There comes a point in most companies where change becomes inevitable.  We're at that point. In the last year we have out grown two warehouses and space really has become a premium.  All is not lost however. In August we are hoping to move into a nice new building at the other side of Perth. All good and well but we still have to move!

While the majority of the move will be big bulky furniture and carpet, my job is to worry about the other side of the business, communications infrustructure, the offices etc etc etc.  To kick things into motion I phoned a nice chap at BT called Paul in the Business Movers Team who set about organising the move.  I wasn't expecting much since last time I loved lines with BT it was a complete disaster.  We lost our numbers and were without phones for over a week.  I wouldn't want to do it again.  Anyhoo back to just now,  Paul assures me processes have completely changed now, everything is far more seamless, for example, no more waiting for broadband to be provisioned.  Everything is getting done on the one day, and because we were able to identify the existing lines, for far cheaper than we were expecting.

For a change BT have impressed me, lets just see if it all goes as well on the day of changeover!

I finally took the plunge and installed Windows Vista on my home PC.  Despite the huge amount of hype it's not something I'd been desperate to use what with the first time I saw it (a few years ago at a Microsoft Technet Roadshow) the presenters (all Microsoft staff) had trouble making Vista do even the most basic of tasks.

However I felt I'd give it a shot, it's been 2 years since that first presentation, surely they have it working by now...

It all started off well, from formatting to being on the desktop it only took 30 minutes.  Thats where the good fortune stopped.  It then took an hour to get my wireless network card to behave.  Now in fairness this isn't all Microsofts fault.  The vista upgrade advisor didn't flag up any issues with my hardware however it didn't take into account the distinct lack of 64bit drivers for netgear products.  If you go to http://www.atheros.cz/ you can find generic drivers for most wireless chipsets, for my netgear WPN311 I used the AR5004G drivers.  After forcing the network card to use the atheros drivers I was at least back online.

The next fun task was installing Office 2007 and connecting Outlook into works exchange mailbox.  There is one major issue here.  Our exchange system is built on Small Business Server 2003 and as such uses Self-Signed security certificates to authenticate everything.  However Vista appears to not like self-signed certificates which causes a few problems, for instance it won't allow Outlook to connect to my exchange server.

No matter what I tried, Vista/Outlook wouldn't behave (ridiculous for two flagship products) until half way through a game of the new Mahjong that is bundled with the OS, outlook sprung to life and everything worked.  I'm not 100% sure what I did to fix it but here goes anyway.

1. Run Internet Explorer 7 as an Administrator (right click then select run as admin on IE icon)
2. Log into your exchange server via Outlook Web Access (OWA)
3. When you get the error message saying invalid certificate click continue to get to the normal OWA login screen
4. On the address bar at the top click on the red certificates box then click View Certificates
5. Click on install certificates on the pop up window
6. When asked to choose the certificate store select "Place certificate in the following store" then from the list select "Trusted Root Certificates"
7. At this point I gave up as it still didn't work and started playing Mahjong, suddenly it started working! 

Here's to finding out what else is broken!!

After a lot of fighting with CSS and a stroppy web server, the new Launchpad website is now online!

Why a new website you may ask?  Well it's now based upon a Content Management System.  This means non techy users can log into the site via a browser and update elements of the website, leaving the design and hosting aspects to us.  It'll allow our volunteer staff to contribute directly to the website without the massive learning curve.

We've also added some extra functionality such as search and the sitemaps protocol.  This nifty wee thing is nothing more than an XML file that tells search engines such as Google and Live Search when a page has been updated.  It saves them crawling the site as often and improves the search engines accuracy.  Well worth looking at for your website.  http://www.sitemaps.org has all the details.

Well after a good few hours tweaking with CSS and generally trying to make Blog City break we now have the brand new Launchpad ICT Dept blog.  Whats the point you may ask?  Well it's a place for us to keep notes of what we're doing, but in a way that lets everyone else gain knowledge of what we've broken achieved.

Since CSS is the bulk of what I've been working with lately it's only fair I admit how it was all done.  A member of the Blog City forums mentioned a Firefox plug-in called ColorZilla.  It's a wee program that sits in the status bar and will tell you the colour of any element on a website you wish, more importantly it'll tell you the name of the CSS tag controlling the element.  Really handy for modifying premade scripts to look exactly how you want.  This blog is the result.

As you may have noticed lately, I never seem to post on here anymore.  Not sure why but just don't feel as angry as I was when I set this up.  I'm putting money on it being down to not being in Glasgow anymore.

Anyhoo, I'm changing this thing around so its the proper blog for the charity I work for, interacting with all you, the little people out there! 

Thanks to everyone who's been reading this over the last 2 and a bit years, it's been fun etc etc.