Driving on the road near our house last night, and came across this little guy in the middle of the road.

He was about 50cm long, including tail.

He showed off a bit once it was clear I wasn't just going to leave him alone, but really I was just trying to get him off the road, so he was safe. In the end, I had to get a stick and put under his front legs to drag him off the road!

We've been using Trixbox for many years as our PABX at iseek computing, but I wasn't happy that it was moving forward nicely as a project, so last time we rebuilt the PABX using AsteriskNOW instead.

It all worked fine, slightly easier that Trixbox perhaps, and no weird forum registration required, and its pretty clean with FreePABX being the main interface.

Also went out and got another trailerload of firewood, but didn't take a photo of that ;-)

Did you know you can see what advertisement categories Google will offer you?

You can even customise them to show things that you want to see!

Checkout yours.

http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/

If you are using a Windows SBS 2003 or 2008 with a domain, and client computers are taking a while to login, make sure that you've got the DNS server set to the SBS box as the default.

We use a linux box as the dhcp server and gateway, and this small change to the dhcpd.conf reduced login times from 2 or more minutes down to seconds.

Wish i'd discovered that earlier!

I've developed a little script over the years that dumps production databases, and loads them locally on demand, and its been very handy.

However, it was taking ages to load a database on a Virtualbox ubuntu environment I use for debugging with Zend.

A quick look into it, and I found that i'd put --skip-extended-insert on the mysqldump command sometime in the past.

I changed that to --add-locks --extended-insert and the loading has gone from over 12 hours (I was asleep, not waiting for it ;-) down to 30 minutes.

If you've updated to the latest firefox, you might have noticed the "Switch to tab" feature, which checks if you have a website alreay open, and switches to that existing one if you have.

What a stupid thing!

If I open a new tab, its because I want a new tab! It even does it across seperate windows.

To remove this "feature", just install this excellent add-on - Switch to Tab no more.

Phew, back to reasonable web browsing again.

Booted into Windows yesterday to play the awesome new Dirt3, and Adobe flash wants to update itself.

It seems that between the 4 or 5 PC's I regularly visit, that I'm always updating the cruddy flash player.

And all I need it for is youtube video.

Bring on HTML5 and lets stop this Flash upgrade madness!

Why do they have to mess with window decorations? You know, the title bars, close, minimise buttons etc.

Microsoft must spend millions making things look pretty, then people making software for Windows go and screw it up.

Why bother overriding the Window decorations from the standard windows default.

Don't pretend it makes your software "sexier". It doesn't.