Other « James Tombs

Jul201016

How not to create a registration/login process – T-mobile UK

I have just come across a great example of how not to deal with users logging in or registering for a site with T-Mobile (UK).

I am on my second phone with them and had an account with them for the original phone, so I tried logging in using my username which I had in an email and my password. It wasn’t having it.

So I tried the forgotten password route. This asked for my mobile number and my username. Entered my original number and username. Nope. Entered my new number and username. Nope.

So I tried the forgotten username + password route. This asks for your name, phone number and email. I entered all this information using my original phone number. Nope. Tried again with my new phone number. Nope.

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Jun201025

New Hosting

If you are seeing this post, it means you are being served through the new hosting from DamnVPS soon to be ThrustVPS.

They offer very good VPS packages which are very fast for a very good price and allow a lot of customisation with some excellent backend configuration options.

May201024

Finding a string in any file with a subdirectory in linux

Nothing new or major but something that I keep forgetting.

find . -exec grep -l "string to find" {} \;

This will search all subdirectories from the current directory for the “string to find”.

Feb200909

www.i-wax.co.uk – Home of valeting and detailing good offers

About www.i-wax.co.uk

www.i-wax.co.uk was founded in January 2009 as a place for consumers to freely share deals for valeting and detailing products while saving you and others money. The purpose of the site is to escape from the marketing messages and ads and collate all the best that the web has to offer and get us genuine deals.

Self-promotion

The basis of the site is that it is for best deals from other people who don’t stand to gain. But merchants who are self-promoting are also welcome as long as it’s a genuine deal where the consumers will save £££’s.(items may be removed without notice)

Anyone can share, public or trade

www.i-wax.co.uk has no-registration and open to everyone. The more users we have sharing and contributing their savings on detailing and valeting equipment, the more everyone gains! You can help build this community by sharing deals you’ve found.

The site is displaying offers on:

Meguiars, Pinnacle, polish, glaze, wax, Poorboys, Menzerna, Sonus, Swissol, Swizol, Zymol, pakshak, Chemical Guys, Collinite, Einszett, Gliptone, P21s, Sonus, Clearkote, Harley wax, Klasse, Mothers, Autoglym, Belgom, Wheelwax, Renovo, Eurow, Muc off, 3m, Bilt Hamber, Smartwax, Wolfgang, Four star, Optimum, Dp, 303, Lexol, Corbra, Oxo, Blackfire, Lake Country, Jeffs Werkstatt, Zaino, Concept chemicals, Dominique France Concours, Visomax, Duragloss, Prima, Hosecoil, Car cleaning, Carwash, Shampoo, Victoria wax and many more.

All can be seen at www.i-wax.co.uk.

wwwiwaxcoukfe9

Feb200908

Free access…is it always free?

Something should be thought through before being put online.

This was on a webcam site from someone who added me on Twitter.

Dec200811

HTPC software configuration using MediaPortal

For my HTPC, I now have configured most things up, so it is all working just like it should be. It took a few OS reinstalls to get it exactly where I wanted it, but I more or less have it, just have to sort out Blu-ray & HDDVD playback sorted first.

Here is a list of what I was aiming for:

Be able to play backed up DVD, Blu-ray & HDDVD videos in either .avi, .mkv (H.264) or WMV
Central bit of software to cover everything
Able to play off network shares
Be able to play back Blu-ray and HDDVD easily

For my software I am using the following:

Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate Edition
MediaPortal v1.0 (with TVSeries 2.0 plugin and Monochrome 2.2 skin)
iMon 7.2

I did try using Ubuntu over Vista but found that Blu-ray support was a bit limited in the way you basically had to manually dump each film on to the harddrive stripping out the DRM.

So I ended up using Vista which has been very reliable. I have turned off Aero to give a small performance increase in playing 1080p MKV files and have disabled UAC for the obvious reason; it’s annoying.

Although the integrated Windows Media Centre that comes with Windows Vista is good, it can be a bit of a chore to get set up correctly to play any video format. So I am using MediaPortal which is a free bit of software which is simply fantastic.

I followed this guide from ProjectHTPC on setting up MediaPortal which is an easy to understand guide and tells you exactly what you need to know.

I then followed this guide on getting the Monochrome skin on Media Portal and getting the sound through to my sound system playing proper DTS. Following on from that guide, I came across a plugin for MediaPortal called TVSeries. It’s fantasic. I followed this guide and have all my TV series on my computer set up with fan art, which has now given me an excuse to get all my box sets on to the harddrive to have them as easy to access as possible.

Media Portal plays off network shares which has ticked off number 3 and allows me to continue on my search to get a NAS set up with a lot of storage to store all my DVDs etc on.

The only problem I still have to overcome is getting Blu-ray and HDDVD to play through MediaPortal properly, which should be OK once I get around to getting PowerDVD 7 or hacking PowerDVD 8 which removed any trace of HDDVD.

iMon has been a pain though, my case came with a CD with it on which I have now misplaced while moving house and have found myself downloading the latest version off the SoundGraph website extremely slowly.

Oct200825

AVG and OpenDNS bring up some bad suggestions on searches

On a computer with IE7 and the AVG toolbar I tried to go to mail.google.co.uk, which it turns out doesn’t exist. So as no DNS record is found, the address is sent off to Yahoo. AVGs partner, then it gives some suggested results of what I may be looking for, but the results it gave certainly weren’t child friendly.

My first thoughts, were that, that was very wrong from Yahoo. So I tried it on another PC with Chrome and had been set up to use OpenDNS as the ISP’s DNS kept going down and having problems.

Quite clearly not a one off on the AVG results. The fact that they are so similar, either AVG toolbar uses Google for the search recommendations and Yahoo for the actual search feature or some SEO sites are spamming the keywords and getting some recommended words to the top of all search engines.

Either way it is inappropriate and you wouldn’t expect this, least of all when searching for something to do with Google itself. Perhaps they better put a redirect in for mail.google.co.uk to mail.google.com.

Oct200823