Longest plane to fly into Newcastle Airport… … and I’ll be on it when it takes off again. I’m flying Emirates to Dubai (then on to Melbourne) on Monday 26 July and it just happens to be Newcastle Airport’s 75th birthday. As part of the celebrations, Emirates are flying a 777 into the airport – the longest plane to land at Newcastle, and 50% bigger than the Airbus A330 which normally flies the Newcastle-Dubai route. This means that I will …
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Losing my keyboard input
This is something that has been bothering me on the odd occasion for years. It is intermittent, so is something I have been able to live with, but it would be nice to get to the bottom of it. Basically, there is a key combination – somewhere around the “A” on my keyboard, probably involving the control and perhaps the shift keys, and is so easy to accidentally press when not being careful, that locks up all my keyboard input. …
Screengrab tools
Was on the hunt for some software that would let me take multiple screengrabs. Eventually settled on Grab them all, a Firefox extension. Here’s the story! Step 1 was to create a list of URLs that needed screengrabs. I wrote an small PHP that printed a list of URLs (one per line) which I then saved to a text file: http://www.siteroom.co.uk/ http://www.consil.co.uk/ The first tool I came across was WebShot. The GUI interface is simple, but there’s far more flexibility …
DIBI 2010
Had a great day yesterday at the DIBI (Design It, Build it) conference in The Sage Gateshead. It’s a new conference, with – as the name may suggest –two tracks; design and development. I was in the design camp, while Phill went for the development (standing in for Jason after he had a nasty bike accident a week or so ago – get better soon Jason!). Great selection of speakers including (in reverse chronological order, for no good reason!) Andy …
Magento – making sense of theme inheritance with a simple script
Trying to make sense of theme inheritance in Magento, I have started to put a simple script together to help navigate the themes installed on a shop. When I say simple, I mean very simple. Jump straight in and have a browse: http://magento.consil.co.uk/themes.php This script is installed in the root directory of our 1.4 test installation. What it gives you is a layered approach. First you select the interface, then the theme within that interface (try default->modern for example). The …
Faxing from your desktop
Occasionally there is a need to send a fax, but it can be such a rare occurrence that it is hardly worth keeping a fax permanently set up, or even keeping track of where you last put the fax modem cable for your laptop. I took a look at free or cheap online fax sending services in the UK, and many offer lots of promise in the Google search results, but few deliver once you go through their long registration …
Moving a Plesk Database Between Domains
Note: I have only tried this on Plesk 8.6. If you have used this technique on any other versions of Plesk, please let us know – whether it worked the same way or not. The Plesk web management interface is pretty cool. There are lots of sophisticated things you may want to do on a web server, but 99% of those tasks are encapsulated into the admin screens provided by Plesk; it simply gets the job done of managing web …
Magento Commerce Email Template Set
Magento comes with a set of email templates. There are rather a lot of them, as there are a lot of reasons for Magento to send e-mails. There is a problem though: none of them are designed for real-world use. The problems with the default templates are multiple: Many contain default text for the “Acme Shop” with hard-coded phone numbers of the Magento offices. Many rank very highly as SPAM and usually don’t get to their destinations. HTML tags are …
Cleaning UTF-8 Streams for XML Parsing
Many applications I work on require the reading and parsing of third-party XML streams. These streams often originate with user-entered data and subsequently end up with invalid characters in. Of course, this should never happen, but it does and when it does, you need to be ready for it. It surprised me to learn that not all valid UTF-8 characters are in fact valid in well-formed XML. So with a combination of this fact, and with remote applications allowing user-entered …
nLite – Windows Installation Customizer
I came across this neat Windows application today. It is basically a tool for creating customised Windows installation disks. I’ve seen similar tools for slip-streaming service packs into disks, but this one goes a step further and makes it dead easy to include drivers and various other Windows tweaks. It is all very straight-forward to use: Point it at the original Windows disk. Tell it what you want to change (point it at service packs, drivers, etc.) Tell it to …