Category Archives: Guides

ZDNet loves Microsoft, hates privacy (and is not averse to providing misleading information to support their cause)

Posted by David Hurst on September 17, 2010 1 comments

I happened upon a ZDNet article about Internet Explorer 9 today. What drew me in to have a read was the post title: “Internet Explorer 9 beta review: Microsoft reinvents the browser”. Wow, thought I. Have Microsoft done something groundbreaking with their new browser?

Simple answer: no. They just caught up with the other guys, optimised it a bit, added hardware acceleration and made it look like Google Chrome. Apparently, it even supports standards. Yep, you read that right – a Microsoft browser that properly supports standards. Web professionals around the world will probably need to hold off breaking out the Champagne though, because IE 6 – 8 will linger around like a bad smell for many years to come, and we’ll still be writing and re-writing CSS and doing silly Javascript hacks just to get our standards compliant code to look right on IE.

What struck me as odd is the way ZDNet positively orgasmed over the browser and made lots of unfavourable comparisons with other browsers. They particularly seemed keen to highlight the fact that Google Chrome has no hardware acceleration, as though rendering complex 3D scenes and animations through a web browser is a commonplace occurrence.

Then I clicked through the various screenshots on offer, and found these two:

ZDNet: Code required for IE9 rounded corners

ZDNet: "Code required for IE9 rounded corners"

Fair enough. That looks like straightforward CSS – the same code that can be used on Chrome / Safari to do the exact same thing.

And then…

ZDNet: Code required for rounded corners in Chrome 6

ZDNet: "Code required for rounded corners in Chrome 6"

Hang on a minute! That’s the exact same piece of code expressed in explicit notation. This is complete misrepresentation by ZDNet in some half-arsed effort to prove that IE9 is somehow better than Chrome. ZDNet need to wake up and join the 21st century, where web developers have been happily applying rounded corners in standards compliant browsers for ages. Perhaps they should consider hiring someone who actually knows a bit of CSS before they publish this kind of pure arse gravy.

Naturally, I felt the need to remonstrate and post a comment on the post – an action that (surprise, surprise) required registration. I duly therefore went through the registration process, taking care to de-select all email newsletters and junk mail options – I don’t want my inbox bombarded with articles from this lot, because I now don’t trust a word they say.

You can imagine my annoyance then when I got an email confirming my newsletter subscriptions with ZDNet. Yes, they completely ignored my wishes and privacy, and decided to send me their junk mail anyway!

Unbelievable. But, it gets worse…

I naturally logged straight back in to the site to change my subscription preferences, but found I was unable to do so, without giving ZDNet loads of personal information first!

This kind of contempt for user privacy is perhaps to be expected from an organisation the publishes complete falsehoods in order to support a product they favour. I guess Microsoft has them on the payroll.

Use ZDNet at your peril. They probably sell your data to the highest bidder… and the lowest… and every bidder in between.

How personal should your company website be?

Posted by David Hurst on July 2, 2010 None comments

The thing about companies is that they’re made up of individuals, and individuals have personalities. A company is the sum of its parts, and in the case of a service company  those ‘parts’ are people. This is a good thing, unless one personality becomes too prominent in the overall mix.

This is a problem experienced by a website development company local to me recently – one I once worked at. The dominant personality there is the MD, a man with strongly held opinions. There’s nothing wrong with that of course – we’re all entitled to our own opinions. Sometimes though, it’s best just to keep your opinions to yourself. The aforementioned MD, thinking he was having a private email conversation, expressed some particularly strong opinions (in a somewhat unfortunate way), and sadly for him, the email correspondence found its way to a national newspaper and received copious amounts of negative press coverage.

Whilst I was working for this guy many years ago, I recall recommending that he kept his strongly held opinions to himself and desisted from publishing them on the company website. He ignored my advice, but I still stand by it, and am perhaps somewhat vindicated in light of recent events. Strongly held opinions, particularly those of a political or divisive nature, are best kept totally separate from a company website, lest a potential client’s opinion of your company be coloured by their distaste for your personal viewpoints.

