will open up an API”? It would be quite cool to have an API to request search results from, and Google returns you a load of results in well under a second (Firebug reports the requests take around 300-400ms, which is nice!). At the moment I don’t think it’s a possibility – even me just playing around brought up Google’s human checker (a captcha) that is meant to stop automated search requests…

Makes ya think though, doesn’t it?

This process does involve a bit of fiddling and knowledge of how things work, and the instructions on the app’s page are pretty straightforward anyway.

Tethering has been made really easy by using an app called Azilink. All it is is an OpenVPN server on your phone, which allows your laptop to connect to it via a USB cable.

Here’s the steps – pretty much the same as on the instruction page linked above – but specifically for Ubuntu:

• Install OpenVPN (don’t bother with Network Manager): sudo apt-get install openvpn
• Enable USB debugging on your phone. From the home screen, this is under Settings > Applications > Development > USB debugging.
• Download the Android 1.5 SDK: http://developer.android.com/sdk/download.html?v=android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3.zip
• Extract to /opt/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3
• Add the /opt/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3/tools directory to your path (e.g. in .bashrc add PATH=/opt/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3/tools:”${PATH}”
• Log out and back in again for the .bashrc to update
• You should be able to run adb now – type “adb”, hit RETURN and it should say it’s starting a daemon.
• Create and open /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules in your favourite editor
• Add the line: SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0bb4″, MODE=”0666″
• Set the permissions of the file: sudo chmod a+rx /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules
• Connect your HTC Magic via USB cable to your laptop (hint: “tail -f /var/log/messages &” gives you information when your phone is connected)
• Check adb recognises your device: “adb devices” you should see a device listed
• Download: http://lfx.org/azilink/azilink.apk
• Install the app to your phone by doing “adb install azilink.apk”
• You should see the Azilink app in your apps list (its a little moth icon).
• On your laptop, type “adb forward tcp:41927 tcp:41927″
• On your phone, run the Azilink app, and check the “Service active” checkbox. Status will change to “waiting for connection”
• Download: http://azilink.googlecode.com/files/azilink.ovpn
• On your laptop, run “sudo openvpn azilink.ovpn”
• In a few moments on your phone, Azilink should report the status is now “Connected to host”.
• In a new terminal (don’t close the openvpn program, you’ll lose your connection!) edit /etc/resolv.conf and add “nameserver 192.168.56.1″

With any luck you should now have internet. Next time you want to connect, I think you’ll have to do something like (and I’ve not checked this yet!):

• On phone, check USB debugging is enabled (if you disabled it)
• Connect HTC Magic to laptop with USB cable
• On laptop terminal, type: “adb forward tcp:41927 tcp:41927″
• On phone, check the “Service active” box (if you disabled it — recommended as it will probably drain your battery!)
• On laptop run “sudo openvpn azilink.ovpn”
• Add “nameserver 192.168.56.1″ into your /etc/resolv.conf (assuming Network Manager over-writes your resolv.conf)

I did this on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and this worked for me. Hopefully this should work pretty straightforward without problems.

Essentially what this app does is run a VPN server on your phone. ADB (Android Debugging Bridge) is a development tool that allows forwarding of TCP traffic from your laptop to the phone (and vica-versa) – working in a similar way to an SSH tunnel, but this is all unencrypted. Then all you have to do is open an unecrypted VPN connection to the forwarded port (i.e. 127.0.0.1:41927), and route the traffic through that. The nameserver isn’t auto set of course so that has to be done manually.

I have no idea why tethering is so difficult on the HTC Magic – it should be made much easier, especially as it’s such an open phone. However, thanks to it’s open-ness, apps like Azilink exist and make tethering possible!

Handy tip: You can download this article and keep it on your PC which may help if you’re trying to set this up and you dont have an alternative internet connection. Don’t forget to download all the files mentioned above as well! Right click this link and Save As….

Open your CSV in Excel, and add two new columns “vlookup” and “is_processed”. The formula to apply should be something like:

=VLOOKUP(C2,'already processed'!A:A,1,TRUE)

C2 is the ID you want to check if is in the list of already processed IDs (the “needle”). If you want the matching to be non-strict and have the lookup table sorted in whatever order (probably not), set the last parameter to TRUE. Normally you want FALSE to check anywhere, and make sure you sort the lookup table in ascending order.

Add a new sheet, and call it “already processed”, and add your list of IDs in the first column. This is your “haystack”.

If you return to your original sheet, you’ll see the “vlookup” column has either IDs (if the ID is found in your list) or #N/A if the value is not found. To make this neat, add this formula to your is_processed column:

=IF(ISNA(F2),"no","yes")

Where F2 is the vlookup column. Then for the IDs (“needles”) that are found in the search list (“haystack”) the value of is_processed will be “yes”, and all that aren’t found it’ll be “no”. You can then filter on this or whatever you like!

apt-get install ubuntuone-client ubuntuone-client-tools

to get it to work. Still, after that, it ran pretty smoothly and I’ve just synced up my first few files. As of yet I don’t really have a use for this sort of thing, but I expect backups of certain things would be useful. The free tier is a 2GB plan, or there’s a paid 10GB plan. Personally I’d prefer more storage if I were to use it but the 10GB is USD $10 so the amount of storage I’d need would I guess cost around $50 a month going on $1/GB.

Still, it’s a cool little feature and a welcome addition to my laptop, although as of yet I have no-one to share files with… I’ll figure out how to invite people if someone requests

I’m no expert by any means, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Whats more, if Microsoft really love the Bing name, will they start replacing all the Windows Live products after replacing Live Search? Will we start using Bing Messenger, Bing Hotmail and so on? Will they do a last minute re-brand of Windows 7 to be Windows Bing? That would be quite funny…

I think this table (source) pretty much explains itself…

Basically to get the iPhone 3G S 16GB for free, you must be tied into a £73.41 a month contract for 18 months. Pay-as-you-go prices for the iPhones 3G S 16GB and 32GB are £440.40 and £538.30 respectively, which is just disgusting.

The HTC Magic (released back in May) already has most of the features the new iPhone is now touting – so why bother spending all the money when you could get just as good a smartphone, but for much less. I’m on a £35 a month 18 month contract, and my phone was free. The only feature the HTC Magic doesn’t currently have is internet tethering, but I’ve only had a use for that once in my life… so… I’m not really that bothered. And from what I’ve led to believe the HTC Magic hardware does support it, but it requires a little hacking to get working. And despite what you might read in the press, it’s actually a bloody good smartphone, and I got along with it much better than the iPod Touch I tried. Admittedly I’ve only played with an iPhone for about 10/15 minutes, but I found it pretty janky, just like the iPod Touch I tried.

And if you don’t like the virtual keyboard on the HTC Magic, word on the street is that there will be a new Android-based phone released in the summer that returns the physical qwerty… along with a whole host of other Android-based phones from various manufacturers.

Today is a good day for Android, and a bad day for your pocket if you’re an iPhone fan…

I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.

Here is mine, and although I didn’t have to think very hard about who to post about, I still admire her more than anyone in the world.

Hannah is 39 weeks and 1 day pregnant today, and she’s still working hard at Netbasic. She’s not exactly a pro programmer, but she’s learning so quickly. From knowing nothing at all about HTML or CSS or Photoshop, she’s come forwards in leaps and bounds with the help of everyone here. It’s certainly not easy for her, she gets aches and pains all day, Braxton Hicks contractions, extremely painful kicks, and all sorts. She’s under the weather, tired and very drained, yet somehow she is carrying on, she’s still working hard and creating pages that are helping keep the company going!

