Website Design in Hastings

We now offer a fully bespoke web-design service providing affordable website design for companies and individuals in East Sussex.

Using traditional technologies such as PHP and MySQL we can create a fully content managed website for you. If you require more interactivity, we can give your site the 'Facebook' feel by incorporating AJAX programming to make pages dynamic with the 'Web 2' feel at no extra cost to you.

All sites include domain name registration for a year and the setup of unlimited email addresses.

Hastings Musical Festival

The syllabus for the 2010 Musical Festival is now available. There is a lot of exciting news about the Festival, not least the fact that Roger Daltrey of The Who is judging the Rock Band competitions!

Why not pop over and have a look.

Finished another site

I've just designed a simple one page site for a local petshop. This includes 5 selectable templates, full Content Management of the page and randomisation of special offers.

A Shameless Plug

I'm currently working on a couple of ideas with a talented web designer at the moment, Ben from B A C Productions. He is a specialist in Zen Cart and also provides a photo printing service with very reasonable prices; http://www.a3prints.co.uk/

Another Site Finished

Another site that has just been completed is that of http://www.samphire.it. This is a completely custom site designed for a racing tipster. The code is a mixture of PHP, Javascript and HTML with a back-end MySQL database.

The site features full CMS on all pages with automatic updating of results summaries in real time. In addition, it links through to PayPal for handling subscriptions.

Just finished a modification for Zen Cart

I've just finished a modification for Zen Cart that permits variable pricing of products by multi-dimensional attributes. This is ideal for all those Zen Cart owners who sell products such as custom doors, carpets, tiles etc. The modified code is 4 PHP files that need to be uploaded to your store and over-write the existing files. All database modifications are taken care of within the code.

Removing add-ons from Internet Explorer 7

Start Internet Explorer.
On the Tools menu, click Manage Add-ons.
Click the name of the add-on.
Use one of the following methods:
Click Update ActiveX to replace the add-on with the current version. This option is not available for all add-ons.
To enable an add-on, click Enable, and then click OK.
To disable an add-on, click Disable, and then click OK.
You may have to restart Internet Explorer

If that doesn't work, then try this;
Go to Start > Run, type iexplore –extoff and press Enter.
then internet explorer should load and you can remove the add-ons from the tools menu

New service from Roy Penfold Computer Service

I am pleased to announce that Roy Penfold Computer Services can now supply hardware. Please visit http://www.roypenfold.co.uk/page19.html and browse our on-line store.

Returning an alphabetical list consisting of the first letter in MySQL

In a recent project, one task involved returning the unique first letter of the data held in a MySQL field in order to provide hyperlink navigation through the web-site as opposed to a drop down menu.

This was accomplished using the MySQL statement below;

SELECT DISTINCT (left( [field], 1 ) )FROM `[table]` ORDER BY [field]

Revisions to websites

I'm spending the next few days making some changes to websites http://www.findapro.co.uk and http://www.hastingsmusicalfestival.co.uk

The Findapro one is a directory of professionals (accountants, builders etc) and I am employing a few SEO tactics to get its Google pagerank up a bit, not to mention permitting inclusion of banner adverts. The Findapro site is totally bespoke written using PHP and MySQL.

With the Musical Festival, it is a case of extracting the results from their bespoke Access database, re-formatting then uploading results pages to the website which is based upon Joomla. As time permits, I plan to write some custom Joomla modules to permit on-line entry and real-time updating of results.

Badly installed network

Had an emergency call out to a local supermarket today, their network had gone down making their tills inoperative.

When I arrived, there was a long patch cable strung across the shop floor to the point of sale terminals. The manager informed me that they had previously had an engineer in who said there was nothing wrong with the wiring.

Normally I attempt to repair before re-wiring (this is an 'open all hours' supermarket and removing ceiling tiles to re-lay the cable or pull new cable using the existing would have been extremely disruptive requiring dismantling of much of their counter displays). Hooking up the network tester to the two points revealed that one had two wires reversed on the cable and another was showing open circuits across two pairs. Opening up the Cat 5 outlet behind the till revealed two wires that had not been punched down correctly and examining the RJ45 connectors in the back office revealed the one which the owners had been informed was damaged during installation had in fact been wired incorrectly.

All in all the diagnosis and repair took about 20 minutes which was much less disruptive than re-cabling.

Google Streetview car spied in St Leonards

Saw the google streetview car in St Leonards today. At about 15:00 it was driving down Tower Road from Bohemia Road towards London Road, then a few minutes later driving down St Peters Road, obviously having been round the block.

A 'Rupert'

Had an unusual one with a laptop today. I don't normally do laptop repairs, but this one seemed straightforward if the cause wasn't so bizarre.

