JohnBs personal blog

Just in case you’ve missed it, or not seen it yet Apple has just released 10.5.3 to software updates.

I heard about Secunia PSI on the recent Security Now podcast. It’s a pretty handy tool - we’re all pretty well drilled into keeping Windows Update current to ensure we have the latest updates for the OS, what about all the apps we have installed?

Secunia PSI comes to the rescue. It’s a light weight download at around 500k and it peforms a scan of your computer for .exe/.dll if i understand correctly. It then checks back with their database of applications to see if there is a security related updated version for the app.

For instance, on my 1 week old installation of Vista it’s telling me my Sun Java 1.6 has a security fix available and provides me a link to download the patch

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If you’ve got an software that’s gone ‘end of life’ then it’s able to show you that too and also the ‘patched’ tab shows you all the software that it detected and the patch level - all on one screen!

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By default it installs it self to start on boot but i think that’s a bit excessive, I prefer to opt to run these scans myself so I’m always in control (or try to be) about what’s running on my machines.

ok, so first off - look at this web page.

It’s a web page for ‘Deaf and Hard of hearing people’ and it has videos of a lady doing sign language of the text…

Am I missing something? Deaf people can read - so what’s with need for the special page? Or is it just a triumph of a salesman and the ultimate in accessibility?

A week ago today I, almost to the minute I returned from lunch to find my (new) Dell XPS M1530 laptop (Vista) wouldn’t let me log in so i had to hard reset it, only to find it had suffered from a corrupt disc - a few hours later of running SpinRite I had a working system again. It’s ironic since Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery are in the same building, directly opposite us and people spend a fortune (£1k+ for data recovery) - they should try SpinRite. Anyhow, I digress.

You’d have thought that the period beep (and i mean beep) that my hard drive occasionally omitted, or the loud clunk too would have made me aware that my hard drive was definitely suspect - but no….so I logged a support call with Dell and on Monday morning had a new replacement drive sitting on my desk at 9am (great job guys!).

I’m been dabbling with Ubuntu, both as a WUBI installation and a partition prior to my drive failure so went ahead and installed 64 bit Ubuntu on the entire new disc, along with an XP VirtualBox machine. I soon had everything up and running, Evolution Mail work just fine with Exchange, Eclipse + Aptana plugin + CF Eclipse etc etc - but the one thing that meant I’m now back running Vista - dual screens. Either I missed something completely or dual screen support on Linux sucks - especially if your two screen differ in size (laptop is 1280×800, lcd is 1280×1024). I got it partially working using 2 X-Server sessions at the correct resolution but couldn’t drag windows between the sessions - did i miss something that would have just made it work as on Windows or is multi monitor support on Linux just naff?

Whilst I was deploying a web site yesterday for a client I ran into a problem. After deploying to the client server and them restoring the database to their SQL server, every login resulted in an error whilst trying to insert an audit record of the login.

Error Executing Database Query.
[Macromedia][SQLServer JDBC Driver][SQLServer]The conversion of a char data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range datetime value.

The error was regarding converting a char to a datetime field. Now this code ran just fine on our servers, we checked everything, from regional settings, locales etc - to cut a long story short it turned out that the SQL user the client had created for us to use had it’s default language set to ‘British English’ instead of ‘English’ - switching it to English it all started working fine - probably not something the majority would run into but posting it here for prosperity

http://www.moanmyip.com/ - enough said - I guess it’s one way of finding out your IP address….ps, turn your volume down

You know those times when a client phones to say "i think my website is down, can you check for me?" and it turns out not to be a problem with their web  site, more a problem with their internet connection. Sound familiar?

ismywebsiteok.com is something i knocked up in 10 minutes to help in just these circumstances. It performs a cfhttp to the specified URL and checks it get’s a 200 response back - nothing flash, nothing clever - just a simple test from a remote server.

I’ve found myself in a position before when I’ve assured the client that their web site is fine only to find that there is a connectivity problem from the public Internet to the server but I was accessing it via a private network which was just fine…

If you have a Nintendo Wii then you really must watch this video - it’s a few months old but boy does it open up some great gaming opportunity for the Wii - Nintendo - you must hire this guy!!!

Well if you’re reading this then it’s worked. I’ve just migrated my blogging platform over to WordPress. After almost 5 years (First post Dec 16th 2003) of using Ray’s BlogCFC (a fine CFML blogging engine!) i’ve jumped ship - shock horror, to WordPress.

Once I’m sure it all went well i’ll post the export script I wrote - basically I tied into the (I think new) WordPress import/export functionality and wrote a CF page that rendered all my posts, including comments into format WordPress can import.

I think it may take a while for the aggregators to pick up as part of the process involved me changing the DNS entry for john.beynon.org.uk - so i guess most will be seeing the feature of Java - caching of the old DNS entry.