All Change - Day 2

By the end of day one I have activated my new server, setup my domains (all 4 of them), uploaded my websites to the new server, setup email accounts and started to setup the server and permissions.

Day two started by getting all the email accounts working as they should. I then began to try to add the databases to the domains. I found I had to learn a new way of working because the new server did not accept the settings and code my previous server worked just fine with. This meant out with the manuals, fire up Google and try to work out what was different. I eventually tracked down the main difference to the path statement. My old server used

'Server.MapPath("../private/database.mdb")'

to point to the data source. The new server required the full path to be used in the connection string like this

'sConnString="PROVIDER=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;" & "Data Source=C:\inetpub\vhosts\\httpdocs\private\database.mdb'

quite a difference but it does now seem to work just as it should.

Late in the afternoon the publisher I worked for arrived with a script that needs correcting so I guess that as my new server is working reasonably well, it will now have to wait till the bread and butter stuff is done and I can find some time to start fine tuning.

All Change

I have decided that the time has come to move up a level and start to host my own web sites and email on a server I control. As part of the move I am also going to change my ISP (Internet Service Provider) to try to get a more stable service as my present ISP has been having to tweak my connection almost daily to keep me connected. I am sticking with a business service as the contention ratio tends to be better and you don't get the server drops that plague residential connections. I thought a diary of what I am doing might just help any of you that are considering changing your Internet connection or hosting services.

Right where did I start?

The first place is on the web to look for an ISP that offers the services that you want. Many folk buy just on price or because the man in the pub says that this service is the one to go for. Many folk also take as gospel what the TV adds say and promise. A better way is to find out which service all your neighbours are using and then pick another one - why? let me explain.

The Internet works in a way that is similar to your mobile phone. Residential customers are divided up into groups (cells) of 50 connections and the ISPs gamble that not all 50 customers will log on at the same time. This is called the contention ratio. If they do all log on the service just disconnects people until there is enough bandwidth to allow connections to the web. These are the slow downs and dropped servers that are very familiar to Tiscali, AOL, TalkTalk and other popular ISP customers. I pay a bit more a month for a business connection and get a 20 to 1 Contention Ratio. Because I live in the middle of a residential estate there aren't many other business customers around here so I don't get dropped servers or suffer the slow downs all my neighbours suffer. This time round I have plumped for a local business ISP here in Yorkshire (PlusNet) which should give me a similar service to the one I got from Eclipse before they grew too big to give an individual service to all their customers.

Once you have chosen your new ISP you have to ask your present ISP for the MAC code (Migration Access Code) that allows you to switch ISPs without any downtime other than having to type in your new User Name and Password to your router. The only problem you may get here is that some ISPs try to delay giving you your MAC code so that you get fed up waiting and stay with their service. This is against the code of practice and usually if you make that known to to your ISP the MAC code arrives by email within a couple of hours. All you need to do once you have got it is pass it on to your new ISP and then wait till switch over day.

I have done this and been given the switch over date of 28th July. In the mean time I can log on to PlusNet and setup my email mail boxes ready for switch over so that I don't miss any email. I am not going to detail what you need to do to make mailboxes as every ISP is slightly different but most ISP have a help page that gives you detailed instructions how to setup mailboxes and the settings you need for the email program on your computer. This my ISP's help page for setting up email for example.

I have also signed up for a virtual server with ServerChoice who are a sister company of the domain registration company who manage the registration of my domains for me. The server should come on line today so I should be able to tell you how I get on configuring it tomorrow.

In the mean time I have received the Mac code from Eclipse and passed it on to PlusNet so my new broadband connection should be up and running on the 28th July.

Scam Warning

This week I have become aware of a nasty little scam being run on the websites of some major players on the web like Easyjet, Interflora and Vistaprint. You may see an offer on the order confirmation for money off the next spend, If you take up the offer you're taken through a lengthy process in which you're joining up to the Shopper Discounts & Rewards programme run by Webloyalty and agreeing to a monthly direct debit or continuous payment. The offer is a hefty discount on hundreds of major shops and eBay but try to use it and you will find out it is not a discount at all.


My bank tells me that the way they operate this scam is by getting your card details from the firm you have ordered from and then using the details to set up a recurring debit on your card. The banks can't refuse to pay it so the only way to stop the scam is to cancel your card with all the inconveniences that causes.


If you want to read what other people think about this scam and how it works look at http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=819869. There is also information on this site about what to do if you are caught.