I suppose this is just my way of saying how proud I am of her, and how awesome she is.

It fustrates me though when people (even an established name like Intel) are trying to lower the cost of laptops (or in this case Ultra Low Voltage technology) such as the Macbook Air when, even at reduced prices, most consumers still can’t afford them, and lenders still can’t afford to give out credit. All they’re doing is reducing the value of these laptops and (although ULV tech is a bit expensive even for the current climate) making them almost a “cheap” alternative to a decent laptop. Essentially, the market won’t be stimulated until people have money again. How that happens isn’t really my area of expertise.

In my personal situation, I can afford repayments on a laptop but no-one will give me credit in these “exciting” 0.5% base rate times. That means I won’t be getting a new laptop any time soon.

Now is the time I really wish I was one of those fat cat execs with $1.2 million bonuses after 5 months of work. I want a new laptop, damnit!

Many Windows users will have already seen this install software, which is now downloaded every time you want to update a program, such as Windows Live Messenger. The program itself isn’t my concern, rather the automatic ticking of nearly every other Windows Live software on the list. I only wanted to update Windows Live Messenger, yet the program had automatically selected Mail, Photo Gallery, Toolbar, Writer, Family Safety, Office Outlook Add-on and Office Live Add-on for additional installation. That is an extra 128mb – a paltry amount, by most accounts, yet still an amount I have no need for.

To rub salt into the wound, post installation the default option is to change your search engine as well as fix your homepage. Rumours on the Internet are that if you do not remove the “Set my homepage” link, then the program installs an additional program that forces your homepage to stay the same; apparently (although I have not had first hand evidence) to the extent of not letting the user change their homepage for themselves. The idea behind it is to stop spy ware changing the homepage, yet this seems counter-intuitive to not allow users to change their homepage at all… As I said though, I cannot confirm the legitimacy of this rumour, so it may be speculative.

To summarise, Microsoft shouldn’t have these additional pieces of software automatically selected for installation – a less savvy user (family members come to mind…) might not look at this list and add these unnecessary pieces of software to their system.

Instead of Google’s angle of just taking pictures of everything, Microsoft are going down the less intrusive route of just making 3D models of all the buildings. When I last saw this last, it was much less impressive, but looking at it today, you could almost say it’s better than Google. Although having said that, Google Earth has this same 3D view, but in a standalone app.

My opinion though, is that they both have their merits – Google Street View is pretty cool, and so is this 3D view… I suppose it depends what you want it for.

Regardless, with competition from these, and probably other mapping software, combined with online shopping, online chat, video gaming, home offices and a whole host of other software, it’s looking more and more likeley that I’ll never have to get off my bum ever again.

Today was the last straw really and I got fed up of it. All I wanted was a plugin that allowed me to put a form on my contact page, and that was that. Instead, I got that, plus it seemed every time I logged into my admin UI, I needed to upgrade it.

I don’t mind the odd upgrade, but cforms II just got annoying. When I upgraded to WordPress 2.7, it because much easier to upgrade it, so I carried on. But now, due to some quarrel which frankly I don’t care about, there is a permanent message saying that you have to update manually – which I just can’t be bothered with really. So cforms II has lost out, and I’m now using a new plugin which I hope will need upgrading less frequently and generally be less bulky… Contact Form 7.

Anyway, I digress a little, but my overall point is that we should be pushing for web-orientated services over desktop apps. I mean the first two points in their comparison are real bonuses for regular web apps really. “Applications can be easily discovered, explored, and used.” and “No application installation is necessary.” The plus for the desktop of the former part is “Installed applications have more persistence, power, and functionality.”… well that’s true to a certain extent, but persistence exists in web apps already – in the form of logins, which can be things like Windows Live Passports, Google Accounts, or truly (going) global logins such as OpenID.

Both browsers and Adobe AIR apps are cross-platform, Javascript and Flash are already in both, and there’s few other real advantages… the advantage of hosting a website is that when you update it, the changes are immediately available, rather than clients having to update.

I see it as a step backwards really – there’s been a huge push for using everything on the web recently, and having Adobe AIR apps are just like having new desktop applications. Where’s the advantage of that? You just have to install and update yet more software. I’ve got enough bloody software to keep updated as it is! Not only that, it’s just no good for those of us on the move, always using different workstations, maybe at work, at home and your laptop, and your T-Mobile G1 with Android… Personally I’d prefer a tool I can use on all of those that I don’t have to download. Something like Google Calendar that I can access everywhere to manage my life schedule, and something like Google Docs so that if I’m somewhere and I need to look at the list of Christmas presents I’ve purchased for Hannah, then I can load it straight up.

I think I’ve made my point, but in a really long round-about sort of way. Although I sound like I’m shutting Adobe AIR right out, I’m not actually, I just don’t see the point. It’s just another cool idea, but I don’t really see a future for it, ya see?

We dragged out an old favourite, but varying a little with the Here and Now UK Edition of Monopoly. Playing reminded us both of why we never play it, because it’s such a long game, and boy it drags. Hannah eventually gave up trying and I managed to settle hotels on half the board and own the rest of the board… which I suppose is the aim of the game really.

Fun nevertheless, but it’s off to bed for me, ready for another busy week in the office… and a whole new week’s worth of Twitter updates.

Using iCal, I can also view my calendar in Outlook at work, and another really cool thing is that I can sync my Nokia 6500 slide with my Google Calendar, using GooSync.

So hopefully I won’t miss a thing…

It isn’t really a new concept, just like AJAX was never a new concept, it’s just when people realise things can be used in a certain way, it gets popular real fast. Basically, the concept of clouds is providing an abstraction layer, and normally a physical seperation between several nodes, for example cloud storage (Amazon SimpleDB, Google BigTable), cloud infrastructure (Amazon EC2) and cloud services (Google Checkout). In fact, you’ve probably already used cloud computing without even realising it… Google Maps and Google Docs are a couple of examples. Google, as you might have guessed, are pushing forward with the cloud computing bits quite a lot, and the only other real competitor in my eyes is Amazon, especially their hugely popular EC2 and S3 services.

It’s a pretty cool concept though – instead of having a laptop with 10GHz processors and 1TB of RAM and all that, we’ll all be using Eee PC with just Firefox running, most likely connected to Google. The concept of that forces buying hardware into the providers hands – the companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. and all we do is use the services. I’ve not really gone into too much detail about what it is, but one of the advantages of this whole thing is that you don’t have to worry about data storage, and you can access your stuff anywhere you want.

The big thing holding UK back from diving headfirst into this cloud computing stuff is the fact that most residential UK internet connections suck. We’re still using ADSL and cable broadband for christs sake. And unreliable at that. Despite Virgin Media having a 35% market share, and BT Broadband having 40%, I still hear endless complaints about them. At the end of the day, even 24meg just doesn’t cut it (although in reality, I’ve rarely seen someone actually get anywhere near the potential throughput of a 24meg connection, due to contention ratios and all that). We need Fibre to the Home, and we need it with low contention ratio – we need Gigabit internet (or maybe 40 gigabit anyone?). The problem with that is that no-one wants to foot the £28.8 billion bill. I digress, that’s a different story…

What?! It seems illogical to me that Microsoft, after years of development still require you to restart your computer after installing trivial pieces of software, yet in Linux, the only time you need to restart is if you want to try out a new kernel or something… strange indeed.

