Monthly Archives: March 2007

Woeful England – will somebody sack Steve McCLaren and drop Frank Lampard?

Did anyone else sit in stunned silence watching the England v Israel game on Saturday? 79% possession to England and no goals. Why is it when England have so many world class players they simply cannot produce a decent result? Simple really: big name players being played out of position. Here’s England’s best line up in an attacking 4-4-2 formation: Read more »

PHP – include all files in a folder

Ever wondered how to include every file, or a series of files in a folder without having to reference them individually? It’s easily done with PHP’s glob() function. Read more »

Spare a thought for the British motorist – Part 1 – oppressive taxation

UPDATED: I’ve had to update all the figures in this post, because in the few months since I wrote it, petrol has risen by 10 pence per litre. Unbelievable.

Why is the UK government intent on killing off the car? Not satisfied with chucking our industry to the dogs, the senior governmental bean counters have turned their attention to the softest target of all – the motorist. Consider if you will, the tax implications of driving in this country…

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How private is your e-mail?

Interesting question this, brought to the fore recently by a client of ours. Due to a mail server upgrade and subsequent restore of an out of date user database, his server reverted to an initial email configuration from when we had first commissioned the server. Oh dear… Read more »

Staying sane in a litigious world – a little knowledge is dangerous

We have the Americans to thank for a lot of things. Not all of them are bad. In fact, some are astonishingly good – I give you Harley Davidson. One thing that’s particularly unpalatable to me is the notion that all business disagreements are a matter for courts. This mentality has been made ever more pervasive with tales of huge compensation payouts from large corporates to freeloading individuals. Is it really reasonable to eat nothing but Big Macs and then sue McDonalds for making you fat…? Read more »

Starting an e-business: a beginners guide

Starting an e-business (i.e. a business based entirely upon a website) is not as simple as many people think. The notion that you can come up with an idea, create the website and then sit back and count the cash is, in my experience, pervasive, and yet nothing could be further from the truth. Here are some helpful hints from a guy with 10 years’ experience in building commercial websites… Read more »

Linksys WAG54G & WAP54G – constant failures of wireless and ethernet

Man these things are shoddy. In fact, pretty much all Linksys kit I’ve used in the past two or three years has failed. I’ve had 3 wireless access points just stop working. Hard resets and reconfigures can bring them to life for increasingly short periods before they fail again. Eventually the damn things just won’t reset anymore and are fit for nothing but the bin. We still have a WAP54G wireless access point in our office. It has a mind of its own, and will for no apparent reason just drop the wireless for a few minutes at a time. No doubt this thing too will shortly find its way to the bin. Read more »

BT Home Hub – XBox 360 Live – Strict NAT Issues: UPDATE

2nd Update 9 March 2007

Thanks for all the comments on this. Since the original post, the Home Hub software has been upgraded, (Your Home Hub will update itself in the early hours of the morning.) and this strict NAT thing really isn’t an issue anymore. It’s very easy to fix now, and the DMZ is easy to find in the advanced section, so this information is mostly out of date. I’ll leave it up on the site in case anyone out there has older firmware and still needs help.

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Fiat Coupe 20v Turbo – Part 2

Well, I have been living with my Fiat for a couple of months now and I’ve covered 4,000 miles in it, so I figured it was time for an update. Read more »