I had another attempt to complete the rewiring of my network this week. When I torn the nail off the thumb that is in plaster I gave up. My study looks like it has been trashed by a determined police rummage team and I can only just get to my main computer but it will have to stay like that till I have got both my hands back.


The publisher I do occasional work for has decided that one of his sites needs a face lift. This site was originally written using an ecommerce program called Zencart. For a small business like his, Zencart has proved to be unwieldy and needs a lot of expertise in PHP to maintain. Also Zencart seems to be biased to selling music on line and adapting it to sell books has not been fully successful. His other company website uses osCommerce http://www.oscommerce.com/ which is more lightweight, much more intuitive to maintain and has a good number of people writing first class templates for all sorts of online stores including bookstores. I am meeting with him on Monday to decide which template to use so watch this space to see how we get on. The site we are updating is this one http://senbooks.co.uk/ so keep an eye on it.

That's all for this week I'm afraid, typing one handed isn't good productivity wise.

Post op week 2

I must admit that I am pleasantly surprised by the lack of pain from this op on my hand. The previous three ops all had me taking pain killers for weeks and my hand was totally useless as the slightest pressure on my thumb or fingers was extremely painful. This time round, it took until the morning after the op for the anaesthetic to fully wear off and my fingers to start moving again but when it did I was pleased to find that there was very little swelling, hardly any bruising and very little pain. Within three days I was using my hand to type with one finger. Now apart from the clumsy great pot on my hand and not being able to grip anything properly I hardly notice the op at all. I also don't need to take any more than my usual dose of pain killer to keep my arthritis under control.

I haven't managed to do any work on my network due to my hand but I have been busy doing other bits of upgrades. I have rejoined Skype using a wireless head set and web cam bought from eBay. The camera is tiny but give a good image even in the dark due to the LEDs that supply illumination. The web cam is compatible with Skype but not with Yahoo messenger so I can talk to some of my friends and customers but not others.

The wireless head set is a multi purpose one. It can be used for online audio/visual chat, It can be used as a baby monitor although wearing a headset all the time isn't my idea of comfort. It can be used wireless headphones to listen to music or DVDs without disturbing anyone else so it wasn't bad value at just less than £6. I haven't worked out how to wire it in permanently to my system as crawling about under the desk is a no no with this pot so it is just plugged in to the front mic and earphone connectors for now where it seems to work perfectly once I had told Vista what it was and where it was connected.

Earlier this week I was reading an article about how to make curved corners in CSS. It looked to be a lot of hard work just to make boxes with rounded corners so I thought I would have a go. I set to and designed a template for a web page called Curved Corners which you will find here if you want a look Curved Corners Test Page . It is a bit rough and ready at the moment but it wouldn't take much work to make it fully functional if anyone out there would like a site built using it.

I often find myself grinding my teeth at the claims of WYSIWYG web site editors who claim to be able to write perfect cross platform code first time every time. The simple fact is they can't as the following example will show. On Curved Corners is a small piece of code that produces a search box like this:-

<li id="search">

 <h2>Search</h2>

  <small style="margin-left: 25px">Search this site</small>

    <form id="searchform" method="get" action="">

 <div>

   <input type="text" name="s" id="s" size="15" style="height: 27px;" />

   <input type="submit" value="Search" style="height: 29px;" />

 </div>

    </form>

</li>

What this is supposed to look like is this :-

What you get is this in Mozilla :-

In Internet Explorer 8 you get this :-

And in Avant you get this:-

I am told that the WYSIWYG editors can sort this out but I think the above examples from my template show they are not quite as good as they claim. When I have debugged the code and made them all look the same I will let you know what had to be done to the CSS and HTML to get it right.

On Tuesday the heavy pot comes off, the stitches are removed and a light weight pot put on for the next four weeks. I am hoping that I will get a bit more use out of my hand although I will have to care full not to over use it.

Post Op

We had a bit of a scare when we turned up for the op as my BP was too high for comfort but the Anaesthetist decided that it was OK to go ahead, The op was straight forward so I now have a very heavy pot on my left hand and I am trying to learn how to do everything one handed.

I have managed to edit a new article for my web site all about User Accounts and Passwords. I know some of my readers have concerns about how to secure their computer from intrusion both deliberate and accidental so there should be something for everyone in here. A word of warning, some of the recovery techniques described in the article could in the wrong hands do some damage so think carefully before you implement them.

