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After many years of using Nero, I’m finally fed up with it.

I have been using Nero 6 for some time now, and refuse to upgrade to Nero 7 because when I did use it, I did not like it and I felt it used up far too much hard disk space for such a simple task.

Over 200mb of space is used by a standard installation of Nero 7, there must be another option.

I looked back, and remembered changing from Easy CD Creator to Nero because of this very issue, Easy CD Creator was simply excessive for what I required, Nero was very simple and straight forward.

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One of the things I enjoy doing while I work is listening to music.

After a while of listening to the music stored on my computer and my good old CD collection I find myself getting bored of it and in search for something new.

The sure way of getting hold of new music is to go online and look for it.

My first port of call for free music is BBC Radio1, where you can “listen live” or even “listen again” meaning you can listen to any previous shows, this is good if you like a particular show or type of music. One of the main problems is that you are required to use RealPlayer (if you’re in the UK, you can use Windows Media Player as well) to listen to the radio streams.

Of course as you probably know, there are some limits with this, including the fact that the music is rather general, and sometimes the presenter can get annoying.

Another radio streaming option is WinAmp’s Shoutcast based radio stations. The situation is that nullsoft (the company that makes winamp) released a streaming server application that can be used for free. People all over the world use this to run their own online radio station, ultimately meaning that there is a lot of choice. Best of all you can listen using Winamp or your choice of media player.

If like me you are a fan of dance music (in particular trance), you’ll probably find that Digitally Imported is probably one of the best online radio stations out there. They offer everything from Trance right through to Euro Dance to Gabber.

If streaming audio using third party media players isn’t your thing then don’t worry, there’s still more options out there.

As part of a new generation of websites Pandora offers the ability to listen to your choice of music via an embedded flash player. The question I am sure you’ll be asking is “how does it work?” well basically Pandora has a huge collection of music, and a huge database of recommendations from users. Simply, you put in a song that you like and you are provided with a radio station that seamlessly plays music that other users who liked that song recommended. It works very well most of the time. One of the best features of this site is that if you don’t like the current track, you can skip onto the next track.
A similar concept is Last.fm which is probably a bit better as it appears to have more users, and allows for integration with your media player meaning it has better recommendations and feedback to utilise.

Yahoo! have recently jumped on this band wagon and released Yahoo! Music, which appears to offers a similar service to Pandora and Last.fm, you can expect this to be quite good.

Another site that I am forced to mention is of course MySpace, as you are probably aware MySpace was originally created so that bands could get better known, and bands have chosen to take advantage of this by offering their music via MySpace’s music player. This is a good option if you want to listen to a few tracks at a time by particular artists.

mp3.com has existed for many years now, far longer than MySpace, I remember downloading PPK – resurrection from this site years ago.

mercora.com is fairly new offering music search and internet radio network, I have yet to try this out to its full extent.
There are plenty more sites out there, this is just a short list of reliable sites that really work.

The Problem:

By default when you try and export emails from Outlook, there are NO dates.

I wanted to export emails in a certain folder from outlook so I could then import the data into a database such as MySQL for further manipulation.

When I tried to export the emails, outlook would NOT export any of the header details or even something as simple as the date/time.

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No doubt at some point you will have experienced this error at one point or another:

“Cannot delete Folder: It is being used by another person or program”

AKA:
“Cannot delete file: Access is denied”
“There has been a sharing violation.”
“The source or destination file may be in use.”
“The file is in use by another program or user.”
“Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.”

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Today I looked into social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking has been around for quite a while now, it’s a great way to bookmark your links, and share links with others.

Sharing your bookmarks

In the past people have asked me how to go about how to export their bookmarks from their browser.

First of all I would like to say that if you are currently using Internet Explorer, you need to stop, and download a copy of Firefox.

Once firefox is installed you will be asked to follow the setup. At this point you can import your settings (including your favorites) from Internet Explorer. I would recommend this.