Have a look at the Element Four website for more info! I’m also interested in finding out how much this thing costs…

Update [4th Oct]:

I e-mailed the company asking for more info, and where it will be distributed in the UK, and aboute the solar version. The response was that it can be run of a 600 Watt solar panel, and it will retail at $1299.00 (I assume Canadian, about £680 Sterling) and be available February 2009. Nothing specific was said about UK distribution, but £680 is a hell of a lot to shell out, as well as buying a 600W solar panel… it’s definately a long term investment, and as I’m still in rented property, I doubt I’ll be getting anything like this any time soon!

The Tech Track 100 is published annually and ranks Britain’s fasting growing private tech companies over the last three years. Netbasic started in 2003 and in 2004, the company made £255,000 in sales, which soared 235% to £9.6 million in 2007.

This huge increase makes Netbasic rank at number 3, just below Lovefilm International, which in my eyes is a damn good feat!

I’m not sure if it’s direct competition to the new iPhone platform, but I really wouldn’t be suprised if Google had a good try at it. In fact, I really hope they do, and I hope it’s ten times better than the iPhone. If it is, I might pull myself away from Orange and get some T-Mobile action with the Google Android fun…

First, let me give you an overview of how the flags work underneath. A flag in my example is the number 1, shifted n steps left. I have a list of flags that represent different weather situations, that could happen simultaneously:

define("WEATHER_CLOUDY", (1 << 0));
define("WEATHER_FOGGY", (1 << 1));
define("WEATHER_RAINING", (1 << 2));
define("WEATHER_SNOWING", (1 << 3));

These values, displayed as binary are 1, 2, 4, 8 respectively. The important part however, is not the decimal values, but the binary values, which are 0001, 0010, 0100, 1000 (with leading zeros for ease of understanding).

Lets look more at this, without looking at any more code. What if it was raining AND cloudy? The advantage of using binary is that it can be cloudy and raining. All you do is set the cloudy and raining bits. This would result in a binary value of 0101 (decimal 5). The correlation is simple, the first bit is the SNOWING bit, the second is the RAINING bit, third is FOGGY and the last is CLOUDY. If it’s cloudy, the last bit will be 1, if not 0. And so on… I think you get the picture.

I’ve written (and believe me, it didn’t take long) a couple of functions that allow you to manipulate a value in this way without worrying about the dynamics of it.

function bv_is_set($bits, $bit)
{
	return ($bit == (($bits) & ($bit)));
}
 
function bv_set_bit(&$bits, $bit)
{
	$bits |= $bit;
}
 
function bv_unset_bit(&$bits, $bit)
{
	$bits &= ~$bit;
}
 
function bv_toggle_bit(&$bits, $bit)
{
	$bits ^= $bit;
}

These functions do what they say on the tin. Say you want to store a value that represents a cloudy, rainy day, you would do this:

$weather = 0;
bv_set_bit($weather, WEATHER_CLOUDY);
bv_set_bit($weather, WEATHER_RAINING);

The binary value of $weather is now 0101. You could store this single number in a database or something, the minimum space you would need to store the fact that it is cloudy and raining, is just 4 bits. Thats tiny!!

If you wanted to run a function only when it was snowing, you would use bv_is_set to test this:

bv_toggle_bit($weather, WEATHER_SNOWING);
 
if(bv_is_set($weather, WEATHER_SNOWING))
{
	start_snowplough();
}

The toggle function literally toggles whichever bit. The is_set function tests wether a bit is set or not, the set bit will set a bit, regardless if wether it was set or not previously, and the unset does the opposite. Pretty self-explanatory really.

The problem is when I come to install some pieces of software, I get “Error 1327: Invalid Drive P:\“. A useless error message, and fustrating.

The cause of this error is that my Pictures, Video and Music folders are stored on a NAS drive (mapped to P:\). When running a setup program in elevated security using the UAC, it appears Vista does not know that P:\ is mapped any more.

There are two solutions:

• Disconnect current drive. Run command prompt as Administrator, and “net use P: \\path\to\share”. Then map your drive as normal. I’m not sure if this sticks, or even works, as I’ve also done the other method which I think is more likely to have fixed it.
• In regedit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\. Change whichever mapped locations you have (e.g. P:\Music) to the full UNC path (e.g. \\path\to\share\Music). Basically, don’t use mapped drive letters, use the UNC path.

Find out more here: bbc.co.uk/thebox

Anyway, there are other reasons I could list, but for now I’m going back to Firefox as Chrome is sort of hampering me at the moment… sorry Google, I just need stability for now…

• Permatabs
• Faviconize Tab (thx to Newboy for those suggestions!)
• Flashblock
• Adblock plus
• Twitterfox
• Firebug
• IETab (maybe we now need FFTab too??)

I’ve become quite set in my ways with Firefox, I’ve got it running quickly by disabling pretty much all flash (including YouTube). I’ve got an ad blocker as well, so that helps a little. I have to say, the thing I do like in Google Chrome is the speedy Javascript execution. I’m not sure how it works, but from what I understand it actually parses Javascript into machine code (i.e. compiled code that has been put together to work on the processor you are using). It opens a whole new window (and I’ve thought of compiled Javascript before, and it seemed to be a good idea to me… interpreted languages just aren’t as quick). Think of it like this:

Current JS Execution:

Browser parses Javascript, and goes back and forth between the JS, interpreting it, which can be slow. The parser interacts with the script, and does the calculations by processing the information. It’s constantly going back and forth. It’s just running a clean tidy binary that just parses a text file that could be very VERY messy and unoptimised.

Google Chrome’s Idea:

On page load, browser parses Javascript and compiles it into compiled binary code. The code can interact directly with the CPU, and magic is done, there is no on-the-fly parsing and it just works, and quickly.

It’s a really good idea, and I approve of it. Even though I thought of it about a year ago… hehe.

I’m an advocate of Google stuff, and I’m not too worried about them invading my privacy etc., like some people… and this browser has an opt-in button to send information about how you use the browser to Google. I’m all for this sort of thing, as it makes me feel like I’m doing my bit to make the browser better. They should have microphones so you can hear the swearing and cursing at the browser when it messes up.

One final thing to note though is that it actually uses Webkit, the rendering engine of Safari, as opposed to Gecko, Mozilla’s prized rendering engine. I’m not sure what to make of it yet, I never liked Safari, but so far things are rendering well in Google Chrome. I’ll try and use it today (despite using Firefox right now) and see how I get on with it…

Oh, and for those of you who have seen this, take a look at this for a bit of a laugh.

Read these instructions** first. If the CPAN shell complains about not having permissions to modify /root/.cpan, read this. Instead of putting the whole Apache httpd.conf <Directory> section (you probably dont have access to an httpd.conf…), you can put the AddHandler/Options/DirectoryIndex lines in a .htaccess file in the Bugzilla directory. Just to note that I couldn’t add the AllowOverride option in for some reason – it threw a 500 error…

Another thing that confused me was this:

perl -pi -e 's@use strict\;@use strict\; use lib \"/home/foo/perl/lib\"\;@' *cgi *pl Bug.pm processmail syncshadowdb

Perhaps the document is out of date, but none of those files existed. I changed Bugzilla.pm (note: you must use the FULL path to your local Perl installation, not just ~/myperl/lib!!!), and hey presto, it works! I now have a nice neat and tidy Bugzilla installation.

* It turns out that Bugzilla 3.2 (in release candidate stage) has a script to do all this for you – doh!

