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Spark Computing

Here is a simple Word Press theme created for Shrewsbury Badminton Club.

Club night:

Every Monday 7-10 at Shrewsbury High School (town wall). More info…

CGH Electrical - A little electrician company in Telford, Shropshire. It also covers Staffordshire. It provides these services

http://www.cghelectrical.co.uk

• Domestic
• Agricultral
• Periodic Testing
• Lighting
• Alarms

CInCH - A Shropshire LINk Charity organization for Community Involvement in Care and Health is live.

http://www.cinch.org.uk

People living in Shropshire are encouraged to take part in CInCH to help to improve community Care and Health.

Skype is doing that from start. But for MSN, if you login from another device, you would be forced to logout from the first device.

Now MSN live supports login from multiple devices. This is a very nice feature as many people have PC/Laptop/Smart Phones. The chat can be seen in more than one place and thus the chatting history can be saved into multiple locations (unless you exit MSN from one of your devices)

Not all software that works on Windows XP/Vista will work on Windows 7. Mounting ISO files can be difficult if you’ve been using Daemon Tools to do it so far. There is an updated version of Daemon tool available but it is not official. You need to search bittorrent for with.

Currently we have found two utilities that support windows 7.

http://www.poweriso.com/download.htm

and

http://www.winmount.com

There are many reports on the “Cannot copy files required for installation error” (with error code 0x80070017). There are many reasons:

1. When you burn the ISO image to a DVD, you need to choose the lowest speed and verify it after burn.

2. Do a memory test. You can get a tool from
http://www.memtest.org/
Any errors reported need to be ironed out.

3. Reload your BIOS settings to default and make sure you are not aggresive to overclock your system.
Compared to Linux or XP, Windows 7 is very poor in terms of overclocking. We had a over-locked system running Linux for a couple of years but Windows 7 freezes from time to time so we have to undone the overclocking.

You can also disable things you do not need (such as onbard wifi for a desktop, firewire etc..)

Vim is an excellent text editor that can do amazing stuffs.

When the web server is configured to treat html as php file, the vim editor needs to configured to recognize all the php functions within the html. To do that,

Code:

to open the configure file.

and add one file to the bottom

Code:

The latest vim has syntax turned on automatically anyway. If not, add this line to your config file

Code:

We just have a task to extract all email addresses from a word document text file containing more than 800 pages. The size of the doc file is 250M. But the size does not matter. To extract the email address, we need to

1. convert the .docx file into a plain text file.

2. transfer the text file to a Linux machine

3. use grep to extract the email address and save result.
grep -E -o --color "\b[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\b" email_list.txt > output.txt

This code is obtained from http://enure.net

4. Use Excel to open the text file and save it as a workbook.

5. Do the mailshot using the Excel file

Shopping online is becoming more and more popular.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2372577.stm

There are many price comparison websites to help online shoppers to save money. The most famous one is moneysupermarket.

One of my customers has a website called poundpig.com
http://www.poundpig.com

Members of the website can get cash back if they shop via the website. Membership is free. On registeration you will get £2.50 of credit immediately. So give it a try!

and if you refer a friend to the poundpig.com site, you will get £7.00

Flash can be very nice to enhance the usability and aesthetic of the web site. A graphic designer might be very keen to get creative and design his/her own flash. For a programmer, he would like something that can be controlled by XML without getting his hands dirty to write action scripts. XML itself can be generated using any server side script such as PHP/Python/Perl/Ruby/ASP.

Here you can find a lot of XML driven flash:
http://www.flashcomponents.net/

and here a few show cases
http://www.flashxml.net/

Generating graph from data collected on the internet and shows it on the web can be very useful.
I found 2 ways to create data graph/chart on the fly:

1. Use the google api
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/basics.html

To create a simple pie chart, all you need is one line of html

XML:

And you will have

2. Use php + GD Library
to create the same chart you need the following codes. Codes are based on

http://www.talkphp.com/advanced-php-programming/2508-3d-pie-charts-php-gd.html

with small changes

PHP:

If you need to know more about using GD Lib to create graph on the web, please visit a tutorial at

http://php.about.com/od/advancedphp/ss/gd_library_6.htm

You need to be careful when you are using server side script to generate graph as it is CPU intensive.

I don’t anyone of you know why this could happen:

A Windows SBS 2003 would disconnect a remote desktop session when it starts its backup. The default windows backup verifies the backup copy and it takes forever. I have to edit the executive file to stop the verification following this guide:

http://www.slickit.ca/2009/05/turn-verify-off-sbs-2003-backup.html

This allows me to re-schedual backup to starts later at night so people can do their work at the early evenings. But this just avoids the problem.

Please let me know if you any idea …

If you are a web design agent and looking for good quality web script programmer, please feel free to contact us. We provide programming service for web design agents in UK.

We have good experience in writing CMS, e-commerce and web-based application in PHP/Mysql, Javascript (Ajax). If you have questions in technical issues, please also feel free to ask.

WE will provide a strong portfolio if required.

Have a good day!

I have been using the a javascript from

http://www.javascript-coder.com/html-form/javascript-form-validation.phtml

for awhile and I totally like it. It’s very easy to use in order to validate the web form. What’s more, it is very easy to extend.

Here is how to extend the script so that it can find out if a user input the right confirm email address or not.

Code:

Hello people, here is a water cooler company in Shropshire

Wenlock Water coolers » .

You can buy or rent bottled/mains water coolers online.

Here is a handy function for forcing a download a file in any folder on the server that is readable by your php script.

PHP:

For example, if you have a image button like

Code:

When the form is submitted via POST. there is nothing for $_POST[’Submit’]. However, you will have $_POST[’Submit_x’] and $_POST[’Submit_y’] that records the x and y coordinates of the click.

You can not do

Code:

that’s because a user might press the Enter key to submit the form. In this case, $_POST[’Submit_x’] and $_POST[’Submit_y’] are both 0!!

A convenient solution is to put a hidden field such as

Code:

within the form. Then in your php code

Code:

Suhosin is a “hardened php” project which can improve security of a web server running php script. If you are having some troubles running some scripts after you’ve installed, you will have to change some of the configuration values. I learned that when one customer has a very large html form to submit data using POST. However, only part of the form data can be accessed via the $_POST variable.

One way to sort it out is to put

Code:

in the account’s php.ini file.

Another way is to put

Code:

in your .htaccess file. This only works if your administrator put

Code:

in the global php.ini file.

– Ben

Warwickwright.com is specialised in retirement planning, pensions, investments, life insurance and annuity. Check it out more on their website.

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In a move to basically outflank the EU antitrust investigation, Microsoft has announced that all version of Windows 7 shipped in Europe will not include Internet Explorer 8 by default.

This is reminiscent of the Windows XP N editions, which did not include Windows Media Player, but the difference here is that Microsoft will not ship versions of Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8 in Europe.

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AFP is an Independent Mortgage Adviser in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. The director, Gary Harper, has excellent reputation in Shrewsbury dealing with Mortgages, Life insurance and re-mortgages. The website features a free mortgage calculator.

Please check out more at AFP Shrewsbury Mortgages & Protection.