Strictly Software

Problems connecting to Remote Desktop over a VPN

2010-08-26T20:43:00.003+01:00

Troubleshooting issues with Remote Desktop connectionsI have just experienced and finally resolved a problem that started suddenly last week that prevented me from connecting to my work PC from my laptop at home using Terminal Services / Remote Desktop.The problem started suddenly and it has made little sense for the last week. The symptoms were:A virgin media broadband Internet connection.A

Techies Law - Definition

2010-08-06T23:04:00.002+01:00

The definition of Techies LawIn a similar vein to "Murphys Law" which states if something can go wrong it will I have over the last two days experienced multiple occurrences of what I call "Techies Law" which all developers should be well aware of even if they haven't heard the term described as such.The law is pretty simple and states thatIf you have spent considerable time trying to resolve a

Strictly System Check Wordpress Plugin

2010-07-20T01:38:00.003+01:00

A Site and Server Monitoring Plugin for WordpressI have just created a new Wordpress plugin, Strictly System Check, which allows me to easily monitor my Wordpress sites for signs of performance problems such as an overloaded server, too many database connections, corrupt tables or website issues.I created this plugin primarily for my own use as I noticed that I quite regularly would experience my

The Wordpress Survival Guide

2010-06-18T01:21:00.007+01:00

Surviving Wordpress - An IntroductionAs well as my technical blog here on blogger I have a number of Wordpress sites which I host myself on a virtual server. I have only been using Wordpress and PHP for about a year now but in that time I have learnt a hell of a lot regarding the pros and cons and do's and dont's that are involved in running your own Wordpress blog. As a developer who has spent

SQL Injection attack from Googlebot

2010-06-09T02:16:00.003+01:00

SQL Injection Hack By Googlebot ProxyEarlier today on entering work I was faced with worried colleagues and angry customers who were complaining about Googlebot being banned from their site. I was tasked to finding out why.First off all my large systems run with a custom built logger database that I created to help track visitors, page requests, traffic trends as well as having security features

Debugging Memory Problems on Wordpress

2010-05-22T22:30:00.003+01:00

High Memory Consumption on WordpressThis year I have taught myself PHP and setup a couple of Wordpress blogs to get my head round the sort of code PHP developers hack together. Although PHP has a lot of good qualities such as the variety of functions compared to other scripting language such as ASP, the ability to write object orientated code and the amount of available help on the web it does

Problems with LINUX, Apache and PHP

2010-05-22T04:35:00.003+01:00

LINUX Apache Server stopped serving up PHP pagesWhen I logged into my hosted LINUX web server earlier tonight I was met with a message saying I should install a number of new packages. I usually ignore things like this until it gets to a point where someone forces me to do purely for the reasons which will become obvious shortly.The packages were the following:apache2.2-common apache2-mpm-worker

Tune Up Utilities 2010

2010-05-19T12:35:00.003+01:00

Tune Up Utilities 2010I don't usually promote products other than the odd Google advert and in reality that seems to be a waste of time considering I make literally pennies. However one of the products that I do admit to liking and help advertise is the TuneUp Utilities application which takes the best features of all the other clean up and performance tuning apps that are available and puts them

Are you a spammer

2010-05-05T01:02:00.002+01:00

Spam Checker ToolIf you post comments on blogs and sites around the web you might find that your time and effort is being wasted especially if you have been marked as a comment spammer.Most blogs and sites that accept comment use a tool called Akismet to check whether a comment is spam or not. It's a free service that comes with a simple API that allows users with a key to check content and user

Strictly AutoTags Wordpress Plugin

2010-05-03T23:29:00.004+01:00

Wordpress Plugin - Strictly AutoTagsI have been doing a lot of work with Wordpress lately and have been working on a number of custom plugins that I already use with my own Wordpress blogs. One of these plugins that I find very useful is AutoTags which automatically detects words within new posts to use as tags.Unlike other smart tag plugins that add lots of functionality to manage existing tags

Banning Bad Bots with Mod Rewrite

2010-04-19T22:22:00.005+01:00

Banning Scrapers and Other Bad Bots using Mod RewriteThere are many brilliant sites out there dedicated to the never ending war on bad bots and I thought I would add my own contribution to the lists of regular expressions used for banning spammers, scrapers and other malicious bots with Mod Rewrite.As with all security measures a sys admin takes to lock down and protect a site or server a layered

Great new site - From The Stables

2010-03-30T01:24:00.005+01:00

If you are into horse racing, like a bet or just interested in getting great information straight from the trainers mouth about upcoming races then I suggest checking out my new site www.fromthestables.com. We have teamed up with some of the best known UK trainers to provide a unique high quality service available to members on a daily basis.Each day our top trainers will provide their expert

