Me and my girlfriend both have a Nokia 6300 but she dropped her’s into the sink and after drying it out, the screen doesn’t work. I wanted to try swapping the screen with mine to make sure it was the LCD that had blown before I head to Ebay for a replacement. First job: get the front screen off. Here’s how you do it

1. Remove the back cover (if you’ve never done it before, push it down with your fingers)
2. Remove the two screws at the bottom of the phone. They screws are apparently T6 screws but if you don’t have a T6 screwdriver you can use a 2mm diameter flat screwdriver
3. Take the screwdriver (or knife) and insert it between the silver case and the black plastic and then prise it apart.

From there you can mess around with the insides as much as you like!

Before I start this is not intended to be the usual argument between the Microsoft and Linux camps but more a desription of my findings when I had to evaluate the two products for use within our office as the main server. Our office network is currently of the usual standard you’d find in a small 5-10 person company that doesn’t have an in-house IT person:

• All internet traffic is routed through the ADSL router with no management and for the large part, static IP addresses
• Printers shared on which ever PC they were configured from first
• PCs with no password on the user account
• A random mixture of different versions of Windows and Office

I know this shouldn’t be the case with me being the in-house IT “professional”, but my main job is to develop and maintain several enterprise quality websites. This leaves me with very little time to devote to my additional role as IT Manager and Sys Admin so up until now as long as everyone good do their job on that particular day and as long as none of the office IT equiptment had smoke and flames billowing out of it then I considered that part of my job a success.

Unfortunately the MD has thrown a spanner in the works by setting us all a set of goals that will allow our company to function at it’s best and also to grow over the next year or so. This is normally fine by me as it’s the kind of mission critical memo that I lovingly file away in the “Deleted Items” folder before getting on with some serious Ajax coding. This time is a little different though as he’s made our bonuses dependant on the goals being acheived. There’s a few bits and bobs in here that I’m not going to include here but for the most part they boil down to:

• Reliable uptime of printers, file storage and internet connection for all office PCs
• Backup of all files and email that can be recovered with 1 working hour
• Document collaboration for both onsite and offsite staff

Now my initial reaction was to head off to Dell and spec up a shinny new server running Windows Small Business Server 2003 to take advantage of the combination of Exchange and SharePoint but after taking into account some of the PCs are running old versions of Office (there may even be an odd Works and Outlook Express installation) and a few Windows XP Home, by the time everything was upgraded to XP Pro and Office 2003/2007 plus the server it was a bill upwards of £2000!

For a small business of 6 employess that is a bit steep by anyones standard so I did the obvious and headed off into the Linux world. I’m not a die hard linux fan by any means. I like it a lot - where it’s appropriate, but I don’t use it on my desktop - I’m on XP Pro. Neither will I use windows all the time - I don’t have a single IIS or SQL installation (L.A.M.P all the way!) but Linux is cheaper if you can do it yourself. That’s where businesses of our size have to find the trade off: you don’t want to be paying a consultant or your IT staff more than it would have cost to get a Windows server up and running.

In the end I weighed up the pros and cons and made the following decision: Linux this time based on the following:

• Fedora Core 8 running on a P4 1Gb box
• Leave the email running on our Web Hosts SMTP/POP3 servers
• Configure all the usual DNS, DHCP, Samba, Firewall and routing servers so that they worke just as though we’d forked out £2000 on Windows SBS
• Install OpenOffice and O3Spaces (or similar) on every machine

So thats the plan. The moral of this (as usual) long winded rambling and unnecessary story? Find the solution that fits your needs and budget. Time to implement it and then report back!

I just got one of the regular phone calls from a mobile provider trying to get me to upgrade my handset. Usually I’m a little suspicious of these companies as they just want to get a sale so I asked a few leading questions to find out if they were “on the level”. Since they knew me details (not hard), knew what phone I had (must of bought it from them) and knew what Orange tariff I was on (which is different from when I originally signed up) I thought I’d give them a listen.

They wanted to renew the tariff but with unlimited texts and enough free minutes to last me a month (any network, any time) for about a third what my bills seem to be at the moment, plus they’re throwing in a free Nokia 6300 which I can either use or eBay. Seemed like a very good deal to me and as they said it negates my current Orange contract I thought I’d sign up.

The next bits were the usual bits along the lines of “do you agree to our terms”, “seven days to cancel” and then the “would you like insurance”. As I’ve got a eight month old baby who loves to chew anything and everything, I had a moment of unusual sensibleness and thought I’d sign up for it. They read out the short T&C and the only bit I can remember now was:

“You aren’t covered for wear and tear sustained in a war zone”

Well, I knew that you don’t get cover if you leave your phone on a bar. Now I’ve got to be careful when I’m in a war zone as well!?!

This is a little bit “lower tech” than usual for me but it seems to crop up again and again, either when I set up new PCs for people or just when people are asking me one of the usual computer questions. The question being “What is Hibernate?”.

