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If you use Be or Be There broadband and the supplied Bebox (THOMSON TG585v7) and you are having connection problems when playing Counter Strike or other Steam games, try this solution (taken from here: http://www.beusergroup.co.uk/technotes/index.php/Steam_issues) This fix should correct the following issues: * Servers in Steam/in Steam games suffer ping ‘spikes’ * Difficulty/Inability to connect [...]

I often need to refer to instructions on how to turn on the template path hints in Magento. This is an indispensable feature for anyone working with any element of Magento design customisation. Once you start to see the logic of the Magento design folder structure, it becomes less of a requirement but even then [...]

Continuing to play around with Symfony I am impressed with what I am seeing. It definitely has a feeling of "best practices" that seems to pervade the whole framework. It feels like without any effort you are going to be working in a secure way. It also seems to do a hell of a lot [...]

Drupal is an excellent PHP based open source content management system with a wealth of features. It allows rapid development of feature rich web sites and can easily be extended to cover a wide variety of useage scenarios from basic CMS to social networking portal, eCommerce and more. Edmonds Commerce specialise in open source PHP [...]

I've been meaning to play with Symfony for ages. I have played with Zend Framework and have also created my own light weight framework (which I will probably continue to use for light weight / rapid development projects or where I am working with a designer and need to keep the complexity to an absolute [...]

If you want to add another harddrive to your Ubuntu system, the easiest way to handle it is to use Gparted (think partition magic for Linux). You can install via the add applications menu in Applications. Once you create your various partitions though, you might get confused because you can't actually write to them. Gparted [...]

The Lunchbox Has Landed is all about healthy options and convenience and pretty good value as well. No more queueing up at the supermarket for sweaty sandwiches and a packet of crisps. Instead get your lunch delivered direct to your desk so that you can enjoy the full length of your lunch break to relax. [...]

Just found this MySQL snippet for validating EAN numbers. http://snipplr.com/view.php?codeview&id=17928 I have modified it a bit to suit my requirements (namely totally corrupted EAN data). PLAIN TEXT SQL: SELECT ean FROM products WHERE (LENGTH(ean) != 13) || (SUBSTRING((10 - (((( SUBSTRING(ean FROM 2 FOR 1) + SUBSTRING(ean FROM 4 FOR 1) + SUBSTRING(ean FROM 6 [...]

Currently working on a project that requires some fairly complex integration between Magento and Mail Chimp. I'm really impressed with Mail Chimp so far - the API is really well documented and a pleasure to work on. A breath of fresh air compared to most API's that I have worked on before. It's amazing what [...]

We are big believers in the power of blogs and regular blog posts to boost the SEO performance of sites. Especially ecommerce style sites that can sometimes struggle to get the kind of SEO focus that is required to rank at the top of the search engine results pages. For this reason we have recently [...]