This is a known problem with Windows XP and I’ve hit it myself a number of times. It’s particularly bad when you realise you don’t want to print something, turn off the printer, then try to delete the job and it gets stuck “Deleting”. Normally the only way to fix this is to reboot, but in the case above, this didn’t fix the problem. Unfortunately Windows isn’t like one of these Seiko watches which you can take back to the shop you bought it when it gets stuck, you have to deal with the problem yourself. So here’s how you can delete the job manually off the queue:

• Stop the printer queue: The first thing you need to do is stop the queue. Open a DOS prompt and type net stop spooler and press Enter. This puts the queue to sleep and enables you to access the files directly
• Find the spool files: Point your browser at  c:\windows\system32\spool\printers and press Enter. This will show you all the files that are currently queued.
• Clear the queue: Delete all the files in the folder. You may need to be able to see “system files” in order to do this.
• Start the printer queue: Open a DOS prompt and type net start spooler and press Enter. This restarts the print service again and give you access to print again.

It may be tricky the first time you do it, but it’s not really that hard. I’ll tell you the truth, I wish I knew about this earlier as some time ago I was printing a catalogue for some NFL jerseys (which was huge) and I just couldn’t get rid of the job. In the end I had to shut my computer down and bring it back up again. If I had known of this technique things might have been so much easier!

You probably have noticed by now that there are a plethora of services that have sprung up that make use of Twitter’s API to provide additional functionality. One of these is called Twitterless and one of the features it provides is a notification mechanism that lets you know when someone stops following you.

The website provides a bunch of other features too, including:

• Dropped follower notifications via Twitter direct messaging
• Graph and Timeline view of follower history
• Google map of followers
• Follower filtering by description
• Ability to create searches for keywords in follower’s posts
• Auto-Follow and Auto-Block bots
• Ability to make profile private
• Ability to post tweets from the Address bar of any browser with automatic url shrinkification

There’s some great stuff in there. For example, I can group people I know who are on a diet together then search for the term CLA (a diet drug) across their tweets. Or I can group all my geeky friends together an search for data center automation across them. I’m looking forward to seeing a graph of my followers for example, but my data is still being crunched at the moment.

Give it a try; I’m sure you’ll find it useful (if you’re a Tweethead that is).

The service you’re looking for is called a Reverse Phone Lookup and there are a number of services that allow you to to this. One of these is www.nationwidephonelookup.com, a website that lets you research phone numbers, find out who they belong to and even find background information about those people. The service covers the entire of the U.S. and even includes mobile number. Note that this website doesn’t have data for other countries (but the question I got the question from is based in the U.S.)

You’ll notice that the service isn’t free and that’s because there is access to a lot more information than you find on free service. Apparently this is because they have access to a superior service, which includes mobile numbers and unlisted numbers. Luckily they operate a policy whereby if they cannot supply you with information, there is no charge. This means you get charged for information, not for the attempts.

Sounds pretty comprehensive. Good luck!

It was only recently that LinkedIn announced an API for development teams to build Applications that can integrate with their website. The boys down at WordPress managed to roll out an application pretty sharpish that lets you specify a WordPress blog which gets fed into your Profile page. Here’s how to implement it:

• Click on “Applications” at the bottom of your left hand menu
• Select the WordPress Application (shown alongside)
• Click Update Settings on the WordPress Application main screen
• Specify the URL of your blog. You can also specify here whether you want to display all posts or just those which you decorate appropriately.
• Click Save

If you visit your profile page, you’ll now see your blog posts showing there for the whole world to see.

It’s pretty useful I though, especially if your blog is very much in line with what your profile is about. It’s helpful to showcase your blog, especially if it serves as a vehicle for you to increase your credibility and spread your thoughts. Much better than fighting over bar stools and drinking beer (though social events shouldn’t be undervalued)

I was speaking to a friend at work and this question came up. It prompted me to point him at a post I made on my other blog and talks about how you can use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to transcribe your speech into a blog post. In fact, here’s a short video I posted that demonstrates the idea:

I thought that was pretty cool and I managed to do that after only a few minutes of training. Now, it’s really easy to achieve 150 words per minute with this technology even if you don’t know how to type. I thought that was awesome. Ok, you might need to teach it how to spell a few word; I’m pretty sure “orovo detox” isn’t in it’s dictionary for example; but those words will be the exception rather than the rule.

