Our DBA recently installed a SQL Server 2008 instance and sent us admins off to the intarweb to find the corresponding version of Management Studio. This wasn’t needed as all the installation images are available on our CD archive but, still, I couldn’t figure out which version I needed. (more…)

Installing Linux on an IBM ThinkCentre M50 requires the ACPI interface to be disabled or you could see the system slow to a crawl. Here’s how I found out and how to fix it. (more…)

Every now and again I have cause to install MySQL. I wish I didn’t but, apparently, you can’t always get what you want. I try to make the process as painless as possible and get phpMyAdmin up and running almost immediately but always stumble on the creation of PMA specific tables as they are the only bit that need to be done from the mysql>| command line (yuk).

So I inevitably end up searching the MySQL help for how to do this. Well, no longer will I travail so for here they are.

Like it or not we are all travelling through time. Professor Stephen Hawking may have somewhat more to say on this subject but this is my view. (more…)

Despite the name this is not a hacking article.

In it’s default install SSE2005 only allows local connections. Getting it to talk to other systems is a bit of a pain.

Here are some hints.

Permissions in M$ SQL Server can be a pain in the ass.

Your application needs access to the database but handing out the ‘sa’ user password is generally a bad idea. For most people this doesn’t seem to be a problem. Most example code I’ve seen uses the ‘sa’ user account. Ouch! (more…)

For ages I’ve had a page open in my browser and today I actually used it. The idea of doing something with RSS on our site has been hassling me for a while now and I must’ve been looking for code to implement (read: copy and paste) it on our site. (more…)

Fixed my first bug last Thursday. Didn’t write about it then because I couldn’t be buggered (no pun intended).

Seems DNN3’s skin and container preview thumbnails weren’t displaying in its admin interface. Unbelievably the <img src= URL had back slashes in it. On my W2K -> W2K3 server URLScan was blocking this. (more…)

After an evening and a morning wrestling with a DotNetNuke installation it finally started working. (more…)

I think I may have just come up with something for me to do to a) do some actual work around here and b) further my knowledge of web standards.

One of our academics has a Journal web site that is desperately out-of-date web standards wise. It’s a relatively small site (compared to the main site I work on) and will allow a degree of freedom design-wise that is not true for my main site.