Geek Alert Geek Alert

So I was thinking yesterday, (I know its a silly thing to do but I can't stop it) I describe myself as a IT geek but I figured there are different types of IT geek's. So I decided to define what I think are the three major type of IT geek's. You have your always on the computer, trying to solve problems and find good solutions to everyday life stuff this I defined as the Techie Geek and I would put myself in this group. Then you have the other end of the spectrum people that spend hours and hours on the computer in virtual world trying to play the virtual guitar better, race the virtual car faster shoot the virtual enemy. these I call Game geek's, They have no real IT skills as such but they can tell you how to connect to a doom server in Japan. And Finals you got the geek's that span both geekness area's when they are not fixing or programming stuff they are killing stuff, I would say the latter two are the most common, I have tried to get into gaming, I own an X box and a PS2 and I play both once in a while but to be honest I get board of them very quickly. give me a good programming problem or a system not working I would pick that over shoot aliens any day. I wouldn't say one type of geek is better than another just different and we probably all need to get out more to be honest although. I would just like to say thou I don't see a geek as someone with no social skills and no dress sense, they are Nerd to me.

so This IT geek is going back to working on his web site and investigating RSS and MP3 players on web sites. GEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK !

del.icio.us Tags: Gaming, Techie, Computers, IT

Someone call security

So McAfee has released a rootkit detective today. version 1 Beta, root kits have become a big issue over the last few years, as people have become more aware of Trojans  and Worm virus. Rootkit's hook themselves' into  Kernel and into the registry undermining the anti-virus software and the spyware detectors but rootkit detective is not for the amateur its a tool for pro's as  you need a good understand of how the operating system works and what processes and hooks there should be. go here to read more

Now some news for the home users, Secunia  has released a Utility that checks for updates. Again this is a beta version and is free for home users and private uses, installation is easy enough and it auto start itself after the first install. To be honest I was impressed on how much software it detected and how quickly I could update software even software like Filezilla. It also told me all the software I had that had become end of life and gave me a percentage score for how up to date my machine was. Of course I have only had a small play but I will let you know if there is any major problems with it after I test it some more. if you want to download a copy for you self then go to the Secunia PSI site

To Much Information Running Through my Brain

Yep I know its an old sting song but its got a lot of truth behind it, the point is these days there is so much information its becoming hard to see the wheat for the chaff (to use an old fashion none technical term) now you can get just about anything deliver to you mail box or listed on you RSS Feeds,

I am going though a culling process at the moment, getting rid of the feeds and mailing list that I haven't had any valuable information from. but its a task, its almost easier to write a rule just to delete it but that's using up bandwidth of course one of the most annoying things for me thou is sites like WAYN or Face book that still send you mail even when your logged on.

Today my official membership to WAYN expires and now I got to find a way of stopping them mailing me to death.

 I mean if I sat and read every mail and every RSS Feed I got I would get nothing else done in the day what we need is RSS Feed reader with Filters, oh god just set myself another project by the looks of it.   

of course I have some must reads like Lazy View and slash dot but a lot is just junk and also not relevant to the claimed subject matter. it seems that some think more is better, I prefer quality information myself and that's something that sometimes lacks on the web.

del.icio.us Tags: RSS, Email Groups, Spam

Eight dot three

A conversation with my wife this morning lead me too think about how the IT industry has change since I started working in the industry in the spring of 1989. That's 18 years ! and I can tell you there has been a lot of changes. The conversation all started because our poor old laptop threw a wobble and decided to corrupt the windows installation. as it was only have problem loading the PCI driver I Figured a Chkdsk was worth a go. Why it called Chkdsk and not CheckDisk asked my wife, I explain that in the good old days of DOS file name could be no longer that 8.3 and the three was the file extension so that gave you 8 letters to name all your files. (BTW as it happens I had to do an over the top install what fixed the laptop).

So what else has changed in 18 years, so much and yet in reality so little if you believed what the Sc-fi writers in the 80's was tell us what life would be like in the 2000's Still no flying cars yet thank god.

here is a little list of what has changed Feel free to add more

we have gone from 8bit - 16bit to 32bit and now 64bit processors.

we now have more memory than we uses to have disk space.

Floppy Disk drives are almost dead and only used in Emergency and even that's beginning to come to an end .

