Cyber Tech Cafe is currently looking for a PHP developer. This is a contract to perm position. The ideal candidate will be well versed in PHP (v4.x & v5.x) and MySQL and a good understanding of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Most projects will be a collaborative effort with the design team but some basic / general understanding of graphics is helpful. All work will be done on and stored on Cyber Tech Cafe's development web server and copyright of completed work is transferred to the customer.

Disaster recovery is one of those things that people never want to talk about, until they need it. Often, it *may be* an afterthought in their network planning and / or deployment, but there's seldom any real follow-through or testing, until there's a disaster. The tyipcal scenario usually goes something like this:

Company installs a network and has a plan for backups. They will typically deploy either a tape drive or external hard drive, set it and forget it. They will typically assign someone to handle the tape / drive swapping, and this will work for a few days, weeks or months. Invariably though, something happens. The person is fired, quits or business happens (annual inventory, year end, etc.). Things will typically go on for a time, then disaster strikes. The server crashes. That spreadsheet that can save the company gets deleted. The database gets corrupted. The email server crashes. Either way, it's time to use the backup, and there's nothing there.

- The tapes are 2 years old and are no longer storing data
- The backup software stopped working
- The [external] hard drive failed
- Nobody's been swapping the tapes
- Nobody's been swapping the drives
- The building was destroyed and all of the tapes or drives with it

"I took my computer to XYZ computer company to get a virus removed and, when I got it back, all of my stuff was gone!!". I can't tell you how many times I've heard this, and I've already heard it twice this morning!! So, I thought that it would be as good a time as any to tell folks that that's not the way that we do things here.

The facts. In many instances, the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to 'fix' a problem on a Windows computer is to reinstall Windows. It sounds cliche but it's true. Whether it's a hosed up Windows installation or Windows update (often resulting in the famous Blue Screen of Death) or a virus or other bug that's burried itself deep inside of the OS (often resulting in a non-bootable system or a system that's progressively less and less responsive), a bare metal install is typically a sure fire way to fix it. Thing is, to do this, you have to overwrite any data (pictures, files, spreadsheets, etc.) on the drive. Many support companies / people will simply insert the Windows CD and go, paying absolutely no attention to the data that's on the computer. The result is a computer that no longer has the original problem, but no longer has the original data either. What's worse, the process often makes it prohibitively difficult if not impossible to recover the data after it's done.