richl.com » Slideshow

Wampserver for Windows

Rich — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:25:09 +0000

If you have found yourself going through vast amounts of PHP applications, trying to find the right one, you may have used their online demo’s and other similar resources. Unfortunately a lot of these have their limitations, and one thing you can’t do is the installation itself or test how it runs on different systems. One thing i have found recently to help hugely with this is Wampserver. It is essentially a completely bundled installation of Apache, MySQL, and PHP and after installation it will run right out of the box. As with many things i assumed i would configuring it for a while to get various things working but this was not at all necessary – i was up and testing PHP apps within 10 minutes of downloading the Wampserver install.

But what happens if you’ve finished testing your PHP applications, no longer need it running, but don’t want to remove it? As with many aspects of it, that has already been thought of and they provide you with a handy batch file that will stop all services and prevent them from starting so the install lays dormant until it needs to be used again.

At the time of writing it comes bundled with Apache 2.2.11, MySQL 5.1.36, and PHP 5.3.0 so is kept well updated – but you can even upgrade/downgrade any of the individual components if needed to enable you to run older applications or have a specific environment for testing. Obviously it hasn’t been produced with a live environment in mind, but should you wish to host your own small website from home this is a perfect solution and means that even if your PC blows up you can quickly re-install and restore your data to it’s previous glory with very little configuration!

This app is definately worth a look, and well worth writing about.

http://www.wampserver.com/en/

Free defrag utility for Windows

Looking for the GlossyBlack theme?

Rich — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:14:02 +0000

For those that are looking to download the GlossyBlack theme for WordPress it now has its own little page here. The theme is fully CSS and XHTML compliant and is based on the hugely popular GlossyBlue theme, i have re-tweaked each icon and every colour scheme to bring new life to the theme whilst making little performance enhancements on the way such as smaller image and template file sizes.

This theme is freaking awesome. It’s people like this that really make the world worth living in. Truly incredibly, this guy needs to win the lottery for the pure amount of pleasure he is giving others

-Anon

The final episode of the O2 saga

Rich — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:24:32 +0000

Carrying on from this story, the saga has been completed. After a month and a half of hassle i have finally received all my money back from O2 after returning my faulty iPhone. The £582 “mistake” was reversed and they agreed to pay me back the money that had been taken for my first months “usage” that i never got to use, so generally all is well. Now i have another problem…i want an iPhone.

Apple will undoubtedly be revealing some new information and possible updates to their products on the 15th of this month so whatever happens i’ll wait until then before i even remotely think about getting another iPhone, but what i don’t understand is why i want one. The thing crashed on me, made me late for work, broke completely…and yet i still forgive it, i still want to hold one again. Dam you Jobs and your scheming ways!

The human mind on the road

Rich — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:16:17 +0000

I love driving. Unless of course there is someone else on the road. I don’t understand my mentality, and i’m sure i’m not completely alone on this – but i noticed something slightly strange today that i seem to be doing more and more often. Let’s set the scene, im driving along, happy as a cat with nobody else around me, there’s a national speed limit in force so im sticking to around 55MPH. I come up behind a car travelling at around 53MPH, still an acceptable speed for a national speed limit on a slightly windy “B” road, but for some reason i find myself agitated and annoyed at the inconvenience that this person has caused me, i feel myself mutter something like “unbeleiveable, how ******* slowly is this ******* going”.

Same situation, im travelling at around 55MPH as before with nobody in front of me, but somebody comes up behind me, not very quickly or close to me, but enough for me to see his/her headlights in my rear-view mirror, im agitated again…i actually find myself starting to try and annoy this person by sticking religiously to the speed limits, and if i turn off your in trouble – because for some reason i’m going to take a little longer in turning so i hold you up for an extra 37milliseconds. Don’t get me wrong, i’m not angry, i’m not driving dangerously, i’m not a freaking mentalist on the road – i just seem to get annoyed if others are near me. Shouldn’t they be somewhere else?

Know your limit?