Uncategorized Archive

Since starting at my new place the design team have been developing website designs for me to implement. In the past the designers I have worked with have been web designers and so have accepted that you can only use a few fonts, verdana, arial, times, etc. However the new team are graphic designers and as such love using custom fonts in the layouts.

Previously I would have just picked the closest web safe font and used that but being new and wanting to create a good impression, I thought I’d do some research and find out if it was possible. Turns out it is. The first thing you need to do is get your font in the correct format. Depending on what format your font is in you should be able to convert it to the two types you need, TTF (True Type Font) and EOF (Embedded Open Type) using the excellent Online Font Converter website. Once done all you need is to use some CSS in your stylesheet.

@font-face
{
font-family: "font_name";
src: url('font_name.eot');
src: local(font_name), url('font_name.ttf') format('opentype');
}

All you then need to do is declare it for the various CSS definitions:

body,p
{
font-family: font_name, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

And there you go. I’ve tested this on my Mac using Firefox and Safari, Windows using IE8 and my iPhone. It didn’t work on the iPhone but using the above example, defaulted back to Verdana which is close to the test font I was using, Myriad-Pro. As long as you choose a similar looking font to specify after your custom font in the font-family you should be OK.

For a long time now our company has been tracking where our sales come from by using special links in emails and using the http referrer to determin search engine referals and other website’s inbound links. This has been working well but has been a source of controvesy at times since some parts of our team see that we gain sales from emails and search engines primarily and yet all of our marketing speniture goes on more traditional marketing methods such as adverts in publications, printed brochures, exhibitions.

The reason we don’t just stop doing it is brand awareness. This is more difficult to measure. Essentially, someone could buy a product because they saw one of our webpages as the third result on Google and clicked on it – fine, a sale through search engine marketing. But what if they only clicked on the third link because they had heard of the company – the expensive marketing methods had raised awareness of us so that when they saw the company name, that brand was reputable enough to make them ignore the other providers.

That is what we now are going to try and track through simply asking the customers the question. Problem is that if asked, could you remember how you heard about Apple’s iPod? Probably not and this “brand awareness” problem is what I want to remove. Marketing people love it as it adds an element of mystery to what they do and can therefore gain them bigger budgets.

So due to the fact that a few people have recently handed in the resignation at our company and plus I can’t remember whether we’re still in a receission or just leaving it or something but you’d think that since one in ten are out of work there wouldn’t be much out there. I decided to look to see what jobs there are for what I was originally trained for which is PHP/MySQL Developer.

It turns out that there is a fair bit out there. There’s not so much in the Junior field – noone seems to want to get the graduates but would prefer to pay more for the experienced candidates. And the wages aren’t that low either – I’ve seen lots at pretty high salary and quite a few in this area for equal or more money than I’m on (and mine is much higher than average).

Worth keeping an eye on.

We’ve got a Bosch Exxcel WVD24520GB Washer Dryer and it’s been great – up until now! It has a supposedly “brilliant” feature called a child lock. It is a good idea because you can turn it on and then your children can’t turn the dials or push the buttons and screw up the wash cycle!

Problem is that unless you’ve got too much free time and actually sat there and read the manual from front to back – noone knows how to turn it on and so doesn’t use it. Until the child – in my case my two year old daughter – presses a few buttons and turns it on by accident!

You then got one hell of a task to turn it off. Turns out it’s this easy:

Hold down the clock/time button for five seconds

I just wish I’d been able to find that out without having to read the entire manual from front to nearly the back.

I’ve got one of 1and1 root servers and it just went tits up again and required a reinstall. After going through the Server Re-Image process the server is up and running again – with the following stupid partition setup:

• 1Gb / (on a 120Gb drive!)
• 5Gb /var
• 5Gb /usr
• 109Gb /home

Now unless you run a company creating static HTML files for 100 million small businesses, this is a really stupid setup.

Here’s how you can sort it all out into something more useful. I wanted everything on just one major / partition so I could just forget about it.

• Reboot using the Linux Rescue Mode (from the 1and1 Control Panel)
• The default setup has just enough data on it to fit on the 1GB partition. Copy it all over as follows:
  • mkdir /mnt/root
  • mkdir /mnt/var
  • mkdir /mnt/usr
  • mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/root
  • mount -t xfs /dev/sda5 /mnt/usr
  • mount -t xfs /dev/sda6 /mnt/var
  • mv /mnt/var/* /mnt/root/var
  • mv /mnt/usr/* /mnt/root/usr
• Next: modify fstab for the new setup: use VI to open /mnt/root/etc/fstab and remove the lines containing /var /usr /home
• umount -a
• Next: move your swap to the end of the drive and resize your main / partition to fill the space:
  • Run: “parted”
  • “resize 2 start end” where start and end are near the end of the drive
  • “resize 1 0 near-the-end”
  • If you get errors, try doing the resize in increments
• Reboot and you’re done

All fixed

With the current political and economical climate I was wondering how much tax I actually pay every month so I spent a quick five minutes working it out. Every month we’ve got those taxes we need to pay:

• Income Tax – 20% a month
• Council Tax – £113 a month
• Road Licence Tax – £15 a month

So that’s the big ones every month but it doesn’t stop there because for everything else (except rent in my case) you pay tax on in the form of VAT at 17.5%. And then if you have any money left after paying all the bills and want to enjoy yourself, you may have to shell out more on added tax on beer or cigarettes for example.

Then there’s the issue with fuel – as well as VAT, there’s also Fuel Duty Tax – an extra 43% per litre.

I’ve worked this out and for my wages it works out that by paying my bills and going to work every day, about 36% of my money goes straight in the governments pockets. And then they piss it all away building big wheels in London instead of using it productively to improve the conditions of living in the country.

Something to think about.

Happy Birthday DevBlog. You’re 3 today.

Carry on…