This one is good news for all you geeks out there. It looks like O’Reilly Media have extended their discount offer of Buy X eBooks get X eBooks free (where X is however many you want to purchase). O’Reilly I would think are most famous for their “Liama” and “Camel” book series for various programming languages including everything from Perl, to PHP to C/C++.
So the good news is you can get 50% off any eBooks you purchase. You can visit http://oreilly.com to see all the books that the have available. As below you get the eBooks in multiple formats, all DRM free.
The coupon code you have to use is “BXGXF” as per the below email I received, they had a thing at the bottom saying “Forward to a friend” LOL so I hope they do not object to me mass releasing it to the interweb.
Some of the books that I have purchased and have read/am currently reading that I would recommend are:
And just in case you are wondering what I have in my collection you can see the image below of all the O’Reilly eBooks I have.
One issue I have run into time and time again at work is when either myself or colleagues leave themselves logged into Terminal Services (using Remote Desktop Protocol or RDP for short) on a server and therefore lock out anyone but themselves from logging back ON to the server. Obviously this is targeted at servers running on the Wintel architecture.
This issue cropped up for me again and I was struggling to find a way to kick the other terminal services connections or terminate them or (well LOL I had a few other thoughts that were kinda graphic but hey we are trying to be professional here). Luckily a colleague was able to assist me and gave me this gem which I was unable to find elsewhere on the net (probably from a lack of the correct keywords).
If you need to force access to the console session for a host running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, MS Windows Server 2008 or probably a host of other Windows server and desktop hosts, give this little command line switch a try.
On the run command prompt of the computer you are connecting from (the guest) instead of running plain old ‘mstsc’ instead run ‘mstsc /v:hostname.yourdomain.com -console /admin’.
I have no idea why (and will try to do some research later unless someone else can shed light on this) the straight up ‘-console’ switch did not work as a lot of people on the net said it would, without the ‘/admin’ switch I just kept getting the error “Terminal Services had reached the maximum number of licences” and so on.
So… I hope this helps you out next time pesky wabbits leave themselves logged onto your servers and stop you from logging on to RDP.
Stuart
Recently I ran into a problem I have seen all too many times, someone had entered the wrong URL in the admin panel of a WordPress blog and they could no longer log into the application to fix the issue. Normally this would break wordpress so that you couldn’t use the admin panel and require a manual update to the database however I came up with the idea to use WordPress’ own functions to enable an update of the URL without using the admin panel.
So there was born the idea of WP-Recover. A simple script to do one very simple task, allow you to change the wordpress blog URL when it is not working or you have entered it incorrectly.
I have decided to use the new power of my Open Source Battlefield Wiki to document the script so you can access WP-Recover on the OSBattlefield site.
A brief how-to:
1. Upload recover.php to your root wordpress folder (the same folder that wp-config.php exists in).
2. Open your wp-config.php file however you would like and get the first five charaters of the AUTH_KEY string (excluding the ‘ )
3. In a web browser access http://www.yoursite.com/yourwordpressfolder/recover.php
4. Enter the new URL for your site (ensuring it is in the format ‘http://www.yoursite.com/yourwordpressfolder’ without the ”)
5. Click Submit
6. Once you receive a confirmation message DELETE recover.php from your wordpress folder. Leaving it there is a DRASTIC security risk.
Download
Getting Help
Ideally if you need assistance please pop over and log a bug/support request on the JIRA Bug Tracking Site, although if you have any issues using that you can also use the Open Source Battlefield Contact Page or leave a comment here.
If you are suffering from an issue that causes your network connection to drop out when your computer idles then you have come to the right place.I have been using Dell notebooks for many years, and one little trick that I picked up quite some time back relates to the drivers for network cards on Dell Laptops.
Most commonly I have found this issue with the Intel 82567LM Gigabit Ethernet adapter however it is entirely possible that it affects other models too.
What Causes It:
This behaviour is actually a “feature” of the driver and is designed to drop it from 1 gigabit to 100 megabit mode which in turn saves power (on the assumption that you do not need 1Gbps of throughput while you aren’t physically at the machine). I have only ever experienced this with the Intel Gigabit cards (Intel 82567LM) but it may happen with others as well.
How to stop it from happening:
You will need to get a new driver directly from the manufacturer. As I mentioned I have only ever experienced it with the Intel ethernet interface so if you pop over to the Intel Download Center you can grab the drivers from there (if you are having problems specifically with the Intel 82567LM click here to get the latest drivers).
When you have installed the new driver go into the Device Manager and select the network card. Open up the properties panel and select the Power Management Tab, then uncheck the “Reduce Speed during System Idle” checkbox and you should be sweet.
Why you have to get a new driver:
Dell in their infinite wisdom decided that with all the network interface drivers they put out they will automatically enable the above setting and REMOVE the ability for you to change it. Therefore in order to gain the functionality to change the setting you have to use the manufacturer driver not the Dell OEM version.
I have been using this little workaround for at LEAST the last five odd years and have yet to have an issue with using teh Manufacturer Driver over the Dell Driver.
Hopefully this will help someone else out when they run into this frustration.
Stuart
I am very happy to say that Atlassian has been kind enough to offer full licenses to me for my development site Open Source Battlefield.
After setting myself up with JIRA, Confluence, Greenhopper and Crowd, I applied to the sales team at Atlassian for a license based on the nature of software that will be released on Open Source Battlefield. The team got back to me in a couple of days and I can now happily say that the new site is up and running with all the bells and whistles.
So thank you very much to Atlassian for the following products and supporting my open source development initiatives. So now I can get on to all the documentation and coding I have backlogged in my brain which I will be doing in due course.
Stuart 
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