So here we have a new website I have been working on. A proud production of Alpha Ready Ltd:

http://www.rainbowlake.co.uk

Rainbow Lake is situated on Newbridge Road, Burstwick, just past Hedon on the Withernsea road in East Yorkshire, is well stocked and has a large selection of fish for all types of anglers.

John and Linda have own this well stocked lake and have a re-stocking plan to make his one of the best fishing lakes in the area. So keep looking in the News to read about the catches, and the Gallery to see the variety of fish caught.

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Today this day 28/02/2009 a new chapter in Social networking has begun. In a small bedroom above a delapidated former council house somewhere in the world a new concept is born… More later.. If I told you now I would have to kill you, its on a need to know basis and guess what?.. eyes only ( which looks a bit silly cos without your ears nose and other bits you wouldn’t have a face… Back later….. You aint seen me and all that !

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Well here it is, the new look and style for my blog. I hope you all like it. Any comments on the look and style are greatly appreciated.

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Recently at work we installed the latest version of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) but we had a few issues with installing it. When installing we were getting the error: Unable to connect to the server yourserver.yourdomain. My work colleague spent hours searching forums and help topics but nowhere had the answer. In the end all it appeared to be was drive compression! WSUS will not install or function if the place where it stores the updates is compressed. To turn off, right click the folder where you’re installing to, properties, click advanced button. On the new window that opens un-tick the box “Compress content to save disk space”. You will notice folders and files that are compressed when the names are in blue. Hope this helps you.

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Just to get the legal stuff done and dealt with; file sharing copyrighted material is illegal and by doing so you could be fined, imprisoned and given a criminal record. The following information you use at your own risk and I take no responsibility for your own stupidity.

As of recent companies have been cracking down on file sharing and are targeting those that share copyrighted material, rather than those that download it. By getting rid of the source then they stop the downloader’s because there is nowhere to download from.

ISP’s in the UK are now tracking what you share and if they see you sharing copyrighted material you can see a £500 fine come through your letter box. They are hoping that with a small fine you will pay it and it will deter your from doing it again. If you refuse to pay they may take you to court and you could end up with a much heavier fine!

So what can you do?

1) Use an ISP that is not well known, find an ISP that is relatively small and hasn’t had much media coverage. Larger ISP’s that are well known are always the first to be targeted by the law and are always under the watchful eye of big brother.

2) Try not to share new releases, try only sharing material that has been available for some time. ISP’s will set up filters to pick up on latest releases that everyone is trying to get their hands on.

3) Try and keep your bandwidth usage as low as possible. By sharing a huge amount of material your ISP will most definitely pick up on this and they will be wondering why you are using so much bandwidth and therefore they will start investigating what you are doing.

4) Use sharing programs that has some method of encryption. Many programs out there will set up a secure an encrypted connection between you and the person you are sharing with. By doing this you ISP only sees encrypted data and they won’t know what you are sharing.

5) Change the filename of what you are sharing. If you keep the original name then ISP’s are going to pick this up in their filters.

I think that just about covers it. If anyone else has some tips or advice they would like to add then leave a comment.

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I’m not going to babble on here because if you have found this post you just want to know how it’s done.

Here is what you need:

A portable/removable hard drive/memory stick (USB) that is capable of being made into a bootable device. Some of these devices cant be made bootable; if you are unsure if yours can be made bootable then contact the manufacture. I have successfully made portable Maxtor, Western Digital and Freecom USB hard drives bootable ranging from 40GB to 320GB in size. I have also made a handful of generic USB sticks bootable ranging from 512MB to 8GB in size so it should be unlikely you will have a device that cannot be made bootable.

You will need a computer that can boot from a USB device.

You will also need an existing boot disk of some sort. I find what works best is a Windows 95 boot disk. If you are going to use a floppy or CD then you can get images from http://www.allbootdisks.com/

So now lets get prepped! Now we are going to use a fat32 partition for our boot partition. Now the max size for fat32 partition on Windows 95 is, have a guess, 32GB so if you have a portable drive that is 320GB then you will need 2 partitions. The second partition can be NTFS and can fill up the rest of the drive, but the first partition must be fat32 less than 32GB. Just as a side note http://support.microsoft.com/kb/140365 will tell you what cluster size to use depending on what size your partition is.

Now have you set up your Windows 95 boot disk? If you have downloaded the ISO then burn it to a CD and if you have downloaded the diskette image then run it and get the image on the floppy disk.

Shutdown your PC and insert floppy/CD and plug in your USB device. I would recommend you unplug any other hard drives in your system so that you don’t have any confusion later on and so that you don’t accidentally break your windows install on your PC.

Tell your PC to boot from floppy or CD and wait for Windows 95 to start. You will be presented with:

[code]A:>[/code]

Now type fdisk and hit enter:

[code]A:>fdisk[/code]

What you are going to do here is set your USB device to the active partition this should be under option 2 on fdisk (This is the FAT32 partition). Once you have set the partition to active you should now see a capital A on that partition. Press escape a couple of times and you will be prompted to reboot. So go ahead and do that, then boot back into your floppy or CD.

