We don’t have the official figures yet, but numbers appeared to most veteran show goers to be well down on previous years. Not surprising really given the amount of gloom in the UK market at least.

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Yes the title seems a little weird, but it’s a little problem that has been the bane of my and a fellow techs existence for a couple months now.

An international office on permanent VPN connection to where I work would experience extremely slow load times of office documents even if they were local to the machine, strangely this only occurred when connected to the network (and hence to the domain).

What was eventually found by the afor mentioned fellow tech was that every time an office application would load (i.e. open a new document) it was “polling” the entire domain for listed printers and folders, not a problem in the local office with Gigabit connectivity, but a major problem for an international office with several employees over a low bandwidth line …

So how to fix this?!?

 (Assuming windows XP & Classic Menu)

START > CONTROL PANEL > Folder Options > View

 Uncheck “Automatically search for network printers and folders” > OK

 Now make sure you exit all office applications (better yet just reboot)

If this does not solve the issue, or only provides a slight gain it’s time to remove the “recent files” list, from within excel

TOOLS > OPTIONS > General

 Uncheck “Recently use file list” … Exit all office apps (or reboot).

And try again, this appears to solve the slow down.

Any problems drop me a comment.

I was reminded today on MSN that I had in fact written (albeit a long time ago) a class for querying the A2S protocol using PHP sockets.

So I have decided to release the source code for this under the MIT licence.

Bear in mind this was written when the Source SDK was leaked, so it is for PHP 4 (Which reaches “end of life” 08/08/2008 ). And I havent re-tested wheter it works in a LONG long long … etc time.

However With the exception of the addition of RCON functionality (which should of been put in originally Valve!), the A2S protocol has not changed

Anyway check the attached files, the licence is included at the top of the file.

PHP 4 A2S class (Valve Server Query)

Digg this

I have been working on a script as of late to aid in the ever ongoing process of optimizing a web applications “back end”, inevitably the database, and underlying code.

Thus dbstat was born, the current version is not for release just yet , as some tweaks are still needed, at the moment it only supports reporting for a single database at any one time.

v 0.5 Features list.

1. Dynamic / Fixed row size checking. (Dynamic size rows can cause table fragmentation).
2. MyISAM / InnoDB  checking (Reports total number of tables using these engines).
3. Index threshold testing.
4. Table fragmentation threshold testing.
5. Table size threshold testing.
6. Database size reporting.

At the moment this is currently written in PHP, and is quite heavily scripted I will be looking to move to C++ for a v1.0 for the release, for calculations sake and to remove the need to install PHP.

I will post more information as the project develops, I will be looking to release the program and source under GPL by version 1.

By version 1, I intend to have included the following:

1. User interactive reporting. (On even of threshold being exceeded, prompt user to fix or skip, with cursory notes*)
2. Table de-fragmentation.
3. Reporting to include suggested fixes.

*Cursory notes  to describe the fix, and possible implications of actioning it.

So watch this space, and please leave requests via comments :)

Working with a company that largely deals in property investment and information relating to it, has left me quite intrested in the whole buy to let market …

Over at Propertysecrets (free registration required to view) Rob Best talks about property auctions, and the insane amount of profit some people are getting by finding properties being auctioned well below their market value.

Now to find some property auction data feeds, and write a daemon to automatically pick out the best BMV’s (Below market value) for me … well I can dream can’t I ?

Sod it I’m going back for another coffee, if it’s not spouting binary I’ll never get my head around it :-P