My mad ramblings
General
Part of my office
Aug 9th
Just for the sake of it, here is some of the equipment I currently work with on my Tapewise application. Couple of Fibre channel switches, and old STK L40 with 3 lto and 1 sdlt drive in, an IBM 3590, some fibre scsi bridges and various other bits of equipment. On the top is a LTO-4 and an LTO-2 drive and lots of rubbish! I also have a small 250GB NAS backup drive (for local backup, also have offsite SVN and USB disk backups). There is a 24 port 1GB network port in there as well that most the equipment is plugged into, as well as my new IP phone powered by Soho66.
On the side my flattened box from the LOTR sword I bought that is currently on display in our lounge 
and a few cables (easy to access, you don’t want to see my cupboard!)
Windows Live mesh rant
May 28th
Ok, sorry for the rant, but I’ve had a couple of shots and now feeling a tad tipsy! There is a really annoying bug in Windows Live mesh that causes the first letter of the sync folder to be dropped (e.g. select d:/my folder and it tries to sync as d:/y folder). This only effect those of us that have changed their my documents folder to a drive (I think) but has now been a bug/issue for over 6 months! How can it take over 6 months to create a simple patch for this issue! The affect it has on my work flow is huge, as I used to be able to sync no problems with Xp and the old Windows Mesh. Come on MS I do like your products but get your thumb out your arse on this one!!!
WordPress admin / wp-admin 404 – AAARRRGGG
May 24th
Man oh man, this install of WordPress has been running fine for the last year, till last week! I recompiled Apache on the server to include PDO support in PHP. Didn’t think anything of it till I went to respond to a comment, BANG! No admin… POO POO… recompiled Apache again removing PDO, still didn’t work (After trying 4 other installs of WordPress on this server which all failed). Did the usual searches on the net and found LOADS of solutions, but none of them worked til…
http://www.webmasterfamily.com/f12/wordpress-solution-500-internal-server-error-8.html
admin section was accessible anymore, Problem: PHP is running out of memory. Solution: Create a text file and name it “php.ini” and with a single line of code in it: memory=20MB This file has to be placed into the directory /wp-admin/ within your WordPress installation.
So my hearty thanks go out to Vita who posted that!
VitaVta
MySql table names, case sensitive
May 13th
I’ve been building a script to compare mysql databases so I can better see what tables need updating/adding. All was going well till I started copying data and structures form my local pc (running under WAMP) to my UNIX server. I was using PhpMyAdmin to get a dump of the table, then adding to the main server, however I was then getting table not found! After much frustration I have found out that my local copy had been turning all the table names to lowercase, so when I recreated them on the server the table names where not consistent. The fix? Add lower_case_table_names=0 to the my.ini (access on WAMP menu) in the [wampmysqld] section, table name are now kept the same as the backup file or entered value. Personally I tend to only use lower case for table names, but this website has a lot of legacy data which has mixed case table names! Hope it helps!
Codeigniter 2.0.2
May 9th
Just in case you don’t visit the CI site (Would be surprised!) there has been a new release to Code and Reactor which includes a security fix which patches a small vulnerability in the cross site scripting filter. Not a big one but worth updating!
Ever been in a position where your dev site DB tables have changed, and you *cough* forgot to write down what changes would be required on your live site?! Well it has for me, and consequently I’ve been trying to find a tool/script to show me the database changes, but with no luck. So after a bit of experimentation I’ve written a small script that does this! Click here for details
What am I doing?
Nov 10th
I intended this site to be a personal place for me to talk on the net, and anyone to read. Due to business changes I half decided to sell some website work on here as well, however I’m not sure. So for now I’ll just pile content on as and when!
Spritely
Oct 14th
Added a test page for Spritely that I was messing about with last night. Do you recognise those arches from around Farnborough? I jog under them when I can
New content
Sep 20th
I’ve added a new section to the site now called “Digital Dribble” (Did consider Digital diarrhoea!) which is just some of my ramblings about stuff! I’ve also changed the site structure slightly and added some more information about me (more to come!). Still learning this WordPress 3 system, getting there
WordPress 3
Sep 2nd
This site is not my blog, so there will not be loads of posts, however I felt compelled to quickly write about WordPress 3, which is what this website is running on. I’ve used Joomla on several other websites before (Another open source CMS) which I’ve always enjoyed using, however I can see the massive appeal that wordpress has for more basic end users, compared to Joomla. Both products have their place IMO. I have to say that the slick integration for upgrade and installing themes and plugins is far superior to the current methods for Joomla (1.5, 1.6 in dev, not looked at it yet) making it really easy to try and remove new plugins.
On a lighter note I’ve recently decided to try and self teach myself a musical instrument! Not sure why, think it’s because I enjoy learning new stuff, and after much research I’ve decided on the Ukulele. Pretty much the same as a guitar but smaller and only 4 strings, so my small brain should be able to cope! Again after much research I’ll be buying the Makala dolphin (plastic back one) for around £25 delivered making it a great price to start with, and with resale value, not a big loss if I completely bodge it up!