I was asked by Phil to create a DVD slideshow from a load of photos he had to show at his wedding. Thing is because there was a 1000 of them we wanted them in a random order and didn’t want to rename them all or change the order by hand.

Before anyone starts commenting saying “You can’t have a random slideshow on a DVD. Once it’s burned it’s fixed”. I know. What we wanted was to not have them in the order they were taken in but rename the file names so they play in the DVD the same every time but in a apparently random sequence.

After A LOT of Googling I eventually gave in that I wouldn’t be able to do it using either iDVD or iPhoto as for one reason or another, they wouldn’t do it in the current versions. Luckily this forum has a solution using terminal if you’re not squeamish. Since I’m from a programming background it was no problem and works like a charm. Just follow the steps exactly and you’ll be fine.

Luckily after fixing the few problems I created yesterday things have been going better. I’ve actually got on and started doing proper work and things are good.

The biggest problem I’ve had has been the change from using a PC to using an iMac (for the first time ever). After getting used to some of the keys being in a different place I’ve been going through and finding out how to do all the things I took for granted on the PC.

The biggest ones are:

Copy, Paste, Select All, etc..
Yes, this I did have to look it up on Google. Macs don’t use the CTRL key as in Windows but instead use the CMD key – it takes a bit of getting used to it but luckily all the shortcuts appear to be the same.

The mouse scroll
The mouse I had wouldn’t scroll up for some reason. Someone else in the office said that her’s wouldn’t scroll up either so I assumed that was the way it was supposed to work. I looked in the settings for the mouse and keyboard but there was nothing in there. After a little Google it turns out that the way to fix it is to turn it upside down and roll the ball on a piece of white paper. Brilliant.

Back to work.

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.

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.

Problem was that one of the sites, Wellsy’s World was working fine but not displaying any Adsense ads. I went to check the settings and everything was fine so I went to check Google’s reports and it turned out that site hadn’t had any impressions for well over a month – something had broken before the move and I hadn’t noticed.

I tried altering the adsense settings, updating WordPress, checking the privacy settings, creating a new adsense ad and adding that to the site but nothing worked. I then tried removing the plugin and trying some others. None of them worked – half of them wouldn’t even install. At the point when I was about to give up and hard code the adsense code into the wordpress files myself I tried installing the original plugin again and for some reason (maybe is was a newer version) it didn’t just pull in the saved settings from before but asked me to set it all up from scratch again. I did so and hey-presto!

I should have originally just followed rule 1 of IT support – turn it off and turn it on again.

Well, our company is still using the same Linux server we were using 4 years ago – the second hand server only cost £75 back then and of course the Linux distro on it was free – with other networking bits and some hardware failure that means we’ve provided a small business network at a cost of around £50 per year. Any manager would be happy with that. But what about the administration – has my life been much harder keeping this bargain network up and running? Simply put – no.

I was just downstairs on the customer services floor and noticed one of the printers had stopped. This usually happens with that particular printer when it has jobs in the queue but hasn’t had any paper in it for a few days and the printer tells the linux server it’s gone offline. With a Windows server all you would have to do is to find a spare PC, load up a Remote Desktop session and check out the problem. With Linux – even easier.

In this case all I needed to do was get my iPhone out of my pocket, load up Safari, log into Webmin on the server using our wireless network and with a few clicks taps put the printer back online. Before I’d even had chance to put my phone back in my pocket the printer was spitting stuff out again.

How can anyone claim Windows is easier to administer than Linux?

Anyway, the usual way I get it into a usable format is to import the Excel into Access, export it into a local instal of MySQL, and then dump it into an SQL file to transfer to the server I need it on.

Problem is, since I last did this I’ve had a new PC and when I tried using mysqldump on this machine, I kept getting the error “Access is Denied” at the command prompt. After a little searching it turns out that the problem is the User Account Control that’s been in place since Windows Vista. It doesn’t ask for permission in the command prompt environment, just comes up with the Access is Denied message.

The solution. Go to Start and in the search box type in “cmd”. This will show the command prompt in the results and all you have to do is right-click on it and click “Run as Administrator”. This will let you do a dump without any errors.

Windows DVD Maker is really good. It is easier and better than any of the free tools in previous versions of windows or as part of DVD recording software packages I’ve used in the past. All you have to do is add the video files, choose a menu design and then click burn. This worked fine for the first one I did but since then it’s been taking widescreen videos, adding them to a widescreen menu and then playing the resulting DVD in 4:3 format instead of 16:9. Even changing the very limited options does nothing – it ignors choosing either 4:3 or 16:9 from the options menu – it still burns everything in 16:9!

Turns out the simplest solution is actually more free Microsoft software – namely Windows Live Movie Maker. All you have to do is download it, install it and then follow the below instructions to create your DVD.

1. Open Windows Live Movie Maker, Add your movie.
2. Click on the View tab and set the Aspect Ratio to Widescreen
3. Publish the file in Widescreen format

You can then use the new video file to create your DVD. Simples.

This choice is completely unbiased – the user is informed on the first screen what they are doing (i.e. choosing their default browser) and then on the following screen will have a first level selection of 5 browsers to choose from (there are additional choices – who knows what), namely Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera & Safari.

No since IE currently has about a 50% market share, this is likely to be the portion of the browser market that is up for grabs. Anyone who has already been educated into the choice of browser – i.e. that there is one and that they don’t have to just click on Internet Explorer and use that to broser the web, will most likely have already made a choice and will probably stick with it – this prompt isn’t likely to change their mind much. That plus this is only for IE users – those that have chosen Chrome or Firefox shouldn’t see it.

So what about the rest – the 50% that’s up for grabs? Well to me it would seem that these are the people who are unaware that there are other choices out there or possibly just don’t have a need to change (either they can’t be bothered or haven’t been motivated to through IE vulnerabilities for example). For the people that don’t know about the options, I think that this will be something that will make them stop and consider the options. They aren’t likely to just scan across the list (which is displayed in a random order) and pick IE – they are likely to look and make an uninformed or slightly informed choice. For this reason they aren’t likely to choose IE – if they have limited computing experience they aren’t likely to be fans of MS, more likely they are border of staring at the Windows flag while waiting for their aging PC to boot so they can check their email. Or they’ve heard or experienced the horrors of BSOD – not something that’s likely to make them choose MS’s offering.

So which would they select? My money is on either Chrome or Firefox. Mainly because Firefox is the biggest name in the browser market but even more important, Google is the biggest name on the Internet, making them much more likely to ring a bell with the novice and gain their vote. Secondly – they look and sound cooler than the others on the list. Style is as important as anything else dont-cha know.

It’ll be interesting to see how this affects the browser shares in Europe over the coming months. If nothing changes that just goes to show that I was right and Windows update should be forced on people.

Here’s what you do:

• Press TV on the Sky remote
• Press and hold both Select and the Red Button. Wait until it flashes twice
• Enter 1679. It should flash twice again
• Try using the Volume buttons to check it’s worked

Simples