Stuart Turner

Have installed adobe reader 8 on my windows vista ultimate laptop (still not managed to get my web cam working ahem) and was disapointed after an adobe software update to learn that each time I opened a pdf that "A serious error has ocurred, please re-install ...".

So, tried the re-install, then figured out if I opened a file directly in Adobe 8.0 everything worked ok. Changed file associations from explorer to open the correct version of Adobe which fixed launching from explorer. Tried disabling various things in internet explorer, which didn't work, so installed firefox and told firefox to launch in an external program rather than with a helper application.

Everything ok now.

Couple of Firefox addons that have helped me over the last few days.

First up is Scrapbook which allows you to save a web page along with all its dependencies to a local folder. Takes a little while to figure out where Scrapbook saves it's files, but its very useful if you want to take a page along with all assets - images, css and javascript.

Next is Fireshot which allows you to take a snapshot of a web page, create a png image and annotate!!! Awesome!! The only thing I would add is to allow editing of images once you've saved. But it's pretty awesome and better than using printscreen as it catches the whole page.

Have been using rsync from my linux box to backup various pc's around the house. The rsync daemon is included with linux, but not windows which makes backups slower.

Delta Copy installs everything you need to get rsync up and running on windows in a snap. Have installed on Windows XP and Vista with no issues so far.

When installing, setup the windows service and then go back to control panel / administrative tools to change the service to use the local system account rather than a specific user.

Speeds up your backups big time!

Had been looking around for a new laptop. Considered a few options and ended up buying a maching from pcspecialist.co.uk. Machine is awesome, well built, very quiet and very, very fast.

I ended up installing Vista. This was after loading Ubuntu and finding that not many things worked e.g. sound, wireless lan etc. I have it running as a vmware image though, and the sound works fine... wierd! Used easyvmx to create the vmware image - up and running in a few minutes - no problem!

Next was to get some dev stuff on there. Loaded the Activestate Komodo IDE for Python and PHP development.

Downloaded Python, and the win32com extensions.

Next wanted apache, mysql and php. The WAMP project helps get that up and running in a snap.

Installed Office 2007 as there is a project I needed to access an msaccess database from python using odbc. Had to download this component from Microsoft to get ODBC working.

Then had to get the Orange ICON 2 USB card working. Software worked fine. However found I couldn't connect. Worked out that the APN should be orangeinternet rather than internetvpn. To get it to work, you need to enter orangeinternet in the APN field (leave user name and password blank), click save, then connect.

Installed torotiseSVN for subversion access.

Not sure if I formally announced Stu's fone footie to the world on my blog.

It's an amazing mash up of English football from the following sites:

Live sport on tv
Football ground guide
BBC Sport - Football
List of clubs and their ground names / locations

Optimised to work when you are on the move, especially for the Blackberry.

Updated every day, and also every two minutes every day after noon, so you can get the latest results on the move without paying expensive SMS charges.

Enjoy!

(Oh, and of course its written in Python)

And yes, no adverts - I just saw iScore ... tsk, tsk, just more adverts. Whats this? Premier scores, free??? I think not ... and this one - why can't they say how much it costs in plain English?

Stu's fone footie is definitely free apart from your mobile gprs charges. Also definitely no adverts and no downloads.