Laptop are not portable not luggable's

CD have replace LP's and Singles then became a computer data storage format then was replace by DVD is now being replace by blue  ray or HD-DVD

Invention of USB , USB 2 FireWire, Digital Camera's the list could go on

IBM no longer the top hated company Now the title goes to Microsoft but seems Google could be gaining ground

Mobile phones arrived, then you had Text message, now some phones are replace hand held computers

The Internet the single biggest invention after 1950 has become a world wide resource for everyone

you can now take you music library with you everywhere thanks to the Ipod and other MP3 players

The impact technology has had on life is amazing, oh and the biggest change, Geek's have become cool at long last, (thank some higher begin if there is one and the big question is if he does, does he use a mac or a PC ?)

My Must have tools Part 2

Microsoft Visual Studio Express

Here is a set of tools from Microsoft for single type development, there is a Windows Desktop One a web one and others, if you want the power of Visual Studio but can't afford it (no Surprise there) then this might be a good starting point.

CutePDF

Now we all know the best format for completed documentation is PDF but hey Adobe PDF writing is like 2 arms a legs and the left nipple to buy, so it didn't take long for other to write PDF writers, this one is my favorite it work very well and doesn't even cost a arm hair. works well from just about any application that has the option to print from, basically like all the others it creates a document to PDF printer driver so instead of the document coming out on paper it comes out as a PDF magic huh

Winmerge

Need to compare two files or need to merge two files then you need Winmerge merges all know files dead, oopps got in advert mode there. but seriously (no not the album by Phil Collins) this is a great little tool can be used also anywhere from the file system, from within Dreamweaver or WinCVS. oh and its open source too.

Opera

Figaro figaro figaro oopps sorry not that sort of Opera but in fact yet another web browser and yes once again its open source with loads of widgets once again good for testing not really a lot more to say except Thunder bolt and lightning very very frightening Me Galileo.

Net Tools

A set of network Diagnostic, security and monitoring tool over 150 different tools in one package, from port checkers to time sync and IP Calculator if your dealing with any kind of network Security or monitoring you want this set of tools, all runs in a single window so easy to keep open while you do other thing without taking up all the room on your taskbar.

First Page 2006

This is more than just an application the whole web site is dedicated to web master / designer. The application itself is a good basic WYSIWYG HTML editor but it also comes with loads of JavaScript ready to run so taking a leave out of the book of my friends over at lazy view why reinvent the wheel, someone done all the hard work all I have to do is copy and paste it. the web site also has a lot of online tools worth looking at.

The Sea Monkey

Remember Netscape ? well when I installed Sea Monkey suite. It was a bast from the past, Netscape renamed with all the old tools, again really just another browser but still worth checking your pages with.

Acrobat Reader

well you need to be able to read all those PDF you create, Still the best reader for its money

Developer's Tips & Tricks - Standard version

Great little tool, if you use may different program languages and scripting languages you end up collecting lots of different tips you really want to keep, this is a great little tool for keeping them indexed

There are many great tools out there I haven't even started on Online Resources that I use or browser extensions. I will talk about these in the future and I am sure I will have more tools and Applications to tell you about, I normally look at one or two most days

del.icio.us Tags: Open Source, Web Design, Utilites, Application, PDF, Browsers, Programming, Development

My Must Have Tools Part 1

Here is a list of Tools and Application I use every week at least

Dreamweaver

got to Start with Dreamweaver 8.0.2 yes I know CS3 is out but its buggy as hell and for most people version 8 is stable and easy to use there is not a day that goes by when this tool is not fired up Dreamweaver has some wonderful Extensions that can save lots of hours recoding straight forward stuff, Dreamweaver has some good site management tools

Photoshop CS2

yes again I know CS3 is out but just like Dreamweaver its still buggy as hell one of the best graphic design tools there is. great for editing graphics for web sites as well as modify photos, Comes with some great effects and loads of plug in's

CVSNT

Only really just started to use this open source version control system and to say I was impress would be an understatement, once you understand the basic principles its fairly easy to configure and well there is a lot of support out there on the web for it

WinCVS

one of the best clients around for win32 for CVS on any platform including CVSNT, easy to use interface with a lot of support on the web

FireFox 2

where would we be without dear old FireFox, in a future blog I will talk about my favorite and most useful extensions for FireFox but for now I just say if I didn't have FireFox I would cry I think

Internet Explorer 7

What I hear you say why do I need that if I have FireFox, well simple stuff that works in FireFox doesn't work in IE and stuff that works in IE doesn't work in FireFox so I am afraid that makes IE a must have but you don't have to use it for browsing stick with FireFox for that unless you hit one of those oopps we never tested it with FireFox sites

Notepad++

I love this tool when I can find the bug in Dreamweaver I go to Notepad and 99% of the time spot it right away it a full feature text editor with loads of help for HTML, Perl, PHP, ASP etc etc name a language and its there in the list of file types

CSS Tab Designer 2

ok so I am lazy, I could code all the CSS by hand but when you have great tools like this why bother, if you want a very smart looking Interface very web 2.0 Style then you should have a look at this and its great for beginners too as they can just user the bog standard output and not customize it at all.