Now your USB drive should be set as C: so type dir C:

[code]A:>dir C:[/code]

You should see no files and it should tell you the space available of that drive, it should match the size of the partition. Now lets copy the contents of the floppy or CD to your USB device. Type copy *.* C:\*

[code]A:>copy *.* C:\*[/code]

Once that has coppied type in sys C:

[code]A:>sys C:[/code]

This copies the system info to the USB device. Now just need to set up a Master Boot Record so type fdisk /mbr

[code]A:>fdisk /mbr[/code]

Ok so we are all done now, so reboot and try booting up off your USB device. Now you should see your usual A:> just as if you booted off CD or Floppy.

So that’s about it, you can load up a load of useful DOS utilities. If your using a hard drive with an NTFS partition you might want to put on your new bootable USB device a program called NTFS4DOS. This will give you access to NTFS partitions from DOS. Also another handy utility is Ghost. This will allow you to take an image of any hard drive and put it in one handy file. With that one file you can then restore that image, ideal for taking an image of a fresh install of and operating system and then restoring when you come to reinstall. This will save you having to redo the windows install and reinstall all your software, patches and user preferences.

So there we have it, if you have any problems or want to know more just leave a comment and I will get back to you ASAP.

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Ok so I’m back at university and back to comuting to and from Leeds, and there are a few things that really get on my nerves. One of them which I want to talk about is people constantly sniffing because they have a runny nose. Yes I know its getting colder and everyone is getting colds but there is no need to sniff up ever ten seconds. All it takes is one good blow and your nose will be good for 5 minutes. Whats really bad is when your on a full train and you have 5 people with running noses. All you hear is sniff…..sniff…sniff……sniff….snort every 2 seconds. It’s enough to drive anyone mad! Just blow your nose for flip sakes! Plus the sound of someone blowing their nose is more satisfying because you know you don’t have to put up with the constant sniff. More to come!

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So here’s a new one, recently at work we have had a number of XP Pro machines login but failed to load up explorer. The first thing you would attempt would be to start task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete), start a new task and start explorer. Now when we did that we were getting an error saying that explorer was missing or corrupt. So we opened up CMD to browse the Windows directory only to find explorer was there and seemed fine…

We came across a fix to rename explorer to explorer2.exe and update the registry with regedit to point to the new explorer2.exe. This worked and proved there was nothing corrupt or missing but it wasn’t an ideal solution as it was quite long winded.

The problem started to appear with more and more PC’s on our network, this is no longer a coincidence. The problem is happening on different service packs of SP so we know its not an SP related issue. After doing a bit of searching around I found something called FixO. After running this and rebooting the PC explorer was now working great and it kept explorer as same name etc. You can get it here: FixO – Repair explorer.exe

Still this was a long way around script but at least it can be scripted into the login script. Anyway one of my work colleges found another solution, which seems to cure the problem but no idea why. It’s a simple one-line registry edit.

Open notepad and put the following in:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\explorer.exe]
"Debugger"=-

Save the file as a reg file. Then run this file in regedit, this simply removes the offending registry key that is causing problems. If you want you can just get the file here: Reg Fix – Fix No Desktop

So we still don’t know what’s causing this but we do have a temporary solution.

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A while back I posted a way of making same height div’s but came across an issue when padding was involved. Well I’ve modified my code to take into account padding. Now the obvious thing to do would be to be to check padding on a div and subtract it from the height, but it’s not that easy. You would have to check three things: padding, paddingTop and paddingBottom. For some reason when I was checking padding I couldn’t get a value from JavaScript, this had me really stumped but after a nights sleep I came up with a better and more simpler way of sorting the padding issue. This is to let the code run and let it re-height the div’s and let the padding mess things up then run the same thing again and check for height differences from last time we checked. Oooohhh look the height has gone up 10px from last time thanks to a padding of 5px on the div. Now we know there is 10px of padding lets remove it. Sorted!

JavaScript Code:

function sameHeight(divs) // Bring in an array of your divs
{
var highest = 0;
var heighttu = 0;
for(i = 0; i < divs.length; i++) // Loop through the divs
{
// Check to see if this div is the highest?
if(document.getElementById(divs[i]).offsetHeight > highest)
{
// Yes its the highest so set the highest value to this div's height
highest = document.getElementById(divs[i]).offsetHeight;
}
}
// Loop through divs and set their hieght all the same
for(i = 0; i < divs.length; i++)
{
document.getElementById(divs[i]).style.height = highest+"px";
}
// now get offset hieght again and we may found we have gone higher this is because of padding
if(document.getElementById(divs[0]).offsetHeight > highest)
{
// correct the height
highest = highest - (document.getElementById(divs[0]).offsetHeight - highest);
// Correct divs
for(i = 0; i < divs.length; i++)
{
document.getElementById(divs[i]).style.height = highest+"px";
}
}
}

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So when we went to Florida it was hurricane season so we were bound to get some real nasty storms, well we sure did. Heavy down pours with loads of thunder and lightning. I managed to capture some with my camera but the sound is not very good on it. You really have to be there to really feel how powerful the storm really was.

Hurricane Season

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