gerard's blog

I know it's been a while since I posted on here. I've been slowly updating the photo gallery, but rarely finding the time to cobble a few words together. Hell, I've been to Italy for a fortnight, started working on a Windows Vista course and am undergoing an intensive but interesting audit at work.

A cracker story from work this morning - I've just pulled into the office car park, and the security guard is chatting to one of the inspectors. As I approach them, the inspector points just beyond my head.

Not initially realising what he's pointing at, I look back, slightly bewildered, and ask him what he's on about.

"Not very observant, are you?" comes the reply, "I'm pointing at that big ferry sailing down the channel. I'd love to be getting on that right now..."

I can't blog right now, which is ironic considering that's exactly what I'm doing.

I think I have the cursed writer's block, brought on by a general malaise about blogging in general, the quality of news reporting and the full-on futility of blogging for money.

Mozilla FireFox and Opera both have a nifty bookmarks feature which allows you to give a bookmark a shortcut, sort of like speed-dial for websites.

Here’s how it works: Browse to a website you visit often, say this one. Bookmark the site by either pressing CTRL+D or going to Bookmarks / Bookmark this page.

Lifehacker has a post about dragging unlinked URLs to the address bar to navigate.

Let’s say you come across an URL that hasn’t been linked. Select it (careful with spaces at the start and end) and drag it up to the address bar. Release the mouse and FireFox will automagically jump to that page.

In fact, you can even drag regular links to the address bar for the same effect.

I’m throwing in the towel with Dreamhost. The downtime problems that started in the summer and seem to be intermittently reappearing have caused me to completely lose hope in DreamHost.

I signed up for a Media Temple Grid Server (affiliate link) account a few weeks back and have been gradually porting my blogs across one-by-one. With other people following suit, I thought I’d share my notes for moving a WordPress install over to Media Temple.

Any SEO worth his (or her) salt, knows that Google Sitemaps are a great way to tell Google about the pages that are available on your site. Using a sitemap, you can basically pass Google an inventory of your content and let wee Googlebot crawl your pages without having to rely on your shaky navigational system!

As you know, I’ve been getting to grips with CentOS, the Community ENTerprise Operating System.

Another little foible that CentOS inherits from Red Hat Enterprise is that it doesn’t include native support for MP3 playback. Again, down to legality/licensing issues. Damn those lawyers!

Just upgraded to the latest and greatest version of Kubuntu Linux yesterday, the Dapper Drake edition. Such a smooth upgrade path - just modify your /etc/apt/sources.list file, replacing every instance of breezy with dapper (back the file up first, of course), then you simply run the following commands:

I’ve been working on a couple of projects recently where I’ve had to retain legacy databases and integrate them into new websites.

In order to do this without damaging the original tables, I find it useful to make a copy of the original database table and use that for the development work. Since I do all of my bespoke CMS development on hosted Microsoft SQL Server databases, I had to hunt down a quick method to copy an existing database table into a new one.