http://www.mysite.com/blog/index.php?category=news&year=2012&month=1

This is a rather simple request, but it is not very nice looking or easy on the eye, and it can be improved, for the user end experience.

Take this for instance:

http://www.mysite.com/blog/news/2012/1

That’s much nicer, and easier to read and understand even for a non technical person. They may understand the category, year and month without any input from you,

How do you convert your site? Well you don’t need to, but you can use a .htaccess mod_rewrite to change the url in the background.

RewriteRule blog/([a-z0-9]+)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]) /blog/index.php?category=$1&year=$2&month=$3 [L]

This takes the first quantifier after blog (a-z0-9) and says any characters, put into $1. The second is a 4 digit number, and the third, any number.

The [L] tells the re-write engine that if this rule matches, don’t do any more rule processing (last one)

If you implement this way of displaying your links, then your site should be better off in the big wide world of search engines. A lot of search engine spiders ignore URL’s with & in them as it can cause recursive looping and its easier to just ignore them.

Also, if you come to rewrite your blog in a new language, ASP for instance (shudder at the thought) then you can change the rule simply:

RewriteRule blog/([a-z0-9]+)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]) /blog/index.asp?category=$1&year=$2&month=$3 [L]

Thinking about your user experience, even if you are considering the search engines, is important.

If you want to read more about the Apache re-write module, you can go here

VPNetMon is an application that montors your VPN connection and if it drops, the application can be configured to close certain apps.

So if you are using a BitTorrent client and using an anonymous VPN connection to download content this will make you feel much more secure indeed.

You can get it at http://vpnetmon.webs.com/

Upon returning to my desk (Ubuntu 11.10), I decided to merge the branch with the major trunk. I checked out a brand new copy of the branch, merged it (for the first time in several months) and then re-committed the pages.

Guess what, he’s still checking out the original!!!

Do yourselves a favour guys, make it Linux this Christmas…

One major problem was Unity, but I got round this by installing Xfce and use that as a shell instead. Much better.

Now, my Thunderbird is proper maximised. Like full screen, so I can’t switch to any applications unless I use ALT TAB. Found help on the net.

1) Close Thunderbird

2) Locate your localstore.rdf file, mine was in:

~/.thunderbird/ftfxbq7f.default$

3) Edit the file, and find the section that looks a little like this:

<RDF:Description RDF:about="chrome://messenger/content/messenger.xul#messengerWindow"
                   width="1024"
                   height="1024"
                   screenX="344"
                   screenY="113"
                   sizemode="fullscreen" />

And change it to:

<rdf:Description RDF:about="chrome://messenger/content/messenger.xul#messengerWindow"
                   width="800"
                   height="600"
                   sizemode="normal"
                   screenX="5"
                   screenY="5" />

Then, once restarted, Thunderbird should be all nice and accessible again. Thanks to Greg for this one!

To access the externals file, navigate to the root of your site:

> cd /var/www/mysite

And add the external to the svn:externals file. I am using the latest version of Zend Framework for this, but you can use any SVN source you like. Note, it has to be available as an SVN repository.

> svn propedit svn:externals .

This will open a text editor.

To enter an external, just enter the local folder to download to, and the source SVN.

destination source

So, if I want my Zend Framework files to be saved in /var/www/mysite/library/Zend :

library/Zend http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/release-1.11.9/library/Zend/

The first part is the local, second part is the URL of the repository.

Save and close.

Next time you do an update, svn will go and fetch the external files and save them for you.

Other externals are available, such as JQuery, various wikis and other JS sources.

> svn add --force *

Saves a whole bunch of time when committing a load of new pages via the command line.

> sudo apt-get install rsync
> rsync -avu /source/ /dest/

For example:

> rysnc -avu /media/externaldisk/ /home/chris/diskbackup/

Will increment copy everything (ignoring older files) from /media/externaldisk to my /home/chris/diskbackup folder.

The options are:

• a – Archive mode – Will retain the folder/file properties, such as owner, permissions, etc.
• v – Verbose – Output the progress to the screen (so I know its still working)
• u – Update – Only update files that have a more recent file modified date.

Fortunately there is a little program that will rotate a video for you.

> sudo apt-get install mencoder

Then, to rotate my video clockwise by 90 degrees:

> mencoder -ovc lavc -vf rotate=1 -oac pcm inputfile.ext -o outputfile.ext

I had to do this twice, obviously changing the input filename for the second rotation for the output filename on the first…

Job done. That were easy.

There is more help here: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/HOWTO_Mencoder_Introduction_Guide

To combat this, open a terminal session and type:

nautilus-file-management-properties

Then, you can click on the Media tab, and choose “Do Nothing” for Photos.

Job done. Thank god!

C:> TASKLIST.EXE /V /FO CSV > 2011-06-14.txt

That is the function I have been using. So this is what I want the script to do.

To get the actual current date, I used this call:

ver | date > date.txt

This creates a file called date.txt and inserts the current date (with another line which I can ignore)

So, now I want to read this file into memory so I can get the date from it.

set /p var= <date.txt

This reads in the first line of the file and stores it in the var variable

The line is:

The current date is: 14/06/2011

So lets get rid of the preliminary string as we don’t want it

set var=%var:~21,10%

This sets the variable “var” to be a substring of itself, starting at character 21 and fo 10 characters. Get it?

All we need to do now is chop and change the date so I get it in the format I want, from dd/mm/yyyy to yyyy-mm-dd (I am a database sucker, so always use these format dates)

A little more confusing looking, but does the same as the previous line, picking bits of the string and putting them into the var variable.

set var=%var:~6,4%-%var:~3,2%-%var:~0,2%.txt

If you read it, you will see it takes the 4 characters starting from position 6 (this is the year), adds a “-” symbol, then 2 characters starting from the 3rd, another – and then the first 2 characters

Put it all into a batch file, and it looks like this:

@echo off
REM Chris Tate-Davies
REM Export the current process list and save as todays date.txt
REM To be run from the schheduled tasks every day

REM delete any existence of previous date
del date.txt

REM Get the date and put it in a file
ver | date > date.txt

REM open the new file and put the date in variable "var"
set /p var= <date.txt

REM chop out the string so we just have the date
set var=%var:~21,10%

REM re-allign the date parts to yyyy-mm-dd
set var=%var:~6,4%-%var:~3,2%-%var:~0,2%.txt

REM run the tasklist and pass the %var% to output to
tasklist.exe /V /FO CSV > %var%

Now all I need to do is add it to the scheduled tasks and then I can pick up the files once a week instead or stopping what I am doing every day to do it.