Easy DNS mistake with TXT and wildcard records

I recently discovered that it's actually quite easy to get your DNs settings wrong and potentially take your site offline. Especially if you've got a lot of domains and subdomains. This issue is specifically to do with having a wildcard set up for your domain and also having TXT records for subdomains.
I thought I'd better share this to stop any one else making the same mistakes I have.

More Laughable Future Smart Homes

You may have noticed before I don't take current smart home technologies very seriously mainly due to their pointlessness (5 Things All Future Smart Appliances Should Do, 3 Pointless Smart Appliances). Well here's another reason for me to continue to not take them seriously. This is not smart! You can get this future right now by attaching bells to things and listening for the bell ringing.

Watch this BBC video ad see what you think:

Top 7 Fictional Geeks

I like to think of geeks as clever people, people with skills who are a bit too obsessed with their skills to be normal. Perhaps border on their skills taking over their life. Rather than nerds who are just wanna-be geeks. No real skills just obsessed.

With that in mind here's my top fictional TV geeks:

Top 10 Command Line Shortcuts

Here's the top 10 shortcuts I use on the command line. THese should speed up your productivity quite nicely. If you're using the Gnome Terminal on Ubuntu (possibly other distro's too) you might need to enable ALT+f and ALT+b in the preferences.

• ESC + .
  Escape key and the period/full stop at the same time will insert the last argument from the previous command. For example if your previous command is:

Top Command Line Tips: Apache Access Log

I said I should do some top command line tips. So I thought I'd start with some useful Apache access log monitoring and analysis commands.
These can come in useful if odd things are happening on your websever and maybe you think there are dodgy spiders or your need to only see requests from your IP, that kind of thing.

Assumptions
I'm assuming the path to your access log is /var/log/apache/access.log. So adjust if it's different.
Also assuming your access file's LogFormat is 'combined' and that you actually have permission to view the logs.

Commands Overview
Commands and options we'll be using are:

Top 5 Command Line Tip Posts

Linux CLI cheat sheet from Pixel Beat

I'm a big fan of 'Top X Command Line Tips' type posts and I keep meaning to get around to doing my own I've now done my first couple on Apache Access log tips and Top 10 Shortcuts. In the meantime I thought I'd share 5 of my favourite. Numbered but not really in any order.

Actually my favourite of these is 9 ways to recover your screen. that has come in useful countless times.

Richer Rounds Vouchers > Free headphones, 10% off WiFi Dongles & 10% off Pink Floyd Albums

All vouchers have moved to Vouchers Baby Yeah.

Here are the Richer Sounds Vouchers.

Here's the latest vouchers from Richer Sounds again. As usual you can just click on the image and then print it. Take it to your nearest store to use it.

This time we have Free headphones again (don't forget to see if you can get a free mug and/or keyring as well), 10% off WiFi dongles and 10% off Pink Floyd albums (online voucher code)...

Best Domain Registrars

We have a lot of domains registered for work and we often need to have good control over the zone records. Unfortunately not all registrars make this easy for you. So I thought I'd do a comparison of some of the ones we use or have used to help decide where to keep all of our domains.

In this comparison I've included the following sites:

• GoDaddy
• Daily
• UKFast
• 123-reg
• Easily
• NetBenefit
• NetNames
• Network Solutions

I've used all of these except UKFast. But where I couldn't test the interface myself I just asked their support team.
Here's the data table:

Evaluating Recruitment Campaigns

Previously I'd posted on the best IT job sites and given some tips for getting the best value for your money. This post is an update to the method used to evaluate which site performed the best. Even though I'm looking at IT job boards here, it could work just as well for any other industry or if your using multiple recruitment agents.

How The Scoring Works
I've tweaked the scoring system slightly since the last post, to make it a bit fairer.
The formula is this:

Richer Sounds Vouchers > Free Headphones Are Back!

All vouchers have moved to Vouchers Baby Yeah.

Here are the Richer Sounds Vouchers.

The free headphones are back. This time I'm actually going to go and get some myself. Especially after the reports on MSE saying lots of people also got a free mug and keyring as well! Last time got to the local store only to find it had been looted.

Richer Sounds are fast becoming one of my preferred places to buy TV/Hi-Fi equipment. They're priced very competitively, although I probably still end up buying from Amazon most of the time. If Richer Sounds would accept Nectar Points it would be a game changer :)
I bought my Humax Foxsat HDR 500G from there a few months back, which I'm very pleased with. Unfortunately I wasn't as pleased with the channels available on Freesat, see the Freesat channel comparison to find out why.

Anyway here's the voucher....

