After a bit of reading and checking out other pages on there it seemed like a good idea to change the main images we use. You can use an image up to 200px by 600px and it makes sense to make the most of this. this is the one I came up with, I think it does the job quite well. Bear in mind that you need to be able to make your icon from this image, I left a lot of orange space around the top to make this easier.

Next was to tidy up the menu on the left, it was a bit of a mess and didn’t really have any consistency. I got rid the FBML stuff that was on there as it was a bit rubbish and set about creating my own pages.

FBML is being deprecated as of1st June 2012, so it’s not worth going down that route. Writing your own php pages (which will appear in iframes) allows you to create far more powerful applications.

First, download a copy of the Facebook PHP SDK from here. It’s pretty well documented and I would recommend having a little play with it. The iframe width is 520px, always, so set you out div to that size and you can’t go too far wrong.

You will need to be logged in to facebook under your individual account and you can then navigate to https://developers.facebook.com/apps where you can create you new app (this new ‘app’ will basically be a menu item on your page, well, strictly speaking it will contain the link(s) to the php page(s) which you will store on your server.

Give your app a name (you can change what will appear as the ‘page tab name’ later on) and then give it a nice icon. If you are struggling, you can always check out Google images and search by the specific size of 16px by 16px.

It’s worth noting that your server needs an SSL certificate as Facebook requires both http and https versions of your pages.

If you’ve followed any other guides (like me), you’ll probably get as far as the last step, which is adding the app to your page menu. That magic link no longer exists, but fear not, you can get around that.

When you create your app you will get an ‘App ID’ and you will know the url that the iframe is pointing to. Armed with these 2 pieces of information, create the following URL:

https://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=[MY APP ID]&display=popup&next=[MY APP URL]

replace [MY APP ID] and [MY APP URL] and then navigate to it. you can then select which page you cant to add the app to, simple.

The hardest part is deciding what apps (tabs) to make, I would recommend having a look around and see what works for others.

There is some nice php code here which allows you display different content in your iframe page, depending on whether a user have liked your page or not. this means you can hide content from users until they have liked you, thus driving up the number of likes you get, hopefully.

I ended up writing quite a few apps, all which are menu items on our corporate Facebook page. I wrote:

• About us
• Contact us
• Testimonials
• Videos
• Games (which can only be played if the user has liked us)

I also created a ‘Like Dore’ page, which I’ve set as the default landing page. This page contains an image, persuading users to like us. If they already like us, the page automatically forwards them to our wall.

if ($like_status) {
	?>
	<script type="text/javascript">top.window.location = 'https://www.facebook.com/doreuk?sk=wall'; </script>
	<?php
}
else {

All the pages have been styled using CSS and the corporate colour scheme and I've used quite a bit of JQuery to pimp it up.

All in all, our Facebook page is looking a whole lot sharper now, likes are up and hopefully if we keep the content fresh, this will continue to increase.

Check out our Facebook page here, and don't forget to click like!

My initial investigation saw me play with the IIS Log Analyzer but this seemed to be far too manual a process for my liking, so I then set about looking to script the import of the log files into SQL, but this seemed over the top, I was sure there was a better solution than this ‘hack’.

I next came across this article which allowed logging to SQL straight from any IIS site by making a few simple changes. Basically you add the sqlLogginModule.cs file to the App_Code folder in your site and then modify the web.config to enable this module. All in all that worked pretty well, but I did run into a few issues when dealing with pre-compiled applications. Whilst searching for an answer to that issue, I then came across the solution I am sill using now.

The article here explains how to setup IIS SQL Logging using an ODBC connection. The article is very straight forward and you can’t really go too far wrong. Make sure that you have Custom Logging and ODBC Logging installed.

Once ODBC connection has been created and the applicationHost.config has been modified with the ODBC connection details, I can then easily start tracking a site by running:

appcmd set sites “My Website Name” -logFile.logFormat:Custom -logFile.customLogPluginClsid:{FF16065B-DE82-11CF-BC0A-00AA006111E0}

(appcmd can be found in ‘C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv’ for reference)

Obviously the down side to this is the overhead that the SQL logging will put on the server. I’m yet to notice any performance decrease, but will obviously be keeping an eye on this and the space used by this database. Down the line I might look at scripts to clean out or archive old data, we’ll see how it goes.

Now that everything is being logged to a SQL database, all that left to do is write the front end (I’ll most probably use .net for this as it makes quite light work of this sort of thing) so that I can make some use of all this data. Watch this space.

Anyway, as with most things like home insurance and that, it’s easier to renew, but you can normally save some money by shopping around. As I had some free time, I opted for the latter.

After a wee bit of searching, I came across this article which mentioned www.certificatesforexchange.com. Now, bearing in mind that the Digicert UCC renewal price was $328 (£214 in today’s money) for 1 year. In comparision, www.certificatesforexchange.com charged me $71.99 (£47), so quite a saving to be made, £167 to be exact.