** Updated documentation link to the correct version – doh!

Bit of a funny name as well…

I was planning to write a WP plugin as the ones I’ve found so far have been rubbish, but I might wait it out until I actually start using it (if at all…)

Creating the client:

// WSDL client
$client = new SoapClient($wsdl);
 
// Non-WSDL client
$client = new SoapClient(NULL, array(
					"location" => $endpoint_url . $script_name,
					"uri" => $endpoint_url);

It’s that easy to create the client, and just as easy to make the request itself:

// WSDL client
$result = $client->doSomething("argument");
 
// Non-WSDL client
$result = $client->__soapCall("doSomething", array("argument"));

As this is PHP, and PHP is lovely, the result is an object, and can be accessed as a normal object.

For the most of the part, its really simple, and using cURL (or a simpler file_get_contents) makes it work pretty well. All you gotta do is formulate a nice-looking URL, retrieve it, and parse the results using something easy like simplexml_load_string.

Lets take it in steps, lets set up the URL first:

// These stay the same for each query
$AmazonAssociateID = "xxx123";
$AWSAccessKey = "your_access_key";
$AWSAPIVersion = "2008-06-28";
 
// This is the query building part
$Operation = "ItemSearch";
$SearchIndex = "Blended"; // Like searching the WHOLE of amazon.co.uk
$ResponseGroup = "ItemAttributes,Images";
$Keywords = "Harry Potter";
 
// Glue together the whole URL
$url = "http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml"
		. "?Service=AWSECommerceService"
		. "&AssociateTag=" . $AmazonAssociateID
		. "&AWSAccessKeyId=" . $AWSAccessKey
		. "&Operation=" . $Operation
		. "&Version=" . $AWSAPIVersion
		. "&ResponseGroup=" . $ResponseGroup
		. "&Keywords=" . $Keywords;

When you sign up for AWS and Amazon Associates, you will be given your AWS access key and associate ID. Put those in the $AmazonAssociateID and $AWSAccessKey boxes. API versions are regularly released, so this version of my code is compliant with the AWS release made on 28th June 2008 (co-incidentally, my birthday!).

// Retrieve the URL
$response = file_get_contents($url);
// Or use cURL...
 
// Or if you can't get that to work, here is a dirty wget hack...
ob_start();
$ua = "Asgrim's AWS Client v1.0";
passthru("wget -U '{$ua}' -q -O - '{$url}'");
$response = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

There are three ways of retrieving the XML. First and easiest is a simple file_get_contents as on Line 26. Some hosts have the PHP setting allow_url_fopen = Off, meaning this will not work. Your alternative is to use curl (sometimes dodgy), or my wget hack listed from Line 30.

$xdoc = simplexml_load_string($response);
 
// Validate response
$success = true;
if($xdoc->Items->Request->Errors)
{
	foreach($xdoc->Items->Request->Errors->Error as $error)
	{
		$success = false;
		echo "{$error->Code}: {$error->Message}";
	}
}

The parsing is simple and uses simplexml. I won’t actually demonstrate using the result as it’s pretty self explanatory. The validation is simple as well anyway, and is self-explanatory.

And that’s all there is to it… easy as pie. If you want the whole file, you can download it here.

Where do we go from here? Well I think a short word or two about PHP4 might be in order. I’m not upset or anything, it’s just a legacy passing really – I got into PHP when it was version 3, which -lets be fair- was a bit of a hack, but it was getting there. PHP4 was polished, oiled and much slicker, and ironed out most of those annoyances, and gave the language more structure. The way I see it now, it was a big building block for PHP5 – which now features proper Object Orientation and a multitude of other bits. PHP6 I see as a yet more refined version of this, with legacy bits removed. Web development is a fast-moving world, and you just have to keep up really…

So – migrating to PHP4 to 5? Well for simple websites, it should be a case of sticking it up there and it should mostly work. Unfortunately for those huge frameworks, that could take a while as there could be in the region of thousands of problems. Still – eventually it’ll have to be done I think, so what better time than now?

PHP4 is dead… Long live PHP5!

The ability to sync with network folders is not included in Windows Vista Starter, Windows Vista Home Basic, and Windows Vista Home Premium.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t cost £100 odd quid to upgrade! I don’t have that sort of money, damnit!

• 4U Rack Mountable Server 1.7GHz (bidding starts 4th August)
  
• 4U Rack Mountable Server 2GHz (open to offers!!)
• Air Conditioner Unit Silver 9,000 BTU (bidding starts 4th August)

Please buy them, we have a wedding to fund, and they don’t come cheap!

The technical support know what they are talking about.

I have never had such a pleasurable experience being told I can’t get internet just yet. It was simply bliss. The good thing is, they explained the problem clearly, in simple-to-understand language, and without just repeating what BT Wholesale just told them, or just reading from a script!

So, here’s to Newnet, possibly the best ISP in the UK.

You could probably hack the Jack PC thin client so that you have the corresponding connection on the wall-facing side of the socket. That would enable you to run cables down from the attic and simply plug into the wall socket, and install.

With that sort of setup (although slightly hacky), as opposed to being a thin client and requiring a Terminal Server, you would literally have a PC in the wall that you can just plug into. You could even have a whole network of PCs.

Of course, the original design of this is meant for thin clients, so converting it into a solid PC would defeat the point of the thin-client-ness. Thin clients are there to save money, and my idea basically just hides away your ugly PC case, and puts it into a nice neat wall socket where you just plug in your monitor/speakers/keyboard/DVD/Blu-ray drives.

I gave up on that and tried setting up the array using the onboard RAID device… which actually makes more sense as it’ll probably be a lot faster and efficient than using a PCI RAID device. Anyway, I enabled RAID in the BIOS, set up the array in the nForce BIOS, and it was happy and existing as a nice big striped 1.2TB (!) array. Then it came to Vista, and the annoyance began.

The array appeared in Disk Manager as four seperate drives. My first instinct was to reinstall or upgrade drivers. I tried re-installing, to no avail. Having no internet meant I had to go round a friends house and download the latest nForce drivers (and get exceedingly drunk in the process…). I installed these, and still the same result. I did a lot of Googling, and some people recommended upgrading the BIOS. I managed to get my mobile phone to connect my PC to the internet just long enough to get on the ABit site and download the latest BIOS. No difference…

I tried various hacks that were suggested, and I finally gave in and posted on the nVidia forums. A bloke called Fernando responded telling me that the latest nForce drivers (15.17) didn’t support nForce 4 for RAID. Nice one, nVidia. This guy has obviously done a lot of work on this issue as he’s actually made a driver pack (even WHQL’ed!) for nForce 4 systems that worked straight off. If anyone has any issues at all with nForce 4 boards, I highly recommend installing this driver pack at the first instance. I am now happy with my 1.2TB hard drive… now I just need to fill it!

More detail, and the download links can be found here.

And lastly, thanks to Fernando for putting the effort in and making the solution so simple.

Machine: Please say your postcode
James: PO15 XXX
Machine: Please say your street name
James: XXXX XXXX Road
Machine: Please say your house number
James: Eighteen
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response. Please say your house number
James (slowly and clearly): EIGHTEEN
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response. Lets try again from the beginning
James (smacking forehead)
Machine: Please say your postcode
James: PO15 XXX
Machine: Please say your street name
James: XXXX XXXX Road
Machine: Please say your house number
James (clearly): One eight
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response. Lets try again from the beginning
James (shouting): EIGHTEEN YOU STUPID MACHINE HOW HARD IS IT TO UNDERSTAND?!
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response.
James hangs up in anger and disliking the total lack of customer care.

