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:

• Learning Perl, 5th Edition
• The Twitter Book, 1st Edition
• Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition

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.

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

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

WP-Recover v1.0 Stable

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.

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

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

The best program I have found thus far for managing blog advertising is the OpenX advertisement management platform.

When I began using OpenX I believe it was only available as a self-hosted version however in more recent times the Free OpenX Community Hosted version has been released. For those of you that are expecting less than 100 million ad impressions per month (which I am expecting to be 99.9999% of the people that will ever see or read this post) the OpenX Community Hosted version will probably suffice. Personally I host OpenX myself as I have a pet hate about being too reliant on other services for my site to operate as well as the fact I have always hosted it myself… but it is entirely up to you.

Essentially OpenX allows you to add numerous websites, advertisers, advertising campaings, and banners (a.k.a ads) into the system and manage the links between all of these. If you have a single blog it is probably somewhat more complex than you might need but when more than one blog comes into play I have found it to be of great assistance. OpenX manages all of these aspects in the background and in turn requires only a single section of code to be inserted for each place you wish an ad to display, the handy thing here is that when the ads change the code on your site does not have to.

OpenX Has Allowed Me To:

• Consolidate all my advertising across three blogs and two galleries into a single location.
• Manage advertising campaigns from various affiliate programs (including the ability to set expiration dates).
• See detailed statistics such as how often banners are displayed, and the effectiveness of each (such as click-through rates).
• Run specific campaigns at certain times. One example being the ability to override all other ads with a campaign that may be holiday related or related to a specific post on the blog (as an example).
• Rotate multiple ads across a single location on a site.
• Change advertisements without having to change the code on my site.

Some things to be aware of:

• In the case of the self hosted version, can take a bit of work to set up.
• It is designed as an enterprise solution so can be pretty much as flexible (complex) as you would like it to be.
• If you are using it across multiple sites (and using the self-hosted version) you may want an additional central domain to run it from. That way the installation is not dependent on any one of your domains so if one site gets shut down in future OpenX is still hosted on a separate domain.

So… that is just a quick and dirty on what I use for advertising management. If you have multiple sites I would highly recommend you at least take a look at OpenX and how it works as it may save you a lot of hassle and time later down the track.

I welcome your thoughts, what are your experiences… or do you have any questions you might like to ask?

Stuart

Before I continue, the task I have set out to do is install the following:

• Crowd – Atlassian’s Centralised User Management Software
• JIRA – Atlassian’s Bug Tracking and Project Management Software
• Greenhopper – Atlassian’s Agile Project Management Plugin for JIRA
• and finally Confluence – Atlassian’s Wiki Software

I began my journey with the Atlassian “Here Be Dragon’s Quest” and I found it was an excellent starter to assist in getting my head around Tomcat and how I could set up Confluence, JIRA, GreenHopper, and Crowd. However due to a memory constraints on the server I wanted to roll the three applications into a single Tomcat instance on my server. For the average Tomcat admin this may seem like a simple task however for me… a person that has never touched Tomcat with a 10 foot pole, it wasn’t as easy as I was hoping.

In steps Scott Herdman a good mate of mine from uni who has been helping me greatly with this little project of mine as he has administered Tomcat and the Atlassian products before. (Oh and for the record he was the one who told me I should document my experiences for others to hopefully learn from (and granted… he is right it IS why I have this blog) so therefore he gets this free plug).

Scott has been answering questions on and off for me and the circle of my learning has gone something along the lines of:

Problem –> Read Error Logs –> Search Google –> Re-Read the Atlassian Guides –> Search Google Some More –> Read the Error Logs Again –> Beg Scott for some assistance –> and back round to the beginning for the next problem.

After many MANY trials of getting the Atlassian Suite up and running in a single Tomcat instance I decided that they have made the recommendation for them to be installed separately for a reason. Unfortunately it appears that due to conflicts in the libraries that are included with each application in order to get them to all run on the one Tomcat server would require a lot of tweaking and careful petting LOL of which I don’t have the time for.