From the looks of the interface, there are strong links with GoDaddy, who I have had issues with in the past, and with GoDaddy unable to decide where they stand over the whole SOPA/PIPA issue lately, they are not top of my list. But, money talks, and so I decided to give it a go. So far so good too, I can’t say I’ve ran into any problems. Once I verified all my domains, I installed the certificate and it’s been working happily ever since.

It’s worth noting, that you can easily create the CSR here they copy that into your Exchange Management Shell to create the certificate request, which you can then pop into the form at www.certificatesforexchange.com.

PS, I wrote a previous blog post about the Exchange PowerShell commands, you can find that here.

The solution was a monitoring page that checked all the connections strings in the web.config file for each site. PRTG could then check this page and monitor it for keywords. In my case it checks that it must contain the word ‘complete’, so the page has loaded fully, and must not contain the word ‘failed’, one or more of the connection strings has an error.

I setup a virtual directory within all the sites (/monitoring/) and they all then pointed to the .aspx page that i put in a single location. This meant it was easier to update down the line. Because it was a virtual directory, it picked up the web.config of the site that was calling it.

Thanks to PizzaBoy for the initial code:

<%@ Import Namespace="System" %>
<%@ Page Language="c#" Theme="" %>

<script runat="server">
  public void CheckConnectionStrings()
  {
    Response.Write("<h2>Checking all web.config connection strings:</h2>");
    Response.Write("<ul>");

          foreach (ConnectionStringSettings item in ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings)
        {
            if(item.Name != "LocalSqlServer")
            {
                using (System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection conn = new System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection(item.ConnectionString))
                {
                    try
                    {
                        conn.Open();
                        conn.Close();
                        Response.Write("<li class='passed'>"+item.Name+": Passed</li>");
                    }
                    catch (Exception Ex)
                    {
                        Response.Write("<li class='failed'>"+item.Name+": Failed</li>");
                    }

                }
            }

        }
        foreach (string item in ConfigurationManager.AppSettings)
        {

            if(item.Contains("ConnectionInfo"))
            {
                using (System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection conn = new System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[item]))
                {
                    try
                    {
                        conn.Open();
                        conn.Close();
                        Response.Write("<li class='passed'>"+item+": Passed</li>");
                    }
                    catch (Exception Ex)
                    {
                        Response.Write("<li class='failed'>"+item+": Failed</li>");
                    }

                }
            }

        }
    Response.Write("</ul>");
    Response.Write("<h3>Test complete.</h3>");
  }

</script>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" />
    <title>Dore Database Monitoring</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="monitoring">
<h1>Dore Database Monitoring</h1>

        <% CheckConnectionStrings(); %>
</div>
</body>
</html>

I did some basic styling, so errors were in red etc and so it was nice to view on my phone.

body
{
background-color:#d4d4d4;
}

h1
{
color:#ff7300;
text-align:center;
font-size:200%;
}

h2
{
color:#000;.
font-size:150%;
}

h3
{
text-align:center;
color:#000;
font-size:100%;
}

li.passed{
 color:#339900;
}

li.failed{
 color:#ff0000;
}

#monitoring{
	background-color:#fff;
	-moz-border-radius: 15px 15px 15px 15px;
	-web-kit-border-radius: 15px 15px 15px 15px;
	-khtml-border-radius: 15px 15px 15px 15px;
	border-radius: 15px 15px 15px 15px;
	padding: 20px;
	margin: auto;
	width:600px;
	border:2px solid #ff7300;
}

The virtual directory also had its own web.config to override ASP.net authorization rules for the sites and also lock access down to the IP address of my monitoring server.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <authorization>
            <allow users="*" />
        </authorization>
    </system.web>
</configuration>

Thats it really. Within PRTG I set it to monitor all the pages and check for the specific keywords. If anything fails, I’ll know about it.

And because it automatically checks all the connection strings in the web.config, it’s future proof too, bingo.

To get as much reporting as possible, I changed a few options:

• In php.ini, set display_errors to ON
• In Moodle set Debug ADOdb to ON (Debug ADOdb connection to external database – use when getting empty page during login. Not suitable for production sites.)

Once this was changed it became apparent that MSSQL was the issue, from there I checked phpinfo(); to find it hadn’t loaded, and that in turn led me to Google when I realised I wasn’t going to be easy to make this work. I read a few blogs on other people getting this working, with self-compiled versions of php_mssql but I couldn’t get this working myself and so looked for other options.

I initially went down the route of installing php_sqlsrv, which I got working fairly easily, only to find that there was no easy way to then select this from within Moodle.