The CD mechanism had been pushed down so the tray wouldn't open. This was caused by the user burning a CD and setting the laptop down on the floor whilst it completed.

What the user hadn't bargained on was their dog, Rupert sitting on the tray as it ejected on completion of writing the disc.

Stripping the drive out of the laptop and removing the outer casing revealed a simple repair - one of the runners had been bent and was easily straightened.

A large project and a puzzle

I have volunteered to help the Hastings Music Festival with their information technology systems and have the task of migrating their bespoke Access database to an online version. This is going to be a challenging project, which hopefully will reduce the administrative burden on their army of volunteers.

The other newsworthy post of today is a puzzle. One of my clients runs a linux server with Samba providing file-sharing to their network. Part of the role of this machine is to provide real-time telephone statistics via a plugin I wrote for PHP-Nuke. In order to make this system work, it needs to map a shared windows drive into the linux filesystem. The mount is set to activate at boot in fstab, yet every time the server is downed, the shared drive is not mounted. Any suggestions?

fstab snippet below (username and password blanked out)

//oak/advance /var/www/html/modules/Phone_Stats/raw smbfs password=*****,username=***** 0 0

Bits and Bobs

A few jobs on today, some not even IT related (although you could argue that wiring a scart lead from a video recorder to a tv is technology).

I set up a blog for a racing tips service at http://www.samphire85.info/ and sorted out a few network niggles for one of my bigger clients, including re-training spamassassin so it didn't mis-identify emails from their domain as spam. sa-learn is a useful tool - I'll have to spend a few hours learning the various command line options for future reference.

A synopsis of the options are below;

--ham Learn messages as ham (non-spam)
--spam Learn messages as spam
--forget Forget a message
--rebuild Rebuild the database if needed
--force-expire Force an expiry run, rebuild every time
-f file, --folders=file Read list of files/directories from file
--dir Learn a directory of RFC 822 files
--file Learn a file in RFC 822 format
--mbox Learn a file in mbox format
--showdots Show progress using dots
--no-rebuild Skip building databases after scan
-L, --local Operate locally, no network accesses
-C file, --config-file=file Path to standard configuration dir
-p prefs, --prefs-file=file Set user preferences file
-D, --debug-level Print debugging messages
-V, --version Print version
-h, --help Print usage message

Network Cabling

Spent much of today up to my neck in Cat5 cable, wiring a network for a firm of
Will Writers.

My back is now killing me!! At least all the points tested ok and I was able to hand-over the installation smoothly.

The ongoing saga of my HP Laptop

As readers of this blog may be aware, I bought myself a HP G70-111EM laptop back in January, however had to return it for repair following a burning smell when booting. For many years, I have used only Toshiba laptops, but was convinced by a special offer in my local electronics store.

I received the repaired unit back from HP last Thursday. For two days it was fine, but upon booting it this morning, had exactly the same symptoms as when I sent it in for repair. I telephoned HP and asked whether I could have a replacement unit, as clearly mine was unfit for purpose. I was informed that no, I had to send it in for a further repair. This means that out of ownership for one month, I have had 5 days usage from this machine.

I have sent an email to the CEO of HP in the UK asking him to take some remedial action before I start bringing in big guns such as Trading Standards etc.

Their response will be posted here.

Is there anyone out there?

Just curious - does anyone read this blog?

Networks

I had a call today from a client stating that one of the network printers at a remote site was not responding to the Head Office print server, yet would respond to individual workstations at Head Office. This company runs two networks (one for external support and one for internal usage).

The main routers for the IP Clear circuits used for WAN connectivity provide NAT services to route across the two networks.

Pinging the printer from the main server produced a response, yet pings from the print server were being lost.

The printer had its default route set to a broadband router (which mainly provides DHCP services and redundancy in the WAN link) this router had full connectivity to the internal network and the the print server was set to have its default network as the support network and to utilise the support router.

Changing the default route on the printer to the main router gave immediate connectivity both from Head Office/remote workstations and the Head Office print server. Perhaps I was being a bit too clever for the broadband router when I initially set up the routing tables.

Support for TurboCash

I am now an approved consultant for TurboCash. If you wish advice with accounting software (I am also experienced in Sage and Quickbooks), please do not hesitate to contact me.

Setup/Custom Reporting can all be provided at a reasonable price.

FindaPro Relaunch

I've just uploaded the re-work of the FindaPro directory website. There are still a few tweaks to put in place, but the client wanted the revenue streams up and running as soon as possible. The site has been written using PHP and MySQL and is fully bespoke, featuring postcode searching and a content management system.

Why not pop over there and have a look?

Duplicated MAC addresses

Had a fairly interesting one today, a client complained about the speed of their proxy server running squid.