However, I have worked with many clients who have enjoyed success by personalising their company websites to some extent. People like to deal with people, and the Internet hasn’t really changed that. When you make an order with an online shop, don’t you like to know that there are real human beings at the end of a phone line who can help you in case something goes wrong? What better way to humanise a company online than feature a staff blog, or some staff profiles? For single owner and small businesses, it’s really not worth trying to pretend your business is something else. I once worked for a very small company that advertised numerous regional phone numbers and tried to give the impression of a huge operation when it was anything but. I’m just not convinced this has any benefit. Why not embrace your small business status and advertise that fact by personalising your company website. Just don’t get too personal.

The moral of the story is to ensure that anything personal presented on your company website has been duly sanitised. If you’re not sure, seek the opinions of others or just don’t publish. And remember, email is one of the most insecure forms of communication, so never use it for really confidential messages, and never commit anything to writing that can be misconstrued, used against you, or cause offence if the wrong person saw it.

OS X Single User Mode – reset forgotten password

Posted by David Hurst on February 11, 2010 2 comments

Have you forgotten your OS X password? Maybe you bought a second hand Mac and don’t know the password, or even the username? This quick guide will solve your troubles.

  1. Shutdown your Mac
  2. Start the Mac whilst holding down Command + s
  3. The mac should boot to a command prompt with white text on a black background.
  4. Type: sh /etc/rc
  5. Now if you know your username, skip to step 9, otherwise follow on…
  6. Type: cd /Users
  7. Type: ls
  8. You are now looking at the contents of the Users folders where the users’ home directories are. The directories will match the names of the users, ergo you now have a username to change the password for. (You may need to repeat this if there are multiple users until you find an admin user.)
  9. Type: passwd username – where username is the name you want to change the password for.
  10. You now type a new password and confirm it.
  11. Type: shutdown -r now
  12. The Mac will now reboot and you can log in with your new password. From here, you can set up new user accounts via System Preferences etc.

I hope that helps someone out there.

What exactly does the Apple iPad do better?

Posted by David Hurst on January 28, 2010 None comments

When Steve Jobs launched the iPad yesterday, he made a compelling case for a device to fill the gap between a smartphone and a PC/Mac. In his words, “If there’s gonna be a third category, it has to be better at these tasks — otherwise it has no reason for being.” Which tasks?

  • Browsing
  • Email
  • Photos
  • Video
  • Music
  • Games
  • eBooks

So, I thought it might be interesting to look at each of these things and see whether it is better at these key tasks than any of the alternatives.

Browsing
I think browsing the Internet on the iPad would be a nice experience. The screen size and touch interface combined with the portability of the device would seem to offer a better experience than a smartphone, netbook or PC/Mac. However, at the moment there is no Flash player on the iPad, and given that much of the video streaming done on the Internet now runs through Flash, I would see this as a huge fault.

Verdict: better than a smartphone, but simply cannot compete with a PC/Mac. Probably a better browsing experience with that screen than a netbook, but at least my netbook has the Flash player, not to mention a choice of browsers. I don’t believe anyone could say the iPad is better at browsing.

Email
Apple have vastly improved the iPhone email interface for the iPad, but the iPad is not a phone. Surely they should have used Mac Mail as the starting point? By virtue of the bigger screen, the iPad will be more pleasant to use than a smartphone, but given the superior portability of a phone and the cheaper cost of connectivity, it doesn’t really win out in the mobile email stakes. And of course, it can’t match a standard OS for email power and choice of email clients.

Verdict: what’s better? Nothing that I can see. Smartphones are better for mobile email, netbooks and PC/Macs are better at general email. Another defeat for iPad I’m afraid.

Photos
I’m just confused by this. I could see a use for the iPad as a way to share and enjoy photos with family and friends, but its lack of standard USB connectivity ruins this. You can’t just plug your digital camera into your iPad (not without the special adapter/connector, which will be a cost extra anyway), nor can you copy photos onto a memory stick or external hard disk. Presumably you will be reduced to copying all those 10MP photos in your collection via the incredibly slow Bluetooth, or by WiFi, assuming you have an access point nearby.

There’s no camera in the iPad, and it’s not like you would want to actually take photos with a device of this size anyway. Many smartphones on the other hand, do have cameras, and some of them are very good. My Palm Pre has an acceptable camera, with a flash, and is able to upload directly to Facebook, which is actually where I share photos with my friends and family.

Verdict: better than a smartphone or netbook for browsing photos, but much more difficult to get the photos on the device in the first place. Can’t match a PC/Mac for this at all.

