Craig Mayhew’s Blog

Regular backups, we all know the score. If you don’t make regular backups then you will lose data.

In recent years more and more of the big players are releasing bigger and cheaper cloud solutions. e.g. Amazon’s EC2 or Microsoft’s Azure. Clouds offer incredible scalability allowing you to go from needing no processing power to thousands of CPUs or a few megabytes of storage to terabytes without ever needing to upgrade your server. Unfortunately sometimes proper backup solutions are not put in place. After all it is no easy task to backup an entire data centre in a timely manor that doesn’t impact upon the clouds performance. Even more than that the backup must be stored differently to the main cloud. For instance it’s not a good idea to backup an Amazon EC2 cloud to another EC2 cloud. If someone found an exploitable flaw in the EC2 platform that meant they could wipe the cloud or the cloud itself failed and erased all it’s data then the exact same thing could happen to the backup copy. A simple solution is to mirror your data between two cloud platforms. The perfect solution is to maintain a tape backup (or at least some kind of offline storage) of your data and keep it in geographically different place.

Cloud computers are not immune to failure, they are simply as good as the software running on them. Some good examples of massive irreversible data loss:

Upto 1 million T-Mobile sidekick customers lose their mobile data

100,000 websites wiped by hack attack

Although WQUXGA doesn’t quiet roll of the tongue it is the next size up for 5:4 displays. In anticipation of screens with this many pixels I thought I better start the search now for a desktop background…

Google does actually have a few images at this resolution:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?imgsz=huge&q=3840×2400

Flickr has just one:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=3840×2400&m=tags

Wow, IBM built some! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

To block Google analytics from recording anything about you visiting a website simply add the following lines to your hosts file. This will also give you slightly faster page load times on websites that use Google analytics.

# [Google Inc]
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com

Autumn is now upon us in the UK and in my opinion it’s cold. Some people might remedy the problem by turning on the central heating but not I. I’ve turned on more computers and set them running folding@home or World Community Grid. This warms the house just like the central heating except that instead of just generating heat that then seeps out of my house and is slowly wasted, I’m helping to cure cancer too. It would be good if more heating systems were able to make use of the energy before just turning it into heat.

Now imagine if everyone did this? Suddenly folding@home might have 1000x the processing power and would do the same amount of protein folding this winter as it would normally do as a whole over the next 8 years (taking into account processor performance increases).

So what do you say? Will you join me in this protein folding endeavor?

These are all built from flickr images, but instead using a much improved version of the photosynth algorithms.

Fly through of the San Marco square in Venice. Reconstructed as part of the “Building Rome in a Day” project. The reconstruction contains 13,699 images.

3D reconstruction of Dubrovnik, Croatia, containing 4,619 images.

A 3D reconstruction of the Colosseum in Rome, built as part of the “Rome in a Day” project. This model was constructed from 2,106 images.

The grand canal in Venice.

Microsoft took a step to far recently when they installed an add-on into Firefox in a recent Windows update “Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1“. As you can see in the following image I have disabled but not been able to uninstall the add-on.

The reason it can’t be removed is that Microsoft installed the add-on for all users but the Firefox GUI can only handle uninstalling add-ons for the current user. Microsoft have released a further update that installs the addon on a per user basis rather than for all users which enables you to uninstall it via the previously inactive uninstall button in the Firefox GUI. The download can be found here.

If you get a corrupt mailbox with Microsoft Outlook, when you open outlook it will kindly tell you which mailbox is corrupted and tell you to use Scanpst.exe to fix it. Unfortunately it doesn’t tell you where Scanpst.exe is!

Windows 2000:
In Windows 2000, you can locate Scanpst.exe on the CD:
<CD drive>:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\1033\NT\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe

Windows XP
If you have Microsoft Office installed:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
If you don’t have Microsoft Office installed, try here:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe

Windows Vista
C;:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively, if you have Microsoft Office:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Programme\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1031\Scanpst.exe

Internet Download
If you still can’t find the Inbox Repair Tool, you can download it from here (http://www.emailaddressmanager.com/outlook/Scanpst.exe) then copy it to one of the above folders so it can easily be found again.

I came across the missing NTLDR error when I was rebuilding a machine to run folding@home. It needed the power supply replacing as it had recently failed (gone bang!). At the same time it damagaed some of the filesystem on the hard disk.

To fix the error:

1. Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer.
2. When prompted to “press any key to boot from the CD”, press any key.
3. Once in the Windows XP setup menu press the “R” key to repair Windows.
4. Log into your Windows installation by pressing the “1″ key and pressing enter.
5. You may then be prompted for your administrator password, if it asks then enter that password.
6. Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk (usually the c:\ drive). In the below example I am copying the files from the CD-ROM drive, which in this case is “e:\”. This letter may be different on your computer.

copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\
copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\

7. Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot.

Hopefully that should solve the problem for you. Although in my case it was fairly obvious why the hard disk had been slightly corrupted, This error although fixed may be caused by any number of serious problems such as a partially corrupted hard disk, so it’s worth taking a backup of anything important and investigating further.

