Month: March 2005

Google desktop search results

Another google related post, but I accidentally closed firefox with a page that I needed and thought I’d use the desktop search to find the word gnome. Out of the 5 web pages it returned, none of them were for the page I wanted. So I then searched for Nebit which returned the page I wanted….and look at the title of the page and the text – BOTH include the word gnome.

localised google change?

I’m sure google didn’t use to do this, but now if I enter http://www.google.com in my address bar it now goes to google.co.uk instead. I know you can do this by detecting the language used by the browser but I’m sure they didn’t used to do it. Annoying as I wanted to get some prices in america and the searches are mainly coming back with UK stores because of coming from .co.uk!

Bang in the cats room

I switched on the light in the cats room last night and there was a flash, a bang and then the power went out to all of the lights upstairs. After resetting the trip I retrieved the bulb and found that the metal collar of the bulb was still in the bulb retainer and the bulb had been blown away from the metal part.click for a larger image of the bulb

Caching finds include

I found mt-rebuild which allows you to schedule a rebuild of an entry/page/index which is just what I needed to force a rebuild of my main index page on absocachinlutely to include my latest finds in the side bar of the page. I had to rename my Main Index to MainIndex and then include the blog id, set the mode to index and provide the template name in a cronjob as follows:-

/full-pathname-to/mt-rebuild.pl -blog_id=9 -template=MainIndex -mode=index

Watch out Ohio – here I come.

I’ve just handed in my resignation to work via email (what a chicken) this evening. Actually the reason it was done via email is that I’ve been out on a customer job today and just got back in and the last thing I want to do on a Friday night is talk work over the phone. Wonder how long it will take for the grapevine to work…..

VPN connections fixed at last

For the past week I’ve had agro from two of our users who have recently had new laptops and been unable to vpn into our network. The vpn connection is established but no traffic is passed through to the lan. The weird thing is that the wireless card on one of the machines would pass traffic but the lan connection wouldn’t. I spent about 5 hours troubleshooting this last week and thought I had a working solution until the next morning when it stopped working again.
This morning I spent an hour systematically working through symantecs troubleshooting guide and finally found this document:- Symantec VPN Client connectivity problems on IBM ThinkPad Laptops and guess what these new laptops are?
Turns out that IBM include some special software that automatically work out where you are connected and fiddle with the tcpip stack appropriately. As soon as I removed the IBM access software from running tasks I was able to ping the network – I was SOOO relieved as I really was starting to get worried about how I was going to fix this problem.

Yet more extensions.

I’ve now decided that if someone asks me to fix virus/spyware problems then I’ll remove any kazaa type programs before I even start (which may sound obvious!) and also change their default browser to firefox. I’ll probably also start installing Mozilla Thunderbird (and disabling outlook express) as an email client, although I need to dogfood that myself so I can support it better. If the person doesn’t agree to these three changes then I just walk away from the pc. Not only will this hopefully save me time in disinfecting the machine *now* but it will hopefully reduce the number of problems infections that occur in the future.
The more section contains a list and link of most recent extensions to install which I really need to write up as a static page to link off the main page on this site.
Next post should be some quick “getting started instructions”