Video
This I really don’t understand. The screen is 1024 x 768 resolution, or 4:3 in aspect ratio terms, so there’s no widescreen and given that most video produced now is widescreen, that means you will be chopping part of the video off to make it fit, or you will be forced to watch video in a strip across the middle of the screen. Most smartphones are widescreen, and so is pretty much every netbook or PC/Mac you can buy.

The lack of Flash player means that there’s no chance of watching online TV with BBC iPlayer or other services, and that’s just a huge flaw. And that lack of USB also means no DVD drive either.

Verdict: smartphones may be small but they are at least widescreen. Netbooks have the Flash player and can play DVDs with external drives. Your PC/Mac can do all of these things much better. So where does that leave iPad?

Music
Music? Really? Who is going to want a portable music player with a 9.7″ screen? It could be useful, plugged into an amp whilst streaming music from your main iTunes collection, but on its own the iPad does not look like a revolutionary music device, nor can it do anything better than any other devices.

Perhaps Apple are referring to music production, but given they have supplied no apps for this, I think I’ll stick to Garageband and Logic on my more powerful and usable Macs.

Verdict: iPad does nothing better than anything else.

Games
Again, I don’t get it. Touchscreen games are all well and good on an iPhone or iPod touch, but on a larger device it is a nonsense interface. Plus, the graphics power is hardly going to be blowing anyone away. For the price of a decent iPad you can have a reasonable PC games rig, or you could have a netbook and a games console.

Verdict: smartphones are better for mobile games, and PC/Mac is better for proper games. The iPad probably beats a netbook here, although mine does run Quake3 at perfectly acceptable speeds. I remain entirely unconvinced.

eBooks
And here we get to the core of the issue. If Apple had launched the iPad as the iReader, I think everyone would be happy. Whether or not its screen works as well as the Kindle’s e-ink screen for reading books, remains to be seen. But given the closeness of the pricing on the various reader devices, the iPad makes a lot of sense: pay a little more, get a lot more. Personally, I’d rather sit and read a well thumbed paperback.

Verdict: the iPad’s true reason for being.

Should you buy an iPad?
If you are in the market for an e-reader, then the iPad has to be worthy of consideration. If not, then I don’t believe iPad will do anything for you other than giving you a short period of popularity whilst all your friends and colleagues come to stroke it and dribble on it. I guess if you have money to burn and you want to buy into Apple’s sexily packaged gadget du jour, then go for it.

If you do buy it, just remember that Apple will eventually address all the flaws, just as they did with iPhone, and then in short order they will bring out a better specced, more powerful and cheaper second version, leaving you with an obsolete but attractive door stop.

Apple has always treated its early adopters with an attitude bordering on contempt, yet the fanboys keep coming back for more, always failing to realise Apple couldn’t give a crap about them – they are, and always have been, a corporation interested only in the bottom line, and a bunch of early adopters buying what is essentially a beta version are simply helping to pay for the research and development of the final version, and that is very good for the bottom line.

Facebook notifications not working

Posted by David Hurst on July 7, 2009 49 comments

I’ve finally fixed this annoying problem.

Users of Facebook will be familiar with the notification icon in the bottom right of the screen that lets you know when people have commented on your activity etc., and I’m guessing that if you’ve stumbled on this page then your Facebook notifications have stopped working too.

The fix is simple:

  • Click on the notifications icon to open the Facebook notifications window.
  • Click on ‘See All Notifications’ at the bottom.
  • In the list of authorised applications on the right hand side, under ‘Other Applications’, tick the box next to ‘Feed Comments’
  • Job done!

Yep, you never unticked the damn box in the first place. Who knows why this happens?

I hope this post helps you out – leave a comment below if so.

Apple iPhone 3G with Microsoft Small Business Server SBS 2003

Posted by David Hurst on August 1, 2008 66 comments

If like me you have encountered problems setting your iPhone 3G up to sync with Microsoft Exchange on SBS 2003, read on.

