Been banging my head against a brick wall for over an hour trying to work out why I kept getting a "Could not connect to database" error when installing LimeSurvey.

According to their mods on the forums, this is "intended" behaviour.  Well tyvm for that mods.

At no point do they mention in their installation documentation or in the error message that you actually have to go to run an install script that isn't in the main directory.

Just append /admin to your URL for your limesurvey installation and it will redirect to the install script.

Fake Hard Disk Utility scareware is a new type of malware that is trying to one-up the fake anti-spyware scams that have been common for years. While fake anti-spyware tries to convince you that your computer is infected with spyware and malware, Fake Hard Disk Utility scareware tries to convince you that your computer is falling apart.  It has appeared under a number of names, HDD Defragmenter, Quick Defragmenter, Win HDD and Win Defrag. The most common variety seen in the wild is named HDD Diagnostic.

OK, so it really started to bug me that every time I was theming up a website and have Skype installed that the toolbar would replace all of the phone numbers on my pages with their buttons.

Now, sometimes this is a good thing and I'm not giving off completely, but there are times when the buttons just mess up your design completely.

There are a few options you can use to show/hide the skype buttons:

Hiding buttons with CSS

You can add the following to your CSS to hide all of the buttons:

Today I was setting up a virtual machine with Debian 6 (Squeeze) to run a basic web development server.

After a few hours of tinkering with MySQL to get remote connections from my machine, setting up a bridged network adapater (making sure to add the MAC address to my firewall settings) and various other configurations, I decided it woud be useful to edit my CSS files from my Windows XP machine.

In order to reduce the risk of Malware infections on Windows XP computers, Microsoft decided that as of 8th Feb 2011 a new security update would disable the automatic running of any disk put in your machine.

This is something which had already been in place for Windows 7, but they liked it so much they disabled it for everyone!

A small change for the better? Or yet another annoyance in a long line of M$ annoyances?

Recently there have been a number of reported cases of people receiving telephone calls from agents claiming to be calling from or on behalf of Microsoft. They advise that you may have recently had some technical issue or virus infection on your computer (who hasn't!) and that they can help you remove it. They won't. They are just after your personal information!

Please be aware of variations of this scam and avoid giving any personal details to any caller you are unsure of.

Details of the Scam:

Hello to all. This will be my first post as new Systems Admin for NICVA. After spending many hours getting to grips with an inherited infrastructure my first intent is to streamline, consolidate and virtualise where possible. This begins with the virtualisation of our backup domain controller, using the standalone vmware converter my task is made very straightforward and also allows me to quickly alter the hardware physics of the machine. This small task will help contribute to our efficiencies and overall environmental friendliness by decreasing power consumption.

I am currently setting up one of our spare machines as a test server for Solr to replace the core Drupal search on our websites.

As Solr is written in Java (it runs on on servlet container such as Tomcat), I needed to get Java installed.  A lot of websites I read were giving me a lot of interesting instructions on how to use fakeroot to create a Debian package to install the binary etc etc... but it turns out it is actually quite easy.

Removing cached search descriptions

To remove a URL description/title that has been cached by Google you can log into the webmaster tools at www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ using the login details from the password file.

To remove the description from the Google cache, click on the site you are trying to remove the link from. Go to Site Configuration > Crawler Access and click the Remove URL tab. Create a new removal request using the URL of the page you are trying to clear and select the appropriate removal type, tick the checkbox and click submit.