Blogs

Skype Adverts Compromised?
Published: 07/09/2018
So my work computer started randomly launching a phishing site into my default browser yesterday. I performed a full scan and that yielded no results. I eventually pinpointed it to Skype.

Porn names and other fun games
Published: 05/07/2017
Ever since I opened my first bank account that had telephone banking an alarm bell has been ringing about this innocent childish bit of fun. For years we have been telling friends and even strangers our bank security question answers openly. I've been telling people for well over a decade, but still I constantly come across disbelief, after all what would you say if you where asked 'What's your porn name?'

MacOS Sierra PPTP VPN Client
Published: 16/01/2017
I currently have to connect to my companies VPN over PPTP. Unfortunately, I upgraded my Mac to Sierra and consequently denying my access to our VPN, I have since found 2 pieces of software that bring back my access. One payware (Shimo VPN) and one that appears to be free (FlowVPN).

Last day of my 30's
Published: 09/06/2016
So begins the last day of my 30's. In the last decade of my life I have gotten married, renovated a house, had child number 3, have become a grandfather, bought a new house (even if not quite managed to move in). I have lost one or two people on the way, but these things happen. While my body appears to be aging (finally), I still feel as if I am in my early 20's.

phpStorm Crash resulting in missing Deployment Menu
Published: 06/11/2015
My installation of phpStorm crashed and the result caused settings to go up the spout and projects to not open correctly. After hours of trawling the web and lots of frustration I found a solution to get me back up and running

The hunt begins
Published: 15/10/2015
So I'm on the hunt for a decent PHP IDE again. I have been phpDesigner and Brackets for the past year and they are causing me way to much irritation and they both seem like a step backwards in terms of what I have used over the years, I have been flitting from IDE to IDE ever since ZendStudio 6 (5.2 was just simply the best).

Mysql: Finding the intersection of two SET fields (or delimited fields)
Published: 18/08/2015
I needed a way to find the interset of two delimited fields and discovered that there is no simple way to find the intersect of two SET, ENUM or delimited fields in MySQL with out creating complexed WHERE clauses using the FIND_IN_SET built in function. I finally found the solution!

Subversion Repository Spring Cleaning
Published: 12/05/2015
Following on from my last article, I have recently been working on migrating a repository from a contractor that contained multiple code bases for various system over to individual repositories for each system.

Moving a subversion repository to a different address/server
Published: 13/04/2015
A dirtier way of moving a repository to a different server or address

Digital better that Digital
Published: 04/08/2014
Recently I abandoned me flakey digital tv signal in favour of my flakey broadband to watch tv. The result were impressive and reminiscent of the old analogue broadcast days