After that, I decided to create an ODBC connection to MSSQL and then in Moodle use the ODBC connection for user authentication. This was fairly straight forward. The first thing to note is that there are both 32 and 64 bit versions of the ODBC Data Source Manager. I initially used the standard link from admin tools, which turned out to be the 64bit option. From Moodle I then entered the following database details:

• Host: DSN Name
• Database: odbc_mssql
• Use Sybase quotes: Yes
• DB Name:
• DB User: SQL Username
• Password: SQL Password
• Table: [Linkedserver].Database.dbo.vw_VIEW
• Username field: username
• Password field: password
• Password format: MD5 hash
• External db encoding: utf-8
• SQL setup command
• Debug ADOdb: No (Yes while testing)
• Password-change URL:

This all seemed OK, but I kept getting the error:

The specified DSN contains an architecture mismatch between the Driver and Application

A bit Googling took me here which revealed that I should be using the 32bit version of the ODBC Data Source Manager. Once I ran it in 32bit mode it all worked perfectly, and I didn’t have to muck around rewriting the PHP code to use SQLSRV.

After experimenting with NET USE, SUBST and various other solutions, I came across MKLINK.

The syntax is pretty straight forward:

C:\>mklink
Creates a symbolic link.

MKLINK [[/D] | [/H] | [/J]] Link Target

        /D      Creates a directory symbolic link.  Default is a file
                symbolic link.
        /H      Creates a hard link instead of a symbolic link.
        /J      Creates a Directory Junction.
        Link    specifies the new symbolic link name.
        Target  specifies the path (relative or absolute) that the new link
                refers to.

For example:

MKLINK /D “VirtualFolderName” “\\ServerName\ShareFolderName”

Wherever you run that command, it will create the directory “VirtualFolderName” and contain all the files in the network share. Tidy.

Management decided the other day that they would like recent news items to be displayed in the signatures too, so I went about modifying the script.

I wanted management to be able to modify the news feed item without needing to contact me, so opted for a simple text file stored on a network share in the office.

\\Server\Folder\newsitem.txt

BBC: Bean bag exercises help man deal with dyslexia|http://bbc.in/toXgNC

(I use bit.ly to create the short links, I can then also monitor the traffic generated from this from the chrome bit.ly plugin)

As it stands it’s just one news item, but I plan to increase this so in future it will pull multiple stories. The title and link are separated by a vertical bar on the same line.

Anyway, this is the modified code which I inserted towards the top of the script

‘Get news story from flat file      

                Const ForReading = 1

                Set objFSO = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

                Set objTextFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile _

                                (“n:\news\emailnews.txt”, ForReading)

                Do Until objTextFile.AtEndOfStream

                                strNextLine = objTextFile.Readline

                                arrServiceList = Split(strNextLine , “,”)

                                ‘Wscript.Echo arrServiceList(0)

                Loop

                strNewsarray = split(arrServiceList(0),”|”)

                ‘New Story Title

                strNewsStoryTitle = strNewsarray(0)

                ‘New Story Link

                strNewsStoryLink = strNewsarray(1)

It basically opens the file, stick the content into an array then loops through this array, splits the news from the link and then puts these items against the variables. Hopefully soon I’ll finish the code so it can support multiple stories.

Then later in the script the following code runs:

‘check if there is any news

if (strNewsStoryTitle <> “”) then

                ‘double line break

                objSelection.TypeParagraph()

                objSelection.TypeParagraph()

                ‘Latest news

                objSelection.Font.Size = “8″

                objSelection.Font.Color = RGB(10,10,10)

                objSelection.Font.Name = “Arial”

                objSelection.Font.Bold = true

                objSelection.TypeText “Latest Dore News…”

                ‘line break

                objSelection.TypeParagraph()

                objSelection.Hyperlinks.Add objSelection.Range, strNewsStoryLink, “”, “”, strNewsStoryTitle

end if

Which basically checks that the news item is not empty, and then adds a sub heading and then lists the hyperlinked news item.

Thanks to @comdot for his help today, at least I had someone to blame if it did go tits up (thankfully nothing did, but while we’re at it – I’m not responsible if you follow this guide and brick your phone. If that happens, you Sir, are on your own - OK?)

I followed a lot of information from this forum initially, there’s some very useful stuff on there.

It’s a good idea to first turn off fast boot, and turn on USB debugging mode (Settings, Applications, Development)

Turn off the phone, then hold in the volume down button and turn it on, keeping the volume down held, then you will find a new menu with some interesting stuff there. It will show S-On at the top, this basically means it’s locked, and you can’t root it until this is off.

Take a look also at the HBOOT Info on the second line, you will need this later.

You can then reboot the phone and on your PC, download the S-Off software from revolutionary.io. Unzip this on your PC and its also worth uninstalling HTC Sync from control panel if you have it installed. Also download the HTC fastboot drivers from here. Also check that your phone is supported by going here. You will also need to create a BETA key on that site, for this you will need your serial number to generate your BETA key, which can be found in Settings, About Phone.