Judging by the posts in forums all over the Internet, many people are having problems connecting their iPhone to SBS 2003 Exchange. You may be getting a certificate error come up (due to having a self-signed certificate on your SBS 2003 server), but you accept this and the account appears to verify. However, your calendar and inbox remain defiantly empty. I managed to solve this, so check out the following steps and see if it can fix it for you.It’s important to bear in mind that Exchange is something of a behemoth, and different configurations abound. Our server is running Small Business Server 2003 with a single network card and is standard configuration from the SBS setup wizards. If you have a similar environment, your chances of success are high.

Caveat: whilst this all worked smoothly for me, I cannot guarantee this will be the case for everyone – Microsoft products can be tempremental at the best of times! So, if anything goes drastically wrong, it’s not my fault – you use these notes at your own risk.

I don’t know for sure whether the iPhone will work smoothly with the SBS 2003 self-signed SSL certificate. It may work with it, and it will probably work if you switch SSL off, but I took the decision to buy an authenticated certificate as they’re not much money. I can arrange an Equifax certificate for anyone for £50 – get in touch if you want me to do this. Or you can do it yourself. Just avoid intermediate certificate providers like GoDaddy, as these require extra configuration on the iPhone. If you are going to buy a certificate, here’s the process:

  • On your SBS box, go to Start > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
  • Expand the server tree on the left, and then the Web Sites tree
  • Right click on Default Web Site and click Properties
  • Click on the Directory Security tab and then click Server Certificate to start the wizard
  • If you don’t have a certificate you can create one (unlikely) – if you do have one, you will have to remove it. This will kill secure connections until you replace it.
  • After removing the self-signed cert, run the wizard again and create a new request – don’t choose the option to send it directly to a certificate authority.
  • The wizard will create a CSR and save it in a text file. Open this text file and copy the certificate then paste it onto your chosen certificate provider’s order form. Copy the whole certificate request, but only the certificate request (extra spaces will kill it) – it should start and finish with five hyphens —–
  • Order your certificate and use the same wizard to paste in the certificate sent to you by the provider – job done

The certificate alone is not enough to fix the problem. The real problem is that SBS 2003 ships with Exchange 2003 SP1, whereas iPhone requires at least Exchange 2003 SP2. So, we need to install Service Pack 2 for Exchange, but before we do this, we need to backup our information store – just to be on the safe side. Choose Start > Run and type ‘ntbackup’ (without the apostophes) then press enter. Follow the wizard.

When you are done with your backup, we need to patch Exchange. You cannot do this with Windows Update as Microsoft have not released an official Exchange 2003 SP2 for SBS 2003. However, you can download the service pack separately and apply it – it works with no problems.

Download SP2 here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=535BEF85-3096-45F8-AA43-60F1F58B3C40&displaylang=en (link opens in a new window)

Extract the service pack to the desktop or wherever suits, and find the upgrade.exe – double click it. When the upgrade finishes, reboot the server just to be on the safe side.

Now you should be able to add the Exchange account to your iPhone. Give it a few seconds and your inbox will start filling up.

If it doesn’t, and you’re connected with WiFi to the same LAN that the server is on, it could be that your router doesn’t support loopback. Remember that you put in an external DNS name for your server address, and some routers can handle external DNS names that loop back to the same IP address. If this is the case, switch off WiFi on your iPhone (it’s in the settings) and it will connect via EDGE or 3G instead.

This might seem like a lengthy solution, but the key is really the SP2 thing. The vast majority of SBS 2003 servers out there will be Exchange 2003 SP1, which just won’t work.

Much thanks and kudos must go out to my lifelong chum and Microsoft guru Mike Southby, as he gave freely of his time to help me sort this out.

Let me know if this helps anybody else.

How to dismantle / open an iPod HiFi

Posted by David Hurst on July 23, 2008 58 comments

UPDATED 28 August 2008

As I was relaxing on the sofa last night, I became aware of the general silence in the room. For the ordinary guy this might not mean anything, but when you are sharing the room with a 10 month old who’s just started walking, silence is usually a fair indication of a misdemeanor being committed. In this case, the little darling had pulled the cover of the front of my iPod HiFi and was busy prodding the middle of the speaker cone. Result: one deformed speaker cone, and one angry daddy.

So, I figured I would just dismantle the iPod HiFi and push the middle of the cone back out from behind. In fact, if I had thought about it for any amount of time I would have realised this is not possible as the center of the cone connects directly to the magnet, preventing any rear access. This is pretty much the case with all speakers, but I wasn’t focusing properly, and having decided to open the damn thing and got my toolbox out, then it was coming apart and that’s that.

