Disaster planning… why you need to practise recovering

November 26, 2008 – 7:23 pm

It happens!

Flood

In my second job, one of our clients got flooded: the computer room was below sealevel (?) and there was a canal not far way - maybe it rained a lot, maybe the canal broke it’s banks.. I don’t know but what I remember is: When the waters were rising and people left, they put their printouts and spare disks and other pseudo precious stuff that they weren’t carrying on top of the filing cabinets.

One programmer was well protected, he had a backup on the front seat of his car, a backup on the filing cabinet and a backup on his desk at home:

  • multiple copies
  • offsite

And then..

  • The waters rose above the filing cabinets and it was very muddy…
  • The car park was higher but not high enough
  • The dog’s tail knocked a coffee cup over

It’s the impact you need to worry about, not the likelihood.

These days anything is possible.

These have all happened within the last couple of months either to us or our friends:

PC and backup both fail

For a horrible few days I though I had lost my Pc and my backupdrive.  Yes I had a third backup but I had got slack… it was out of date.  Managed to recover the PC - thank goodness - I found out how expensive thoise hard drive recovery people are - your data has to be really serious.

Extended power failure - all your stuff is electronic

  • and your phone is old and does not have many contacts in it

Your laptop gets stolen

  • along with the expensive application’s dongle
  • within months of purchasing it and you are so busy with your new business

Your laptop gets unpredictable

  • not so bad you replace it, bad enough that you spend days waiting for Dell engineers to replace this, that and the other
  • you have not integrated with the cloud, so you are having problems getting at emails, contacts etc

back a bit more….

Your facebook account gets trashed

  • I don’t remember the details but somehow this theatrical arty friend pretty much was running her electronic life through facebook

Your website gets hacked

  • I helped a friend clean up their web, and in researching it I discovered many sites who did not even know that they had been hacked.

You accidentally deleted (?) your outlook contacts

  • you have no backups at all!!

You only had a webmail account, which got deleted…

  • You leave the employment of a small company who finally get around to cleaning up your email account…..Luckily all were on good terms and there was a backup.

The power station has not figured out how the big glowy thing works

  • The province continues to have rolling unpredictable blackouts…
  • my smart cookie of a sister whose livelihood depends on her pc had already got herself with her own UPS and yoga breathing to deal with the scheduled blackouts happening at unscheduled times.

We all live with the possibility of disaster of one kind or another.  We insure our houses, our cars, our bodies.  We lock our doors (most of us anyway, some of us drop our car keys in the front yard … the car gets stolen and the insurance company investigates for fraud!).

We need to insure our electronic lives too - our memories, our financial records, our network….

We have fire drills, so…

  • Do you now how to restore from your backups?
  • Are the backups actually backing up everything you think it is?
  • Is your data safe? as in encrypted, password protected …..
  • do you have offsite/ remote access
  • ,…

At the very least make a page of what is important to you and what you would do if it is lost, damaged or stolen.

See next posts for an example backup plan

By anna-marie | Posted in Internet and Pc, Life | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Because they annoy people intensely

November 26, 2008 – 4:50 pm

Naomi of ittybiz eloquently tells you why she hates flash intros and splash pages.  A few more boringly put reasons are here.

The situation is improving.  There are some appealing sites that gently use a little flash to enhance the site.  The danger is that there is a fine artistic line between enhancing and detracting and so one must ask one self really

  • is it necessary?
  • is it worth it?
  • perhaps a slideshow would suffice (for portfolio sites say)?

Rather spend your time and money developing good content and service.

By anna-marie | Posted in Web design | Comments (0)

Wordpress user training

November 19, 2008 – 6:38 pm

Web Designers sometimes neglect to factor in the training and hand holding required to get website owners comfortable with managing their own websites.   These days with the various tools out there, one can leverage off other work, and.or deliver training materials in a variety of styles.  Video’s are popular bow as one can work alongside it and pause as necessary.

One should however always review the content to be sure that one is  not wasting one’s client’s time.  For example in evaluation the use of training videos, please consider the following:

  • does the video use too much terminology for your client?
  • Is it on a reasonably up to date version of the software?
  • Is the theme similar enough to your clients so they won’t get confused?
  • Does it dive into detail too soon?
  • Will the voice be a problem? eg: accents?

Following are some video’s that may help:

http://www.wordpresstutorials.com/ - very well presented, clean looking site that offers a paid subscription for wordpress training and supposedly helps them navigate the geek speak.

The wordpresstraining.com site has a number of videos.  These are good, but may proceed a little quickly for users who are not used to all the terminology, html and css etc.   For example in writing posts, they proceed fairly quickly to loading images.  This is a little fast for some users.  Some videos to start with are:

Cory Millers: screentutorials.com/videos/ (American, not too strong an accent, fairly recent wordpress version).  Samples:

By anna-marie | Posted in WordPress | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Gift photo calendar using Google ical files

November 19, 2008 – 11:29 am
Photo year calendar example

Photo year calendar example

Looking for some personalised seasonal, christmas or new year gifts?

Use your ical calendars (google or other (others by importing into google)) and your own photo’s to generate a A4 year calendar.  Print to PDF and send to your local print shop for bindin.  Viola! instant personal presents.

Test it out on the demo site.
 See how the examples work, then add your own ics url to the query.

The month view styling

The month view styling

Restyle embedded google calendars

I have developed a script for personal use, however added additional coding in the hope that others may use it as well.   The idea for this year calendar was prompted by a post by lindenlan back in 2006.

The css could also be used to simply restyle your google calendar.

Firefox only, although IE also possible if you adjust the IE stylesheet yourself

Note that this has only been tested on firefox on vista and styling may depend on your default font sizes etc and may require tweaking.  I made minimum changes to the main style sheet get what i wanted happening and did not change the IE sheet.

Inputs:

I may develop an html form later, but for now it is url query string driven, so maybe start a text file with your parameters:

src=some google calendar name

Under the calendar settings when you click on the html tag, you get a url - we need the piece that says something like :src=0bajvp6gevochc6mtodvqcg9o0%40group.calendar.google.com.

These could be private calendars - such as your families birthday’s and special anniversaries, or public ones such as,

google calendar colours

google calendar colours

If you have multiple calendars,use src[0]=xxxxx, src[1]=xxxx etc

Coloured calendars

For multi-calendars, colours are a good idea.  We are limited to those that google allows - else we just get the default blue.  Use the embed helper to see the colour options (need to login to google).

  • red and one color only for first calendar:  color=#CC3333
  • pink:  color[0] = #DD4477
  • purple:  color[1] = #994499
  • etc

Months & start date

  • Specify the number of months to return &months=n
  • Specify the start month &start=YYYMMDD

Images

Images can be switched on or off:

  • imagesfile=none
  • or imagesfile=someurl.txt, where the text file contains as many images+1 as months you would like
  • The image file is a text file that looks like this
2009zebra.jpg
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1004/580865496_d15b16308d_o.jpg
file:///C:/temp/test.jpg
etc

Styles or Stylesheets

My default is aimed at a monthly print view, developed for firefox for my font-size etc.  The times are switched off - they appear just as a note on that day.
I struggled to find some halfway decent other interesting examples of calendar restyling - you could look at using their ideas to create your own stylesheet.

Demos or Examples

Multi calendars overlayed

Multi calendars overlayed

kahaku style

kahaku style

Test it Out:

Resources:

You can also get more information by trolling through linden lan’s posts and comments.  Note that google changes it’s method now and then, so be wary about using any old advice:

If you enjoy messing around with ical files, you could also have a look at ical-events-list, which is about styling a better agenda or list based table of upcoming events.

By anna-marie | Posted in PHP | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)