This afternoon Windows XP crashed on me which is actually quite an unusual event these days. It simply locked as my pointer was moving across the screen so I forced a reboot and XP came back to life. What didn’t come back to life, however, were my Firefox bookmarks!
I keep my permanent bookmarks on Yahoo Bookmarks and only use the local bookmarks for pages and sites which I think are of temporary use or for future study so the loss of them was no great hardship but annoying none the less.
If you are ever in the same situation, the following procedure should recover them (it did for me at least!):
Continue reading ‘Firefox: Lost Bookmarks’
A Mind Lost has just been upgraded to WordPress 2.5 which has a number of enhancements, primarily to the admin interface which will take some getting used to I think. The upgrade seems to have gone relatively smoothly apart from the fact that I’m using the K2 theme and the RC4 release is not quite compatible with the 2.5 release of WordPress.
After the upgrade the admin page simply didn’t load and the apache log showes an error “Call to undefined function: wp_register_sidebar_widget() in ………/dashboard.php on line 31″
It seems this is a widespread problem with blogs using the K2 theme and the cause appears to be the K2 theme’s sidebar manager which clashes with the requirements of WP 2.5’s admin interface. I found two possible solutions:
Continue reading ‘WordPress 2.5 Update (+ K2 Snag)’
I found a great JavaScript routine yesterday which allows you to zoom a linked image in a web page to full size without it opening in a new page or window. It’s called FancyZoom and it’s written by Cabel Maxfield Sasser. You can use it free for non-commercial websites and he offers a low-cost, one-off license fee for commercial use.
Using it is as simple as copying two folders into the root of your website and then inserting two lines of script into the header and an onload statement inside the body tag on the pages you want it to work on. You can selectively disable the zoom on particular images and it can show a title for the image when it zooms.
Nice work Cabel!
Another UK budget has come and gone and every year they get more and more like a round of useless tinkering with the finances and a raise in overall taxation. Every time there seems to be a glimmer of a lower tax rate, a rise is announced which completely wipes it out. The whole charade is just smoke and mirrors these days.
The government is going to attack binge drinking but instead of simply using existing rules to prevent drinking on the street and to arrest people who are drunk and disorderly, they are going to increase the tax on alcohol. The drunken idiots on our street have no idea how much they are paying for booze anyway. By the time they are half-pissed they are are happily handing over notes in the pub and being short-changed by many of them. An extra few pence on their booze does nothing to alter their behavior but it does impact the millions of casual drinkers who are now paying more for other’s stupidity.
The increase in first year car tax is also poorly thought out. A £70k Range Rover will now cost an extra £950 in the first year. Will the person who has that money to spend on a car or the company that supplies it as a company car really care? Of course not. It is just another revenue-raising tax disguised as environmental action.
That is the real lie in this and the last budget and the last few budgets. Tax is increased on the back of an environmental agenda when it has been proved there is negligible impact on the public who will not change their use and abuse of natural resources until there is a viable alternative. If the government really cared about the environment, they could invest much more in improved public transport or they could increase the grants for home insulation making cavity wall and loft insulation free. This alone would cut electricity and gas requirements by a huge amount.
As always, it is too much stick and no carrot.
When your work involves regular reconciliation of data, you will often find that you have a discrepancy which you can’t easily pin down to particular entries. For example, you may be reconciling a bank statement to a purchase ledger and you find that there is a difference which means that purchase payments have been posted incorrectly, duplicated or missed entirely. If you have a large number of transactions, manually locating the offending values can be laborious, not to mention tedious.
Fortunately, Excel has a feature called Solver which simplifies this process (Open Office and others may have an equivalent).
Continue reading ‘Excel: Matching Values to a Total’
I’m in the process of migrating two Management Information Systems, written in VB6 from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL. The main reason for the migration is that the SQL Server is sitting on a large tower server which runs Microsoft Small Business Server 4.5 and dates back a number of years when MS SBS looked like a good idea for SMB’s like us. As it turned out, the software turned out to be an utter pile of garbage which consistently had significant performance and reliability issues. After persevering for about 18 months, I dumped it in favour of three separate linux servers running file sharing, mail and intranet. Now the tower is old, everything other than MSSQL and WINS is shut down and it’s taking up a significant amount of the available space in the systems cupboard!
I’ve done a couple of SQL Server to MySQL migrations before with VB6 applications and thought I’d share some of the database and coding issues you might come up against.
Continue reading ‘SQL Migration’
I’ve written about my frustrations with printer drivers before. Today I had to install an Epson TM-T88IV receipt printer I needed to develop a warehousing application. I’ve used them before without any major problem apart from getting the RS-232 serial version to talk nicely, but this was a parallel version so should have been be much easier to setup.
I downloaded the latest version of Epson’s “Advanced Printer Driver 4″ from their POS site. The very name of the thing should be a warning. It installed OK except that it installs a program which you then have to use to go in and install the printer, no hastle but a bit unusual. What really p***ed me off this time was that it decided, for reasons known only to itself, that every other printer on my system apart from the other Epson should be set to “Print to file”! I had to go through and set up all the network printer destinations again and in the case of the OKI C5100n I use as my main printer I had to delete the printer and install it again!
Nice one Epson!
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