As it turns out, opening up an iPod HiFi is not a simple task. I spent ages looking at it from every angle trying to figure out where the screws are. I eventually decided they must be under the rubber foot on the base of the unit, but after prising part of it off (it’s glued on), and seeing no screws I gave up on that notion. It took some extensive Googling, but I eventually found a Swedish website with a couple of photos that pointed me in the right direction.

So, here are my instructions. If you are suffering the depressed centre speaker malady like myself, please don’t go to the trouble of dismantling your iPod HiFi – it won’t get you anywhere.

Instructions to dismantle or open an iPod HiFi

WARNING: The plastic box of the iPod HiFi is soft and easily damaged. Dismantling your iPod HiFi using these instructions WILL leave marks on the white plastic. You have been warned, and I am not responsible if you cock it up.

  • You will need a couple of thin edged flat tip screwdrivers – the wider the end, the better. It may work better with a strong and thin putty knife.
  • Take the fabric cover off the front of the iPod HiFi.
  • Take a look at the black front – you will see that it doesn’t sit perfectly flush with the white box. In fact this is just a veneer that is glued to the front of the iPod HiFi. It’s a piece of metal about 2mm thick and it hides all the screws and fixings.
  • The join line is just beyond where the black edge meets the white box. It may be possible to prise this cover off from the edges around the speaker cones, but I was too scared of damaging a speaker to try this.
  • You need to work your screwdriver or knife between the white outer box and the black speaker workings. Again, this WILL leave marks on the box – the plastic is soft – it would be a good idea to work on the bottom edge of the unit. The fabric cover will hide the marks.
  • Once you have worked the screwdriver in a couple of milimetres, you need to lever case out a bit. Whilst you are doing this, you should be able to see the join line where the veneer is stuck on. Slide your screwdriver back towards this line and start prising it up.
  • Use a second screwdriver or knife to widen the gap. Work along the edge a few inches until you can start pulling with your fingers. The metal will bend a little, but the glue is strong enough to stick back down afterwards. Still, it would be sensible to bend it as little as possible. You may need adhesive anyway.
  • Once you have completely prised off the veneer, you will be presented with a number of screws which hold the iPod HiFi together.
  • Fix / play / experiment at your leisure.
  • If you pull the main works out, you will invariably pull the cables for touch controls and LED away from their connectors. This is because the cables are impossibly short, and you may spend significant amounts of time trying to re-connect these. The simple way to do it is to take out the centre speaker, and reassemble the box. You can now put your hand through the aperture and plug the cables back in. It’s easy to then plug the centre speaker back in and screw it back in.
  • When the time comes to close it back up, you just stick the veneer back on and apply firm pressure all over the surface to ensure it’s stuck properly – it probably won’t stick properly, depending on how much you bent it, so you may need additional adhesive. I suspect this part was always designed to be throw-away.

Kudos to Apple for designing such a good looking and great sounding speaker unit. However, they have singularly failed to accommodate their customers or provide any kind of lasting support for the iPod HiFi. It has been discontinued, and there are very few spares or service options available. You can get new battery covers, fabric fronts, or clip-in iPod mounts, but that’s it. If your speakers die, you’ve had it.

Fair enough to discontinue a product, but to also eliminate all service options on a unit that is clearly very difficult to open without damaging it, is just poor. They could at least describe the dismantling process on their website so that third parties can offer service options.

I use Apple computers and have done for many years, and I always recommend that Windows users switch. I’m not one of those Apple devotees that think they can’t do any wrong though. They’re famous for this closed box – no support nonsense. It really is pathetic given how much you pay for their kit. Their laptops are getting harder and harder to service (try upgrading a hard disk on a Macbook Pro yourself), and this is the wrong direction to head in.

Anyway, I hope these instructions help somebody get their iPod HiFi working again.