Next, plug in the phone via USB and run the software. When prompted, hit Yes.

Once complete, you check your phone again by holding down the volume key and it should now read S-Off.

All you have now is S-Off, not root. To get root, download this file and place it on your phones memory card. Turn off the phone, and turn it back on again using the volume down as before. Go to recovery mode and install zip from SD card. Choose the zip we just downloaded (su-2.3.6.3-efgh-signed.zip) and install it. Once complete, you can go back and reboot the phone.

Now you have root, now you can perform all your backups. To do this, download Titanium Backup. I backed up my Angry Birds data as well as WiFi access point data and some other bits and pieces individually. I also created a entire phone backup, just in case it all went horribly wrong!

You can also grab a copy or ROM Manager from the Market Place to have a play with.

You should already have the Superuser app, but its worth checking if there are updates available for it.

I decided to use the latest ROM from here, as I’d heard good things about it, there are many more out there to play with though. Download the file and copy it to the SD card as before. Reboot the phone holding down the volume key as before and then factory reset the phone. Also delete user data and wipe the cache. You can then proceed to installing the new ROM from the zip file by locating it on the memory card.

This will take a little while, don’t worry (like I did!) and you will then boot into your lovely new ROM – awesomeness!

I fear already that this list could become quite large. I’ll update it in the future too, It might even make a book one day…

I may even try and resolve all these issues one by one, my name is Earl style – perhaps?

In no particular order then:

1. People who don’t indicate when driving, there are other drivers and pedestrians around, give us a clue lazy arse
2. People who walk slowly
3. People who stand at the top of escalators or in door ways
4. Screaming babies
5. Everyone who’s ever sat behind me on a plane
6. Fireworks when it’s not Bonfire night or new years
7. 1and1 Customer support
8. GoDaddy customer support
9. LiveDrive customer support
10. People who ding my car because of their inability to open their door without hitting mine
11. Cold callers
12. People who sit in the middle lane in their BMW or repmobile, pull over dozo
13. Queueing
14. Useless checkout scanners at B&Q
15. People who drive too slowly
16. Looking forward to an onion ring, only to find out its calamari
17. Flat batteries
18. People who don’t look where they’re going
19. Foreign call centres
20. Being given a million options on the phone when I just wan’t to speak to a real person
21. Lack of documentation
22. People who smell bad
23. People who are just plain rude
24. Pushchairs
25. Umbrellas
26. People who use grammar incorrectly (@peteryates)
27. People who leave their full beam on
28. Misuse of Their/There/They’re & Your/You’re

Anyway, backing everything up to t’cloud means I’m doing a lot of uploading so I upgraded my virgin package to the 20Mb XL, which should make my uploads super quick.

As stated in this document from Virgin Media, my area has already been upgraded so I should have already been getting the 2Mb upload.

• The old upload speed on the 20Mb XL Virgin package was 768kbps
• The new upload speed on the 20Mb XL Virgin package is 2Mb – tidy!

The problem is, I’m not getting 2Mb upload, infact I’m only getting at best 768kbps up. I monitor all the traffic using PRTG and it’s never gone above 768kbps (convenient that it matches the old upload limit), not even in the middle of the night or any other time outside the throttling zones.

I emailed Virgin Media, who a day later replied telling me to call them, so I did and I spoke to Piresh in India, who basically told me there’s nothing they can do. So I spoke to his supervisor, Abdul, who told me it was my anti-virus software, genius. I mentioned that I thought maybe my modem (from information on the Virgin forums) could not support the higher speed, he assured me this was not that case and that my modem could indeed support these speeds.

After a bit of nosing around, it turns out I can access my WebSTAR EPC2100R2 modem by going to http://192.168.100.1, and would you believe it, the Upload Symbol Rate is set to 768000 bits/sec, or 768kbps.

FYI: If you want to access all the hidden pages on the modem, navigate to http://192.168.100.1/_aslvl.asp and use the password W2402 (Thanks to borfast for that)

This config is received by the modem from Virgins TFTP servers as I understand, and there seems to be a lot of confusion as to whether the webSTAR modem supports the new upload speeds or not.

So, it seems it’s not my anti-virus software after all eh Virgin?

I rang Virgin that evening and after half an hour on the phone, to a UK call centre this time, they agreed that the modem wouldn’t support the new speeds, so they’re sending me a new one, which takes 3-4 days though.

FYI: The support number (0845 454 1111) can also be access by using this local number 01256 752000 (Say no to 0870)

Update: Virgin promptly sent me a new modem, a black netgear wireless jobbie, and within a few minutes it was installed. I had to call to activate it, but after about 15 minutes I was online and up to speed, 20Mb down, 2Mb up – sweet.