MySql Administrator

one of the best MySql managers around also come with the migration tool and query browser nearly everything you need to manage a MySql DB with on windows or Linux from a Win32 workstation.

FileZilla

A very good open source FTP client that I use to move sites from UAT to Live environments they also have a server product that I confess I haven't looked at yet but I will let you know when I do.

Windows Live Mail Desktop

Running a few Sites and also the standard Webmail's like Hotmail and Yahoo means I have quite a lot of Email Accounts in addition to my exchange accounts This is a Great tool for managing difference account and Access RSS Feeds and Newsgroups in one client

Windows Live Family Safety

Anyone that's a parent these days worries about what the child might find on the Internet, things you really don't want them to be exposed too, this free Tool from Microsoft is very good easy to set up and is based around Live Accounts

Picasa2

This is a Graphics Management tool Perfect for managing you Graphics and photo libraries but so much more, as its a Google tool you get all the normal Google goodies like web albums and the ability to add pictures directly to your blog. you can also create a collage also interacts with Google screen saver and Google Earth all this and some good basic Editing tools with effects as well if you use Google tools then your find this very useful.

Web CEO

If your releasing a webiste you will need to think about promoting it and here is a free tool that will help you with a lot of the basic's, there is a paying version with a lot more features but for the basics of working out what keywords to use and monitor your ranking in lots of different search engines

Toad for MySql

Although this covers a lot of the same area's as MySQL Administrator it also provides two extra tools that are very helpful, the first is SQL Modeling tool that gives you a visual tool not dislike access to create views. The second really useful Database management tool is Reports (reverse Engineering) of the database structure, what great for both upgrades and documentation.

VMware Server

Now they have released a free version for download this is the most useful developers and Techie tool of all time, no more destroying PC installation with testing and having 10 PC's around your desk for every version and type of OS now you can have virtual development environments on one machine

Password Safe

If you like me your signed up to about a million different web sites, every web site these days wants you to sign on from Hotmail and Google to MySql Sites they all want a username and password. of course you could use the same username and password for every account you set up but if you do that your crazy some sites are less safe than others and if your one password becomes known someone could get access to everything. so this is a great little tool, from now on you still only need to remember one password that opens your password safe and in there you can store you passwords and usernames as well as information about the sites URL Notes Extra, that's all well and good but now you just got to come up with good passwords but the writer of this software has even thought of that and includes as password Generator that always creates Strong Secure passwords.

More to come in part 2

Technorati Tags: Software, Tools, Application, Open Source, Freeware, Web Design, Graphics, HTML, CSS, Password Management

Now what's the Syntax again

I spend ages trying to work out how to do that, one thing I need to do in Dev and test as well as live environment is copy databases on the same server with the same data to a different name

well after much searching I found this useful page

Duplicating an MySql DB on the same page

but for quick reference here is the Syntax cos I know I will need it again in a few hours

mysqladmin create DB_name -u DB_user --password=DB_pass && mysqldump -u DB_user --password=DB_pass DB_name |mysql -u DB_user --password=DB_pass -h DB_host DB_name

so there you have it renaming a DB made easy

Technorati Tags: Mysql, Duplicating a Database

First Post

Well hello all and welcome to my blog

Mostly this will be a technical Blog, so for those that technical subjects bore you then err sorry try the family blog instead at hitchinson.eu they are more social and a bit more fun

Not saying my post here will not be fun but fun in a geeky way, at the moment my main project that i have been working on is www.stonedideas.co.uk to this end i have been teaching myself Mysql, ASP and learning a lot about CVSNT whats a great open source Version control software tool what i have found invaluable along with WinCVS i would full recommend these products if your doing any sort of development, even if its just you on your own rather than a team its still a very handy tool, next i hope to be looking at bugzilla on Windows and Linux. Hope to be posting Hints and Tips on here when I have time so hopefully some people will find it useful