I’m sure I wasn’t alone in suffering a feeling of dread when I heard that the new rate is going to go into effect on the 1st December 2008, leaving us just 5 days to plan, implement & test any changes that need to be made. For the majotity of the businesses I run sites for, this was a minor thing since I tend to follow these simple rules:

• Store the VAT charged with the payment record - don’t rely on coding to calculate it post-transaction
• Store the VAT amount in a configuration file or database value - never hard code it

In these cases all I need to do is change the VAT amount on the morning of the 1st and everything will be fine. There is one company though that wasn’t so easy to change.

VAT & Services
Our primary client, Medicology, provides services in the form of training courses. People decide to book onto one of their courses, usually well in advance and they receive a 28 day invoice which is then paid. In this companies case, the tax point (the point at which the VAT is calculated and paid) is the point at which the course is run. This has major implications for them:

• If a customer had booked onto a course in September, they would have been invoiced at 17.5%
• However, if the course they are attending runs in January, they should have been invoiced at 15%
• This would therefore require the original invoice to be credit noted at n17.5% and then a new invoice generated at 15%

This was potentially devastating for the company as they may have hundreds of invoices, some paid, some unpaid which need credit noting, re-invoicing and in some cases, refunds issued and new payments taken.

Luckily, due to the short notice, the HMRC has said they will waive this process and let the existing invoices stand. This will save the company hundreds of man-hours and thus thousands of pounds. From a customer point of view, they are not loosing out by paying the extra VAT since the majority of courses are paid for by the NHS Trusts who can claim back the VAT, whatever the amount.

I will be keeping a close eye on the press for what will happen in 13 months time when the rate will increase and my guess is, the government won’t be so kind about letting people off paying additional VAT. In this case, their courses running in 2010 may have to be re-issued so as soon as the new VAT rate is announced, I will be making changes ot the system to calculate the VAT amount based on the tax point as opposed to the current amount.

I just hope they decide the amount sooner rather than later

• 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

• 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.

I have a site that uploads a file in the usual HTML form way and then the PHP on the server checks if it’s a JPEG and uses copy() to move it to a desired folder. I tested it in FireFox and everything was working fine and since it’s so simple a script I left it at that. Then a client with IE7 called me because he was trying to upload a jpeg and nothing was happening. I fired up IE and gave it a go and when I clicked on the Submit button it just sat there, doing sod all.

A bit of digging and I found that the problem was because I’d included the following in the code for the Submit Button:

onClick=”this.disabled = true;”

This was being executed by IE and then it appears it just sits there and forgots you clicked Submit. You can give IE a good kicking and get it working again by changing it to:

onClick=”this.disabled = true; document.form.submit();”

I hate IE and M$

We let our Admin staff loose on the collection process and as I didn’t have any input, they used MS Excel to store the info. Now the time has come to add the info to our main MySQL Database and process it for any errors. To minimise the amount of work I’d have to do I wanted to use both Access and PHP to do some processing and data manipulation so I installed WAMP on my laptop and the Mysql ODBC Connector.

After loading up Access, I tried to connect to the MySQL table I’d created but after choosing:

File > Get External Data > Link Tables…

After choosing “ODBC Databases” from the Files of Type, nothing happens.

Turns out it is the “wonderful” Norton Internet Security at work again. You can fix it through the following method:

• In the System Tray, double-click the Norton icon
• Click Norton Internet Security.
• Click Settings.
• Click Additional Options, then Virus and Spyware Protection Options.
• Click Miscellaneous.
• Clear the Turn on scanning for Microsoft Office Documents check box.

Close Access if you had it open and then open your DB again. Should work fine now.

A bit of poking around the interweb has given me this little gem though. Basically it has to do with DDE, an old method of allowing applications to communicate with each other. The simplest thing to do is disable it for Firefox:

1. Go to Control Panel -> Folder Options -> File Types.
2. Click on: Extension: {NONE}, filetype: Firefox URL
3. Click on Advanced
4. Click Edit
5. Uncheck the “Use DDE”, and OK twice.
6. Repeat 2-5 for the the following:
   1. “URL: Hypertext Transfer Protocol”
   2. “URL: Hypertext Transfer Protocol with Privacy”

Hopefully this one should fix the problem permenantly

I have recently got a new laptop and when I transferred everything across I just dumped things in a shared drive and copied it across, including certain files such as Desktop.ini and Thumbs.db. The last file was the cause of the problem and the simplest fix is this:

• Open Windows Explorer (or My Computer) and go to “My Pictures”
• Go to “Tools” > “Folder Options…”
• Uncheck “Hide protected operating system files [Recommended]” and click OK
• Delete the file “Thumbs.db”
• Change back the setting for hiding protected files
• Preview the folder again - everything should be back to normal

You might have to do this with every folder that contains images and therefore a Thumbs.db file.

I’ve read through the manual and various other tutorial sites several times and still couldn’t find where I was going wrong. Instead of getting my simple company branded holding page I got 1and1’s holding page (but hosted on my server). I eventually gave up on trying to re-write my httpd.conf and instead did a search for the text “http://www.oneandone.co.uk” which was contained within the HTML document used in the holding page. You can search the drive using:

grep -R “http://www.oneandone.co.uk” /var/www/*

Among a few other files the main one I noticed was a file contained in the /etc/httpd/conf.d folder containing the apache configuration for Pleask and since this is loaded into httpd before any of my directives, this was causing the VirtualHost container I had created as default to be overwriten by a Plesk one which is higher up the series of config files.

Since I don’t give a crap about Pleask I just moved the file out of the conf.d folder and restarted apache and all was fixed!

Carry on…

Original Post

This problem occurs when you click on a link in Outlook and the page opens in Firefox but also creates an error message along the lines of:

General Failure. The URL was:
“http://www.devblog.co.uk”. The system cannot find the file specified.

I think that this problem only occurs in Outlook 2007 but I could be wrong. Anyway, the problem appears on both XP and Vista and in both cases the same registry fix will cure the problem. Usual advice: back up the registry and important data and if it all goes wrong, moan to someone else!

Go to “Start > Run” and Enter “Regedit”. Or in vista I think you can just type “Regedit” in the box at the bottom (I can’t be more specific, I left my Vista laptop at work). When you’ve got regedit open head to the following path:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxURL\shell\open\ddeexec

Open the key “Default” which should have the value of “”%1″,,0,0,,,,”. Delete the string of crap and save it then exit Regedit. This will stop the warnings from popping up.

A quick warning though - If you tend to switch the Default Browser between Firefox and IE (for banking reasons or website testing such as myself) then when you switch back to FF the problem will come back and you’ll have to edit the registry again.