Blog Random

I’m a bit of a Killers fan. I loved hot Fuss, liked Sam’s Town and am hoping I’ll like new album. I seem to be on the losing side but I like their new song, Human. Once it hits the charts I think people will suddenly change their minds and like it too.

At first I thought the lyrics were “are we human or are we dancers?”. Thinking this couldn’t be right I looked up the lyrics and found its not dancers, its denser. It appears I’m not the only one mishearing the lyrics. Popwatch have an entire article about it, crazy.

I’m 90% sure it is denser now, even if it does sound like dancers. It would be funny if the official lyric was dancer.

P.S. This post is just a segway so that I can gloat I got Killers tickets.

If you have an internet connection and have tried the obvious (firewalls, restarting the computer, etc) and you still can’t stream songs from napster it may be that your Windows Media Player settings have decided to randomly change.

I had to phone up Napster support in the end, having tried everything else, and although they are also helpful and friendly, hopefully this will save someone else some time.

Steps to take:

1. Close down Napster (including the icon in the start bar by the clock).
2. Open up Windows Media Player (assuming WMP 11).
3. Go to Tools > Options
4. On the Player tab, check that ‘Connect to the Internet (overrides other commands)’ is ticked
5. Go to the Network tab, check that RTSP/UDP is unticked.
6. If you have the same problem I did, there won’t be anything in the ‘Streaming proxy settings’ box.
7. Close Window Media Player
8. Open up ‘My Computer’
9. Go to Tools > Folder options
10. Click on the view tab
11. Select ‘Show hidden files and folders’
12. Untick ‘Hide protected operating system files’
13. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Your Username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows Media\11.0
14. Delete the file WMSDKNS.xml
15. Open up Windows Media Player and check you now have ‘Streaming proxy settings’ on the network tab of options.
16. Close down WMP.
17. Open up Napster
18. Start streaming again!

If that doesn’t work, give Napster support a call. They’re pretty good, better than most support companies I deal with.

I spent two hours today trying to figure out why paypal wasn’t sending any instant payment notifications (IPN) to one of our new projects. Everything seemed right, I had notify_url in the form, the script could be accessed remotely, I had logging on for http and the script itself. After processing a payment I had 0 requests from the paypal servers hit our development server.

I read around various blogs and discussion forums for obvious problems, of which there are many (see below), but I was sure I had done everything right!

Eventually I stumbled across some posts on the paypal developers forum where a few posters were complaining that the sandbox IPN posts were either really slow (hours) or just never got sent. Worse still, there was one post where paypal acknowledged that payment notifications just did not work on the sandbox for two months!! Read the rest of this entry »

It may seem obvious to most, in fact, its obvious to me… but, don’t leave a magnet resting on your laptop (above the hard drive) while you go to lunch!

I came back from lunch today and the guys in the office were looking at me worriedly. I asked why and they went on to explain that while I was away my laptop began to make loud clicking noises. They soon realised it was the magnet and moved it away but it seems all too late.

Why did I put a magnet on my laptop? I have a couple of those twizzly gadget magnets and I was fiddling with them while I tested out the paypal sandbox (see next post). I decided to go get some lunch and without thinking just popped them on my desk/laptop. Same thing? No.

Plus I hadn’t backed up my photos in a month (all work related stuff gets backed up anyway) so lost all my pictures of Rome and the trip through France. Bummer!

I’ve been trying to find the start dates for a few of my favourite TV series over the last week as I think this is the start of the winter season. I don’t watch that much TV, but I like to get hold of a few series and watch them when I get some free time.

I soon found that there isn’t a difinitive place (website) I can go to that clearly lists the next new episode of whatever series I’m interested in. I’m planning to rectify this in the near future with a simple (but hopefully useful) site thats sole purpose is to display this information. I know there are larger sites that have the information hidden among various other facts about the show but you have to search around.

Chances are I’ll never get the site listed very highly in search engines but its worth a shot. For now, these are the series I’m interested in and their air dates:

• Heroes (season 3): 22nd September
• NCIS (season 6): 23rd September
• Scrubs (season 8): Unknown, apparently some controversy
• Dexter (season 3): 28th September
• Dirty sexy money (season 2): 1st October

Please don’t judge me. If in the mean time anyone finds a decent site that already does this, let me know!

