Christopher Shennan's Blog

A few months back both my Windows Vista (Business) computers would not longer print even though they had been printing fine for months.  I tried

1. restarting the workstations
2. restarting the server,
3. restarting the print spooler service on the workstations
4. restarting the printer spooler server on the server
5. deleting printers and tryed to re-add them

Regardless what I tried neither of the Windows Vista computers would allow me to printer and always presented me with the following error when trying to add a printer and almost always when the computer booted:-

The local print spooler service is not running. Please restart the spooler or restart the machine.

At that point I didn’t need to print much so I didn’t try too hard to fix it and simply resorted to printing from my only Windows XP machine I had.

Today I finally had enough and decided it was time to find a solution to this local print spooler service is not running problem.

continue reading…

Today I have found a new nemesis in the form of the Zend Framework!  I have been working on a client website that for some reason just will not allow them to log out properly when they’re using IE7 or Google Chrome but it works fine in Firefox (please don’t post the “get a better browser” comments as it’s really not very helpful).

I’ve check the online examples and my logout function is identical, line for line, as the examples.

public function logoutAction()  
{  
    // clear everything - session is cleared also!  
 
    Zend_Auth::getInstance()->clearIdentity();   
    $this->_redirect('/login/index');  
}

For some reason in IE7 and Chrome it only seems to execute the logoutAction() function if i do a hard refresh (Ctrl + F5) otherwise it redirect to the login form but the login details do not seem to get erased and I can still access the administration pages as if I am still logged in.

It’s driven me crazy all afternoon and I eventually had to give up for the day and hope that it’ll all become clear tomorrow when my mind is fresh and my coffee is strong!

For several months now I’ve been using eSense Visualizers for Microsoft Sharepoint to output the contents of a database in a meaningful and easy to understand view that is suitable for the client, although lately I’ve not been using it as much.  Just this morning I’ve had to use it for a few hours again and I’m quickly remembering why I don’t like it and I have several issues that bug me (and I’m hoping it’s not just me).  These include:-

continue reading…

Having  just set up WordPress on here this morning one additional thing I wanted to do which was to put a redirect in place to redirect my sub domain on wordpress.org (which is http://chrisshennan.wordpress.com) to point to my own domain name.

My main reason for doing this was that when I comment on some of my friends blogs (mainly those on blogspot) I have posted the comment using my WordPress profile which only allows me to enter my wordpress username which then links to username.wordpress.com.  As a result I would have to be adding my new blogs entries to 2 blogs which would be a waste of time and bad in terms or SEO (duplicated content resulting in a lower search engine listings).

continue reading…

I have decided to give blogging another try and as I know that I won’t be able to refrain from talking shop I have made the consious decision not to even try and stop myself from talking shop but I hope to bring in some non-shop talk as well.

So with this attempt I have just created this blog, installed my top 5 essential wordpress plugins and have now just said “hello world” once again! but so far the world has not said hello back :(

I hope you will find something interesting in my blog (once I actually write something) and of course all comments as welcome.