I just can't seem to get away from this weird and wonderful tech issues that don't seem to affect anyone else or at least not enough for them to show up on google, I must be some sort of magnet for these things.

The latest bizarre episode was my Broadband connection at my office, which started to become rather unreliable, constantly dropping, becoming slow and then eventually died altogether and has been down for the last month. The router would connect for a few seconds and then disconnect again, so not enough time to do anything.

I replaced the router several times, all cables, ADSL filter, AC/DC adaptor, unplugged all other equipment from the router and phone line, nothing worked.

Finally my ISP sent out a BT engineer to do a line check, he fixed every possible problem he found on my line and at the exchange, so I now have a perfect line with an even better download speed than I had before.

The engineer even connected up his own BT Broadband router and connected to BT without an issue. So it appeared the problem was with my ISP, but they didn't have a clue what it could be so I decided to transfer to a new provider, after much careful consideration I chose Zen based on their good reputation and number of positive reviews for their business broadband.

My new ADSL was connected today, so I came in to the office with anticipation, only to be deflated again when I realised the problem was still there.

So I got on to the phone to Zen and literally within 10 minutes the problem was solved.

The first thing the guy asked me was if I had any other electrical devices near my router or the wires and if I did could I turn them off, which I thought seemed a bit odd but I did it anyway, and by heck my router came to life, the ADSL light went green and I had Internet access.

So it turned out to be by Snom 360 VOIP phone, some how it had developed a fault and was emitting waves at a frequency that was interfering with my ADSL, yes even when it was not plugged in in to the router.

It seems like such a simple thing, but I doubt I would ever thought of doing this myself as the possibility of my phone being the cause even when disconnected would not have even occurred to me, and obviously did not occur to my previous ISP either, so so I have to give Zen top marks for their tech support and this is why you pay more for a quality service.

I have had to replace 3 (yes 3) ADSL routers in the last  few months, and the causes have all been quite bizarre to say the least, certainly worth documenting I thought seeing as I could find no solutions on Google myself only people with similar problems and so answer to their dilemma. So read on and prepare to enter "The router twilight zone"

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Earlier this year I attended Scotch on the rocks, it was my first ever time driving in London which was a nightmare experience I can tell you. I'm sure people who live in London think it's fine to drive but I don't think I will ever willingly drive into London again, especially during rush hour when it is almost impossible to get on to busy roundabouts, I spent most of my time trying to avoid lunatic drivers and trying not to get lost.

Anyway as a result of this trip I entered a congestion zone, now I knew this meant I would have to pay a congestion charge, but this is all I knew and I assumed I had been caught on camera and would get a bill in the post.

To my great surprise a few weeks later I got a £120 fine in the post for not paying my congestion charge. As I had not received my congestion charge I responded and stated this fact, only to be told I am supposed to pay it in advance or stop at any shop that has the congestion charge logo and that it is my responsibility to know this.

OK fair enough this is probably common knowledge to anyone who lives or works in London or travels into London regularly, but surely anyone like myself who does not live in London, work in London or have any reason what so ever to drive in London, also has no reason to know how the congestion charges work either. Just as someone who works in a hairdresser has no reason to know CSS, HTML or Flash or even that they should know them. Or is it just me ?

I have of course appealed the fine based on facts above but my appeal fell on deaf ears. Transport for London have made it quite quite clear with their responses that they have zero flexibility, zero tolerance and  absolutely no understanding or sympathy for anyone whatsoever.

After doing a bit of Google research it seems I am not alone and folks like me are in fact their intended prey, poor hapless individuals visiting London who don't know how the congestion charges work and it is from us where they make most of their money, intentionally.

Seems like just another government money making scam to me, rather like wheel clamping.

So for Christ sake, if you plan to travel into London, make sure you know if you will going into a congestion zone and pay your fees in advance or risk a £120 fine.

My ADSL router stopped working today (or so I thought) and I wasted an entire day trying to get 2 different routers working only to discover the problem was actually the power adaptor.

The bizarre thing was that the routers actually seemed to be working, they had power and the lights were on, so the power adaptor is the last thing I considered as I would expect the router to not even turn on if the adaptor was screwed. I am  sure that this must have happened to a lot of people who have must have simply assumed the router was screwed and gone out and bought a new one when they didn't need to, so hopefully this may save a few people some money if they read this.