Now you have all your bookmarks in one place you can begin to organise them into folders and section them off making it easy to browse them. You can do this by using the “Bookmark Manager”, which is located under the file name as Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks.

Once you are all organized and ready to go you can simply select File -> Export, which allows you to export all of your bookmarks to a HTML document, which you can then use to share with others to send via email or place on your website.

Its also useful if you like to clear out your bookmarks every so often but keep that as a backup.

It could be also be useful to know that there are website bookmarking services known as Social bookmarking available which allow you to access your bookmarks from anywhere in the world. Probably the most popular is del.icio.us, or perhaps Furl, check them out, they are free to use.

I also do recommend taking a look at Google Bookmarks and if you use Firefox, take a look at the GMarks plugin.

Making your blog more socialable

After spending some time looking for “social bookmarking” scripts for wordpress, I discovered that there really is just one real option out there.

• Sociable

All the details are on the site, you can easily add it onto your blog, and start being more sociable!

Other points of reference:

• Social Bookmarking at Wikipedia.org
• SEOmoz Web 2.0 Awards (click bookmarking)
• Digg.com – Probably the most popular social bookmarking site.

From a very early age I have been taught to write the English language correctly, I try and carry this trend over when I’m on the internet.

However, over the years a new language has developed based on English, which I’m sure everyone is familiar with these days, it’s commonly known as SMS language.

It appears that it originally came from bulletin boards and chatrooms particularly the ones that are popular on the AOL network and is, therefore, sometimes called AOL speak.

The main reason why this language came about over the years is that kids began sending text messages to each other via their mobile phones, however the problem lies when they wish to send a message longer than 160 characters, this would span over two or more messages, meaning more costs. As you can probably imagine, kids soon got the idea that you could type a message quicker by using this language and keep costs down by keeping your message within the 160 character limit.

Although this is probably information you already know, recently, questions of whether using this type of language should be acceptable or not have come up.

To begin with I agreed with the majority of people who said English is English, we should use it correctly. However I began to think about where English actually came from, and how evolution has turned English into the language it is today.

I do agree that when people write articles, reports and such it would be probably be best if true English was used, however who are we to say that this new language is not acceptable in today’s modern world, after all it is us who created the need for it, and it is us who encouraged it.

I think over the next few years we will be forced to accept and embrace this new language as part of every day life, as an extension of the English language, that is of course, unless it has already happened.

These days I find myself playing less and less games on my computer. This is mainly because I use my computer as a workstation, and playing games would interfere with that.

My workstation, like most runs Microsoft Windows – Why? – Because I always have done.

With the release of Windows Vista ever dawning, and the new Windows Genuine Advantage checks, there has never been a better time to find an alternative solution.

Over the past few years I have had more and more dealings with Linux, and I find myself asking the same question… “What is stopping me from migrating from Windows to Linux?”, I then find myself creating all kinds of excuses why I cannot.

I spent many months attempting to eliminate these excuses, by offering the solutions to your problems.

My reason for sharing this with you is to make it more of a realistic possibility for everyone, not just IT gurus or geeks, but anyone.

Why would I want to migrate?

There are many reasons why you would want to migrate, I’m sure that the reasons to migrate out weigh the petty reasons of why you are forced to stay on windows.

• Affordable – Not only is it that Windows costs a lot of money, but the additional software you require, such as Microsoft Office costs money too! Using Linux and Open Source software eliminates these costs, as they are freely available for download.
• Reliable – This is the reason why a large percentage of the worlds websites run on Linux based servers, and not windows.
• Secure – It’s not that it doesn’t have its fair share of issues, its that its not targetted in the same way as windows, meaning that there are a fraction of the problems.
• Compatible – Anything runs on Linux. Almost.
• Support – Linux has been very well received over the years, therefore there is much support behind any Linux related project.
• Future – Is it really a realistic idea that people will pay for an operating system when they can get one for free that can do exactly the same things. Certainly not, therefore this is the future.
• Choice – One of the best thing about Linux is that there is a vast choice of distributions that all offer their individual advantages. No longer are you forced to purchase an operating system from one distributor, you can simply download it free from your choice of distributors.
• Anti-monopolisation – Microsoft have had it too easy for too long, holding a large percentage of the workstation market, give them a reason to really get competitive.
• Privacy – By running windows and connecting to the internet, you are seriously compremising your privacy, Microsoft now checks your OS Version, System Manufacturer, System Model, Windows Product Key, the date, and most likely your IP address will be logged, as this is standard protocol when you access a server.
• Open Source – No more closed source non-sense like the software from Microsoft.

