A few weeks ago I was taking a look at Windows SBS 2003 vs Fedora Core for using in the office as a primary all singing, all dancing server and for my particular needs, Linux won. Since then I have had the chance to spend a few days having a first look at Windows Vista and Fedora Core 8. This was not an intentional thing, I’d downloaded Fedora to install on the box I’d set aside for the new server and instead of going for the minimalist text based installation, I installed it as a usable desktop machine as well. At the same time I was given a couple of laptops running Windows Vista Business to set up for a remote user, plus a spare that I’m hanging on to so I can support Vista. This means I’ve had a chance to play with fresh installs of both, trying them out for the all major things an OS does:

• Setup and configuration
• Intuitivity of UI, usability and increasing productivity
• Software installation and built in functionality

As with the previous article, this isn’t meant to start a massive OS war in the comments section. I like both Windows and Linux and my choice of OS is only determined by the job that particular installation will be performing: I wouldn’t try and use Linux as a home entertainment/gaming machine and I wouldn’t use Windows as a web server. It’s just an evaluation for a particular task: a desktop machine for a Web Developer to use during the day, i.e.

• Browsing the web, checking email and various other standard Internet tasks
• Coding and testing of said code (usually on a separate machine)
• Dealing with other standard document types (.doc, .xls, .pdf etc)
• Listening to the radio online or MP3s when it’s quiet

As far as this goes, it’s a pretty even match. Anyone doing my job can easily install either Windows or Fedora and have it up and running within the office network without any issues. The Fedora installation procedure has come a long way in recent versions and it’s much simpler for the novice than it used to be. Windows is also a breeze and even though this one came pre-installed, looking at the various screenshots and reviews, the most trouble a novice would have would be getting the PC to boot from the right media.

So, UI, usability and productivity. This is again a tie in my book. Both operating systems are based around principles we’ve been working with for nearly 20 years such as Menu (Start or otherwise), Task Bar, Windows etc…. Which ever OS you use, they’re all there in one place or another and the only complication is finding the bit you’re looking for. For users such as myself where getting to know new software interfaces and systems it’s not something I worry about. I’m going to skip productivity at the moment as this is something that is affected by a number of factors:

• The software you’re using to do a particular job
• Dealing with bugs and cliches when or if they crop up
• Intergration with other systems used in your particular environment

The only one I will touch on is the last point. In the SME and in particular within my job role, we tend not to use a whole raft of Windows and Office technologies all interconnected with various Server and Client technologies. From this point of view, the need to be on a Windows platform is minimised and the technologies we employ all have open source equivalents that can be used in a mixed environment (Samba etc).

After a week of testing, I’ve come to a few conclusions:

• Fedora is a very good operating system but unless you have a specific need, there’s not too much to tempt me away from the safety net you get by running everyone on Windows. If you need to upgrade and want to save a bit of cash, take a look though.
• Windows Vista has some good user improvements and a very refreshing UI. Unfortunately after 6 or so years I was hoping for more of a leap from XP than a new paint job. If we get new machines running Vista then that’s fine but otherwise, I’m not forking out for it

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!

If you’ve installed Windows Live Messenger, Live Writer or something else that has installed the “My Sharing Folders” icons and shortcuts every-bloddy-place, have a look at the site below to get rid of them all:

Winhelponline.com

Works a treat.

I’ve just re-installed everything on my laptop and the last thing was to get rid of the built in XP messenger and then install the latest Windows Live Messenger. After downloading the WLinstaller.exe and running it I got the following message from the Windows Live Installer

It looks like you’re offline.

To install Windows Live programs, you must be online.
Please connect to the Internet, and then try again.

At first I tried the usual things:

• Disable the firewall (temporarily…)
• Switch from FireFox back to IE and check that “Work Offline” is disabled
• Check I was actually still online…

None of which worked. Finally I found the following work-around:

1. Download an older version of MSN Messenger (File Hippo has archives)
2. Install the older version
3. When you start it up, it’ll inform you that a newer version is available
4. Install this one and everything will run fine

Ta da!

OK, this annoys me all the time because someone will borrow my laptop to watch a DVD in WMP, close the “Now Playing” playlist pane and I can never find how to get it back again. Here’s how you do it:

Click on the drop down arrow under the “Now Playing” tab at the top.
Click on “Show List Pane” and it will come back.

