GoToMyPC allows me to have a longer Vacation
In fact I had a whole month, I was able to check my emails, pay bills, do my work as a technical web designer and still pass the late afternoons at the beach. In fact I rely on GoToMyPC to check out my emails and handle service issues for my various Internet businesses when I am away for a few days or visiting relatives.

Now there is one tip I have learned over the years; you need someone with a key access to your office who can occasionally restart your PC after a powercut, reset your router etc.
Try GoToMyPc for free here

Happy 40th Birthday Unix

Unix, Linux is more than an operating system for us Techies it's a kind of way of life. I get great intellectual pleasure from finding clever ways to write scripts using Bash, Zsh, Perl, AWK or whatever. These days I spend more time using Cygwin on Vista which kind of gives me the best of both worlds. I would like to abandon Microsoft completely but have to work with so many clients that just have Windows.

I've recently had some fairly horrific experiences of using Microsoft software Visual Studio, ASP etc and found myself having download 100's of MB of code just to set a few miserable flags. Everything Microsoft do seems to overloaded with bureaucratic heaviness, endless series of black boxes, wizards where I feel I control very little.

Anyway thank heavens for LAMP Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl and the wonderful community of users that surround it

Periodically Reviewing Which Files you Backup

It's not good enough just to regularly backup your files, you ALSO have to double check that the crucial files are being saved. You do this by periodically retrieving your backed-up files and checking all is well.

I use a backup script to automatically zip up my important files, I found that this wasn't up to date as several files had changed location or name in between times. Remember the shock horror and disappointment you will feel if you need to recover files from a backup only to find they are corrupt, missing, or out of date is equivalent or worse than finding that your car's spare wheel is flat on a rainy night on a deserted road.

Backing up files is such a thankless task that it is easy to skip or say I'll do that when I get a spare moment. The weak part of backup systems is when they require human intervention, that's why I use a totally automatic Internet backup service . This back's up about 2 GB of my files at 3am every morning. Mozy provide the service which is free up to 2GB, you can learn more about this service here . Internet backup also solves the proble of ensuring that your backup media say DVDs are off the premises!

Solution: IE8 does not connect to the Internet

There are many complaints that IE8 (a recent automatic upgrade) does not connect to the Web, ie cannot access any website.

People have been dismantling their Firewalls, virus checkers but no success. Happily there is Firefox so we can browse for a solution.

Here is the solution that worked for me:-

in IE8 go to Tools->Internet Options->Advanced

and click on both Restore Advanced Settings and Reset Internet Explorer settings, you might want to see if pressing just the Advanced Button is good enough.

Then restart IE8

This warns that you about to lose all your settings but that was no no problem for me as I have very few, being mostly a Firefox or Opera person

Hope that Helps

Useful ZSH Commands

vi *(.om[1]) # vi newest file
vi -p *(.om[1,3]) # open 3 newest files in tabs (gvim)
vi *(m0) # re-edit all files changed today!
ls *(^m0) # files NOT modified today
ls -l *(m4) # list files modified exactly 4 days ago
vi **/main.php # where ever it is in hierarchy
ls (x*~x[3-5]) # list files x* except x3 to x5
vi !$ # vi last parameter
vi !-2:2 # second parameter of second but last command
vi !$:r.php # vi last parameter but change extension to .php
^mian^main # modify previous command (good for correcting typos)
^php^cfm # modify previous command replace php by cfm

more zsh tips and tricks here

PHP CURL Based Twitter Feed for websites when fopen() is not allowed

<?php
// twitFeed.php
// curl based twitter feed
// 04Aug09
$url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=thesuccess';

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
print "<pre>".curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
?>

Twitter Feed for Older Versions of ColdFusion (ie without CFFeed)

<cfset feedurl="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=thesuccess" />

<cfhttp URL="#feedurl#"
Method="get"
THROWONERROR="NO"
>
<pre>
<cfoutput>#cfhttp.FileContent#</cfoutput>

The output is an XML feed