Well, simply, it makes your PC boot up and shut down a hell of a lot faster than normal. For those of you who aren’t obsessed with having the fastest PC, or just use it for ordering the weekly online shop, it will save you a lot of time and make your PC last longer (it won’t, but you’ll keep it longer because you won’t get so frustrated with it).

So, slightly more technical: how does it do this? Well, when you shutdown, everything it the memory (RAM) is saved as an image on the hard drive and this is then loaded back into the memory when you start up again instead of the PC having to go through and load everything up from scratch. This also includes all your programmes you had open and any documents you were working on.

This is absolutely brilliant for laptop users as anything you were working on when your battery dies is still there when you finally get back to your charger. I wouldn’t recomend on relying on them to be there when you boot up though as it is Windows and a few crashes while restoring everything has caused me a few lost files.

Note: I tend to ramble and build up to the point by painting a wonderful picture in words… Straight onto The Point

I tend to have a slightly complicated setup at work as far as my files go. For the most part, it’s the same as anyone else’s. Email in my email client, documents in My Documents and shared stuff on the central network share. Bu the files I spend most of my time on are stored on another server. The setup is something like this:

• Desktop running Windoze XP with a Network Share mapped to X:
• Linux box running Redhat with Samba and a username/password protected share with all my web files on it
• Dreamweaver accesses the network share and FTPs to a range of production servers when ready

There’s a couple of reasons for storing everything on a central Linux box and not on a local drive:

1. They get included in an automated backup routine that backs up all remote and local files into one archive to be moved offsite on my laptop
2. The root directory of the Samba share is also the root directory of the Apache installation so I can test stuff locally

When away from the office I tend to FTP to the production server I want and make any changes, FTP them back and then either email myself a reminder to download them when I get into the office or Remote Desktop in and download them straight away. This has always worked and although it’s a bit of bind, noone likes working on the weekend so it means I don’t fire up my laptop to do little bits of bug fixing or whatever on a quiet Sunday.

This morning though I got an email off the MD saying I could do with a new desktop and he’d a catalogue through with a few offers in. I put the kettle on and headed over to www.dell.co.uk to see which ones he was on about. Unfortunately by the time I’d added the options I wanted (RAM, Dual Screen) it was about twice what it was to begin with. I’m now trying to convince him on a nice single monitor spec but with a 22″ wide screen TFT instead, but that’s a bit off point (I haven’t even got to the point yet, but hey!).

While I was waiting to see if he was willing to re-mortgage his house just to buy me a new PC, I thought I’d have a look at improving the rest of my work setup and that’s when I decided to find out if I could access the network share from home as well. I so couldn’t be bothered with a VPN so after a bit of Googling about other options I decided the easiest optikon was to set up a SSH tunnel and send all SMB (port 139) traffic through that.

The Whole Point Of This
Here’s a step by step guide of how you do this in case you want to access Network Shares accross the Net. If some things are called slightly different things on your machines, don’t worry, that’s just because I couldn’t be bothered to look at what they were called, I’m just doing it from memory.

1. Boot up the PC that you want to access the Network Share from, i.e. accross the Internet (call it the client)
2. Go to Start > Control Panel > Network Connections
3. Open any of your connections and go to Properties. Click on “File & Print Sharing” and hit Unistall
4. Reboot (only time, honest)
5. Download and save Putty
6. Open it up and enter the address of the server which has the network share on it*
7. Go down to SSH > Tunels and in the Source box put 139, then in Destination put yourdomain.com:139 and hit Add
8. Go back to Session and Save. This just makes it a double click to load up next time
9. Connect, enter your username and password for the server
10. Go to My Computer and go Tools > Map Network Drive
11. Choose any drive letter you want and then in Folder put \\127.0.0.1\sharename (plus any username and password info you need

You should now have access to your remote Network Share from wherever you are! The speed will depend on the internet connections at both ends plus how busy the net inbetween is. For loading up and editing the 12K PHP files I use, it’s perfectly fine. I’ve also copied accross a 22M zip file but was writing this so didn’t see how long it took. I’m now copying across a 540M zip file to see how long that might take (I’m guessing about 20 times faster than doing it through Remote Desktop) [took about 3 and 1/2 hours on 512kb connection].

I haven’t mentioned security here. SSH means that while copying files across you’ll be pretty safe but I’ve gone the whole hog and blocked SSH acess to everywhere but my home IP just to make sure (no, this isn’t my work or home server). It’s up to you how far you go on the security.