Typing one handed is a bit tiring so I hope you will excuse the brevity of these few words.

New Articles

As my regular readers will know, I do spend some time trawling the web to find articles that I know will be useful or interesting to my 'customers'. This time I think I have found something for everyone.

I find the Telegraph Boot camp a fertile source of articles that, with a small amount of editing, can be made into very readable tutorials, hints & tips and sources of programs and materials. This month Rick Maybury (Boot Camp's author) has rounded up some of the best Freeware programs from around the web. I have often been told that Freeware is a load of rubbish but it isn't so. There is some rubbish out there but in the main the programs and utilities fill in the gaps that the main software houses leave or would find uneconomic to write for as they have a limited audience. A second source of material is those authors who like to find an idea, write a program to develop it and then ask others to add to what they have done. A good example of this are two famous programs The Gimp and Picasa which you will find on the computer of any serious digital photographer.

Rick split his offering up into eight weekly parts but I have tried to draw it together to make it more readable and the programs easy to find so you will find a menu page for the main groups and then individual pages for those groups. The groups are :-

• Handy tools and utilities
• Pictures and graphics
• Audio and multimedia
• Privacy and security
• Networks, Internet & email
• Alternatives to Microsoft programs
• Odds and ends

You will find the menu page here Freeware Menu Page. Not all the pages are up on my site yet (there are nine in all) but I hope this little project will keep me busy while I converless.

This is the week when I have the next op on my hands. I am usually looking forward to an op because I know exactly what the surgeon is going to do and I am intensely interested in what is going on. This time I don't feel that way at all, in fact I am very apprehensive about the whole thing. If my hands weren't so painful and there was another form of treatment available I think I would seriously consider giving the op a miss and trying something else. In this case there is no alternative that I know of so on Tuesday morning I will be lying on the table and hoping the op doesn't go on too long.

Network wise I was called to a computer that had its sound card replaced and was misbehaving when it was re-connected to the Internet. It had a relatively new motherboard with two network adaptors. When just one of the adaptors was connected to the router the Internet connection was painfully slow. However if both adaptors was connected to the router and then the resulting network connections bridged Internet browsing became blisteringly fast. This will be old hat to large network technicians but small network and home networking technicians like myself often miss out on these snippets. When I got home I thought I would see if it made any difference to my own network. My motherboard has two gigabyte adaptors so I ran an extra cable to my hub and enabled the second connection. It took about three minutes for the computer to recognise both connections and to bridge them but the hub took all that in its stride and now have a bridged connection running at a full 1 gb speed. It has speeded up my Internet connection noticeably but the real gain is when I move big files around my network - they now don't doddle about at 20 to 30 kbps they are moving at several megabytes a second. I think I will spend some of my enforced rest time after Tuesday rethinking the layout of my network and seeing just which of my computers will benefit from 2 network adaptors and which can be safely left with one.

I may not be adding to my blogg over the next week or two as typing one handed is a right royal pain so please keep an eye on this blogg and I will be back as soon as I can use at least one finger in my left hand.

Another project finished

I have just uploaded the final files of my latest project. It is an updated website for a person who is heavily involved in providing the support for dyslexic children and adults especially those who have problems with Maths. If you want a look you can find it here after 10 am on the 9th June.

Dr Chinn also writes books about problems with maths and I have been involved in typesetting them. A new set of five books has just been released. They are :-

• What to do when you can't Add and Subtract
• What to do when you can't Learn the Times Table
• What to do when you can't Multiply and Divide
• What to do when you can't Tell the Time
• What to do when you can't do Fractions, Decimals and Percentages

They can be bought from Egon Publishers at this address.

Now this project is out of the way I can concentrate on getting ready for the op on my hand next week. I don't know why but I feel very apprehensive about this op. Unlike previous ops I have known exactly what the surgeon is trying to achieve. This time we won't know what he is going to do until he has opened up my hand and seen just what has gone wrong with the joints at the bottom of my thumb and wrist. As the op is done under a local anaesthetic I will be able to discuss with him what he finds and listen to what he proposes to do about it. Some of my friends and colleagues find this a bit too much to take in but as an ex-nurse I am not a bit squeamish and I am too interested in the procedure to be bothered about feeling faint or sick.

I didn't finish the upgrade of my network even though I now have all the bits. My hands were too painful to hold the components and the tools. The bits will still be here once the op is over and my hand has healed and I hope I will be able to finish the upgrade then.