There are the reasons to migrate, and i’m sure you’ll agree, they are good enough reasons.

Usually at this point you will find excuses of why you can’t migrate, usually along the lines of “My [essential software] will not run on linux”.

I intend to look at each piece of “essential software” people use on Windows and offer either a way to run it on Linux or a compatible alternative.

We all have them, software we use on a day-to-day basis that we’d seriously miss if they no longer existed.

My essential software is as follows:

• Microsoft Outlook (NOT Outlook Express) – This offers Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes and Journal, I mainly use Mail, Calendar and Contacts.
• mIRC – An internet relay chat client that is second to none, not because of its interface, but because of its flexable scripting ability, its very useful to create an automated function to achieve a certain repetitive task. It also obviously allows me to chat to certain people and and within communities.
• Winamp – There’s nothing better than streaming di.fm or playing mp3s from my vast collection of music.
• Mozilla Firefox – Possibily the best browser around at the moment.
• Outlook Express – A very simple mail client and newsgroup reader, I personally don’t use outlook express, as I use Outlook, but I imagine the usenet part is essential to some people.
• Mozilla Thunderbiard – A reasonable alternative to Outlook Express.
• FileZilla FTP Client – A rather good open source ftp client, an absolute must for uploading and downloading to/from an FTP server.
• EditPlus – A really useful text editor, so much better than Notepad.
• MSN/Live Messenger – I need to beable to communicate with my mates.
• RealVNC – Important peice of software to allow me to access my PC from anywhere, mainly for access to mIRC and Outlook, but mainly because i’m very often out and about.
• Photoshop – I like to have a dabble sometimes…
• Azureus – Bit Torrents are big thing these days, you’re gonna need a good bit torrent client.
• Microsoft Word – Everyone needs a good word processor, after all, this is why computers were made.
• Microsoft Excel – Spreadsheets are very useful for displaying tabular data, and creating graphs.
• Microsoft Access – I know that often people use access for their database systems, although I don’t use it myself, I know its very important to some people.
• Nero – A great peice of software for making backups, burning images and duplication.
• PowerDVD – Its nice to beable to play DVD’s on your PC, especially when your PC monitor is bigger than your TV
• Audiograbber – So when I do actually buy a Music CD I like to convert it into mp3s so I can listen to it without the CD in my drive.
• Dreamweaver – Its not that important, but its useful sometimes to have a WYSIWYG HTML editor or web authoring software.
• Putty – The ability to connect to a server via SSH is vital as a server administrator.
• X-Lite – A peice of SIP Voice Over IP software, very useful in this day and age, especially when people are calling you.
• Calculator – I don’t physically have a working one, a software one is very useful.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader – An important peice of software for reading PDF files.
• Norton Antivirus – I left Mcafee many years ago for Norton, we all need a way to stop those little critters!
• Kerio Personal Firewall – Godda block those unwanted connections.
• Winzip and Winrar – Having some kind of compression and more importantly decompression utility is important.
• Apache – I actually run a local copy of Apache with PHP, usually as part of XAMPP for local development purposes and remote file access.
• File and Printer Sharing – Although its actually part of windows, i’d seriously miss the ability to access files across my network.

I got this far, my next step was to look at Linux alternatives to this software, however this is where my migration plan breaks down, as I lack research on a solution to Microsoft Outlook in Linux.

