Welcome to Planet Dan

Planet Dan logo

I set up this website ten years ago although it was neglected for the last 5. It’s currently enjoying a revival for reasons not fully thought through…

My old site had various details about my family tree – Wardles from Kegworth in Leicestershire, and Killick (of Cheam in Surrey), and a few random pages about Ghost Hill in Taverham, Fairey Aviation, the floodlights at Crystal Palace and the oh-so 2001 homepages that showed off holiday photos and the like. I still have a couple more pages to transfer over (I’ll save you the holiday slide show :-) ).

If you like something or find it helpful please rate it (click the thumbs up icon at the bottom of the post) or leave a comment.

Thanks for visiting!
Dan

What I do for a living

Sometimes, this is me.

If your external hard drive stops working…

My aunt’s Lacie external hard drive failed/died a couple of weeks ago, she tried a local computer repair man but he couldn’t fix it. If you really, really need the files that are on the broken disk – they may still be recoverable…

The service you need is disaster or “data recovery” – try searching for data recovery service +your-location and see what turns up.

My aunt lives in Switzerland and couriered her drive to a company in Sheffield (we couldn’t find any service nearby that seemed to cater for smaller/home customers, and in reality sending the drive further afield isn’t going to make a big difference except for the courier cost). The people at ABC Data Recovery were very helpful and friendly, it took about a week but the data was successfully recovered.

I made a note of the company in case I ever need data recovery at my work or home: www.abcdatarecovery.co.uk

Not being ranked by Google

I help a couple of friends out with their websites and I’m struggling to get one updated by Google. I think it’s because there was an old Google sitemap installed which basically told Google

“We don’t update the site much
and here is a list of our pages as of 2008″

We recently upgraded the website and all the pages/files moved (some subtlely, some completely disappeared), and Google didn’t taken any notice because (I presume) the old sitemap.xml wasn’t updated and so Google ignored the changes.

So… if you are taking over a website remember to look beyond the content on the pages visible to you and check what .htaccess, robots.txt and sitemap.xml are also doing to your site. We updated public involvement a couple of months ago but we’re still waiting for Google’s spiders to drop by :-(

Getting found on Google: common mistakes

Lots to think about in this excellent post about common mistakes in Search Engine Optimisation on Econsultancy.com.

I think #1 – not building links back to your site from other places on the web - is a very common mistake amongst small businesses/websites because it is harder and takes longer to do. It makes me think how much easier it is to sit in front of your computer tinkering with your website or “analysing” your marketing instead of getting out there and doing a leaflet drop or something else visible in the real world. Are you working or avoiding working?

If you are looking for a quick hit, unfortunately changes for search engines take time to take effect (#8) – something I can’t stress enough, and I am guilty of #7 – once the website/page is ranking well on Google doesn’t mean the SEO is finished - although my excuse is just because I’m very busy. The reality is that actually doing SEO takes time itself.

More posts about getting your website found on Google

Conversion invalid for datatypes on column pair (SQL2000 Error)

If you trying to import a CSV/text or Excel file into some table on SQL Server 2000 where some of the table columns are int/numeric/float and some of the data is empty (null) – watch out that you are not trying to import a space by accident.

For my work I work with lots of data files from third parties and this morning I was getting the following sort of error message:

Error during Transformation ‘DirectCopyXform’ for Row number 1. Errors encountered so far in this task: 1.

TransformCopy ‘DirectCopyXform’ conversion error:  Conversion invalid for datatypes on column pair 134 (source column ‘q18_9′ (DBTYPE_WSTR), destination column ‘q18_9′ (DBTYPE_UI1)).

A subtle clue does present itself when previewing the data (I’m assuming you’re using the DTS import wizard) – if you are seeing empty columns instead of NULL then this is a sign there’s something there. To fix it’s just a case of opening up the data file in Excel and performing a search and replace on the ‘ ‘ (making sure that Match entire cell contents is checked of course).

Hope this helps (if anyone else out there is still using SQL Server 2000 and DTS!)

Recommended free anti-virus?

I put Windows 7 onto my laptop last week and then wanted to install anti-virus. I used to recommend AVG but it has become “bloat-ware” and using the latest version on a friend’s computer recently was a really painful experience. I tried Avast! (free edition) but found that difficult to use.

So I’m just trialling VIPRE from Sunbelt software which was recommended by a friend who runs a small IT support company. Alternatively, I do recommend ESET’s NOD32 anti-virus which I use for work but neither are free – right now I don’t know of any free solutions to recommend. That said the phrase “no such thing as a free lunch” might explain AVG’s change of direction.

What use are parallel printer cables in 2009?

None it would seem. Clearing out some shelves of old computer equipment today I was planning to put some of the more useful items up on ebay – each for a penny in case anyone out there has a use for a little network hub or a parallel printer cable and some other bits.

A quick search (of ebay) seems to indicate that there will be few if any takers though. We’ll see if freecycle is any better, but ultimately I expect to be taking some perfectly good CPU fans (never used), a 4 year old wireless print-server (which was a pain to configure), three parallel printer cables and various other old bits of kit down to the local tip/recycling centre.

Old computer equipment destined for the rubbish tip

Shame, but then it’s out-dated, slow, or just plain incompatible. It seems such a waste. Chances are another Iomega zip drive will be on its way to silicon heaven very soon.

If you’re looking for cheap Python programming books – I am trying to recycle those too. It’s probably too late for the CD’s I chucked out. If you were looking for (un-opened) Microsoft Works 2000 – sorry, the rubbish is picked up this Tuesday.

Update 25/11/09: The answer to whether parallel printer cables have any use these days is still ‘No’, but most of the other bits got picked up on Freecycle. Search for your local Freecycle group here – http://groups.yahoo.com/ (much faster to access than through www.freecycle.org)

Python Programming Books (second hand) for sale

I’m trying to tidy up my home office and I have a bunch of programming books on my shelves that I don’t need anymore so I’m hoping they’ll find a new home if I sell them on Amazon. Is that a good idea? Or would I be better off listing them on ebay?

I don’t expect to make my money back – they’re priced to just-go. I imagine they would just get pulped if they went to a charity shop…

Starting out in survey design

My work is online surveys but the questionnaire below made its way home from school on Friday. I am so proud(!)… it has yes/no buttons and a little text box for the verbatim answer too.

First SurveyThe questions are:

  1. Did you have dominoes?
  2. What was your favourite toy? Write your favourite toy’s name here:
  3. Did you only play with your toy inside?

LEGO can be work too

I should be working but I couldn’t help enjoy 10 Best LEGO Designs now which was one of those “possibly related” links (automatically generated) at the bottom of a post on Cecilia Weckstrom’s blog – some of which is work related… but also shares great stuff like this: