For any given month, all the multiples of 7 fall on the same day.
So this month, February 2012 is a Tuesday month.

Usage:
“Hey Mum, what date is Dad’s vasectomy this month?”. “The 22nd”. So, 7, 14, 21 is a Tuesday, therefore the 22nd will be a Wednesday. Dad’s vasectomy happens on a Wednesday!

You just have to memorise what day these multiples of 7 occur on each month.

Also: The day a month ends on is the day the next month will “be”. This month ends on a Wednesday so March 2012 will be a Wednesday month.

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Talking with a friend about missed additions to our shared folder we wondered if there was a way to be notified after each change to a folder. There is.
If enabled, Dropbox provides RSS feeds for tracking shared folder events. We can use this RSS feed to be notified anytime a change is made inside a shared folder.

Here’s how:

1. Enable RSS feeds
   Log into your Dropbox account using the web interface https://www.dropbox.com/, then browse to your account settings: https://www.dropbox.com/account#settings
   
   Under ‘Account Preferences’ make sure ‘Enable RSS feeds’ is checked then click ‘Change settings’ to save the changes.

   

2. Browse to your Events page
   Browse to your Events page: https://www.dropbox.com/events
   Here you can select the shared folder you wish to track. You select it from the shared folders in the left menu. In the image below I’ve chosen my ‘Kowald Humour’ shared folder.
   
   

3. Get the RSS Feed URL
   When you select a shared folder you will see a list of recent events for your chosen shared folder on the page.
   At the bottom of this page – now you’ve enabled RSS feeds – will be a link named ‘Subscribe to this feed.’.
   <– looks like this.

   Click this button and a modal window will appear with the RSS URL for the shared folder you want to track.
   It will look something like the RSS Feed URL shown below.
   Copy this feed to your clipboard.

   

4. Subscribe
   Now you have the RSS feed you can subscribe to it and be notified of every change to your shared folder, never missing additions.

   Subscribe in your feed reader
   You may wish to subscribe in your feed reader of choice, for example I use Google Reader for this.
   Add the copied RSS feed to your feed reader and all changes to your chosen shared folder will now be sent to your feed reader.

   Subscribe to updates via email
   If you don’t have a feed reader and don’t want to set one up you can use an ‘RSS to email’ service to send you notifications of shared folder changes.
   I use a service called Feed My Inbox for this.

   To  send changes to your email simply enter the feed URL you copied earlier into the ‘Website or feed URL’ box, then your email address into the ‘Your Email Address’ box.
   Click ‘Submit’ and you’re all done! All changes will now be emailed to you.

   

Another advantage of subscribing to changes in shared folders is you can easily see who has added a file to a folder. This is especially useful if you share folders with more than one person.
In my Google Reader screenshot you can see that my sister, ‘kate kowald’ added a bunch of images into this folder. Something I would not have known otherwise.

A few years ago a good friend introduced me to the excellent Vi editor. His constant talking about how great it was made me curious.
I purchased Learning the Vi and Vim Editors – O’Reilly and learnt the basic commands.
The added efficiency XP I gained with each new command made me so happy. To date I consider learning Vim one of my funnest learning experiences. Editing exclusively with keyboard commands sped up my development and felt great.

I moved to London in May 2009. Shortly after arriving I got a new job at a College.
My boss here is familiar with Windows server environments so all our servers are Windows servers.
I wanted to continue using Vim so started using gVim. gVim is a modified version of the UNIX Vi editor. It contains all the Vim commands in a program you can run in Windows.

Here are some things I’ve needed to configure while using gVim.

Maximising gVim Windows on file open

The default window size when opening a file in gVim is small.
To make gVim maximise windows on file open add the following to you _vimrc  file.

" start maximised
au GUIEnter * simalt ~x

Your _vimrc will be in the root folder of your Vim install, mine’s located in:
C:\Program Files\Vim\

The _vimrc file contains optional runtime configuration settings to initialize Vim when it starts.
On Unix based systems, the file is named .vimrc, on Windows systems it’s _vimrc.

Removing ^M characters in gVim

^M characters are DOS/Windows line-ending characters.
Previous developers at my work used Notepad++ to edit files. When I’d open these files in gVim they were littered with ^M characters and appear without line breaks or indents. Very hard to read and edit.

To remove these use the ex command

:%s/^M/\r/g

I encountered a problem typing control characters in Windows.
In a UNIX environment you type a control character using Ctrl-V. In Windows Ctrl-V is used to ‘Paste’ so you must use Ctrl-Q instead.
To type ^M in gVim you type (Ctrl-Q) <– keep your finger on Ctrl then press M.

:help CTRL-V-alternative

*CTRL-V-alternative* *CTRL-Q*
Since CTRL-V is used to paste, you can't use it to start a blockwise Visual
selection.  You can use CTRL-Q instead.  You can also use CTRL-Q in Insert
mode and Command-line mode to get the old meaning of CTRL-V.  But CTRL-Q
doesn't work for terminals when it's used for control flow.

Good explanation of ^M characters copied from here

There is a difference between how a Windows-based based OS and a Unix based OS store end-of-line markers.
Windows based operating systems – thanks to their DOS heritage – store an end-of-line as a pair of characters – 0x0A0D. Unix based operating systems just use 0x0A. ^M is a visual representation of 0x0D.

Changing the location of gVim swap and backup files

When editing a file in gVim a backup file is created after saving changes to a newly opened file.
It is a copy of the file before changing the file.  It is named the same as the file with a ~ at the end.
This creates a lot of clutter in your directories.
Thankfully you can change the default behaviour by disabling swap and backup files or moving the location of these.

To disable swap and backup files add this to your _vimrc file

set nobackup
set nowritebackup
set noswapfile

I like to keep these files as it saves the line location that I was last editing.

To change the swap and backup file location add this to your _vimrc file

" set where to store backups
set backupdir=C:\vimbackups

" set where to store swap files
set dir=C:\vimbackups

In six days the iPhone 4 is released. In two days I’ve had my 3GS for a year.
Since getting my 3GS I’ve updated my moblog never.
Here’s a selection of photos from the past year that should have gone into my moblog. Here we go.

He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one.

This paragraph made my day. It’s from the book ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut.
Here’s an amusing anecdote about Kurt Vonnegut:

In the mid 1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse that had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, “The horse jumped over the fucking fence,” and left.

I associate the word 'ZOMG' with my friend Daniel

I associate the word ‘ZOMG’ with my friend Daniel.
Incidentally, ‘Words with Friends’ is a great iPhone app.

For the person who empties my bin, thank you!

I left this note and Kinder chocolate for the cleaner of my work office. I meant it as a nice gesture. I worried later the cleaner might think I was being a dick. My bin is emptied nightly, it’s great.

The next morning I was relieved to find this response.

Yes thank you

Fixie Shop, near Soho

I took this photo for my friend Mark, though never sent it to him. It’s a fixed gear bicycle shop I walked past a while ago in Soho, London.
Mark has done a fixed gear bicycle conversion himself. See his documented conversion on his blog: http://solirossi.wordpress.com

Stork Nest Live from Dumbravioara, Romania, Europe

My friend Jason sent me a link to this Stork Nest webcam. I had it on my second monitor all day.
Here’s the webcam: http://www.justin.tv/milvus#r=D9MLLPE

Have you seen me?

The missing cat wrote the headline.

Uterus

This arrangement of cloths reminds me of a uterus.

Animated Uterus

Big-ass keys

I found a keyboard with large keys in the bin at work. I salvaged the keys.

Tooligan: well named

Tooligan: well named matchbox car – seen in Sainsbury’s.

Sylvanian families

My sister used to have a whole mess of these cute creatures.

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My Server Environment

Server: Windows Server 2003 R2
WAMP: The Uniform Server – (with the latest Apache, MySQL, PHP)
SilverStripe Version: 2.3.7

Things I had to Google

Change the breadcrumb separator

This arrow symbol (») is used as the default breadcrumb separator.
You can change this by editing /sapphire/core/model/SiteTree.php

Search SiteTree.php for the variable named $breadcrumbs_delimeter.
Update the breadcrumb separator to what you want.

/**
* Delimit breadcrumb-links generated by BreadCrumbs()
*
* @var string
*/
public static $breadcrumbs_delimiter = " » ";

editor.css stylesheet not being used in HTML editor

I came across a bug where SilverStripe would not use my editor stylesheet in the HTML editor.
This can by fixed by adding the following line to mysite/_config.php

HtmlEditorConfig::get('cms')->setOption('content_css', 'cms/css/editor.css, mysite/css/editor.css');

Alter the third parameter of the setOption method to the path where your editor.css file is located.

Targeting Mac Firefox

The following code with some minor tweaks can be used to target any browser / OS.
I’m adding it here to show how easy it is to create variables for use in your templates.

To add a variable that can be used in your templates edit /mysite/code/Page.php

Add this function:

function isMacFF() {
    // Get the user agent
    $userAgent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

    $browser  = "Firefox";
    $os = "Mac OS X";
    $version = ""; // You could add version or anything else you are looking for here

    // Check the string is in the user agent
    $browserTest = strpos($userAgent, $browser);
    $osTest = strpos($userAgent, $os);

    // If both conditions are true we know it is Firefox for Mac
    // Add more conditions if you are testing for anything else
    if ($browserTest == true && $osTest == true)  {
        return TRUE;
    } else {
        return FALSE;
    }
}

Thanks to George Ornbo for this OS/browser targeting PHP code.

In your main page template add this:

<% if isMacFF %>

<% end_if %>

Changing /themes/apprenticeshipsfirst/css/mac_ff.css to the path of your Mac+FF CSS file.

I would have used <% require themedCSS(mac_ff) %> to add the stylesheet but I found it adds the Mac+FF stylesheet regardless of the conditional statement.

Creating a Dynamic Sitemap

Creating a dynamic sitemap is simple with SilverStripe.
Follow the instruction here: http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=tutorial:site-map

Admin area breaks

While using SilverStripe I ran into an error where duplicating a webform page resulted in the admin area breaking. When the error occured a JavaScript alert popped up informing me something went wrong.
After this I was unable to get to the admin area.

To fix this:
Put site into dev mode.
You do this by adding the following line of code to /saphire/_config.php :

Director::set_environment_type("dev");

Comment out the line in the offending file – this is listed in the error message once the site is put into dev mode. In my case I commented out a line that throws an exception – in the Object.php file.

//throw new Exception("Object->__call(): the method '$method' does not exist on '$this->class'");

Now rebuild your SilverStripe database by visiting http://yoursite.com/dev/build.
Don’t worry, this rebuild won’t delete any of your site’s content. After the rebuild visit your admin area which you should be able to get into again.
Complete the action you were trying to do before you received the error then restore this line by removing your comment.

404 page not being used

In my SilverStripe installation a 404 page existed but when I typed in a URL that didn’t exist it would not use this 404 page.
It instead showed a SilverStripe themed error page saying:

Website Error Not Found
The website server has not been able to respond to your request.

After Googling the problem I found you have to publish this default 404 page before it will be used by SilverStripe.
To publish, select your ‘Page Not Found’ page and click ‘Save and Publish’.
Do a site flush by adding ?flush=all to the URL and it will now use this custom 404 page.

Website not displayed using The Uniform Server

I chose The Uniform Server as my all-in-one WAMP solution.
I chose this because it installs with strict security settings enabled and can be used on a production server.
When using it for the first time I ran into the problem where when I logged out of the Remote Desktop Connection for my production server it would stop serving my website.
I found out The Uniform Server can be run as a standard program – running via logged in user – or it can be run as a service.
When using this on a production server you want to run this as a service. To run as a service follow these directions: http://wiki.uniformserver.com/index.php/5.0-Nano:_Install_and_Run#Run_as_a_Service_.28Vista_and_W7.29

Useful Links

• http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=built-in-page-controls
• http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=installation-on-windows-wamp
• http://www.silverstripe.org/modules/ – hard to find on the website
• http://www.silverstripe.org/stable-download/

Conclusion

SilverStripe is easy to install, use and extend.
SilverStripe comes with all the features I was looking for:

• Intuitive content editing
• Search engine friendly URLs (‘this-page’ format)
• User Management
• Runs on Windows Server 2003
• Developed with PHP
• Works with Apache, MySQL
• Easy to use templating system

The functionality it lacked I was able to add with a module.

I’ve used Joomla and Drupal CMS in the past and found SilverStripe much easier and quicker to build a website with.
SilverStripe templates are great, using normal HTML with custom tags.
The editing interface is simple and easy to use. The admin interface is more intuitive than any other CMS I’ve used.

I recommend SilverStripe to anyone looking for a good, free CMS.

Thanks to Reece for getting me onto SilverStripe.