Well it’s that time of year again where people get into the Christmas spirit and support a worthy cause.

This is mine.

"We are summoning forth the proletariat around the globe to aid us in this revolution. We call on the common man to rise up in revolt against this evil of typographical ignorance. We believe in the gospel message "ban comic sans." It shall be salvation to all who are literate. By banding together to eradicate this font from the face of the earth we strive to ensure that future generations will be liberated from this epidemic and never suffer this scourge that is the plague of our time."

The next person to send me an e-mail with a comic sans signature will get seriously flamed.

Merry Christmas!

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It wasn’t to match my latop…honest.

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Just stumbled across this genuine book from O’Reilly.

It reminded me of a web page circulated sometime ago where you could design your own O’Reilly book covers. A quick Google search revealed that it’s been taken down. I would imagine that this was due to copyright infringement.

Some of the O’Reilly sanctioned spoofs can be found here.

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The naming convention for Server’s in our Data Centre is obscure to say the least. Well come to think of it we don’t actually have one!

The conversation goes something like this;

ANO – Why is that Dev server called Elvis?

JIM – Erm, well when you ‘ping’ it is says ‘elvis is alive’.

ANO – Oh ok, so why is the Exchange Server called nemo?

ANO – So you can use ‘My Network Places’ for finding nemo?

JIM – Exactly!

ANO – I also notice you have Servers called ‘mole’ and ‘ratty’ are they named after characters from ‘Wind in the Willows’?

JIM – Yes that’s right.

ANO – So why is that one called ‘muffin’?

etc etc….

I won’t mention the Servers whose names were influenced by Blakes7 because that’s just sad. *cough*.

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I’ve recently had to write some PHP code that talks to an SQL Server database. I’m pretty sure this is an unusual combination. The common database platform for PHP would be MySQL but I didn’t really have a choice (the data is from Siebel our CRM app).

I decided to use the PEAR:DB database abstraction layer to keep things simple. A couple of changes were required to the Linux box to get it all working.

These were;

1. Install FreeTDS. (required libraries to talk to SQL Server).
2. Recompile PHP with the following flags --with-mssql=/usr/local/freetds
3. Stop and start Apache.

I then used DB::connect to setup the connection and $db->query to select the required data. This appeared to work until I noticed that the information returned of datatype varchar only contained 256 characters. SQL Server should support up to 8000.

After a bit of digging it turns out this a bug in the software. Interestingly MySQL only supports 256 characters for varchars so this may be where it came from.

The way round it is not as someone suggested to change the datatype in the database but to use the CONVERT function to return the data as type text.

This combination works quite nicely. Who says OpenSource and Commercial software can’t co-exist.

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It seems that the market for Desktop Search Tools is picking up. I’ve just installed Copernic Desktop Search and I’m very impressed.

Google Desktop is going to have to work hard to compete.

It will be interesting to see who else gets in on the act over the next few years.

One draw back to these search tools is that it encourages you to be lazy. Why bother having any structure to your file stores when a search tool will find whatever you’re looking for in a matter of seconds? Who needs Windows Explorer?

An observation about the search tools built into MS Windows Operating Systems. In Windows 95 it was called ‘find’ in Windows XP its called ’search’. Perhaps they were too optimistic the first time round?

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