IT Tips, Tricks and Good Advice

WordPress 3.0

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:27:39 +0000

Just upgraded to WordPress 3.0. The upgrade process was straight forwards and painless. First impressions are very good. I’m also trying the latest version of the WordPress iPod app. With a little luck it will make it easier to blog a little more often.

The art of change management

admin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:58:20 +0000

Working in IT we are probably responsible for introducing more change in the workplace than any other profession. If a change is to be made succesfully it needs to be carefully communicated and the various stakeholders need to buy into the change, otherwise you’ll have an uphill struggle on your hands. In my experience people can often be defensive about how they do things and can be resistant to change. I was at a planning session a few days ago and the chairman put up this quote on the screen at the start of the meeting, “change is not a criticism of the past but recognition of an opportunity for future success”. No one had any idea who said this but we all agreed it was a good point to communicate to everyone at the start of the project. If you know where this quote comes from please let me know.

WordPress Tags Cheat Sheet

admin — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:04:30 +0000

I just came across this excellent Word Press Tags Cheat Sheet and want to post a link for future reference and to see what you think.

Google Fast Flip

admin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:47:06 +0000

Google have launched their a new, News Reader called Fast Flip. This presents the news stories from the news.google.com section as a series of images which you can quickly flip through using the left and right next / previous page buttons. This means that you can flick through all the news stories to see what you are interested in, whereas normally you just see the headline and might click on the link. The service only shows the first page of a story and there is a button to take you to the full story. The service is also available on the Android mobile platform where the touch interface allows you to quickly flip from one story to another.

Google Service Status Page – A great example of best practice.

admin — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 12:22:16 +0000

Following the brief outage of gMail on September 1st I was reminded that Google publish a status page or dashboard showing the status of all their services. You can find this service at www.google.com/appsstatus. I mention this because it’s an excellent example of providing visibility and therefore accountability about the services you are providing which is essential if you’re being paid to provide a service. If you’re responsible for providing various IT services to your business or customers then you really need to consider how you can create this type of service dashboard or status page.

If you’re involved in providing online services then you need to have formally agreed service up-time levels and planned maintenance times. When agreeing up-time SLA’s you need to get people to understand the cost of moving from 98% to 99%, to 99.99% to 99.999% (five nines) up-time. Have a think about it, the level of engineering needed to deliver 99% is quite different to 99.999%.

Availability	per day	per month	per year
99.999%	00:00:00.9	00:00:26	00:05:16
99.99%	00:00:09	00:04:23	00:52:36
99.9%	00:01:26	00:43:50	08:45:57
99%	00:14:24	07:18:17	87:39:30

If you commit to 99.999% up-time, you’re allowed 5 minutes a year, that’s not enough time to do anything so you need to your application to be running on a distributed system over two or more sites with instant fail over and probably load balanced workload. In contrast 99% up time allows you 87 minutes of downtime which means that you can stick with simpler technologies like RAID and mirrored servers.

Let me know what you think and how you approach up-time SLA’s.

Upgrading to Mac OS X Snow Leopard

admin — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:40:03 +0000

On Friday the Apple OS X Snow Leopard DVD turned up and I didn’t waste anytime installing the upgrade. This was the first OS X upgrade I’ve done since switching to a Mac from Windows and I was pleased with how quick and simple the process was. In total the process took less than 45 minutes. The end result is a faster system and as a bonus the upgrade returns disk space. There isn’t much to see in terms of a change to the GUI in this release with just one very big exception which I haven’t really seen discussed in detail elsewhere on the web. I may be alone in thinking this but the new dock which now incorporates the Exposé function.

I always found that on Widnows I’d end up with a very cluttered taskbar as I opened lots of documents. On Leopard it could be difficult to find the exact doument you were looking for when you’d opened several. This all changes in Snow Leopard; now you just press and hold down the application icon in the dock and Exposé then shows all the open windows for the application. This is fantastically easy to use and nothing short of brilliant. I could imagine this working really well on a Mac Tablet (iPad) touch screen device!

The overall performance has improved in the applications I use most, those being Safari, Photoshop CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4.

For people using their Mac in compaines who use Microsoft Exchange the built in support in the new OSX for Exchange will be well received. Personally this doesn’t affect me as we use Google to host our e-mail and we’ve always been very pleased with that.

Urgent WordPress upgrade required

admin — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 20:51:03 +0000

I’ve been busy today helping a number of clients upgrade their WordPress sites to 2.8.4 which is the latest release at the time of writing. In case you haven’t heard hackers have discovered a serious security flaw in versions earlier than 2.8.4 which allows them to takeover your site. It has been reported that a worm has been released onto the web which is now systematically working through WordPress sites running earlier releases and taking them over, so it is essential that you upgrade your WordPress software immediately.

Photoshop tips for web designers

admin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:46:54 +0000

We seem to spend more time than ever these days using Photoshop to either create website page mockups for people, so we’re always interested in great tips to save time and make us more efficient in Photoshop. This article on Think Vitamin has 5 Advanced Photoshop Techniques for Web Designers and is well worth a read.

If you have a great Photoshop tip for Web or UI designers please leave a comment below.

IE8 onload() failing

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:53:02 +0000

We’ve just found that the onload() Javascript event seems to fail to fire from time to time on IE8. Having done some reasearch there doesn’t seem to be an obvious fix so we’ve decided to reimplement the page but in the meantime to get the page up and running again we’ve added

to the meta tags section. This forces IE8 to use the legacy IE7 rendering engine. Not exactly a quality fix but enough to keep things running until we can reimplement the page to workaround IE8. Interestingly the page works perfectly in every other browser we try from IE5 to IE7, FF, Safari etc.

Zend PHP degugger not working with 64bit Apache HTTPD on Mac OSX 10.5.7

admin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:30:53 +0000

I’ve been trying to work out why the Zend Debugger wasn’t working from Zend Studio on one of our developer PC’s. We checked everything from the location of the plugin, php.ini, Apache config, comparing this with a Linux box where it seems to work fine. After pulling my hair out and spending some time on Google I found that this is a known issue which hopefully Zend will be fixing soon. In the meantime you can work around this by forcing Apache back into 32 bit mode as follows:

1. Stop Apache HTTP

sudo apachectl stop

2. Restart it in 32 bit mode

sudo arch -386 /usr/sbin/httpd

It then works perfectly.