The first time I installed this USB skype adapter it worked great. Then after a few days it just refused to work with skype anymore and it’s icon would stay a permanent red colour in the system tray instead of being green to show it’s connected and ready to use. Here’s everything I did to fix this and get it connecting again! By the way I’m running windows vista and not xp, although some of this may help you fix a problem in xp!

Firstly I thought I’d try reinstalling the software but unfortunately when I clicked to uninstall the “Zoom Phone Adapter” in the “Programs and Features” list the computer just sat there and did nothing. I restarted and tried this in safe mode but experienced the same result.

Fortunately Microsoft have provided a great tool for cleaning up stubborn programs that won’t uninstall. It’s called the “Windows Installer Clean Up Utility” and it can be found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301. When installing this you need to install it as an administrator or you will receive a VB script run time error message. To install it as an administrator, right click on the installation file and click “Run as administrator”.

Once the “Windows Installer Clean Up Utility” has been installed I found it didn’t add a shortcut to the start menu. To program can be run from “C:\Program Files\msicuu.exe”. The utility will show you a list of installed program, click the zoom adapter in the list and then click uninstall. Be sure to only uninstall the zoom adapter as this utility will completely remove the programs you select.

Once removed I restarted the computer and then downloaded the latest drivers for the phone adapter from http://www.zoom.com/techsupport/voip/voip_skype_5900.shtml. Make sure skype is not running. When installing these I again run it as adminstrator. After the installation I shut down the computer, plugged in the USB zoom adapter, turned the computer on and a prompt came up to complete the installation. After completing the installation the Phone adapter has been working brilliantly.

Wow, that was worth the wait. I don’t think I’ve ever picked up so much knowledge in one day since college. Great organization and an all round brilliant day!

Here’s a summary of the talks I attended but I unfortunately had to miss talks by Scott MacVicar, David Axmark, Staurt Herbert and Stefan Koopmanschap. But I will be watching them when they are made available on the PHPUK website.

Talk 1: “Keynote” by Aral Balkan

Aral kicked the talks off by going through the history of computing and some of the more humorous sides of where programming began with the “ancient” punch card programs of the early 1900’s. He showed parallax scrolling with HTML/CSS, an augmented reality program in flash and talked about the new swx format. He also offered his solution “Gaebar” to the issue of Google not allowing you to save or backup your database from their cloud network. He also reminded us all about the Game of Life which was first created in the 1970’s and then showed us how he had used it within his companies logo. He really wanted to press the point that programming should be fun, really fun and if it’s not then you should stop and figure out how to make it fun again.

Talk 2: “Sharding Architecures” by David Soria Parra

I really didn’t take much away from this talk. It’s possible that I missed the point but others that I spoke to felt the same. David talked about the problems of splitting a database across multiple servers and then needing to know what data is on what computer by use of an algorithm or lookup. This is a very real problem for companies which have a large database and have hundreds or more disk writes as to split a database across multiple computers. However he did have some good points and shared his experience on designing a system that would know where to look for user data by simply knowing the user id.

Talk 3: “Of Lambda Function Closures And Traits” by Sabastian Bergmann

I was intrigued by the traits and the magic method/interceptor “invoke”. I will definitely be installing PHP 5.3 and having a play with these new features. Unfortunately many of the questions that audience members asked about closures such as how to access global variables and closure recursion were not fully answered due to these still being in the development stage.

Talk 4: “PHP on Windows – The Undiscovered Country” by Hank Janssen

I really wasn’t sure what to expect from this talk. Hank spoke about the division of Microsoft he was from, the “Open Source Technology Center”. I was amazed to hear just how much money Microsoft were pouring into open source projects and improving the open source software in the windows platform. Hank explained how his divison of Microsoft have been busy rewriting, patching and optimizing PHP on the Windows platform in a bid to make it run faster than on Linux. I have to say that if it made economic sense to change to a windows server rather than buy two linux servers, I would! It would cost less each month after the inital cost of the windows install and would pruduce much less carbon.

Talk 5: “Flex and Air for PHP Programmers” by Mihai Corlan

Even though I’m not a big user of adobe products and their languages, I could see some immediate applications for Flex + Air. Mihai showed some code examples and showed several real world applications. I was especially interested in AMF and will be looking at this in detail.

Talk 6: “Security Centered Design – exploring the impact of human behavior” by Chris Shiflett

This was a really entertaining talk on how humans interact with web sites. He showed several example videos and images of the effects of “change blindness” which cemented a “best practice” that we’ve been using for a while. He explained the use of login seals to help prevent phishing attacks (Which I thought was an awesome idea and really want to know why my bank hasn’t got this facility!?). He gave some good examples of mislabeled/misleading option names in software and on websites. One in particular was Apples air port that has the option for a “closed network” which just stops broadcasting the SSID. Many people could mistake this for securing the network which would infact be adding strong encryption.

Conclusions:

An excellent conference and will be booking my ticket for php2010 as soon as they become available!