Oh, and if you have a young son who has just dented the middle of your speaker cone, the solution lies in the humble household vacuum cleaner. Suck. Pop. Simple. It’s so frustrating that I now have little marks on my iPod HiFi yet I never even needed to open it. Just be careful that you don’t over suck and turn them inside out! You may need to fabricate a tube to fit precisely around the centre dome of the speaker cone to get the right amount of suction. You can easily cut toilet roll tubes and gaffa tape them into a suitable shape to fit both the speaker and your vacuum cleaner hose. Blu-tack makes an excellent air sealer.

mde has posted a link to photos of the procedure: http://www.flickr.com/photos/42224102@N06/sets/72157624734180975/detail/

Debian / Ubuntu very slow to resolve DNS (slow DNS resolution or lookup)

Posted by David Hurst on May 6, 2008 11 comments

I had this problem the other day: two websites using identical code to collect RSS news feeds from identical sources. Website A loads its pages in about a second, whereas Website B takes up to 10 seconds. Go figure.

After I had thought about the problem for a while, and checked the codebase was identical, I decided the problem must be due to the server. Website A runs on a Red Hat Fedora machine, whereas Website B runs on a Debian server. It finally dawned on me that the server has to resolve the DNS for each RSS feed address, and I concluded (incorrectly) that as the two servers are on different networks, there must be a problem with name servers on the network. I tried swapping the name servers around in my network configuration, and even trying different servers – all to no avail.

A bit of Googling finally revealed that Debian switches on IPv6 by default, and then uses this before it uses IPv4 for DNS resolution. This problem won’t just be affecting servers, it will affect anyone using a Debian linux distribution, and this includes the very popular Ubuntu. So if you have slow website response on websites with external sources, or you are fed up with sitting waiting for your browser to resolve each address you type in, here is the solution:

There is a configuration file called “aliases” here: /etc/modprobe.d/aliases

In there you will find a line like this: alias net-pf-10 ipv6

Change it to: alias net-pf-10 off ipv6

Reboot the machine. If you are running a server with BIND, double check that your BIND server has come back online.

Done.

What I don’t understand, is why Debian should default to this configuration. IPv6 is a while away from widespread use, so why not at least provide an option in the install script for the OS so the user can make their own choice?

Football Manager 2007 Mac No-CD Patch

Posted by David Hurst on January 19, 2008 7 comments

I happen to love playing Football Manager 2007, and the CD usually lives in my MacBook Pro, unless I take it out at work to load something else and forget to put it back of course. So, a whole weekend without Football Manager – that sucks… not any more!

I have purchased the game so why should I be prevented from playing it just because I left the CD at work? It really annoys me. What annoys me more is that there is precious little help or information on no-CD patches on the forums for Mac games players. There is a fake ISO on Game Copy World for PCs though, so I thought I would give it a try. Unlike PC users, who have to download all sorts of utilities, the Mac will load up ISOs right out of the box without any special software.

So, go grab the file from www.gamecopyworld.com (if the link doesn’t work, just go direct to the main website and look on the games list under F). You’ll need Stuffit or similar to open the .rar file. Inside is an ISO. Double click it and it will appear as a removable disk on your desktop. Then start Football Manager 2007.

I’m using this with version 7.0.0, but I see no reason why it wouldn’t work with 7.0.1 or 7.0.2 either.

If you don’t own the game, using this file is stealing. Stop being so tight-fisted – the game only costs £20! I’m providing this information purely to help out people like me who own the game but do not always want to carry their Football Manager 2007 CD with them.

Why won’t my AJAX form upload a file?

Posted by David Hurst on November 22, 2007 1 comments

Do you ever have those dumb moments? You waste a whole load of time trying to get a piece of code to work and performing the most complex de-bugging on it only to realise that you have overlooked the most basic and obvious thing?

Yesterday I was putting together an image upload script, which I wanted to do with AJAX. I wanted to have a file upload box at the top of the screen, press upload, have a nice spinning graphic whilst it uploaded, and then have the image fade into a gallery below. I tried all the AJAX methods with Mootools, checked and double checked my form enctype, until it dawned on me…

When you submit forms via AJAX, then it runs through Javascript (that’s all AJAX is of course). The Javascript takes the content of the form boxes and then sends it through an AJAX request. What Javascript cannot do is access local files on your machine, which is why a file upload field on an AJAX form will not work.

D’oh! I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid. I put it down to the excessive hours I’ve been working…

Anyway, how about a simple workaround?

Put an IFRAME on the page with invisible borders and load up a file in that. Works perfectly, and although the page in the frame is reloading, it doesn’t appear to be at all. End result is exactly what I wanted and very simple.