Over the last few years I have been increasing my use of free, open source alternatives to commercial software products for a number of reasons, mainly because of superior features or ease of use in the free products which assist my work, or in some cases because I want to avoid the budget signoff bureaucracy involved with purchasing new software programs (aka. Saving the company money – lol).

Anyway, this category of posts basically contains my recommendations for free alternatives to commercial software products. I’ll add new programs to it as I come across them, hopefully it will be of some use to you

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Thanks to recent improvements over at Amazon, you can now add items to your wishlist from ANY website! How cool is that? All you need to do is drag this bookmarklet to your browser and you'll be free to add any item to the list of stuff you want!

More:
Woo Wishlists are now Universal

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If you're new to Amazon S3 or have been using it for months without much thought to how it works, then you might be paying unnecessary costs and having pages load slower than they need to because users browsers aren't caching data served from S3 appropriately. This article provides some very useful advice on how to increase page load times and reduce S3 costs by appropriately setting cache control headers for your S3 served content


More here: How to Reduce Amazon S3 Costs

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With new Google Reader Play: https://www.google.com/reader/play you can browse a slideshow of recommended feed items tailored to your Google reader profile in a slideshow format.

Very slick and easy to use give it a try for yourself!

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I love web stats and for a long time now (last 4 years or so) I have been analysing web stats with Google Analytics, which is probably one of the best apps for assessing basic stats (provided the web browser being used support javascript). For the most accurate stats I also use AWStats (which has provided great results for the last 7 years) Within the last year or two I have also employed the use of ClickTale for the analysis of user interaction. Today however I found this website which provides another potentially very useful tool/method to add to the web analysis arsenal which essentially allows you to render your website access logs as a network diagram allowing you to visualise user paths through your site in a way that was only really possible through intuition. The article explains a lot more on how to do it but it's certainly something I'll be giving a try in the next few days!

Continue here:
How to visualise your webserver logs as a map of user progression through your site content

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A really useful tool for providing simple stylised views of apache webserver log files via the browser. Ideal for providing a level of log file monitoring/analysis to novice web developers or website owners who don't want or need to see the raw log file text, but might need to keep occasional tabs on how the webserver is behaving as part of a bigger website control panel style app. Though somewhat useful for picking through the access logs, applying it to the error logs is where this becomes particularly useful

Read more:
Apache Live Log (ALiveLog)

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Really interesting project. Combined with an appropriate backend this may well be useful tool for anyone wanting to implement the kind of product customisation features you find on printshop websites such as cafepress, etc.

Read more here:
SVG-edit - A complete vector graphics editor in the browser

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I don't know if this is just my account, but from the point that Google Buzz got integrated with my Gmail Account (6 days ago or so) Gmail hadn't collected any email from the main pop accounts I have it setup to retrieve from.

I've just forced a collection now and hopefully it'll all work going forwards, but I wonder if anyone else out there reading my blog has seen something similar...

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Nice One Qype

Qype 500 Error Page

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http://spoon.net/browsers

Nuff said...

Actually while I'm on the topic (mainly of IE being an idiot)

http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/

In addition, for up to date browser usage stats (and in theory the most correct stats):

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

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If you're new to SimpleXML then the output and representation of complex XML data produced by the library can be daunting and sometimes confusing, but once you're used to it, SimpleXML is a massively useful tool for processing XML information.

When debugging other people's implementations of simpleXML however, one of the biggest issues I come across time and again is the apparent loss of CType data from the processed feed.

Luckily this is very easily remedied, but not well documented so here's how to deal with it.

PHP 5.1.0 introduced the options parameter to functions such as simplexml_load_string() which allows you to specify additional paramters to Libxml the underlying library PHP uses to interpret XML.

The default Libxml setting ignores any data in CType blocks, but you can override this behaviour by passing the LIBXML_NOCDATA option to the function.

