A Mind Lost

It seems common sense regarding media frenzy over the downturn may at last be prevailing.  Two of the UK’s largest mortgage lenders, Halifax and Nationwide have announced that they will not be making further predictions of house prices throughout 2009 because “things are changing so rapidly in the market, which makes it very difficult to forecast.”

And they finally admitted that “One consideration for the industry is that predictions of further big falls may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, undermining the confidence of potential buyers who might be afraid of a fall in the value of their homes.”

Now if only some of the other crystal-ball gazers would follow suite we might make some progress.

Yes this is a shameless plug, but it has some interesting technical and business aspects to it as well.  The owner of the companies I work for has this year embarked on a personal business to buy and rent out cotswolds cottages for holiday lets.  It is common to book holiday accommodation through an agent website or office which takes a commission from the rental fee.  He wants to own, control and deal with the bookings for the cottages himself via his own website, www.parkluxurycottages.com under the name Park Cottages.

The website was developed by Cardiff-based developers Beanlogic with design input from Mark Boulton, who was recently tasked with the redesign of drupal.org

The site is up and running and has completed a number of satisfied bookings.  We’re now working on search engine optimisation (SEO), visibility and a feedback system.  SEO still seems like quite a black art to me, trying to second guess what algorithms Google uses to rank sites and use it to your advantage without getting penalised in the process.  It is surprising how competitive search terms like “cotswold cottage” and “costwolds accommodation” are!

Another day, another Vista incompatibility.  This time I found that Sage Accounts 2007 has an issue when running on Vista.  It’s not a terminal issue but it’s certainly an annoyance. When you have the customer or supplier list loaded, you can normally doubl-click on an account to open it’s details or select an account and click ‘Record’.  On Vista this will only give you a blank form instead of the account details.

Our Version of Sage 2007 is 13.02.17.0126

Sage article 15117 acknowledges the problem and reports that the only workaround is, when the details form is loaded, either type in the account number or select it again from the drop-down list.  If you have a lot of accounts, the drop-down list does not show enough entries to be very efficient so the best way is to type in the account number.

The Sage article does not mention which version you need to upgrade to to fix the problem. I have asked Sage if their is a fix available and am awaiting their response.

Update: The answer from Sage is that it is fixed in Sage Accounts 2008 so it’s upgrade or put up with it!

I had money in the now collapsed Icesave bank and so did my mother.  Not huge amounts but enough to be concerned about.  It took a few weeks for the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme to get things organised but we now both have our money in our bank accounts and the procedure has been smooth and effective.  All we are waiting for now is an ISA certificate in the post which we are assured will be received within two weeks.

In these unprecedented times, the FSCS is to be commended.  I’m sure their communication systems were put under sever pressure from worried investors but I never felt the need to contact them, relying instead on their website announcements and online news sites.  Has everyone else’s experience with the FSCS been positive or have we just been fortunate?

Update:  ISA certificate arrived in the post 11th December.

One of the applications our sales reps use on their laptops is a “Location Switcher” which allows them to specify whether they are connected to the live databases on the office servers or to the local copy on their laptop.  It also allows them to download a new copy of the databases to the laptop when they are connected to the office.  In order to copy the MySQL databases, the application needs to stop the MySQL service, copy the files and then restart the service.  There are more elegant ways to do it with MySQL Backup/Restore but this method is simple and straightforward.  The problem is, in order to stop/start a service, the application needs Administrator Privileges.

Vista provides this facility for an application.  To set an app to run as administrator, do the following:

1. Right-click on the shortcut and select ‘Properties’
2. Click the ‘Compatibility’ tab.
3. Check the ‘Run this program as an administrator’ checkbox.

Now, if you want to run the application at startup, it’s no good using the old method of copying the shortcut to the ‘Startup’ program group because Vista will block any application trying to start with elevated privileges at startup and you can’t argue with the logic of doing so.  Instead, you can create a scheduled task to run it at log on.  The procedure is as follows:

1. Click the Start orb and type “Task Scheduler” and press Enter.
2. In the ‘Actions’ panel, click ‘Create Task’.
3. Name the task and check the ‘Run with highest privileges’ box near the bottom.
4. Click the ‘Triggers’ tab and then ‘New’ to create a new trigger.
5. In the drop-down list at the top, select ‘At log on’.
6. Choose the option for ‘Specific user or group’.
7. Click the ‘Actions’ tab and then ‘New’ to create a new action.
8. Type or browse to the location of the application you want to run.

Your application should now start at log-on with the required elevated privileges.

I installed AVG 8.0 on the Vista Laptop and though the installation was fine,  Vista wouldn’t let me run it afterwards, simply telling me that it’s “side-by-side” configuration was incorrect.  Not very helpful, but fortunately we have Google!  The solution its seems is to reinstall the Visual C++ redistributables available for download from Microsoft here.  If you get the same error message from AVG or another application, it should fix it for you.

I finally had to bite the bullet and use Vista on a new business laptop.  I’d rather have downgraded it to XP Pro but I don’t have a spare license and at some point I’m going to get stuck with Vista anyway when XP is finally retired.

I’ll leave my general annoyances with Vista for another post.  Here I’m just reporting how to get round a potential problem installing MySQL server 5.0 on Vista.  If you have installed it but just get an error message when you try to start the service with no error reported in the log, it may be that you need to remove the service and re-initiate it.  To do this follow this procedure:

1. Run regedit
2. Delete the “MySQL” key from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
3. Reboot (this will remove the service)
4. Open an explorer window to you MySQL installation “bin” folder.
5. Right click on MySQLInstanceConfig.exe, and choose “Run as Administrator”
6. Step through the configuration and the service *should* start (I had to ignore an error trying to apply the security settings, probably because the security settings were already applied to the database).