It's manic at Manick

I’m currently working on some E-commerce stuff. I’ve been learning quite a bit about Zen Cart, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Apache.

Spent a couple of hours today upgrading from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1

It went ok.

While trying to find some quick and easy ways to import data into Zen Cart I’ve ended up looking into phpMyAdmin.

Also MySQL 5.1 seems to support CSV as a storage engine. See this post: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/csv-storage-engine.html

All good stuff – I’m probably going to need to refer back to that sometime hence the post – time to sleep now.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/examples-of-query-criteria-HA010066611.aspx

Very useful list of query criteria expressions for retrieving records by date:

e.g. last week, last month, last 28 days

Raid 0 Fail

My laptop’s RAID0 array failed the other day resulting in a new hdd installation and a complete re-install of the operating system.

I had backups of my work, my personal files etc however I had to go through the hassle of re-installing all my applications.

As a side note – what a poor config choice RAID0 turned out to be. Unfortunately this was the way the laptop arrived from the factory. In my opinion it doubles the chances of a catastrophic disk failure as either disk going down will render the raid drive unusable. I chose to configure RAID1 when I rebuilt.

It’s always best to have a recent backup to restore from, but when you need to install all your applications again it helps to have a check list as there is just so many to remember.

So in no particular order here are most of them:

• Notepad++
• mIRC
• Adobe Reader / Shockwave / Flash
• Canon Digital Photo Software
• SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
• Visual Studio Express Edition
• SyncToy 2.1
• Windows Live Messenger
• AVG Antivirus / Microsoft Security Essentials
• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• 7Zip
• Gimp
• Blender
• VLC
• nMap – needs WinPcap
• Wireshark
• Microsoft Network Monitor
• Microsoft WinDbg
• Dia
• Inkscape
• FreeMind
• VNC Server / Viewer
• Nokia Software
• Java
• Google Earth
• SysInternals Suite
• Python
• Azureus / Vuze
• Daemon Tools Lite
• FileZilla
• ImgBurn
• Audacity
• Amaya
• Visual Studio 2008 Shell
• SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
• Windows Powershell 2.0
• CDex (ripper)
• PuTTY
• UltraVNC
• ImageMagick
• Skype
• DiscJuggler (demo)

While looking at various image gallery solutions for web content I found a great script called Lightbox 2. Just google it and I’m sure you’ll find it. It produces a nice simple clean effect for showing a clickable thumbnail that expands into the full size image from within any page. Simple but sweet.

While looking for software that performs DVD ripping, ISO creation, ISO burning etc it’s easy to get swamped in the hundreds of options available. However I tend to be wary of paying for such utilities generally as many seem to be mere wrappers around existing code or even open source code.
Anyway – I’d recommend a trip over to Doom9.net for a look around they have a great list of tools for use in this area.
I was making a duplicate of a data dvd and also wanted a ISO to backup to my external hdd.
I used DVD Decrypter to rip it to an ISO and then used Daemon Tools to mount the ISO and check it was ok, and finally DVD Decrypter again to burn it to another DVD. I could obviously just have moved the data files in explorer as this was just a data disc and have created a backup disc that way, but I prefer to have an ISO of an important disc.

As a footnote the developer of DVD Decrypter is Lightning UK and they/he had to stop work on it some time ago after receiving a cease and desist notice – however they/he now provide ImgBurn here: http://www.imgburn.com

Great work – thanks a lot to them.

I’m currently doing some work for a food manufacturing company. During various discussions we’ve been having regarding BOMs for their products it’s become evident that the food industry has to overcome various challenges that are atypical of manufacturing as a whole.

These issues centre around the following observations:

Anyway – I found this short whitepaper to be extremely useful in claryfying some of these ideas and will likely refer to it again – hence it being on my blog.