I spent a long time today searching for a PHP based portal script either for a small community website or an ISP.

What I am looking for as a small community is a basic version of what thisisstaffordshire.co.uk offers or similar.

What I am looking for in an ISP community website is a basic version to what orange.co.uk (formerly wanadoo/freeserve) offers or similar.

My theory was that something like this would exist already, after all there’s no point re-inventing the wheel, or at the very least I would be getting a feel for what was already out there.

So I began looking in all the normal places, starting with sourceforge.net, where I found nothing decent. I then began looking on hotscripts.com where there is an entire directory just for PHP portals.

I soon discovered that the majority were either PHP-Nuke based or PHP-Nuke like, which is NOT what I am looking for, others were basically a CMS package, not a portal.

Eventually I came across a portal called Creative Community Portal, which looks like it would be perfect for the small community website so I take a look. I’m taking to a website called Creative Software. They are offering this script at $79.99, however I soon realised that these guys aren’t the best at web design, yet it strikes me as odd that they have quite a tidy portal script on offer, my assumption was that they had taken it from somewhere else, and so my research begins.

I began by trying to find other sites that use the same engine by searching for the names of the images, and common strings.

I find the following websites:

• http://www.spioneers.org/Default.php
• http://www.omeopatiadirisonanza.it/Default.asp
• http://www.4so9.com/cauca/default.php
• http://www.seniorschoice.com/kelowna/Default.php
• http://www.mcintyreskiarea.com/Default.asp
• http://www.clubgs.org/Default.asp
• http://www.prodavisro.com/icoane_site/Default.asp
• http://www.yuccavalley.com/genealogy/Default.asp
• http://www.rincenatiarna.com/members/AccessDenied.cfm
• http://www.mntalent.com/Default.asp
• http://sleeping.mine.nu/parisian.org/Default.php
• http://www.pataleo.com/Default.php
• http://www.watersport.net/portal/Default.asp

The first thing you should notice is that they all appear to be in different programming languages, and none of them use the same design as the one I found originally, yet they are all closely matched. I figure there must be some kind of third party code generating software being used.

So I take a look at the HTML code of some of the sites.

Its not long before I find this:

So I decide to take a look at YesSoftware CodeCharge v3.0.1.6, and I believe I am onto a winner as I find that an example script bundled with the software is infact a portal! And as if that wasn’t enough I found mention on their forums of an online portal which can be downloaded from gotocode.com for free.

The problem I found is that none of these look anything like the sites above, let alone the site I found originally. The search continues.

I go back to looking for similar sites.

Its not long before I find this: http://www.uksamba.org/portal/Default.php

On this site I find more details, including a user guide, license agreement, and more importantly the name of the company that made it, UltraApps. However, when I visit their website, there’s no mention of this application. Never fear though, there’s always the web archive.

The rabbit hole deepens.

I soon find myself on their old website, via the web archive looking at downloading their portal script, there it is, you can download it for free. I download the PHP version and have a play around with this for quite some time. I find two problems, firstly this does not offer all the features that the Creative Software version does, and secondly it doesn’t appear to login for some strange reason.

I go back to the UltraApps web archive, and discover there is another version, which is the Portal Enhanced Edition, which is NOT free, you must purchase this at a price of $50. I figure I have come to the end of the road with this as without paying somebody some money I’m not getting it for free, and as such UltraApps don’t appear to offer it any longer, and Creative Software doesn’t actually have the right to be selling it in the first place.

So as I begin to close down my windows, I notice something strange on the Creative Software “demo” site, the title says: “My USA City Guide”, this strikes me as odd, as their demo is a UK version.

After a quick search I find this demo, which appears to owned by the creators of the style/theme, yet appear to be using the UltraApps code.

I gave this some thought, and I soon realise that this begs some questions:

• Why does UltraApps no longer offer their portal?
• Is there an issue with selling applications produced by YesSoftware Code Charge?
• Does the USA City Guide have the rights to resell the UltraApps product?
• Does Creative Software have the right to resell the USA City Guide product?