In other words, in cases where you might usually do this to load some xml data and not find the CType fields in the resulting object:

$xml = simplexml_load_string($feed);

Doing this instead, will allow the CType fields to be added to the object and used in your scripts where you need to

$xml = simplexml_load_string($feed, NULL, LIBXML_NOCDATA);

Unfortunately the options parameter is the 3rd in the list, and 9 times out of 10 the second option (which is the name that's given to the class containing the parsed xml) doesn't need to be changed/overridden so I personally choose to pass NULL in as the second option, though you can enter whatever you like here.

It's as easy as that  - I hope you found this note useful

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They guys who produce TinyMCE suggest, when initialising the editor, that you set the content_css parameter to be the url to your site’s CSS, so that the content you type into the text area is styled in the same way as the rest of your site.

This is a great idea and works very well, but a lot of CSS layouts make use of various text positioning options which don’t really apply when translated to a wysiwyg editor, for example making the default alignment centred with no padding.

Thankfully you can get around all of this quite easily and add further custom styling to your editor’s textarea by adding the .mceContentBody style to the end of your site’s CSS file and specifying any further layout options in that.

For example the following css tells the editor in my app to always ensure the text alignment is left justified by default and give a 10 pixel padding to the textarea the editor’s being applied to so that the text that will be input by the user doesn’t squash up against any particular border of the text area itself:

.mceContentBody {
text-align: left;
padding: 10px;
}

Nice and simple really but not so easy to find quickly when searching on Google so I hope this helps someone else out there too!

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Apparently though I've only used 3,341.70 MB of my 20,000.00 MB webspace I have hit my file quota limit of 262,144 files.

And what notification did I get - none!

Just a load of head scratching as to why my FTP uplaods were failing...

Looks like I'm gonna have to delete some stuff...

Cheers 1and1...

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If you use an unsigned MySQL int to count seconds you can count up to roughly 136 years before the field is full

On another note I also got my Google Wave invite today, so if anyone wants to connect just add chrisjohndean@googlewave.com to your list!

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No google storage team, thank you...

Hi,

We wanted to let you know about some exciting changes to your Google paid storage plan. While storage costs have dropped naturally in the past few years, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further. On Tuesday, November 10th, we increased the size of each of our tiers to make storage even more affordable and accessible. For the same $20.00 per year, you’ll now get 80 GB, 8 times as much storage as before. Your current plan will be automatically upgraded and your new quota will automatically show up in your account in the next 24 hours.

We hope you’ll like the extra space, but if it’s more than you need you can always change your storage plan or renewal preferences for next year in your Google account settings: www.google.com/accounts/purchasestorage. Feel free to visit our Help Center for more information.

Thanks,
The Google storage team

Christ knows how I'm going to fill up 80 Gig with email and images, but I'm gonna give it a bloody good go!

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For the last 5-10 minutes I've been wondering why a check on a variable which should be valid has been returning false.

The check is ctype_digit, which returns true if all characters in a string are digits.

So if $var = 1;, you might expect it to return true, but it doesn't.

Why not? Well, as the PHP manual states, this function acts on strings not integers.

Therefore checking something that has been specifically set as an integer (as in the example above) or typecast to be an integer at some point (as is my case) ctype_digit will fail as the data it is checking is not a string in the first place!

So there you go. Although 99% of data handled in PHP is in string form at some point, and therefore a ctype_digit check is generally completely valid, in some special cases it might be worth combining a ctype_digit() check with a preceding is_string() check depending on your application.

Rant over...

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Recently I saw a symbol on the side of the pepsi can that looked something like this and all it said with it was want to know more... visit us, with some url back to pepsi's website.

I thought that was all a bit odd, but unusually for me I disregarded it as some kind of new marketing game I wasn't interested in.

Today however I was starting to catch back up with months of missed Google reader posts, saw a similar thing on Matt Cutt's blog where he was talking about the chart types that the google charting API can produce and found out these things are called QR codes.

And apparently "QR codes can be read by any device that has the appropriate software installed. Such devices range from dedicated QR code readers to mobile phones."