So if you are starting out, and have little experience with Tomcat, I hope that I can save you some time and effort straight up… don’t try to roll your own Tomcat, just use the ones included with each application it will save you a good few weeks.

So this is why I have really not been around much. After my exams are over next week I will be back more and have a few interesting ideas for things I can post about but for the moment I am off to play with my swanky new Atlassian Suite. For reference I got it set up as Open Source Battlefield Home (Confluence) and Open Source Battlefield JIRA. Crowd is installed as well but really has no use of being included here LOL.

If anyone else has experiences with Atlassian I would love to hear your thoughts.

Stuart

In the mean time if you wish to get the source code for cPanelSVNManager (which at this stage is the only active project on OSBattlefield) you can get the latest version from http://svn.opensourcebattlefield.com/cpanelsvnmanager/trunk/.

If you find any issues or have any questions please contact me via http://stuartryan.com/contact-me and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Cheers

Stuart

Summary:

Link to the Special –> Turnkey Q9550 Special
Turnkey Coupon Code: 20OFFJUNE2010
Expires: June 30th 2010

————————————————————————————————————-
Greetings,
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We are offering you an exclusive $20 discount off our Q9550 servers! These servers are already offered at the unbeatable price of $129/month, and include:

• Q9550 Quad Core 2.83 Ghz
• 8 GB RAM
• 250 GB SATA II Drive
• FREE Windows
• 4000 GB of Bandwidth

Head over to the website and use the code 20OFFJUNE2010 to take advantage of this limited-time offer.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
To your success,
Ryan McClung
sales@turnkeyinternet.net

* This offer is available for new purchases only, and expires June 30th. Limit: one per customer.
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Disclaimer: I chose to share this deal of my own free will, hey it is a good deal and I have a Q9550 with Turnkey Internet at the moment. This post does contain affiliate links back to the Turnkey Internet Site but this has in no way influenced the content of my post.

There were however a few things at CeBit 2010 that were a standout for me so I thought I would cover them in a little more detail:

Booth Babes

I thought I would begin with them just to try to catch your interest and hey… they deserve their own section

Eye Tracking Technology – Tobii Technology

It is not difficult to imagine my surprise when I walked up to a stand, started looking at their computer (with a pretty stupid look on my face I imagine, trying to figure out what on earth this computer was supposed to do). Low an behold after a very short while looking at the screen the item that I was looking at activated and a new menu popped up. To cut a long story short after calibrating the computer to my eyes I was able to type on the keyboard and on the screens you see below, have an interesting game of Naughts and Crosses (or Tic Tac Toe). Awesome idea, not 100% perfect but pretty accurate, $25,000 starting price might be a bit out of most peoples league though.

Remote Control Cars with Wii Controllers

We have all seen Remote Control Cars and they are quite a bit of good fun. However Miray Software have taken this remote control cars to the next level developing a kit (and software) that allows a remote control car to be controlled via the bluetooth compatible Wii Controllers using the accelerometer in the controller to control the steering of the remote control car. In the photos below you can also see a car driving behind the front one with a Wii controller mounted on the roof, this car was following the one in front using the Wii’s infra red sensor to track two sensors on the lead car… VERY COOL!

Portable Projectors

One interesting item I have been following for some time is the development of the portable mini projector. At CeBit I saw two interesting contenders one was Digislide and the other was Smartphone Hub & 3M. In the pictures below, the first two photos are from Digislide (white projector) and the rest are from Smartphone Hub & 3M’s booth (black projector). I liked the concept of Digislide’s snap on mount for a Wii however their projectors were darker than those of 3M. I have to say from the presentation I liked 3Ms far more and it was demonstrated to me to operate in a darkened room well at a 50 inch screen size.

Finally a heap of other random images from the day

I have to say I had a lot of fun and got a lot of photos so here are a few more from CeBit Sydney 2010
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