Check out Dragon NaturallySpeaking

A number of websites around the web make use of API features provided by the larger sites to provide functionality that would be hard for them to build on their own. Google Maps is a prime example as it allows websites around the world to make use of their mapping technology and overlay any information they would like on them. However, you do need to have some coding skills to take full advantage of this. You do find toolkits around the web to make mashing up website features but if you want some clean integration you can’t get away from the fact that a developer would need to implement this for you.

If you have a budget to engage someone to implement this for you, check out APICoders. They are a company that specialise in supplying API mashup programmers and are happy to build functionality using any API framework you wish. They are based in India which means that their rates are much more competitive than anyone else you’ll come across and their portfolio includes Google Map mashups, Flickr mashups and PayPal integrations.

They seem to have a wide range of skills including abilities to code in PHP, .NET, Javascript, Ruby on Rails or ASP. This means they can probably integrate with any website you have already and embed any API functionality from sites you choose.

Check them out if you think they can help you.

I got this question from an elderly gentleman I was speaking to some time ago. His exact word were that his browser looked like it had taken a diet pill and that everything looked tiny. Well, one of the features of Internet Explorer 7 is that it allows you to easily zoom in and zoom out of a page. Changing the zoom factor is pretty easy too. There’s a slider at the right bottom of the browser window that lets you modify that:

This lets you change the zoom factor nice and easily so that you get look closely or zoom out of a web page.

You can also control this through a simple keypress. To make text larger hold down the Ctrl key and press the + key as many times as necessary. Pressing Ctrl and - has the opposite effect, and Ctrl and 0 will reset the text to its normal size. These keyboard controls also work in Firefox.

I got this question from someone who received a product catalogue from a supplier who specialises in boots made by UGG Australia. The catalogue was downloaded off their website and consisted of one great big .ISO file. Windows doesn’t actually read this type of file natively but there are a couple of options you can look into to handle this file. First of all, let’s have a look at what a .ISO file is. It’s actually an image of a complete DVD or CD that lets you create a perfect mirror of what the original disk looked like. It’s a great way to package disks up in a way that allows someone else to produce a perfect copy. So, what can we do with a .ISO file?

• Burn it to physical media: One option is to create a CD or DVD and access the data from the disk. Most disk writing packages today let you do this without too much hassle. Personally, I like using Nero for this but there are other pacakges out there that will let you do this too.
• Access the file directly: If you don’t need to have a physical copy of the disk, you may also access the disk directly. This is a process called “mounting” the disk that makes your operating system think you have an extra drive. One free tool that lets you do this is Virtual CloneDrive. Once this is installed you can right-click on the ISO file and mount it as an extra CD/DVD drive. You can then copy files directly off it without having to actually burn a disk.

Virtual CloneDrive is actually one of my favourite Desktop Management Tools because it lets me access data directly even it I’m remotely attached to a machine. I no longer need to burn a disk but can access data and programs directly off it. This has been particularly useful now that software manufacturers (particularly Microsoft) supply their media as .ISO files

This question came from someone I knew who was off to Florida for a few days taking the family and himself for a much needed break. Anyway, the question didn’t contain much information, but I do know that in order to back up MySQL you can use mysqldump which is a backup program for MySQL.

Here’s a cute little script that will backup and Zip up your database:

#!/bin/sh
date='date -I'
mysqldump -u <username> -p <password> <database> | gzip -a > /home/mysql-backup/database-$date.sql.gz


where

<username> is a user who has access to the database
<password> is the password for this user
<database> is the name of the database that needs to be backed up

The script will save the backup with a timestamp so if you need to run this more than once it will make sure each database has a unique name.

There are a few desktop management tools out there that can help you schedule the job, but cron will do just fine. And next time you go on one of those Disney vacations, please, please .. can I come with you?

This was really the topic of conversation (well one of them) over dinner with some friends; different ways in which you can learn new things and find out different facts. At that point someone mentioned Wordia which is a great little website which I had never seen before.

It’s an entirely different concept to when you’re using a search engine. For example, normally you might search for “hotel las vegas” if you’re after information about hotels in Las Vegas. Wordia on the other hand is more like a dictionary. If you type “hotel” for example; you’ll get a definition of what a hotel is, but also a placeholder that lets you upload a video describing the word. If you type in “animation” for example; you’ll get the following video:

The website seems to be quite new and most of the words I searched for didn’t seem to have videos, but it’s really up to the community to try and populate these now. I think it’s a great concept and with lots of potential for people to contribute and share with one another. It doesn’t matter if you want to learn about archaic English words or names for cool baby clothes, you’re bound to spend a couple of hours watching other people’s videos.