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!?!

I’m just about to get started on a new project for a client and it’s going to be my first multi-lingual site. The site is Visit Pyrenees and it’s a holiday home and hotel advertising site based around three villages in the Eastern Pyrenees. As far as a brand new project goes, it shouldn’t be too complicated and the only technically difficult bit will be the French and English versions.

As the site is aimed at UK tourists wanting to visit the area, the default language will be English, but I also want a French version for a number of reasons:

• It adds to the USP of the site by attracting visitors speaking both languages
• There will be a slight SEO benefit from the dual language site
• Some of the advertisers will only speak French and will be editing their advert which will then need translating

There are basically two section to the site: the adverts for the various places of accommodation and the static information pages. Since I don’t speak much French, I’d like the static areas of the site to be editable by a none technical but French speaking person (such as the site owner). It therefore makes sense that the easiest way of implementing the site using a wysiwyg editor that lets the user select their language and then enter the text and any other HTML entities into the editor before saving it. The PHP script will then take the text and then create a version in the other language.

When I find something suitable that works, I’ll post a link or a zip file for download if I have to modify it.

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.

There’s a number of reasons for having a blog:

• Something to pass the time
• Generate extra pages and hopefully PageRank for business and revenue generating websites
• Generating direct revenue from Google AdSense or similar
• Feeding the ego by getting onto page 1 of the SERPs for your name etc

Generally I use my blogs for all these reasons and as for the last one I’m doing OK, being top for “Devblog” and my nickname “Wellsy”. As for my actual name, “Andy Wells”, I’ve got a bit of competition out there as there’s a rock band and a mayor in the US both with the same name. I’m starting to make progress though and have made it up to number 4 on Google (even above Wikipedia).

Yay me!

This is a little bit “lower tech” than usual for me but it seems to crop up again and again, either when I set up new PCs for people or just when people are asking me one of the usual computer questions. The question being “What is Hibernate?”.

Well, simply, it makes your PC boot up and shut down a hell of a lot faster than normal. For those of you who aren’t obsessed with having the fastest PC, or just use it for ordering the weekly online shop, it will save you a lot of time and make your PC last longer (it won’t, but you’ll keep it longer because you won’t get so frustrated with it).

So, slightly more technical: how does it do this? Well, when you shutdown, everything it the memory (RAM) is saved as an image on the hard drive and this is then loaded back into the memory when you start up again instead of the PC having to go through and load everything up from scratch. This also includes all your programmes you had open and any documents you were working on.

This is absolutely brilliant for laptop users as anything you were working on when your battery dies is still there when you finally get back to your charger. I wouldn’t recomend on relying on them to be there when you boot up though as it is Windows and a few crashes while restoring everything has caused me a few lost files.

I got into work after yet another week off (September has been great - only in the office for about a week) and after the usual messing about of rebooting everything that had been turned off or crashed and not booted up again because they thought that not doing any work was a better option than telling me it was broke maybe?

Anyway, after that, checking emails and making coffee, I needed number 1. Our building is being renovated and before I was off they were just finishing the corridor leading to the toilets and the toilets themselves. I walked out into the corridor and all the lights turned on straight away. “Spooky cooincidence someone getting in the other end at the same time as me” I thought and wandered into the toilets where the lights turned on by themselves…

Turns out they’ve fitted motion detectors to the lights. They’re just a little sensor that looks like a smoke detector. Think I’m gonna have a look on eBay and see if I can get some for home. Let the laziness begin.

Note: Probably not advisable if you’ve got a cat….

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

We’ve got two of the Dedicated Root Servers from 1and1 and one of them has been in German since it was set up. This would be great except the only German I can remember is how to ask for beer.

If you’ve got one and would like it to talk to you in English instead, here’s what you do:

• Install Yum or some other method of getting updates or RPMs
• Install system-config-language
• Run system-config-language
• Choose English and hit OK

All your system messages should be in English now.

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.