As you can tell, I was pretty fustrated. I did call up and try again, but it totally failed at recognising something as simple as the number 18. It didn’t even understand “one eight”… and there was absolutely no way to transfer to a human operator, which I thought was stupid.

Rant over…

• 4U Rack Mountable Server 2GHz
• 4U Rack Mountable Server 1.7GHz
• 12U Metal Server Cabinet (black)

Please buy them, or at least tell your friends! The proceeds are going towards Hannah & I’s wedding!!

Last night I spent some of the evening taking apart the server cabinet ready to sell on eBay. One thing I am particularly cautious about is data on the hard drives. Most people think that they need a whopping great magnet (like the ones that pick up cars in scrap yards), or that they need to drill holes in the drive and damage it irreparably. Well, thankfully, this is not the case.

All you need is DD. And, no I don’t mean my friend from Portsmouth, I mean the ancient UNIX command “dd” (sometimes nicknamed “disk destroy”). dd is a low-level data copier or converter. It works by writing blocks of data from one place to another. The very useful thing about UNIX/Linux is that it has these things called “devices”. One of these devices is called “/dev/zero”. It is a constant stream of 0. Lots of them.

Technically minded people might see where I’m going with this (well, they should already know what I’m talking about really…). Basically, an irrecoverable way of properly formatting a disk is top copy zeros all over the disk.

[root@oblivion /]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

The above command is all it takes to completely destroy a disk. If you are really paranoid, you could do it a few times, or intersperse it using /dev/random, like this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

According a data recovery company, there is less than zero percent chance of recovering data after using a single dd command. Some guys have even decided to make it a challenge.

Basically, UK2 are trying to charge me for each domain I want to transfer away, even though I have already thrown tonnes of money at them. This is what Andy Crawford said:

[1] They are not cheap
Ok so they might look cheap at first, but after you register your domain everything else is an add-on. Your website(s) will posssibly cost more in the end.

[2] Pop-ups and the UK2 advertising banner
You will have to pay for removal of pop-ups and the UK2 advertising banner.

[3] Webspace is extra
Webspace costs extra and it will be assigned to only one domain name. If you have more than one domain that you want to run separately, you need to buy webspace for each and every domain. This now becomes very expensive.

[4] Upgrades and add ons are assigned to each domain
You must also pay for upgrades for each domain separately (CGI-PHP, Statistics etc)

[5] Email is a forwarding service only
If you want a POP3 Mailbox or use IMAP, you will need to create a separate UK2.net mailbox address. Even if you pay extra for unlimited email address forwarding you will not be able to forward to multiple recipients.

[6] It’s pot luck whether your CGI scripts will run
Even something as simple as FormMail will not run on the UK2 servers. If you use their own version of FormMail, any mail generated can only be sent to a UK2.net mail box and cannot be forwarded.

[7] Support
My own experience of the support team is that:They will reply with a block of standard text which does not answer the query, or, they reply with various conflicting and incorrect answers.

[8] Transferring your domain
When you have had enough of UK2 and want to move away, they will charge you to have control of your domain and allow the transfer to proceed. But they will not make it easy, they seem to do everything in their power to stop the transfer proceeding.

[9] Renewals
They will renew your domain and services and charge your credit card even when you have asked them not to, and even after you have transferred you domain away from them.

All of this is totally true. I advise anyone to stay well away from UK2.net, they are just money grabbers.

I’ll post more of my experience when (or if…) I’ve resolved my situation.

To outline, I’m trying to get Be Unlimited which allows the use of Annex M, allowing higher upload speeds (ideal for running my servers). From the outset, there were problems. When I first ordered, Be said that there was a problem with my line. I rang to/fro between Be and BT trying to understand the problem, eventually getting the blood out of the stone that my line had a TPON tag.

Nevertheless, a few days later I was given an activation date and my activation pack was sent through. Hooray, I thought! Along came 10th July… I got home, no internet. I rang Be, they told me it could be up to 9pm until it gets activated. 9pm came, and went with no sign of internet. Today, I have been told this by Be:

Dear James, I just spoke with BT Openreach and they told me that unfortunately they can not replace the fibre optic line to a copper in that area and they advised me to cancel the order because the fibre optic line is not compatible with broadband orders.

Well that’s just great. I went on the Think Broadband forum (see thread here) to enquire (as well as replying to Be essentially saying, I don’t care, get BT to sort it out pronto). If the case really is that I’m still on TPON and there’s no copper overlays left, then it looks like I’m screwed. That’s just great. I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on server equipment recently, which will now be wasted.

However, I’m not letting this lie – I am determined to get Be Unlimited service, and I will do everything I can to make that happen.

And if it doesn’t work, then I will be a failure – a web developer… without internet?

Interesting concept… thanks a bloody lot BT.

This is a continuation of Pipex – Absolute Nightmare.

After advice I got from the Think Broadband forum (read the thread here), I reclaimed the £100.79 that Pipex Internet had wrongly charged me for a supposed contract breach fee. I did this through my bank because Pipex were so uncooperative. I filed an indemnity claim to reverse the Direct Debit payment as the charge itself was a breach of the Direct Debit Guarantee (I rang to cancel my account on 2nd June, the payment came out 4/5th June, can’t remember when exactly). They did not inform me of the amount, therefore is a breach of the Direct Debit Guarantee. I was happy with the outcome, and that was that, end of problems… or so I thought…

I have just received this e-mail from Pipex:

Dear Sir/Madam,

As we have no method of payment your Pipex account has now fallen overdue as we are yet to receive payment from you.

Unless the balance is paid and a new Direct Debit/Credit Card Instruction is received within the next 6 days your Pipex services will be suspended.

To resolve this matter and to prevent any unnecessary disruption to your services, we kindly ask you to address this payment as soon as possible.

You can make payment over the phone on 0871 221 2212 with one of our dedicated customer service representatives.

In the meantime if we can be of any assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards

John Cox
Credit Control
Pipex

Well that’s confusing… I moved out of my house on 30th June. I rang up to cancel my account on 2nd June. I considered just ignoring it, but if they were to take up legal proceedings, then that would be a mark against me, so I rang them up. The lady I spoke to told me that my internet service is still fully working and the account is all open. Now that is interesting, considering on 27th June, I did some work on my servers and rebooted my router, only to find that my username and password did not authenticate. I assumed this would be because my account was cancelled earlier than expected. After all the fuss I’d had with Pipex earlier that month, I left it like that as I was taking the servers to their new home the day after.

To now be told that my account is open was yet another fustration in my seemingly endless struggle to end my time with Pipex. The lady, thankfully, did see that I had rang up to cancel on 2nd June, and I told her that I did not want to hear anything more from Pipex. I did my part to cancel – i.e. I rang on 2nd June, plenty of time before 30th June to cancel. The fact is, their cancellation department messed up, so at the end of the day, it’s up to Pipex to sort their problem out.

In retrospect, I’m very glad I cancelled the direct debit – otherwise they might still be charging me. Now, this is the important message for everyone:

Do not even consider Pipex Internet, or Tiscali, or whoever owns them. If you are already with them, when your 12 month contract is up, get away from them.

Pipex Internet are absolute cowboys and con artists. They should be shut down.