Over the last few days I’ve had thousands of requests from a small number of IP addresses. My bandwidth usage had doubled and when I logged on to find out why, I was dissapointed to find it wasn’t a huge surge in new visitors! :p

I’ve since blocked the IP’s in question but, is this common? The main culprit was 78.108.81.41 but not a lot comes up in a search on google for it. The IP resolves to a russian website that looks like it could be a web host or a portal, nothing that looks suspect anyway! Very strange.

I don’t like to name and shame companies and I hardly ever do it, but I’d hate to see anybody else potentially lose money by purchasing leads from Woods appointments without seriously considering whether you may end up in the same position as our company.

My business partner was phoned a few months back and asked if we would like to purchase some ‘meeting leads’ in the local area. Woods appointments would be in charge of calling up and arranging meetings on our behalf and we would pay something like £25 a lead. It sounded worth a shot and we purchased the minimum of I think 5 leads. I’m not at the office now and forget the exact amounts but I know we paid £140 via google checkout.

£140 isn’t a lot, and we weren’t expecting much, if anything, to come of the leads… but we were expecting some leads or some contact from Woods appointments at the very least. Having sent payment we haven’t heard anything back from Woods appointments, they seem to have disappeared.

The payment was over 90 days ago meaning Google checkout won’t mediate the payment. They suggest we get mastercard to do a charge back, which of course we will. I’m not completely surprised this has happened but it is a shame we’ve had to deal with the hassle of requesting our money back.

If I hear from Woods appointments and they have a reasonable explanation I will without hesitation revoke my comments. Until then I hope this warns at least one other person of the risks of dealing with Woods appointments. We have a phone number from a Google checkout invoice that may be worth trying if anyone else is in the same boat, just drop me an email.

P.S. I didn’t see the website until after this little debacle but it should have been obvious not to trust a company that has a website with the title ‘Untitled document’.

At the office we recently upgraded out phone system to use sip phones and chose some linksys SPA-941’s. I was looking for a way to display the caller ID of an incoming call on our computers and potentially the office display screen.

Ideally I wanted something that would connect on the SIP protocol and although there is probably something out there I haven’t had time to find it yet. As a quick (and slightly cumbersome) solution I rewrote a perl script I found here in to PHP.

It’s basically a class that connects to a linksys/sipura phone configuration page at a specified IP and reads the status out of the HTML, also grabbing the callers name and number. You’ll have to adapt it as necessary to poll the phone every x seconds. I’ve included an example file on how to use the class; at the moment the script will just print out the caller ID but you can do whatever you want with it, some examples could be:

• store it in a database for call records
• send the information to growl (mac only) to pop-up a message on the desktop
• integrate the script in to your intranet

If anybody knows of a better way to get the caller ID from these phones, or by using a SIP client on a PC, please let me know!

Download the script here: php-linksys-status.zip

P.S. You’ll need curl (probably already installed) and PHP5 for this to work.

In an attempt to speed up my imap access I moved old emails in to folders based on year. This speed up process majorly backfired when imap/mdir decided to make 7 copies of each email in the same folder. I ended up with 27,000 emails in my 2006 folder!

With my mailbox quota full I needed a quick solution… and couldn’t find one! Thunderbird has a plugin that will search for and delete duplicate messages but it runs over imap which crippled the server trying to handle all the requests.

Using Google I stumbled across this solution for finding and deleting duplicate messages using reformail but after getting reformail installed I found it to be very slow and the number of messages to delete didn’t add up so I had to abandon this approach.

In the end I decided to write my own PHP script that would cycle through the specific mail directory, search for duplicate messages based on the Message-Id (or a checksum of the email if not available) and then delete the unnecessary, duplicate emails. It worked a treat, and went through the 27,000 emails in less than 5 minutes! If anybody wants the code, its below!

Read the rest of this entry »

It has been a while since a post, I was hoping I wouldn’t slip in to a bad routine. Thanks for the comments so far, especially for the rb-internal-links plugin, can’t believe so many people are using it! Need to find a way to push it out there to more people if I can.

Back on topic, I’ve just installed release candidate 1 of the new version of wordpress. Matt mentioned on his blog that it would be a big one and it certainly is! From what I can tell the admin panel has been majorly revamped, both design wise and code wise. Logging in after the upgrade I had a few doubts but the new administration panel is impressively better (I liked the old one anyway). So far no major issues in upgrading from 2.4.x but I can see that I need to fix up the internal links plugin as the button has disappeared from the wysiwyg editor.