* I’m assuming you’ve got a share running, a SSH server running and can open up SSH traffic to it through your firewall as well as all the necessary security/authentication

About a month after I bought my Sony Vaio VGN-SZ1XP, I nocked it off the desk. It seemed that everything was alright but recently the DVD writer has been failing to write and it doesn’t read some of the old disks I burnt. I decided to get a new drive so off to eBay I went and managed to get one for £30. Bonus.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find out how to actually get in to the damn thing to get it out. Well I figured it out and here it is:

1. Hold down the F1, F2 and Num Lock key and while doing this, slide the keyboard backwards.
2. There are three screws holding down the palm rest / mouse pad thing. Undo these
3. Slide the palm rest towards you.
4. There’s one screw holding down the DVD drive. Undo this and then slide the drive out.
5. Put new one in and then repeat these backwards.

If this is helpful, click on an ad!

Was just reading on Blog-Ed about how Joe has become a finalist in the Guardian competition to make as much money as you can on eBay. What he’s doing is buying broken laptops and doing them up and then selling them again. You can check out how it’s going on Laptop Scrapyard.

When I get round to it, I’ll back up this Vaio at work and if you can sort out whatever’s wrong with the power circuitry then you can have it.

I’ve had my Nokia 8800 for a little over a year now and I still love it to bits. It’s still very very good looking and just as importantly to me, it’s got a simple feature set and does just what I want it to - calls, text, alarm, reminders and that addictive golf game. Nothing more.

The only problem is that it’s recently started playing up a bit. When texting, occassionly the screen will go completely white for a few seconds. Also, it sometimes has a bit of a fit and insists that the hands free is plugged in when it isn’t so I can’t make calls as noone can hear me. Luckily it’s indestructible so I haven’t broken it by whacking it on my desk yet.

Unfortunately, it’s probably just a case of phones not living as long as people… It might be time for an upgrade. I was tempted to go similar again and go for a Nokia 8800 Sirocco as it’s pretty much the same, but black. Hmmmmm…. nice! The only problem is that it’ll set me back at least £600 and I should probably pay the rent instead. So, the alternatives?

I’m not bothered about the Nokia N77. It’s quite a nice phone but like the Samsung D900 and all the rest, it’s all become about live TV, 20 mega-pixel cameras, smart phone features, etc, etc and none of this interests me since I never used any of it when all this stuff started coming out on 3. I’d rather have a good looking phone that just does what I want (that said, the camera on the 8800 is useless).

So, the rest? Top of the list at the moment would probably be the iPhone since it looks good and as mentioned previously, I broke my iPod so that would take two things of my “gadgets to buy” list. Only problem is: it’ll cost about £350! Oh, pricy.

At the moment though, thats the only real contender… Unless Google actually makes the gPhone (or whatever it’ll be called). There’s not currently much information about it, about as much as the Google OS, but considering Google is always brilliant at simplicity, all they have to do is come up with a nice design and it could be the winner. The problem with this one? It doesn’t exist.

Any others? Hmmm… not really. I’ve been googling for about an hour and there’s a lot of nice phones out there but they’re all Mazda MX5 ‘nice’, not Aston Martin DB9 ‘nice’ so they’re off the list.

I think I’ll just have to work harder and get the Nokia 8800 Sirocco!

Everybody knows that pretty much any nokia charger from the last decade will work with any nokia handset from the last decade which is great as I’ve got the charger cradle from my Nokia 8800 at home and an old charger from a 3310 at work in case I need a bit of extra juice to get through the day and don’t have to worry about remembering to take a charger with me.

A couple of weeks ago I had a few days off and because I was in a rush I forgot to take the charger home for my Core Duo Vaio and although the battery life is good, it’s not that good. I have however got an old 700MHz Pentium Vaio with a broken screen at home that’s not much use to anyone. As I couldn’t go for three days without my laptop I checked out the spec on the old charger and it matched up with the battery from the new Vaio. It also fits.

I haven’t had a chance to see if any other Vaio chargers work with other Vaio’s but it’s a pretty big coincidence so I’ll bet that they do. Now I’ve got phone and laptop chargers at home and at work and have less stuff to carry around. That’s today’s top tip!

Moore’s Law has to date been dead on as far as chip development goes, but should the focus of development be directed elsewhere? If you look at the most complex computing device on the planet, the human brain, it is not a single “device” that is focused on a single task before moving on to the next one. It is a discreet set of components, each of which is specifically suited to a different type of task.

If this approach was taken with computer and chip design, I think it would produce more efficient systems with uniquely designed modules providing the support and functions required by the specific software running on that system. This way the system’s resources are focused on performing the current set of tasks in the most efficient way, thus requiring more modest components for a specific system or user. This also means less heat, noise, size and hopefully cost.

This approach is already starting to appear with multi-core processors allowing multiple tasks to be executed simultaneously and graphics cards which take it much further in the right direction with things like T&L, it just isn’t far enough.

You could take it one step further, producing systems with chips which could be programmed during use and then later re-programmed for a new task. This way a piece of software could be written with instructions on how to program the rest of the system to fully utilise all the resources available to maximise its productivity. Maybe there’s some mileage in this theory, or maybe it’s all crap. I have got a stinking hangover and am watching Mr. & Mrs. Smith while trying to think about PC design so who knows.