ashleyknowles

  • Building a Hyper-V Lab – cheaply!

    I’ve been trying to build a lab at home for a while, but have continued to put the thought aside, over and over. Not because I lack motivation, no, because it’s so damned expensive to purchase so much kit if I’m going to use it for a few months, and then not use it again.…

  • Windows 8 – to be or not to be?

    Microsoft has a track record for releasing horrible operating systems every now and then, as witnessed by the IT world more recently with Windows Vista. It begs the question, after a very successful Windows 7, what is in store for Windows 8? Will it be king, or will it flop? My motivation for this article,…

  • Lion-style Inverse Scrolling – On Windows XP

    My home computer is a Mac, now running OSX Lion. I’ve become quite accustomed to the backwards/reversed scrolling which seems to be the default in Lion – and matches the “natural” swipe up/down gestures you would use on an iPhone or other touch screen device. Today I was looking around on my work Windows XP…

  • Why you should upgrade to OS X Lion – sooner rather than later!

    Every 2nd Saturday and Sunday makes up what I call “F1 Weekend”. I run a Winfast USB HDTV tuner, which only runs in Windows, and so I have to run it virtually in Parallels Desktop on my Mac. It runs great on my now, old and continually ageing MacBook Pro – until I upgraded to…

  • IIS, PHP, and LDAPS with Active Directory.

    Why you’d ever want to do this is probably a discussion best left to the political arena. But for the purpose of that thing I call my “day job”, I was required to do just this. External website, authenticates against Active Directory using LDAPS. Website is coded in PHP, and runs on IIS on Windows…

  • knowledge

    important lessons learnt today (aka, a very important message authorised and spoken by A Knowles, Brisbane on behalf of himself): 1. study is great, but only if you study the right stuff (i.e. that which you don’t already know) 2. knowledge is power (@petrie friends represent!) in completing the task at hand 3. greater knowledge…

  • osCommerce Stock Level Hack

    osCommerce fails to check stock level correctly when going through the order process. The problem is two fold, and is worsened by the use of PayPal. If you use PayPal for payments, this code will not work as expected for you. The checkout_process.php file is the final script in the checkout workflow, and performs the…

  • MySQL 5.5.12 Config Wizard Bug

    Installing JIRA on a Windows 2008 R2 x64 server today, and had to install MySQL for the database back end. Sounds simple enough… It’s been a while since I setup MySQL on a Windows installation, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the installation wizard pop up to ask me about the server and it’s…

  • Prime number generator

    This is a little something I’ve been working on for an experiment. It’s a pretty basic prime number generator. At the moment, it’s using what I call, an “exponential” search function which I thought of. It’s probably been thought of by someone else, but I’m calling it my own for the time being. In my…

  • Making the most of University

    I feel like a bit of an IT guy, turned philosopher with most of my recent posts, but what the heck! Back to another hectic semester of uni, and I’ve learnt a very valuable lesson from one of my lecturers already. For all the university students out there, hoping to one day make it big,…