We’ve got two of the Dedicated Root Servers from 1and1 and one of them has been in German since it was set up. This would be great except the only German I can remember is how to ask for beer.

If you’ve got one and would like it to talk to you in English instead, here’s what you do:

• Install Yum or some other method of getting updates or RPMs
• Install system-config-language
• Run system-config-language
• Choose English and hit OK

All your system messages should be in English now.

Sod it! Well after last weeks fiasco I was more than a little pissed off when I turned my laptop on this morning and found out that it was October 5th 2010 and as a result, my Norton 360 subscription had expired…. again.

I did a quick system restore to try and fix it which did nothing (thanks Microsoft) and then a quick removal and reinstall of Norton after deleting some of the registry which did nothing (thanks Symantec).

I really can’t be arsed to do any more than that today so I’m unistalling it and shoving a copy of AVG Free on there (you get a link since you’re the only competent company mentioned so far). I had a realllly half arsed attempt to find out what could be causing the time change as the fact it was Monday morning again is a bit too coincidental. The only thing I had in my Scheduled tasks is the Apple update thing.

I’ve deleted that now since the version of Quicktime I have is annoying enough so I’ll give it a few weeks and see if we end up in the future again. If not, you’re on my list of companies to destroy Apple!

Well I’ve tried looking around the Net to try and find out why the date changed itself for no reason. There’s lots of stuff about it going back in time but that’s all because of dodgy batteries which I knew anyway and doesn’t help me. There’s a few related forum posts saying it might be a virus but I think I’m clean.

I tried searching for things along the lines of “Windows date changed 2010″ to see if anyone had had the exact same problem but all I got was millions of news articles about the next version of windoze which is out in 2010 and is called Windows 7.

Not much use at all. I think I’ll have to leave it and hope it doesn’t happen again soon. I so can’t be arsed to do anything now so work will have to wait till tomorrow - I’m going to play CnC 3 instead.

So, who’s on today’s list? That would be:

• Microsoft (surprised?)
• Sony
• Symantec

So what have these three done? Well I was sitting here typing away on my desktop when I noticed a Norton 360 warning window on my Laptop. It was saying that my subscription had expired which is odd since I’ve only had it few a couple of months. Luckily I had a good idea what the problem was going to be so I had a quick look at the date the laptop was set to.

Yup, it thought it was October 2010. I haven’t been able to figure out why this happens, whether it’s a Windoze “feature” or whether it’s a problem with the Vaio hardware. Every now and again though it just decides it’s October 2010. anyway, I set it to the correct date again, rebooted and Norton still thought it had expired.

Instead of getting on to tech support (I try and avoid them), I decided an reinstall was the way to go so off came Norton 360 and back on it went. Easy enough except that Norton loads the registry with data so it had just remembered my product key and the fact that the clock had been set to 2010 for a few minutes so it had expired.

I downloaded the Norton 360 Removal Tool from the Symantec website which just loaded up and then crashed for me. By this point I was getting really pissed off so I searched the registry for any mention of “Symantec” or “Norton” and deleted the lot. I then did the same on the C drive.

A quick reboot and then on to reinstalling. Since I can’t be arsed to carry piles of CDs around, a lot of my software I’ve got stored as images on the hard drive and then load them with Daemon Tools when I need them so I loaded the Norton 360 image, fired up the setup programme and watched it crash and then ask me to reboot. This I did and when it all loaded up again I found I had no virtual CD drives and as an extra treat, the real DVD writer had gone as well.

Delving it to Device Manager all the CD devices were showing problems loading the drivers. At this point I was thinking I might have been a bit too hasty when deleting chunks of stuff from the registry. Very, very nervously I headed to System Restore hoping that the last restor point was sometime this year. As it turned out it was three days ago and since I hadn’t done much except play Command & Conquer on it over the weekend, I gave that a go.

While I was waiting I noticed that one of the network drives on my desktop was disconnected so I headed into the store room to find out what was going on with my Linux box. For some reason it was turned off and wouldn’t turn back on. A bit of messing and I found that the batteries were no longer charging on the UPS so I just bypassed it. At this point I nearly lost it completely and shoved the thing through the window but then I decided to go for a fag instead (they wonder why a lot of IT people smoke).

After yet another reboot all my CD drives were back, Norton appeared to be installed and it wouldn’t let me uninstall it or run setup because it said another instance of setup was already running. At this point I was considering not bothering with AV and never going on the Internet again. I decided a better plan would be to run the Norton 360 Removal Tool again and see what happened. This time it ran OK and after another reboot, Setup managed to get going again.

Since I haven’t been connected to the internet for most of this and when deleting half the registry, Norton quite happily thinks I’m still subscribed. So after two thirds of the day, I’m back where I was when I first got here this morning, except for a broken UPS I’ll have to dismantle tonight.

Since I don’t fancy going through all this again, I’m going to spend the rest of the day looking around the Net to find out why the date was suddenly changed. In the mean time Norton can do the last fifteen reboots needed to get my laptop up to date again!

I have just looked at today’s date and wasn’t at all shocked to see its the 13th….