Symptoms

Netgear DG834G v4.
I lost all connection to the router, I could not ping it or access the interface, it was not assigning IP addresses and was effectively useless. When trying to do a factoring reset by holding in the reset button the power light would flash green and red and would not reset.

Netgear DG834 v2.

Everything was working on this one, DCHP was assigning IP's, I could access the interface, I could reset and do everything, however it would not connect to the internet. The Internet light would go green for a few seconds and the router status would show it as connected for those few seconds, then the light would flash orange and the status would show disconnected.

I had some vague recollection of an adaptor issue in the past causing something similar to the latter, but sadly I have no other adaptors in the office with the same voltage output, so my only option was indeed to go out and buy a new router. So I bought a top of the range Netgear dual band 8.11b/g/n QOS router for £99 from pc world. which allows you to give priority to certain services/ports or mach addresses, which is great if you use VOIP as we do which generally requires you to not be doing any other up/downloading at the same time, but using this it will give priority to my VOIP phone.

I Got it back to the office, and then used the new adaptor (same voltage) to test the other 2 routers, and they both worked perfectly.

I am rather kicking myself now as when I originally went home to find my spare router I threw out 3 old sky broadband routers at the same time as they are useless, but I bet they probably had suitable adaptors as I believe they are made by Netgear and I also remembered I have a whole box of old adaptors in the garage that I have been refusing to throw away in case I need them one day LOL.

The open source PHP dynamic language is one of the most widely deployed languages on Web servers today. But what operating systems are PHP developers using to develop and deploy their applications? It's a question that has been asked before and now it's being answered with a new study from Zend, one of the lead commercial backers behind PHP.

The study surveyed 2,000 PHP developers in December and found that 85 percent reported that Linux was their primary operating system as a production environment for PHP.

Windows came in at a distant second at 11 percent while Mac OS X came in third at just 2 percent. However, when Zend drilled down into which platforms respondents prefer for their development, the rankings change dramatically.

According to the study, 42 percent of respondents reported that Windows was their primary operating system for development. Linux came in as No. 2 at 38.5 percent while Mac OS X remained in third place at 19.1 percent.

The findings indicate that while Microsoft Windows remains the top platform for developing in PHP, its lead may be narrowing. Back in 2006, a Microsoft executive reported that 85 percent of PHP developers were developing on Windows, but only 20 percent deployed on a Windows machine. The change comes despite joint work by Zend and Microsoft to improve the capabilities of PHP on Windows servers.

that the new study was based on over 2,000 completed surveys conducted in December 2009, some of which came from Zend customers. The survey was made public through the Zend Framework website, the Zend monthly newsletter, Twitter and DevZone.

I have also noticed recently from reading blogs and lists that the majority of CFML open source developers seem to deploy Railo or Open BlueDragon on Linux, which is a major paradigm shift from ColdFusion developers who primary use Windows.

I don't think this is a matter of preference but rather one of necessity as pretty much all the PHP documentation is for Linux, most PHP apps are written for Linux/Apache and are not supported on windows even if you can get them working.

If you have tried to install Railo then will have discovered this can also be quite a task and a challenge to get working, especially on windows/IIS7, and there are far more blog posts and docs explaining how to get it running on Linux, as well as ready made virtual disk images, which I suspects encourages people to take the path of least resistance and install Linux.

In the case of CFML this does however tend to be done using virtualisation software such as virtualbox or vmware to run a linux development servers on windows, so cfml developers do still seem to be using windows as their primary desktop OS, so I do wonder if Zend took this into consideration with their study and if many of those who listed Linux as their primary development OS may in fact be running it as a virtual machine on windows. This feeling is further extrapolated by the fact that developers are mainly using servers distros like CentOS.

You also need to consider all the obvious facts as well:- While Linux has a lot going for it and plenty of software, most of the best/popular software, especially web dev/design products like Dreamweaver and the rest of the Adobe line is not available on Linux. Sure there are alternatives, but they are certainly not in the same league and you can't walk into PC World and buy any of it. For those who have always been running a Linux desktop this will of course not matter at all, but for the rest this will be a big issue, especially if it is software you have spent a lot of money on, so running a virtual machine makes sense.

Of course it could be the other way round entirely and developers are running a windows VM on linux, but this would seem an off way of doing it if their primary tools are on windows.

Before the Linux fanboys start ranting, let me make it 100% clear that this is not a linux vs windows slanging match and I will delete all churlish comments attempting to turn it into one. If you comment keep it on-topic and professional.