Now I know where to find out how to do it when I forget next time

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’ve recently had to do a complete reinstall on our 1and1 Root Linux server which is easy enough in itself as it’s just a case of going into the Control Panel and hitting Server Re-Image alogn with your choice of operating system. I went for Fedora Core 6 and within an hour everything was up and running. Within another hour I had my files uploaded (4Gb including images), MySQL databases loaded and my custom httpd.conf loaded. After that I thought the only hard bit would be the extras I had installed but with a quick “yum install ImageMagick” and “yum install webmin” then using Webmin to set up the firewall properly, everything was good to go.

With the sites back up I just needed to do a few quick checks to see if various bits of the website were working. Everything was fine except for PHP sending out emails. I knew that newer versions of Fedora were supposed to use QMail and not Sendmail so I headed off into the system to see if I could track down the problem. After a bit of messing around it seemed the mail server was fine (even with the MTA set as QMail) but nothing would be sent out using PHP. By saving the MTA to Sendmail I could get emails out using the mail() function but not using PEAR’s Mail package. Enabling ErrorReporting on one of my scripts threw up the errors:

Warning: main(Mail.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in
/var/www/html/email.php on line 15

Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required ‘Mail.php’
(include_path=’.:/usr/local/share/php/pear’) in
/var/www/html/email.php on line 15

I then loaded up a phpinfo() script and noticed the following line:

–without-pear

For some reason they’ve decided to be overly cautious and install PHP without PEAR support so even though PEAR was showing as being installed and commands such as “pear install Mime” were working, something with PHP was a bit pear shaped (get it, arf arf!). It turns out that the solution is simply to open up /etc/php.ini and add the following line:

include_path=”.;/usr/share/pear”

Everything seems to be working now, a bit more testing might be in order though

As a web developer for a SME I try to use automation as much as possible to reduce the staff workload. This is generally the run of the mill stuff:

• Sending out an automated email when someone registers
• Creating a PDF receipt when a payment is made
• Checking the database for irregularities and fixing where possible

The one problem with the last one is that the functions I create are never going to be as good at fixing problems as a real live human would because the computer is incapible of making complex decisions: they don’t like too much variation, cannot improvise and are bound by the rules of the system. So what is the cut-off point for using automation?

I think that it is a good idea to try and use automation as long as it is thoroughly planned out. This was brought to my attention yesterday when I had to kill some time in the new shopping center (mall for those of you over the pond) near work and went to use the loo. They’re brand new and quite good: everything is automated. The hand dryers and taps are all motion activated.

The problem is that so are the flushes on the toilets. This is all very good and hygenic and will save the world, etc, etc but the problem is that they put the sensor right next to the toilet roll so when you lean over, you brush the sensor with your arm and get a freezing cold, wet arse. Brilliant. Nice one whoever planned that one.

I’ve been a fan of the Need for Speed series since the first game came out and it’s always been my favourite racing game - until now. I’ve just been playing the new Need for Speed: ProStreet and it’s pretty much the worst racing game in world, ever! The original ones were great, pure racing games with good (for the time) graphics and great gameplay. The more recent ones (since they started being jointly developed for the consoles) have been even better with more options, gameplay and things to work for and the graphics are even better. This latest one though is absolutely shit!

Before I really start having a go, here’s a few brief points for anyone at EA who might come across this:

• Not everyone likes hip-hop and R&B - enough of the DJ, rapper shit!
• The new ones should have better graphics than the last one if nothing else

As for the game, the concept is similar to the other recent NFS outings where you start out at a low level and build up your collection of cars by winning races. This is a tried and tested formula that although being un-original, works very well. The only problem is that this time they seem to have taken a step back in the development of the idea. This also goes for the actual racing.

This is supposed to be a racing game. It’s not supposed to have nice green arrows on the track showing the racing line that turn red if you’re going too fast. Why, why, why? There might be a way to turn these off but I’ll never know because I got so pissed off with this game after playing it for 30 minutes that I uninstalled it and stuck it on Amazon.

I think it might be time for you people over there to put away the Mims album, bin the Fast and the Furious series and head over here to Europe where we have corners and then have another crack at making a decent racing game!

I’m going to find my Carbon disc and have another go until they sort their acts out.

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!?!