Well, as I said recently, on a day for the PHP community dubbed as “8-8-8″ (referring to 8th August 2008), PHP4 will officially be halted. This means there will be no more development done for PHP4. Any new bugs will remain forever. Any developers still using PHP4 won’t get the support they used to. There won’t even be any security updates to seal up loopholes and hacks.

But on the upside, PHP5 will be the choice. We’re already on PHP 5.2.6 (stable), and the next version is well on the way. Now the article I linked to poses several questions:

• What if in 2 months time, evil hackers will find a bug in PHP4 that is exploitable?
• What if they write a spider that crawls the internet in search for applications that run PHP4?
• What if they target all those sites with malicious code?
• What if indeed there will be no fix for this exploit?
• What are you going to do?

There’s a simple answer to all these questions :- people really need to upgrade to PHP5. It’s really that simple. For developers, I think there’s actually very little to do (the odd thing is listed in the PHP5 Migration Guide). My move from PHP4 to PHP5 was simple and very very pain free (perhaps I was lucky?). Personally, I think it’s the web hosts that need to get their bums in gear. Following my article about Newnet, they’ve actually started using PHP5 for new hosts, and are offering free migrations from PHP4 to the newer PHP5 UNIX servers, so good on them, I fully back Newnet 100% in this descision.

At the end of the day though, a day will come when web hosts really do NEED to upgrade, perhaps because of some horrific bug that will destroy the universe. If I were those web hosts, I’d do it sooner rather than later. But as is the way with some companies – they use the ethos “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I used to think that, but I’ve learnt recently that with some things, even if it ain’t broke, you can make it more secure, work faster and work better.

Thankfully, here at Netbasic, we use PHP5 already, so I’m happy as chips.

Basically, someone receives a link from a contact on their Windows Live list. The duped person visits this site (in my case, my Mum and Dad were victims of this phish, and (well, not them) sent me a link to http://r.titcumb.imagefrosty.info/ followed by http://ultraoffers.info/), and enters their Windows Live logon details in the hope of seing some pictures that their friend has sent them. Unfortunately, you probably won’t read the small print:

We may temporarily access your MSN account to do a combination
of the following:
1.  Send Instant Messages to your friends promoting this site.
2.  Introduce new entertaining sites to your friends via Instant Messages.

Basically, what they will do is log onto your Windows Live account (sometimes even when you’re logged on!), send a link (sometimes personalised) to everyone on your contact list. And so the cycle restarts. They also have a nice big list of e-mail addresses that they can now send spam e-mail to, or sell on for lots of money.

There is a simple message that I must say to everyone, even though no-one EVER listens to it, even though they are told umpteen times by everyone who is computer savvy:

DO NOT ENTER YOUR PASSWORD OR PERSONAL DETAILS ON ANY SITE EXCEPT THE ORIGINATING SITE.

i.e. if you signed up for a Windows Live passport, only ever enter your password on sites that end with “live.com”. If you sign up for a Google account, only enter your password on sites ending with “google.com”.

That means don’t enter it on sites like “google.securepeople.com” or “google.email-program.com” or anything.

If in doubt, for heavens sake, ask someone who knows about computers. At the end of the day, it’s the unskilled (or sometimes unobservant) computer users that are fuelling the spam industry. Do your bit to reduce spam. Use some common sense.

Edit 1 – Looking for Encryption Certificates:

Also, websites which ask for your password should always start, in the address bar, with https, the s standing for secure. A valid site wouldn’t ask you for your password unless it was secure.

As Hannah mentioned, you should also look for “https”. These type of sites also have security certificates. You can check these by:

• Internet Explorer 7/8: To the right of the address bar you should see a gold padlock. Click it to see something like “Verisign has identified this site as www.yourwebsite.com. This connection to the server is encrypted”
• Firefox 3: To the left of the address bar, click the site’s Favicon, and you should see the certificate information there.

An example of Google‘s login screen can be seen in each browser here:

Internet Explorer 8

Firefox 3

PHP4 vs. PHP5.

Yes, Newnet are still stuck in the year 2000, and are using the “favourite old shoes” version 4 of PHP. Please, Newnet, PLEASE upgrade to PHP5. Not for me, but for the sake of your hosting service. Not to mention the fact development for PHP4 actually stopped seven months ago! Not only that but security updates will be stopping in August apparently! Surely that’s two really big reasons to upgrade.

And that goes to every other webhost stuck on PHP4. At least provide two hosting options – one PHP4 for those developers stuck in the year 2000, and a PHP5 option for those developers who are modern and up-to-date.

This article is a good debate.

Firstly, the servers. I took them to a friend’s house to stay there temporarily until I could get my new internet line set up. Unfortunately after a day or two of waiting for DNS updates to propogate through the world, it looked like it just wouldn’t work. I didn’t have time to fiddle around making it work, I just needed the sites up as I have a couple of important clients. I’ve had to shell out at my own cost, temporary hosting at Newnet. So far so good except for the fact I cannot get any PHP error logs, which is fustrating as the Frosthold site does not work properly at the moment. I managed to get this blog back up and running after finding that my Feedburner Stats plug-in doesn’t work on the Newnet servers, so that’s disabled for now (coding fail perhaps?). I’m still waiting for their online support service to give me some sort of response (24 hours later, and not even a “we have acknowledged your ticket”… Unfortunately due to the temporary migration to newnet, Tom’s blog and Hannah’s blog won’t be working as I stupidly set them to use the same DB prefix (wp_), and I can only afford one MySQL database. Sorry chap and chapette…

The actual house move went fairly smoothly, albeit loads of heavy lifting and Hannah and I cursing at each other when boxes were dropped on each other (and no, thats not some kind of kinky game..). The new house is absolutely gorgeous, and we’re having a few people over tonight to celebrate our engagement as well as the house warming. Now I know that the blog is working, I’ll take a few pictures to show everyone what it’s like.

• http://www.google.com/ »» http://google/ or http://www.google/ or http://news.google/ etc.
• http://www.microsoft.com/ »» http://microsoft/ or http://windows.microsoft/
• And potentially personal addresses (when prices drop..) such as http://james.titcumb/

It’s certainly a revelation, but is it a good idea, thats the question… How will this be recieved by the general public? How easily will people take to typing addresses without .com or .co.uk or other TLDs? Since practically the dawn of the internet, these popular TLDs such as .com, .net, .org etc. have been a staple of the internet. Even phrases have been named after these TLDs, such as “the dot com crash” and so on.

The other extreme of course, is that it gets taken up a little too well, and it goes mad, and companies register TLDs such as in the title of this article. I’m a bit aprehensive until I read further into it, but if executed properly, I think it could work well, and would benefit the internet immensely.

On the third hand (?!), there’s the already heaving size of the internet. Capacity problems are being taken care of by the introduction of IPv6 to replace IPv4 at some point, and releasing TLDs generally will allow more combinations of domains (to a certain degree), but don’t you think there’s already just way too much information on the internet? Or perhaps there’s not enough… I think thats a whole other debate there, so I’ll put the lid back on that one for the time being.

Of course, part of this proposal is to allow non-Roman text in domain names. So instead of http://news.yahoo.co.jp/, we could see http://ニュース.yahoo.co.jp/… The problem I see with that of course, is that I don’t have a japanese keyboard, so I’d have to use character map… which would take a while. Japanese keyboards of course have Roman letters. Although to me personally, it doesn’t matter as I can’t speak or understand non-Roman languages, but I’m sure it’d matter to someone out there!

