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 to servers
* Use of Steam/Steam games causes the BeBox to freeze/stall/restart (crash)
* Loss of connection to servers, or timeouts
* Poor performance (‘lag’) in servers
If you are having problems with the fix supplied below then please post in this thread and I will try to help, but I will not be held responsible for any damage to Be equipment etc. You know the drill.
This fix involves editing the user.ini file to change configuration. of the BeBox. This can also be done through telnet but I recommend it be done this way as I ran into problems trying the fix via telnet.
Now again, go to Edit , Find and this time search for timerconfig timer=udpidle
You should change this entry to:
timerconfig timer=udpidle value=3
5. Save that user.ini file to the desktop. Switch back to the Speedtouch router page and select Restore Configuration Now….
6. Use the router dialog to locate and select the user.ini file that you have modified. The router should upload the file.
7. Once configuration is uploaded, restart your router and all ‘Connection Problem’ or Server list crashes or Restarting of the BeBox due to UDP flooding in CSS and other games should be FIXED.
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 there will be times where it can be a life saver for tracking down the particular phtml file that you need to edit.
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 for you automatically.
As it relies heavily on command line scripts, there is even room for further automation by creating my own custom scripts to chain together symfony commands. In fact I’m starting to feel like I wont need to do any PHP coding at all any more, just figure out the data model and run a custom shell script, and then issue the invoice!
Of course its not going to be that easy. For one thing, creating YAML files is still taking some getting used to. And deciphering errors on the command line is also taking some getting used to, even though they are probably the same old error messages. One thing that tripped me up was a typo in one of my YAML files that sent Propel looking for a non existant class when running the data-load command. That’s one of those “gotchas” that is bound to happen, but being so green it stumped me for a few minutes until I spotted the errant extra ‘l’ in one part of the YAML.
I now have some nice generated class structures with data models, and Netbeans’s autocomplete is making life even easier for me, suggesting object property getters as I type so I don’t even need to refer back to the schema to double check column names, cool.
Another thing I have noticed is the use of good old fashioned procedural style functions. This is good, because PHP lets you do this and why should you have to have absolutely everything inside a class when all you need is a little function that you can use here and there. Namely the template system uses functions like
<?php include_metas()?> and <?php echo url_for('module/action')?>
. I like this. I’m not a Java developer, I’m a PHP developer, so we can do this kind of thing .
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 development and can help you to put together the best Drupal based CMS system. If its good enough for the White House, its good enough for you.
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 minimum). So I Checked Symfony 1.2 out of SVN and started with the quickstart guide and using the Jobeet tutorials as a reference.
The first thing that is weird for me is creating my DB schema in YML files. Thankfully Netbeans seems to be helping me out by handling YML properly, syntax highlighting etc. Another great thing that I have found are these awesome cheatsheets, especially the DB schema cheatsheet which tells me pretty much everything I need to know in once nice colour coded page
In future I would like to use MySQL workbench and the Symfony YAML MySQL Workbench exporter plugin to make this process more streamlined, but for now I am going to try to get my head around the native YAML syntax. I always believe in learning to do things in a text editor first and then looking to to automate once I have at least a basic understanding.
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 makes the partitions owned by root. You are not root so you can’t write to them.
All you need to do is open up terminal and do the following:
$ cd /media
$ ls
now note down the name of the partition(s) you need to write enable
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. Alternatively for you focussed workaholics to gain an extra productive half an hour of the day with no compromise on your nutrition.
Edmonds Commerce have taken care of the technical development of The Lunchbox has Landed. The project’s main requirement was a user friendly and intuitive ordering system allowing you to easily build up your personal selection of lunchbox ingredients and schedule your lunches in advance.
The project uses large amounts of Jquery for the Javascript, and a bespoke object oriented PHP framework for the business logic. The visual design has been taken care of by Designermagic who have worked closely with Edmonds Commerce to achieve the final cohesive, effective and intuitive result.
It has been a pleasure to work with the team at Edmonds Commerce. They have a thorough technical understanding of building e-commerce websites and we are delighted with the functionality of our site. We would certainly recommend them without hesitation. Stuart Haiz (CMO) – theLunchboxhaslanded.com
So if you are looking for lunch delivered to your office, check out The Lunch Box Has Landed today.
I have modified it a bit to suit my requirements (namely totally corrupted EAN data).
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 FOR 1) +
SUBSTRING(ean FROM 8 FOR 1) +
SUBSTRING(ean FROM 10 FOR 1) +
SUBSTRING(ean FROM 12 FOR 1)
)*3) + (
SUBSTRING(ean FROM 1 FOR 1) +
SUBSTRING(ean FROM 3 FOR 1) +
SUBSTRING(ean FROM 5 FOR 1) +
SUBSTRING(ean FROM 7 FOR 1) +
SUBSTRING(ean FROM 9 FOR 1) +
SUBSTRING(ean FROM 11 FOR 1)
)) MOD 10)) FROM -1 FOR 1) != SUBSTRING(ean FROM 13 FOR 1))
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 a difference decent documentation does.
Magento on the other hand – well I’m sure you know that Magento documentation is a bit like rocking horse ****. Thankfully though I do seem to be getting my head around it and am now utilising both the overriding method of customisation and the extremely useful event/observer method.
The ability to drop in some extra functionality at a key point (event) in the application flow is amazingly powerful and very clean. I am not touching any core code at all, just taking the objects that are passed over to the observer (which thanks to the nature of Magento and the amazing interconnectedness of every object to every other object) is plenty to give me access to the information I need.
Now that I am working in detail with the Mail Chimp API though I can see some really powerful opportunities for tightly focussed email marketing thanks to the powerful list segmentation capabilities. If I had the time (or someone who was willing to pay for it) I would love to roll together a really powerful Mail Chimp based Magento email marketing module… Any takers?
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