When I received my Nokia E71 a year or so ago I noticed it had bar-code reader software pre-installed on it, but had no idea what that was really for, until now, it's for reading codes like this!

So why not try it yourself. If you have a phone with bar code reader software built in and want to give it a try, point it at the screen and find out what this says:

If you have an interest in having these codes produced please get in touch!

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Olark is a very neat new service from as US company called Habla, Inc. that lets you integrate a live chat box on your website directly with one of a number of common Instant Messaging clients.

Very easy to setup and relatively cheap (free for the most basic service), it provides an excellent way of getting direct interaction with site visitors, which can be incredibly important for anyone attempting to engage customers immediately in a sales process.

To date, services that I know of like this require you to actually be logged in to the website or some other server somewhere for them to actually work. This is all well and good, but who wants to keep a live web page open just in case they get any direct enquiries whilst they’re doing other things? Certainly not me!

I’d rather just have my usual IM client popup with a new message/chat request alert as soon as someone wants to get in touch from the website, just as it would if a friend or a known client wanted to talk to me, and that’s exactly what this offers.

So far, though they support a number of IM solutions, they do not currently support MSN (well, Windows Live Messenger), which is my chat client of choice (probably along with 99% of everyone else) BUT after chatting to a member of their support team I am told it’s something being worked on and could even be in place by the end of the month (Oct – 2009)!

For now though I’m quite happy to switch to something like pidgin for a few weeks.

As you’ll see to the bottom right of the screen, I have integrated their service on this blog already, meaning that I can now chat directly to potential clients who visit my website and have questions or comments about the services I have to offer. Fantastic!

If it says I’m online, why not try it out for yourself and send me a message

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When you type keywords into your Firefox address bar and hit enter it usually goes off and searches a particular search engine for you. e.g. Google (as the default) but sometimes other applications you install override this behaviour and replace a Google search with their own search.

In my case I accidently chose to install the Ask toolbar along with another piece of software I actually wanted on my machine. Ok I thought, that was a mistake so I’ll just go and uninstall the Ask toolbar and everything will be fine, right? Wrong! Removing the Ask toolbar alone will not reset the default options in Firefox that were overwritten when the toolbar initially installed.

Thankfully though this is something that’s pretty easy to fix, even if it might look complicated. Here’s how you do it:

1. Type about:config into the firefox address bar (the place where you’d normally type a web address) to open up the firefox config options
2. In the filter box enter: keyword.URL
3. Double click the value column to change the the default url used for keyword searches
4. Enter the search url you actually want to use e.g: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=partner-pub-6458081723116676:1i1tbs-63yw&ie=ISO-8859-1&sa=Search&q=

It’s that easy!

Also you’ll probably find other search options have been overwritten. The others I found that needed changing back were anything in the browser.search group. i.e. if you filter the config options by browser.search as above, you’ll see various options that have the value Ask (in my case) All of these need to be changed back to say Google or Google.co.uk or whatever is appropriate.

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On every other version of windows I've used over the last 12 years or so, you've always been able to double click a .zip archive, open it up like a folder and drag and drop any files you like out of it to anywhere else on your hard drive. A very easy procedure, and I use it all the time.

I don't know if it's just me, but on the 64 bit version of Windows 7 this process seems to screw up somewhere and takes FOREVER to complete...

It's fine if you just extract the whole archive to another location but if you want to drag and drop selected contents it simply doesn't seem to like it... it just hangs there....

If anyone else has experienced this and knows how to solve it, please leave me a comment below

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Of all the websites out there that I visit on a daily basis, I wonder which actively analyse my user agent and do something with it, or at least end up exposing it somewhere else on the web.

As a result I've decided to make the url of this post the value of my user agent string, and we'll see how many hits come into it over the next few months.

I'll update this post as time goes on with what I find out...

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I’ve been using the released version of Windows 7 for about 4 days on and off now and have to say it seems to be a massive improvement over Vista.