• This theme
• Matched Ad sidebar widget
• Feedburner Stats sidebar widget

Feel free to download/modify them etc., but please keep me in the credits.

And as for the latter part of that article, who cares if the iPhone will be 3G soon? It should’ve been 3G in the first place, and who the hell will pay $200 for an iPhone? iPhones are a bane on this earth, just like any other Apple product is.

Bring on Google’s world domination I say!

The botch I’m talking about is my experience of downloading it this morning and trying it out.

My experience was about 15 minutes…

• 1 minute to download Firefox 3
• 1 minute to install Firefox 3
• 1 minute to find out half of my add-ons don’t work
• 1 minute to try and hack the MaxVersion to work and fail miserably
• 2 minutes to locate a Firefox 2 installer
• 3 minutes to download it from the stupidly slow FTP
• 1 minute to uninstall Firefox 3 and install Firefox 2
• 2 minutes to find out Firefox 2 kept crashing because the Firebug I upgraded to crashes it
• 1 minute to uninstall Firefox 2 and re-install it
• 2 minutes to set it up back to the way I like and restore my previous profile

I think I’ll leave Firefox 3 for a little while to get rid of teething issues.

<feed id="1948050" uri="asgrimthemighty">
<entry date="2008-06-16" circulation="0" hits="0" reach="0"/>
</feed>

This is the case, even though I looked at my Feedburner stats page, it’s just the AwAPI (Awareness API) that appears b0rked. Come on Google, sort it out.

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• Disappointed with your sexual health?
• Bring back time when girls were yours.

And so on… the list is endless. I don’t see how anyone with at least half a brain cell (and no spam filter) would not simply take one look at the subject and delete it instantly. The people who send out these spams surely can’t get any profit out of it? Sure – if they were pay per click – they might make a miniscule amount of money by the people silly enough to open it and be interested in buying “Vi.agraa” at “in.sane.ly l00w prices”… but I don’t see how that would make any amount of money worth wasting all those bytes of bandwidth. I mean, in this day and age, people have to pay to use bandwidth! So perhaps back in the early-to-mid-nineties, it may have been more profitable. Bandwidth was cheaper and less of a commodity, and people hadn’t experienced spam e-mail to the levels it is reaching now (such as complex well-phrased phising e-mails, and other decieving spam), so perhaps thought it was genuine. But even a novice internet user must know stuff like the above is spam e-mail and not bother reading it?

Or perhaps I am underestimating the amount of really thick people in this world…

Things are getting pretty hectic around here now. Packing the house up for moving to Whiteley, as well as preparing for the imminent Hellfest (yay!). We managed to get down town today for a bit and pick up some bits (baby wipes, Euros and the like) ready for that. We’re on a really tight budget this year, and it’s made even tighter by the fact we have to save a shed load of money for the wedding, and more importantly, Hannah’s engagement ring! The new house’s rent is £170 more a month between us as well, so that’s another kick in the budget’s teeth.

Another headache I’ve been trying to figure out is what I’m going to do with the servers during the move. I can’t get internet at the new place until the BT line is activated which is on the day we move in (and not a minute sooner!). This means that I probably won’t have internet at all from 1st July for about 10-15 days, providing the new ISP doesn’t mess anything up. I spoke to Kelvin briefly, and understandably, he said no to letting me put the servers in the work’s server cabinet (security risks and all that), so ideally I need to find a home for them at a friend’s house. I’ll try and chat up a few friends who I know have good internet connections, but if any of you are my clients reading this, I will try and keep downtime to a minimum, but there will be a bit of disruption, so be warned!

Anyway, off to cook dinner, ta ta for now!

I joined Pipex in April 2006, never had any problems with them at all, a great service. The one time I lost my connection was when they were doing maintainence in my area, but they actually sent me a letter in advance informing me of disturbances.

On 2nd June 2008 I rang up to cancel my service as I am moving house and no longer need broadband, so thought I might as well cancel it as it’s a £24.99 a month I could spend on other things.

Upon calling, I was told I am still in my 12 month contract, and they insist this is the case, despite me having my activation letter which is dated 8th April 2006. I made at least 5 phone calls today alone, each about half an hour – on their lovely 0871 number(!), after discovering they had charged me a £100.79 “breach of contract” fee, on top of my normal £24.99/month. I immediately cancelled my direct debit in case they took any more money.

I asked to speak to a supervisor several times, to which they always said the supervisors were busy (suprised?). No-one could help me, so I have now applied to CISAS (Communications and Internet Services Adjudication Scheme) to complain against Pipex. I am also writing a letter of complaint to the head office.

No-one at Pipex Customer “Care” was able to help, they couldn’t even get me a supervisor to talk to. I am absolutely furious, and I really do warn anyone to steer WELL clear of Pipex.

If I get an outcome to my situation, I’ll post it here, but I don’t hold out much hope of anything positive.. money grabbing so and so’s….

I’m glad we didn’t even bother calling because we’ve decided on something a lot cheaper. Introducing the wonder of Top Up TV! Currently, TUTV is offering a free 160GB receiver with a 12-month subscription at £10 a month (ends June 30th). This gives you all the decent extra channels that Sky gives you (UKTV Gold, Paramount etc.), and the recording/playback/pause etc. ability for a quarter of the price. What about the HD movies? Something like Lovefilm.com would be ideal. For £12.99 per month, you can have up to 2 DVDs/Blu-Ray at any time. So I can satisfy my urge for HD content with unlimited rentals just as I would’ve with Sky HD. This totals at £22.99 a month, and we get the same features we want out of Sky for half the price.

To summarise:

Sky HD: £807 for first year, £528 after

TopUp TV + LoveFilm.com: £276, every year.

On the first year, we will save a massive £531, and after that £252 per year compared to the equivalent Sky package. This also leaves us open to getting a service like freesat in the future… I know which option I’d prefer to take…

Who said a bit of consumer research never hurt anyone!

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 end-users can work around these issues by pressing Emulate IE7 on the menu bar in the browser window. When the Emulate IE7 button is depressed, Web pages will display in Internet Explorer 7 Standards mode.

Oh noes! The Emulate IE7 button is depressed! Must get him some prozac…

To sign up, click here to make money for free.

And trust me, this isn’t any kind of scam as I can confirm you get paid for this.

For quite some time now, Frosthold‘s website has been operating from this URL after I bought the much easier to remeber frosthold.com, replacing the old No-IP address: frosthold.zapto.org. Upon doing this, I set up a nice user-friendly page saying “We Have Moved!” with a link to the new Frosthold website. The problem is, search engines didn’t pick up on this. It’s taken quite some time for people to update their links on their sites, many still point to the old site. This meant that people searching for Frosthold came to the #1 result first, always the old website. It’s taken even longer for frosthold.com to come second which I just Googled, and it is now second.

I then realised my mistake – for the search engines to know where my site has moved to, I need to tell them using a 301: Permanently Moved status code. So I simply wrote a very very quick PHP script containing this:

<?
header("Location: http://www.frosthold.com/",TRUE,301);
?>

And hopefully in a month or two, frosthold.zapto.org should be gone from the search engine results, and frosthold.com shall reign supreme!

I need to do something about this now, right away. I tried the obvious thing last night, and put cushions against the walls around the servers. Putting one in front and on top was a bad idea though as the ambient case temperature of the main server soared to 40°C! After putting the fans on full pelt and opeining the living room window to ventilate and cool it down rapidly, I put a side cushion and rear cusion back, but left the front and top open. This of course doesn’t stop much sound as much of the sound is coming from the front of the main server – where the hard drive hot-swap bay is. 4 hard drives and fan are practically open at the front causing a lot of noise.