This machine has two network interfaces and upon investigation it transpired by looking at their router logs that both had identical MAC addresses leading to all sorts of mayhem.

Disabling the second network interface (which was only in the machine as a 'hot spare' resolved the issue.

Odd Jobs

Not much of note for today, setting up a VPN endpoint for a customer using a Draytek router, re-installing some network printers that had been inadvertently deleted and re-mapping a windows share onto a linux machine.

My daughter will be happy

Her Nintendo DS went wrong, when switching on, the displays flashed, then the system powered down. After getting extremely poor service from Nintendo (no response), I researched this on the web and found that it is a common fault. The ribbon connectors to the displays work loose causing the console to shut down.

After ordering the required screwdrivers from ebay, I was ready to follow the dis-assembly instructions at http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=98240 and re-seated the ribbon cables after giving them a clean with a dry cotton ear bud.

Putting it back together it now works!

Spam Email

Big problems with one of my clients, they are receiving thousands of spam emails per hour. Their ISP is not much use, nor is their web-host who is complaining about the volume of traffic.

I have set up a whitelist on their email server to dump everything except for legitimate email addresses, however their host is not able to do the same and is having to forward all of the messages to their ISP for collection.

There are four alternatives;

1. Change the customers domain name. This may be the only course of action to stop the influx, however will involve a fair amount of disruption to the customer.
2. Set up a free address with Google mail for example and point the hosts mx record to Google.
3. Set the mx record with their host to point to their internal mail server. This will most likely saturate their bandwidth and server.
4. Transfer the domain elsewhere, and point the DNS 'A' record (website) back to their original host.

I'm waiting for instructions from my customer and have asked them to make direct contact with the host.

The case of the missing CD Rom

A help desk call arose today, where the CD-Rom drive was detected in the BIOS, but not within Windows XP. Device manager showed error 39.

After attempting removing the device in device manager and re-installing did not work, it was time to dig out the registry hack.


In Registry Editor, expand My Computer, and then expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
Expand SYSTEM, and then expand CurrentControlSet.
Expand Control, and then expand Class.
Under Class, click {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.
In the details pane of Registry Editor, on the right side, click UpperFilters if it exists and delete.
In the details pane of Registry Editor, on the right side, click LowerFilters if it exists and delete.

Re-starting the computer then revealed the CD-Rom. Please note, ensure your registry is backed up prior to editing it.

Apparently this can be caused by removal of some CD burning software

Unravelling Paypal IPN

Back to work on the Findapro website. Just unravelling the Paypal payment notification system in order the backend can be as automated as possible.

Interesting ones from yesterday

The laptop turned out to have a large number of trojans on it, which were detected after booting from my ultimate boot disk. Whilst I had the machine booted, I backed up the users documents to a removable USB drive, then re-formatted the hard drive and re-installed XP just to be on the safe side.

No news on the email case.

A couple of interesting ones

The first is a laptop that the user reports has a virus, it keeps re-booting when CTRL-ALT-DEL is pressed to log in. The user states this happens in both safe mode and normal and thinks it is a virus. I'm not so sure - I'm going in tomorrow to carry out a data recovery and will post back the actual cause.

The second is a user complaining about not receiving emails. I have asked that he gets the senders to send me their bounce messages so I can investigate further. There is no filtering on the server other than to flag spam/viruses.

I'll keep you all posted.

HP Technical Support

Whilst on a client site on Monday, I plugged my new HP laptop in to carry out some checks and found that some of the smoke that makes it work escaped.

Not a major problem thinks I, I'll log it with their technical support when I get back to my office...

The error report was raised fairly easily, usual sort of stuff...purchase date, serial number etc. I then sat back to await their response.

Within an hour an email had arrived advising me to fill out a questionaire (serial number, date of purchase etc). All of these details were conveniently attached to the bottom of their email. This was filled out and sent back.

Approximately two hours later a subsequent email was received advising me that they needed to escalate my call and could I provide some details (serial number, date of purchase etc). Is this starting to get familiar?

I finally received a phone call from them advising that a courier would collect my laptop for repair today.

I'm not sure about you, but I would have expected a company like Hewlett Packard to have a more joined-up support system.

Free telephone support

Due to abuse of my free telephone support by one of my customers, I have had to take the regrettable decision to cease providing free telephone support with effect from the end of next month (February).

Customers who have a support contract will still enjoy the free telephone/remote support, but all others will have to pay my published fee for off-site support of £25.00 per hour.

Adsense

I have finally decided to dabble with Google Adsense to generate a modicum of residual income. If you see any adverts of interest, please click through to them!

Hastings IT Support directory

I've just created a directory for IT Support in Hastings. The first month is free, with subsequent months costing just £5.00