Ever get the feeling you’re wasting your breath and no one is listening? I do. For years I’ve been trying to stop everyone in our company from using Excel for everything they can think of. This would be fine except that the majority of this data is just lists of information and the only reason they use it is because the Excel table style view makes it look organised. The other problem is that the users aren’t that organised so there’s stuff everywhere on the network, no one knows which is current and… it’s a nightmare.

I got an email through the other day from our MD with a project to collect information on various organisations and the contacts within them. The brief was very thorough and I like the method he gave us, but the attachment was an Excel sheet with the column headers outlining the information we need to collect. This is fine and if my background was in marketing and business management, I doubt that I would have come up with a better method. Luckily I don’t and all of us with an IT background are thinking about the correct way of doing it - Database.

I knocked one up in Access that wasn’t much more than a front end for the Excel sheet with a few tables to collect the organisation information first, followed by adding a contact and choosing which organisation they belong to. This should save us dozens of hours in cut-n-paste time alone.

So, who’s fault is the Excel obsession? Partly it’s because companies don’t have the resources to provide a database and the training required for the users so people use what they know how to.

How do we fix it? As much as I’d love to uninstall Excel from every machine in the office, I don’t think I could get away with it. Plan B: I’m going to try and become in charge of marketing for Office at Microsoft. I’ve even got a slogan ready:

Microsoft Excel: Use it for adding up columns of numbers!

Although I like my job, the problem with being salaried staff is that no matter how hard you work or how ever much overtime you do, the only way to get more cash in your pocket is by getting a pay rise (hint, hint boss).

Because I like money I’ve been setting up a few sites and blogs with ads on to try and get some extra cash. So far I’m really happy with the way Google AdSense is performing on the various blogs and other sites they are on.

I did want to create some articles on a particular site called Opportunity Club and then put some specific ads with the content. I headed over to Tradedoubler and found the various programmes I needed and applied for them.

Every single one of them came back “Denied”. Now I can see why various companies might not want to approve this site, even though it is trying to make them more money directly. The problem I’ve got with Tradedoubler and the way they do things is that it’s not just that domain I’ve had problems with.

I’ve also been refused for numerous programmes for the Medicology site which is surprising since it’s a well designed, corporate site with high PR and traffic.

I’ve also been refused for various computing and technology programmes for this site. What the hell do they want? “XYZ Computers are great!” in a H1 tag on your homepage with the banner underneath? It’s stupid.

Now I realise that some of this isn’t Tradedoublers fault, but there’s other things that annoy them about me:

• The half a dozen “newsletters” they seem to send me every day
• The absolute uselessness of their website and reporting tools
• The fact that their ads either don’t work or slow your site down so that you loose visitors
• Some of the bizarre rules and restrictions they have

Well, I’ve decided to give Commission Junction a try for a while since they seem to be approving my requests to join programmes and I’ll obviously be sticking with AdSense.

I’ll probably update this in 3 or 4 months when I get a feel of what CJ are like.

Our main company, Medicology, derives the majority of its business from mailings to NHS staff. We currently use PHPlist to manage the sending of our emails, with the contacts being broken down into one of several lists based on the source of the contact and which day they are contacted on.

This works fine at the moment but we want to be able to have greater control over the mailings and who receives what, when. There are a few things that we’d like to do, some of which are easily done and some of which can’t be done.

Possible with PHPlist

• Add extra contact information such as location, job title and hospital
• Automatically schedule emails for later sending
• Send emails through an external SMTP server requiring authentication
• Rich Text Editor (RTE) built in for creation of good quality emails

These are all essential features for us and handled very well in PHPlist. There are some features that either don’t perform the way we want or are missing and which are also essential for us.

Missing from PHPlist

• Skip sending to contacts if they’ve received an email within a certain time frame
• Dynamically create lists based on selectable criteria (slighty supported in PHPlist but not to the extent we need)
• Modify the content of the emails based on contact preferences or other database stored information

Although I’d like to continue using PHPlist, the business benefits of the missing features are too great to ignore so I think I’m going to have to make a decision and either start modifying our PHPlist installation or create my own mailing programme.

I’m going to have a look through the code for PHPlist, make a decision and then I’ll post back later.

Here’s a quick guide to Google AdSense to your Wordpress blog. I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible for the novice user but I’ve made a few assumptions:

• You have a Wordpress blog and know how to upload files to your webspace
• You’ve already signed up for a Google AdSense account (if not, click on the banner on the right)
• You won’t moan at me if you accidentally break something!

Ok, First go to your AdSense account and log in. Click on “AdSense Setup” and then “AdSense for Content”. Follow the guide to create your AdSense code (if you need help at any point, look at Google’s support pages). I’m going to show you how to add the adverts in the “Sidebar” (the strip on the right) so I recommend choosing either a Skyscraper or Vertical Banner.

Once you have you code leave it open in your browser and go to where you’re keeping your wordpress files on you PC. You’ll need to browse through the folders to:

wp-content\themes\default\

Open the file you’ll find in there called sidebar.php in a text editor (such as Notepad). All you have to do is paste your code in there. I recommend putting it at the bottom (just before the </div>) to put the ads below your other links.

Now just save the file and upload it to your webspace. Go have a look at your site and you should now have your ads on there!

If you can’t get it working, leave a comment and I’ll try and help when I get the chance.