I’m exploring getting a server cabinet, and replacing the current server cases with 19″ 4U rack-mountable cases, but this is an expensive option. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years, but just never had the money. Soundproofed server cabinets are horrendously expensive (I found one for about £1,300 odd, excluding delivery and VAT!), so I may have to make do with a standard server cabinet and try and make the fans as big and quiet as possible.

If anyone has any suggestions, please do let me know! If you know me, you’ll know how to contact me anyway, I’m not putting my e-mail address on this blog!

Will it affect PHP in open-source environments? Will LAMP no longer be the norm? Will WIMP (Windows IIS MySQL PHP) become the new standard? I used to use WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL PHP) as a development environment until I became suitably knowledgable about Linux to run a development server, after which I have never looked back. There’s just something about a LAMP environment which makes me warm and cosy. Hell, I use Vista both at work and at home as a development machine, but the test environment is always LAMP (I use CVS to commit, then update the server with the latest CVS trunk, as explained before).

If, and I’m not saying it will, Microsoft buying Yahoo! will affect PHP’s future, I hope that LAMP will still be the standard. I’m fine just the way I am now, thankyou!

A quick tutorial to remind myself (all on client PC):

- Be logged in as the user you want to have password-less login
- ssh-keygen -t rsa (accept defaults, no passphrase!)
- ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remote-username@remote-hostname

That’s it! How easy is that… and much more secure than RSH.

I spent most of today setting up the new main server, which I am currently installing Ubuntu on. It took absolutely ages to set up the 600GB RAID array, as to be expected, even though they are SATA drives! Still, formatting 1200GB worth of physical hard disk data takes some time. I decided to make the main array a RAID 10 instead of RAID5 after reading some random Googled posts about the two. So the 4x 300GB disks are mirrored and striped, so I’ve got a nice big 600GB of data drive. The 2 other 300GB disks will be used for mail & databases etc., and they will be mirrored. Not ideal to mirror a database drive that requires fast read/write speeds, but I’ve made the mistake of not having redundancy and I thnk it’s something I can afford to be honest!

The current main server is chugging away nicely now with it’s new PSU which actually has a working fan now. I didn’t realise how little the server actually needed – all that’s in there is 1x 40GB, 1x 200GB, an Intel Celeron 1.7GHz and 512MB RAM. The new server is of course a vast improvement, and should be much better.

Anyway, here are a few pictures I took of the snow around my area this morning:

This proved more difficult than I thought – initially I did my fun method of turning the PC on without hooking up the front panel, so using a screwdriver to short the power button pins. It wasn’t booting, but fans were coming on. Therefore I unwillingly plugged in the system speaker to find AMIBIOS bleeping at me. AMIBIOS is helpful like that – it tells you what’s wrong at POST. The video card was the problem, I tried several other AGP cards, which all yielded the same results. I had a little break and came back to it, and hey presto! it worked… strange. Next, I hooked up the hard disks, and noticed the power supply creaking and groaning as it struggled to handle this mid-to-low spec setup:

• Intel Celeron 1.7GHz
• 512mb RAM
• 200GB HDD
• 40GB HDD
• nVidia GeForce2 MX-400
• CD-ROM drive

Yes… very pathetic! So I decided to use the other duff power supply I had (the one it was using previously, whose fan has packed up so generates an enormous amount of heat which isn’t dissipating). Using this as a cue, I ordered 2 new power supplies, a standard 450W for the slave and a very shiny Nexus Real Silent 500W for the master. I’ll be picking those up from Novatech tomorrow. After that I went about cleaning the ridiculous amounts of dust off the fans, components, case etc. and re-laid the hard disks – 4 in my Chenbro hot-swap bay, 2 as a seperate array, and finally 1 as the OS and stuff disk. Also mounted is my 4-fan control unit to control the rear and front fans. CD-ROM drive obviously was shoved in, and I re-arranged the hugely complex front-panel wires to be a bit tidier.

I’m very aware of wire clutter these days, so in this build I’m going to make sure it’s as tidy as possible – less wire clutter also means more airflow, which is a great thing when these things are running 24 hours a day.

So, the new main server will look something like this:

• AMD Athlon 2GHz
• 2GB RAM
• nVidia GeForce 5700FX
• ASUS chipset on mobo
• 6x 300GB Maxtor hard disks
• 1x 120GB Maxtor hard disk
• 2 rear fans (Top/Bottom)
• 2 front fans (Left/Right)
• CPU extraction fan (Side)
• CPU heat sink & fan
• Nexus Real SIlent 500W
• CD-ROM drive

That should do me for a little while. Don’t forget, there will be a slave server as well, although it’s not really a slave as it won’t be redundant or be load-sharing with the master. It’s actually going to be a CVS repository, as I intend all the webs I run to be run from CVS (even if the client isn’t aware) as a minor back-up method.

Back-up is the reason I bought the Chenbro hot-swap bay in the first place, and now I’ve got a chance to fiddle around I’m making sure I’m using back-up well this time.

Also, I’ve decided that the now-defunct total-carnage.org domain will be used for my web hosting access for my clients and webmail. Hopefully the system (written in PHP of course) will allow clients to access their mail in an Outlook-style fashion, setup their junk mail filters, administer their websites, add sub-domains, use FTP, and multitudes of other bits. It’s going to be a mammoth project, but I think it’ll be worth it, even if it’s just for my own experience. You never know, my control panel might be the next open-source cPanel equivalent! Heh, doubtful…

One other thing I did at work today was investigate an auto-update of a remote CVS sandbox when committing a file. I wanted this for 2 reasons – the setup at work and my home setup are similar and I’ve been wanting to find this out for some time but didn’t get the chance. I run a LAMP server, I develop on a Vista machine. I use CVS (I know, there’s only one of me, but I like the history of files etc.) to develop sites, and rather annoyingly I used to commit a file on Vista, then PuTTY onto the LAMP server, cd to the htdocs root, cvs update on there, then finally able to view it. I wanted a way to automate this laborious task, and in investigating this it would also benefit my work and hopefully eventually my colleagues.

I thought it was possible, but I wasn’t sure on the exact process, so I’m documenting what I found here to remind myself in future (that’s what this blog’s all about!). I actually found the answer in the form of a Perl script on an old fogo archive posted by a chap named Hugo Haas.

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
my $CHECKOUT_SPACE = '/dir/to/remote/location';
my $CVSROOT = '/dir/to/cvsroot';
my $CVS = '/usr/bin/cvs';
chdir($CHECKOUT_SPACE)
|| die "Could not change directory to $CHECKOUT_SPACE: $!";
system("$CVS -d $CVSROOT update -d");

I slightly modified his to suit my own needs – I needn’t run a checkout every time, I just needed to do cvs update every time, but if I added a new directory etc., I made sure to add the “-d” option to download missing directories. This solved my home problem, so hopefully I can help work find a way of implementing CVS using their SFEE that they’re using as their artifact tracker currently.

To use the auto-update (Hugo called it auto-checkout), simply put the script as executable into your CVSROOT, modify the loginfo in CVSROOT to something like:

ALL (sleep 1 && $CVSROOT/CVSROOT/auto-update %s) &

http://funkatron.com/…security-in-wordpress

Note to self: update wordpress!

It has a very pretty picture though!:

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7223145.stm