Useful for filling in those pesky marketing forms, Oftel has a link which gives numbers that don’t exist for use in drama scenes ie 0161 496 0008. This is great for giving out fake or dummy numbers to salesmen or even to some dodgy person down the pub.

ASP Photo Gallery V2 might be handy to take a look at. Sounds like they were using similar ideas to my asp gallery idea, but they are using xml to store the data rather than an access database. This version will only support one directory too.

I am listening to Yahoo’s LaunchCast service as I’m working on the webpage but some of the icons were not displayed. This was because I had lots of hosts such as a1604.g.akamai.net in my hosts file pointing to localhost to stop ads being displayed and unfortunately Yahoo uses images on these servers 🙁

w.Bloggar has been giving me some timeout errors when using it to create the posts. Really annoying as half the time it actually has posted it! I think the errors are when it comes to pinging weblogs.com

Conquercam has a new version out.(Webcam picture updated!)

Now I have to go downstairs and be sociable with Kristen as it’s New Years Eve! Doesn’t feel like it though. Working in the office until 5pm makes it feel just like an ordinary day. Mind you, we don’t often get ordinary days where a customers server falls over as they only have 1mb left on their C: drive, 3000+ print jobs in the print queue and an administrator who doesn’t know what the password,what remote control software, or the ip address is!

Had some fun hacking on my own pc this evening. I decided to try and get my XP partition back on one of my W2k Servers. When I installed w2k on the box (after xp had been on there) it destroyed the Master Boot Record and I was unable to get into XP. Unfortunately in order to get into the recovery console (by booting off the xp cd) I needed the “administrator” password (I only ever remember logging on as my user so for whatever reason I did not know/could not remember the admin password).
A quick google search later and I had found NTPasswd to change the administrator password. I did this, rebooted and it still wouldn’t let me into the box. I then tried again and changed the administrators password and my own user password. Rebooted back off the XP CD, entered the new password and I was back into the recovery console.
Then ran Fixboot, attrib -hsa on ntldr,ntdetect.com, copied these files to another name (for safekeeping) and then copied these files off the i386 directory on the XP CD back onto what Microsoft call the system partition (where boot.ini is stored). A quick reboot and it still didn’t work. This was because w2k/myself had messed the order of the partitions on the disk, so xp was no longer in the same number partition. A quick copy/paste of the lines for XP, changing the partition number on each line and a trial and error selection of the alternatives and I was in……almost.
For some reason XP would not take the new password for my user. A quick change into administrator and using the new password meant I could then change the password for my user, log back in and everything is ok! Phew!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hope that helps someone! (thanks to Windows Annoyances for the guidance!)

“Sorry we are out of office until the 3rd of January 2003, normal service will resume after this period.” is not the sort of response I want from my webhosting company 🙁

Had to add Et Cetera, the first library weblog in the UK. Found it whilst reading my wife’s library newspaper. Seeing as though sometimes she jokes about me having a blog – maybe I should persuade her library to start one up. A quick search on google for UK Library blogs (using Snip to shorten the URL’s) came up with two. The previously mentioned one and David Little’s one