In my opinion it’s what Vista should have been (the whole release of Vista vs. XP being akin to the release of Windows ME vs. windows 98 i.e. a bit of a joke, with the real improvements come in the next version again – in that case XP in this case 7).

Anyway, things to note so far are:

• Battery life seems to be improved – Win 7 seems to require a lot less juice to run well
• Stacked taskbar icons make the management of multiple applications easier
• Icon themes are nicer than Vista
• Network management is much improved over Vista for those who change networks a lot
• Start up screen is fairly funky
• User Account Control and other Security options are less intrusive
• Windows Media Centre is included in the Pro Version (Vista Business excluded it…)
• So far ALL of the applications that I used to run on XP and Vista seem to run without issue, even small 3rdparty standalone tools (programs that don't require an installer to run)

That’s a fairly short list so far but just for those improvements (minimal though some of them may seem) I’d say it’s worth it.

I’d recommend upgrading for anyone who’s currently using Vista, especially on a laptop and for those of you still running Windows XP, though in your case you might also need a hardware upgrade too.

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My gumtree ads (mygumtreeads.com) is a new project of mine, filling in what I see as one of the major gaps in Gumtree's current service. The gap that I and I'm sure many other people have experienced is the inability to setup a user page containing all of your ads for easy reference, a bit like an eBay store.

The real issue with Gumtree is that each ad is regarded as unique and has no obvious relationship to other ads on the site, even if they've been posted by the same person. So, once you post an ad it can get lost forever in their system and though they send you emails telling you what your ad id is, etc. it's very easy to lose track of the ads that you've setup, especially if you have a lot of items to sell, swap or give away.

The service itself is a mash up between wordpress, twitter and gumtree itself, and though released to a wider audience, is still in beta testing, meaning that from time to time there will be issues with system while I iron out bugs and more importantly I'm very open to suggestions on new features and functionality.

Technically, the site is built on wordpress and uses my own rapid plugin development code framework, to extend the base functionality (which I hope to release sometime soon). It uses twitter as a way of collating a list of ads that you post and then processes these entries to form a catalgouge/store like interface.

Anyway I hope if you are also a regular Gumtree user you'll try out the site and see if it works for you.

If not, let me know why and I'll do something about it!

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Not much for me to say here that isn’t covered in the following tutorial: http://www.howtoforge.com/mysql_master_master_replication

Aside from the comments I made there, which I hope they include, if not I’ll update this post with those comments in due course

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I’m looking to setup some replication between two servers and server B has none of the databases server A has, so obviously I have to populate B with A’s data.

Easy you might think, simply start the slave and issue some like:

mysql> load data from master;

But actually, in my case, this fails because of the following bug when loading master data and the fact that views exist on server A

As it says here http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=20596

[30 Aug 2006 20:36] Trudy Pelzer

Since the current implementation of LOAD DATA FROM MASTER and LOAD TABLE FROM MASTER is very limited, these statements are deprecated in versions 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1 of MySQL. We will introduce a more advanced technique (online backup) in a future (>5.1) version, that will have the added advantage of working with more storage engines.

Due to the deprecated status of the statements, this bug will not be fixed. For 5.1 and earlier, the recommended alternative solution to using LOAD DATA|TABLE FROM MASTER is mysqldump on the master piped (or output copied) to the mysql client on the slave. This also has the advantage of working for all storage engines.

A deprecation warning will be added for these statements in 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1 shortly.

Now there’s a number of ways around this e.g. exporting the views table, dropping them, doing load data from master then re-importing them or just copying the mysql data dir’s from A to B, or using mysql dump as suggested above, but this shouldn’t be necessary!

This is a bug that’s been known about by MySQL for almost 3 years, should be a fairly simple thing to fix really and hasn’t been. I don’t remember seeing any  deprecation warning in the latest version of MySQL and have wasted more time as a result.

Hopefully now SUN seem to be taking a proper hold of MySQL some of these more minor but pain in the ass issues will start to be fixed!!!

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