I’ve recently upgraded to Outlook 2007 and as with the last Office upgrade, I’m glad it was a free download from our hosting provider otherwise I would have been reeeeaaalllllllllly pissed off. There’s some good advancements in it and since it’s a nearly new Microsoft product, a hell of a lot of bugs and problems. Top of the list at the moment is the fact that Outlook won’t exit when I close it.

It’s still running in Task Manager and even downloading emails although it’s not even showing up in the System Tray. This wouldn’t bother me too much except that it’s using 100Mb of my 1Gb of RAM which I sometimes need (for playing Command & Conquer).

After a bit of researching, I found out that it was due to the contact sharing with Skype. I’ve only recently noticed it so I don’t know if it’s an Outlook 2007 thing or part of a Skype update. To turn it off go to:

View > Show Outlook Contacts

and un-tick it. As soon as I did this, Outlook cleanly exited out of Task Manager.

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

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!

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.

As I mentioned in the previous post I wanted to write a script to take the online CSV file from Sex Shop 365 and be able to import it directly into my osCommerce shops.

I’ve tested it and it works fine with my installation. You will have to modify it though as I’ve added an extra field (RRP) and modified the products_price based on this. If you’d like it, you can get the code from this page

PHP Code For Importing CSV Into osCommerce
Latest version for download as .txt file

The script should do the following:

• Extract top level categories and import into database if not already there
• Take sub categrories and import into database if not already there
• Exrtact all products and import main information into products table
• Add products name and description into products_description table
• Match products to categories

Someone might find this useful. As per usual - back everything up first! No warranty is implied or given. Do write to me if you much up your database - I enjoy a good laugh (harsh, but for your own good newbies)

A while ago I decided I wanted to change suppliers from our existing one to Sex Shop 365 as the old one tend to be a bit slow making deliveries and you have to do all the ordering by email. Sex Shop 365 are much better since you can do everything through their site and they’re very good in general.

The only downside is that it means I’ve got to completely recreate the product database. On the up side, sexshop365 have their product range online in CSV format. Luckily there’s this osCommerice contribution that lets you import the CSV into the product database. It doesn’t do everything automatically so I’m going to work on a script to do everything and then put it up.

I’m by no means a SEO expert but I roughly know what I’m doing and I’ve always thought that the default way WordPress displays the page titles for a post is a bit the wrong way round. A post should be optimised for the content on that particular page as opposed to the name of the blog which should mean that the post name should precede the blog name in the title tag, e.g.

<title>This is the post title » Blog Name</title>

You can do this by modifying a line of code within your header file. Go to:

WP root > wp-content > themes > theme_name > header.php

Open this file and replace the code within the title tags with the following:

<title><?php wp_title(’ ‘); ?><?php if(wp_title(’ ‘, false)) { echo ‘ &raquo;’; } ?> <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>

And that should be it!