My Hundredth Article

2010-03-29T22:53:00.004+01:00

An overview of the last 102 articlesI really can't believe that I have managed to write 102 articles for this blog in the last year and a bit. When I first started the blog I only imagined writing the odd bit here and there and saw the site purely as a place to make public some of my more useful coding tips. I never imagined that I could output this amount of content by myself.A hundred articles

Turn one Google Mail account into many

2010-03-28T17:48:00.002+01:00

Multiplying your GMail Account to create multiple email addressesI just come across a wonderful tip that allowed me to bypass the rule on Twitter that prevents you from using an email address for more than one account. You may have tried this yourself and found that if you try to create a new Twitter account with an email address assigned to another Twitter account you won't be able to.Obviously

Write your own Proxy Checker Tool

2010-03-22T00:17:00.008Z

Creating your own Proxy Checker ToolFinding good reliable proxies is a hard task and although many sites offer free lists the majority of the proxies on them will be out of date or not working when you get round to testing them. If you are happy with using WebProxies then there are plenty about but they don't help if you are wanting to access content that utilises complex AJAX to deliver movies

Wordpress, WP-O-Matic and custom HTML tags

2010-03-19T18:29:00.005Z

Automating Wordpress posts with WP-O-MaticIf you use wordpress you should really look into the great WP-O-Matic plugin that allows you to automate postings by importing content from RSS or XML feeds. You can set up schedules to import at regular times or import on demand from the admin area.One issue however which I have just spent ages getting to the bottom of is the use of HTML such as OBJECT

The difference between a fast running script and a slow one

2010-02-27T22:48:00.003Z

When logging errors is not a good ideaI like to log errors and debug messages when running scripts as they help diagnose problems not immediately apparent when the script is started. There is nothing worse than starting a script running and then coming into work on a Monday morning to find that it hasn't done what it was supposed to and not know why. A helpful log file with details of the

Handling YouTube Videos in Feeds

2010-02-27T16:25:00.002Z

Reformatting HTML to include YouTube video linksIf you use XML feeds to import content into your site or blog you may have experienced the problem that your blogging software or add-on tries to err on the side of caution for security reasons or just messes up the import and in doing so any EMBED or OBJECT tags are stripped in the process.This is especially annoying when the content is for a blog

Strictly Software's Anonymizing Super Search Tool

2010-02-20T17:52:00.004Z

Introducing the Anonymous Super Search ToolThe following free online tool which I have created follows in the same vein as the wonderful anonymizing search tools such as Scroogle which give you the searching power of Google but without all the privacy issues.If you don't know what the privacy issues are when you carry out a Google search then you should be aware of the following:1. A search on

Browser Survey Results

2010-02-06T22:19:00.007Z

The results of the Strictly Software Browser SurveyIf you have visited my site in the last couple of months you may have noticed the survey on Browser usage that popped up. It was geared towards developers to gather information about their favourite browsers in terms of developing, debugging and features.I have let it run for a couple of months and now I am publishing the results. Thanks to

Update Orphaned SQL Users

2010-01-29T18:52:00.003Z

SQL Script to relink orphaned users to loginsIt's quite a common task to have to move one or more databases from one server to another and this usually causes issues with orphaned users that have no related SQL login due to the SID values mismatching. The following is taken from an MS Knowledge base article about the problem:When you move a database from one server that is running SQL Server to

Creating Twitter Mashups

2010-01-09T03:38:00.004Z

Using Free Online Tools to Create Twitter MashupsIf you are into Twitter then you may have wanted at some time to automate some tweets. There are many reasons you may want to do this such as creating new content quickly or providing an online presence when your not physically around. You may want to follow certain hash tags and retweet the same post with new hash tags or you may want to auto

Grant Execute Permission to all Stored Procedures and Functions

2010-01-03T22:49:00.005Z

How to grant execute permission to all your stored procedures and functionsAnother useful stored procedure I have in my toolkit that I find myself using over and over on any system that I work on is the following proc that allows me to grant execute permission to all stored procedures and user defined functions within a database to a particular logon.Sometimes I find myself creating multiple

Find Text Inside a Stored Procedure or Used Defined Function

2009-12-30T22:09:00.003Z

How to find text inside a stored procedure or user defined functionOne of the most useful stored procedures I have in my toolkit that I find myself using over and over on any system that I work on is the following procedure that allows me to return a list of stored procedures and user defined functions that contain a particular string of text.I maybe looking for all procs or UDF's that contain a

Writing a Port Scanner In PHP

2009-12-27T02:39:00.006Z

How to write a Port Scanner in PHPI am pretty new to PHP but one of the things I like about PHP as opposed to other server side scripting languages such as ASP Classic (JavaScript or VBScript) is the amount of functionality that is built into the language. With ASP Classic if you want to do anything remotely sexy you have to write a COM component and then register the DLL on the web server which