[SOLVED] Drupal db_query and date formats

Here's small issue I came across and didn't find many answers online. When using Drupal's db_query method to execute some SQL that contains dateformats in it the weekday always comes out as a zero.
for example:

db_query("SELECT DATE_FORMAT(from_unixtime(changed), '%Y-%m-%d') lastmod FROM node LIMIT 10");

This will return dates like 2011-09-0. The month day will always be zero. It will also match %s (seconds), %f (microseconds), and %b (abbreviated month name) Don't worry there's a simple solution.

How to Create Secure Passwords

As a web developer or any kind of internet professional, you naturally end up with loads and loads of logins. Maybe you use LastPasss, KeePassX or MyPasswordSafe or some other service/program, as long as you don't store them in a password protected word/spreadsheet file, or your browser! You don't do you?
Anyway I recently had to create a new password for a particular online service, one that I want a good secure password for, but starting to use a new secure password can be tricky.
How can I make a password long and include several special characters, upper and lowercase letters and numbers, and still make it memorable?
I had a brain wave that resulted in a really easy to remember password that is 21 characters, has plenty of special charecters, numbers and letters.....

Richer Sounds Vouchers > 10% off Cambridge Audio CD Player & Free Headphones

All vouchers have moved to Vouchers Baby Yeah.

Here are the Richer Sounds Vouchers.

Some more vouchers for Richer Sounds for you. Click on them to get a full size version then print off and take to your local store.
Click here for the Richer Sounds Store Finder

How To Take Advantage of Recruitment Agencies

Trying to recruit IT staff directly can be a challenge. It's not helped by the constant calls from recruitment consultants telling you're wasting your time, and that they have the worlds most amazing candidates, and they all dying to apply for your vacancy, right now! for a big fat fee, of course.

Well here's one way of  using them to your advantage:

Richer Sounds Vouchers > Free Head Phones & £50 off Receivers over £400

All vouchers have moved to Vouchers Baby Yeah.

Here are the Richer Sounds Vouchers.

Here's a couple of vouchers from the Richer sounds VIP email. One for free Maxell BUDZ headphones and another for £50 off any receiver over £400. Just print them and take them in store.
Enjoy.

Best IT Job Sites

Recruiting IT staff can be difficult, especially if you're trying to avoid extortionate recruitment consultant fees. We've been trying the direct approach for a while now so I thought I'd share some tips and stats on how the some of the IT job sites perform.

There's quite a lot of job sites to choose from, you might want to consider local sites, non-IT specific sites, european sites, global sites, social media, etc, etc. One thing that's garuanteed is that as soon as you raise your head above the parapet, by posting and advert, you'll be bombarded by recruitment consultants. You'll likely also get call from the sales guys at various job sites too. but which to choose.

Here's a couple of tips to help you choose and the table of statistics for a position we are currently advertising.

Freesat from Sky with Humax Foxsat HDR

Following on from my previous post on Freeview vs. Freesat vs. Freesat from Sky - Channel Smackdown I thought I ought to post some more information on what your options are in you've already switched from Sky to Freesat and paid out the cash for a new box. In my case the Humax Foxsat HDR.

Can I get Freesat from Sky using my Humax box?

According to Humax: "Yes; your sky card can be used in the Humax Foxsat HDR CI Module slot. This can be bought separately. This will give you give you Channel 4, Five, Five Life, Five US and Sky 3." But there issues, lots of them, see below....

5 Things All Future Smart Appliances Should Do

So after my post about pointless smart home appliances, I thought I'd come up with some ideas on how all future homes and smart appliances could be better. So rather than adding cool but useless features, finding poor excuses to connect something to the internet, we should have good reasons and focus on costing less to run not more, in a financial sense and a ecological one.

1. Use Less Energy (and any other resource)!
   The most practical thing any new appliance can do is save you money over your current one! But most of the smart appliances look like they'll just put our bills up even more.
   

3 Pointless Smart Kitchen Appliances and How They Could Be Improved

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Robo-Fridge

During every tech show there's always a bit where some company will show off their latest inventions for 'smart home' technology. Sounds brilliant, but why are they always such pointless products.

Take for instance the LG appliances from this  BBC Click video  Smart kitchen appliances connected to the Web. So what's LG's vision of the future kitchen.

[SOLVED] How To Stop XSL Outputting Unwanted Namespaces

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Unwanted namespace in transformed XML

I'm using XSL quite a lot now and several times I've had an issue with namespaces in the output XML/XHTML. In particular if you're using xpath-functions then you might have the xmlns:fn namespace finding it's way into your output. I've finally found the solution and though I'd better post it before  I forget it.

Lets see some an example of the problem.