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’.

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.

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!

All you need to do is change the dir variable at the top to the location of your mdir folder that contains all the duplicates. In my case it was a folder called 2006, so you’d use …../.2006/cur/. I suggest you run the script once with $delete set to false to check that the stats it echoes out sound correct. If they do just change $delete to true and let it run! Hope this helps somebody.

<?php

$dir = ‘/home/username/mail/domain.com/user/.2006/cur/’;
$delete = false; // set to true after testing to actually delete them

$emails = scandir($dir);

$found = array();
$dups = 0;
$actual = 0;
$blank = 0;

$i = 0;
foreach($emails AS $file){

set_time_limit(20);

if($file == ‘.’ OR $file == ‘..’) continue;

$i++;
//if($i > 1000) break; // temp stopper

$messageIds = false;

$email = file_get_contents($dir . $file);
preg_match(’#Message-ID:(\s+)<([^>]+)>#is’, $email, $messageIds);

if(!is_array($messageIds) OR !isset($messageIds[2]) OR empty($messageIds[2])){
$messageIds[2] = ‘md5_’ . md5($email);
$blank++;
}

$messageId = $messageIds[2];

if(in_array($messageId, $found)){
// message is a dup, delete
if($delete) unlink($dir . $file);
$dups++;
}else{
$found[] = $messageId;
$actual++;
}

}

echo ‘Found ‘ . $i . ‘ emails’ . “<br/>\n”;
echo ‘Found ‘ . $dups . ‘ duplicates’ . “<br/>\n”;
echo ‘Leaving ‘ . $actual . ‘ originals’ . “<br/>\n”;
echo ‘With ‘ . $blank . ‘ without message IDs’ . “<br/>\n”;

?>

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.

I imagine the site could be quite busy but surely a site that popular (and with a decent budget I’d imagine) must be able to sort out some decent hosting for their website?!

I wonder how it is hosted.. possibly in-house?

At first I tried using a single embed object, then changing the src of the embed on a button click and using embedObj.Play(); but for some reason changing the source of the file stopped that happening.

My second idea was to replace the entire embed code each time, and then call Play on the embed to get it to play. Still no luck!

Finally after a bit of searching I found somebody that had managed to do it. Its similar to my second idea only instead of calling .Play() on the embed object you just use autostart=true in the embed code, simple!

This is the code I ended up using, it requires WMP which was fine for my needs but I’m sure it could be rewritten to not be so picky.

<script type"text/javascript">
function PlayMedia(fileName){
document.getElementById("player").innerHTML='<object id="mediaPlayer" width="320" height="240" '
+'classid="CLSID:22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95" '
+'codebase="http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab#Version=5,1,52,701" '
+'standby="Loading Microsoft Windows Media Player components..." type="application/x-oleobject">'
+'<param name="fileName" value="'+fileName+'">'
+'<param name="autoStart" value="true">'
+'<param name="showControls" value="true">'
+'<param name="ShowStatusBar" value="1">'
+'<param name="loop" value="false">'
+'<embed type="application/x-mplayer2" '
+'pluginspage="http://microsoft.com/windows/mediaplayer/en/download/" '
+'showcontrols="true" width="0" height="0" '
+'src="'+clipName+'" autostart="true" loop="false">'
+'</embed>'
+'</object>'
}
</script>

Just send it the file location as the first parameter and remember to include an element on your page with an id of ‘player’ (in this case), like so:

<div id="player"></div>

I was sceptical at first, the car was a pretty good price for what it was (not always a good sign) and I had to travel 2 hours to go see it! Having checked them out on-line and by telephone I went to take a look. Not only was the car great but so was everybody I dealt with. Most car show rooms seem reluctant to help, as if turning up is causing an inconvenience but not this place.

Having got the car home I found something very small wrong with a part of the interior. The part could easily be replaced for £40 and I had a free 3 month warranty, but the warranty wouldn’t cover it. At £40 I was just going to replace it myself but I gave them a call and after refusing to drive back to Peterborough for a cheap part they happily agreed to just reimburse me if I bought it myself - excellent!

To top it all off, they sent me a Christmas card the other week!

If you found this looking for a review of car world, I’d recommend them based on my experience. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, apologies for the niche topic.

Unfortunately there are still many people using IE6, at least 15% of visitors to this site and a lot more to other sites that have a less technical audience. Luckily that number is falling day-by-day and hopefully soon we can all stop wasting time making exceptions for IE6. I’ve found there are far fewer issues with IE7, hopefully it will stay that way in future versions.

I’d apologise to IE6 users but I think its about time they upgraded! :p

Some of the new features include:

• Changing the charset to utf-8 for tinymce plugin (thanks to vanco)
• A switch from the {{ … }} method to <!– … –> for entering a link
• Putting in the option for ID or slug returned to editor, default to be ID (good idea, thanks again vanco)
• Support for creating an internal link with an image
• The intlink code is now hidden in visual mode, replaced with the highlighted text
• The parsing engine has been completely rewritten for speed and scalability
• Some code changes that should help people with problems related to the wysiwyg icon not turning up
• Added filter for ‘the_content_rss’

I’d like to thank everybody that has commented on the blog so far regarding the plugin, it has been more popular than I had hoped for and I really appreciate it. More feedback, ideas and code very welcome!

A relatively new customer phoned us up last week in a panic, claiming his server (the powermac) had stopped working and wouldn’t even switch on. We’d recently set-up a remote backup solution for him and installed an extra internal hard drive in the powermac for local backup. I’m guessing the extra load of the hard drive took it over the edge. Needless to say he needed the server back up asap.

Phoning around we found one supplier with a spare powermac psu in stock. None of the local apple stores did and most companies sounded confused, as if I was asking a silly question. We ended up paying £150-£200 for the psu, a little on the expensive side but desperate times call for desperate measures.

I’m definitely not an expert with mac hardware and I don’t have special tools for taking apart a computer - this scared me - because everybody I spoke to or every article I read said not to change the psu yourself and to take it to a professional. My advice would probably be this too, it isn’t for the faint hearted or impatient. But if you’re up for a bit of a challenge you can’t do too much damage, read on.

Get hold of a guide to taking apart the mac, such as this one. I found a few discrepancies but it gives you a basic idea on how to remove things. To start with, remove everything. At first I tried to remove things that looked as if they would be in the way, leaving a few parts behind. Unfortunately the psu is so awkwardly positioned and large that the only way to get it out was to take out everything including the motherboard.

Having removed everything, switch over the psu and put everything back - simple. In total the changeover took about 2 hours. I used a standard toolkit but struggled with the screws for the processors because you need a very long, very thin screwdriver that will fit through the holes in the heatsink. I got by with a pear of pliers, a screwdriver bit and some brute force but it took forever.

I think as long as you keep the parts and accompanying screws separated in to the order they need to go back in the task becomes less daunting. The case on these powermacs aren’t small but then neither is the space left over. There are a lot of tightly packed components in the machine and it’s a bit of a puzzle to put back together. Good luck!

Also worth noting: When you’re finished with the broken psu most suppliers told me they’d buy it back for about £50 - worth a try.