Further more I found that the Creative Community script had some major vulnerabilities.

And after all that I have no decent portal script for a basic small community website.

The only half decent thing I found was called phpFoX, and by a look at the demo, its simply a clone of MySpace, which is NOT what i’m looking for. Despite the fact that it’s expensive.

For the past few weeks I have been mostly working on eTicket.

eTicket is an open source Support Ticket System based on osTicket.

The reason eTicket exists is because no further development has occurred on osTicket since 2005, and unfortunately there were some major flaws found in osTicket.

Over time, many users of osTicket reported many of the known bugs onto the osTicket Forums, this made it very easy to figure out what the problems were and how to overcome them.

I myself had discovered some issues with osTicket and already coded some solutions. With this in mind I decided to take on osTicket as my own, and add the appropriate fixes and modifications.

There were some restrictions with working on eTicket from osTicket, this was the database structure. This is due to the fact that I understood that one of the most important things to users was that they would want to upgrade from osTicket to eTicket, the easiest way of achieving this was to keep the database structure the same and simply changing the files.

eTicket is now at the point where there are no known problems or bugs, the only issues that remain are features that require changes to the database structure (such as additional tables).

I hope to continue working on eTicket indefinitely.

I get asked quite often if I know how to get a mobile phone unlocked, so this is my experience…

I was given a Motorola V525 as the original owner had an upgrade. They are on the vodafone network, and I am on O2.

When I put an O2 simcard in the phone it asked me to “Enter Subsidy Password” (other phones may say “Enter Special Code”), I tried a few random numbers (probably about 15 by the time I had finished), and the phone locked up. Displaying the following: “Contact Service Provider”, and it will not go away.

However, there is a solution I found at: http://www.gsm-unlock.com/unlock/unlock-motorola.html

Q: I keep getting the following prompt on my Motorola after I insert another sim card “Contact Service Provider” ?
A: That means wrong unlock code has been entered already!
(This message appears after many wrong subsidy or special code entry)
Power on phone and wait between 30 min to 8 hours till Enter Subsidy or Special Code
message appear again! (Please note that phone should be powered on during this time).

I left it turned on, and charging over night, and came to it the following day, it asked me for the unlock code.

After reading this forum I discovered that you CANNOT unlock the Razr V3, or V525 or any other Motorola simply by providing someone with your IMEI code.

As far as I can see there are only THREE ways around this:
1. You need a datacable (~$10) and MotoPhoenix ($25) — It seems this guy here has achieved it using a datacable and some choice software…
2. Contact your phone carrier/operator or service provide (O2, Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile, etc) and ask them for the unlock code, like this guy did.

They will ask you for the following details:

Mobile Telephone Number:
Customer Account Number:
Full Name:
Full Address:
Date of Birth:

Make:
Model:
IMEI:

3. The third way involves using buy methods, such as buying from ebay, gsm-unlock.com or fonefunshop.co.uk, but as these methods are completly untested (by me), and they don’t tell you how it works, I wouldn’t advise them.

I used method 2, and after a few emails back and forth, and a phone call from the previous owner, I was provided with 2 unlock codes and told that one of them would work.

I have since then used the same method again with Vodafone ([email protected]) for a Motorola V3X, this time I simply put a request for the unlock code, and provided them with the details (as above), within 3 hours I had a reply from them, as follows:

NETWORK UNLOCK CODE

Good Afternoon Mr. XXX,

Thank you for your email to Vodafone about the network unlock code (NUC) you requested. I’ll be happy to assist. Your NUC is as follows:

XXXXXXXX

 

I hope this information is of use. Please contact me if you require any further assistance.

 

Best wishes,

Neil Breeze
Vodafone Customer Services

This worked no problems, so I sent an email back to them congratulating them on their quick response, which makes a change.

http://www.hm2k.org/news/1139531105.html