Category Archives: Software

Barclays Stockbrokers Have An Invalid Security Certificate

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if you go to the barclaysstockbrokers.com url and try to login you get presented with an invalid security certificate error by firefox and ie 8.  The certificate is for www.stockbrokers.barclays.com not www.barclaysstockbrokers.com.

I have rang them and emailed them but no one seems that interested in getting fixed they dont see it as a problem.  Well in these days of phishing and spoofing I would say its a problem.  We will see how long they take to fix it, if at all.

UPDATE: 9 July 2009

Well eventually someone got back to me about it.  Looks like they have a problem with the login on the page as its hardcoded to stockbrokers.barclays.co.uk instead of the using the url that you actually come from.  I have been told by there technical bods that if you use the login at the top of the page it uses the correct url.  And it does work.  Come on Barclays sort it out so that all the logins use the correct URL.  I cant believe it took so long for you to actually come back to me with a sensible answer but to still see the site broken in this way is really unbelievable.  I expect quite a few people are having this problem as your eyes go to the login button within the site not the black bar at the top.

Looking at the stats on my page quite a few people are getting this error as the number of people coming to my site with the search words ‘barclays stockbrokers’ and ‘invalid certificate’ are quite high.

Vista, Windows Media Center, Windows Media Player And Blu-Ray DVD's

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My last upgrade of my media center included a blu-ray media player, it was  a cheap LG player although wasn’t as cheap as they are today.  This was bought a few years back when they first came out but didn’t install it for some time until now.

Well I thought Vista was bound to support blu-ray and didnt think anything of it until I started to buy loads of new dvd’s and found windows media center and windows media player couldnt play them.  So what are the options, well currently they are

  • Cyberlink PowerDVD (current version 9)
  • Roxio CinePlayer DVD Decoder
  • Arcsofts TotalMedia Theatre

Well my experience is this, Roxio forget it wouldnt even register properly and looking on the NET couldnt find one person that had installed it successfully on Vista so got a refund straight away.  Arcsofts TotalMedia Theatre was the same installed but didnt play at all.  Now the board I have in my media center has the INTEL Graphics G35 chip so could be because of that as its not really that good enough to play Blu-Ray discs.

So I know a lot of people dont like it but the PowerDVD was the only thing that played the blu-ray movies for me on Vista with a motherboard that uses the Intel G35 chip.

And that concludes my findings now to buy a micro ATX motherboard that uses the NVIDIA 9400 chipset.

IPhoto9 – Places Map Not Showing

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All of a sudden the places map isnt showing just a grey screen.  Everything I tried just didnt get it to show any more.  Eventually I found a solution that worked.  I went to preferences -> advanced and set the dont look up places automatically to never.  Quit Iphoto and restarted it.  I then set it back to automatic and the places map shows straight away.  Wierd but it now works.

Nikon D5000 Gets An Outing To Boxhill

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DSC_0035

Originally uploaded by paulfarrow

Well got the GP1 gps unit for the Nikon and decided to take it out to boxhill where all the bikers meet. It was only Saturday so not that many about.

The GP1 unit is good but took a little while to get used to it. I also thought I would try Flickr which this picture has been uploaded from. So photo was taken with the Nikon D5000 and the GP1 unit so it has the geotagging info in it. Then I uploaded to IPhoto9 and then uploaded using that into Flickr. I then composed a blog entry with flickr so will be interesting to see how this comes out here on the blog.

13 Inch MacBook Pro – Time Is Wrong

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Just got the new Macbook Pro and after transferring from my old Macbook it seemed it couldnt actually set the time correctly was always an hour behind.  The problem was actually the timezone as it just said GMT in the closest city.  After a little bit of tickering I realised that that the localtime folder should be a symbolic link to /usr/share/timezone/<timezone> and instead a physical folder had been copied over during the transfer and was sitting in  /etc.

The way to fix this is to open your finder window and click on go->go to folder and type in /etc then then delete the folder.  Then you can set the time zone correctly.

How Can I Remove That IPhoto Export Plugin ? Such as Facebook IPhoto Exporter.

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Ok go to your applications folder on your mac within the finder window.  Right click the iphoto application icon and click show contents.  Browse to the plugins folder and look for a folder named the same as the exporter your looking to remove.

Delete the folder that is the same name as the exporter your trying to delete and bobs your uncle – the exporter will be removed next time you start IPhoto.

WordPress RSS Feed Not Including Images

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Ok so searched high and low for this and finally found out that it was my theme that I had added which was wrong.  Look for feed_rss2.php in wp-includes and look for some code in there, that uses use_excerpt_rss my theme used this whether the rss setting->full (rather than summary) was selected or not in the settings->reading.

If you change the else to be “the_content()” rather than “the_excerpt_rss()” it works.  Your images are sent in the description so then the rss readers can read the whole article.

Changed My Blogs Theme

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The standard themes that come with wordpress are OK !! but if you want something really good / different you have to go elsewhere.  I found quite a lot of themes on WordPress Themes and particularly liked the Modern Sofa 10 theme.

This is particularly relevant these days as I am always falling asleep on the sofa and wake up in the early hours of the morning.

It was a good starting point but something were lacking which I modified by hand ie. put the title on the search box, modified the footer to take out the advertising etc etc.  There are still somethings that arent quite right for instance the tag cloud isnt formated properly but that is not the themes problem that is a problem with the tag cloud that comes standard with wordpress as it really needs a tag cloud div html tag created around it.  When I have more time I will try to sort that out.

Any way think it looks quite alright for the mo….

WordPress Search & Permalinks

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Using the carrington theme and after switching to permalinks I noticed that the wordpress search doesnt seem to work.  Not sure if this is by design or what.  After a little bit of scrabbling around I decided to hack the scripts so I changed the search.php script which sits in themes/carrington-blog/forms.  I commented out the permalinks section of the if like so

/*
if (get_option('permalink_structure') != '') {
    $onsubmit = "location.href=this.action+
'search/'+encodeURIComponent(this.s.value).replace(/%20/g, '+'); return false;";
}
else {
    */
    $onsubmit = '';
//}

so that it always does the non permalink bit whether or not it is selected.  Seems to work still, all comments welcomed on this.

Adding Google Adsense To WordPress

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Well tried several and dont think any of them are that good.  For one thing that is a problem is that google only seems to work in internet explorer which I guess is by design.  I cant get any of the google adsense stuff to appear on my wordpress blog using firefox to surf the pages – unless my adblocker is stopping them but I dont think its configured for it.  Any ideas any one am I being a really silly person as normal ???