OliverBrown.me.uk

Oliver Brown, the civil rights activist

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0100

Sharing a name with someone is usually unremarkable. Sharing it with the plaintiff in a landmark Supreme Court case is rather less so. I have Googled myself since before Google was even a thing, so I have known about Oliver Leon Brown for a while.

Oliver Leon Brown

Oliver Leon Brown was a welder and part-time minister in Topeka, Kansas. In 1950, the local NAACP recruited him as one of thirteen parents to sue the Topeka Board of Education over racial segregation in the city’s public elementary schools. His daughter Linda was among the children denied entry to the nearest white school.

Supremacy now on 9o3o

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

9o3o is a web-based version of Flashpoint Archive which provides a way to play old browser content without installing anything locally.

It has long had support for Flash content via Ruffle but has recently added support for DirPlayer, which means Shockwave content is now playable through it.

As a result, Supremacy is now available on 9o3o.

This is the same version of DirPlayer you can play here so you can’t actually play it properly yet, but things should improve over time.

Oliver Brown, the London tailor

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:07:20 +0000

When I was born, “Oliver” was quite an uncommon name. I was the first one my primary school had. And even though “Brown” is a common name, the combination is still pretty rare. But not unique.

The popularity of “Oliver” has drastically increased. It has been the number one name for boys born in the UK several years recently. This has been a bit strange for me since I spent most of my life never being around other people with my name. This is obviously still true for adults, but as a parent who now spends time in playgrounds, hearing other people call “my” name is still strange.

Disney+ on Sky

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:08:19 +0000

I used to post a lot about TV and Sky in particular. It was mainly about options around having a home media centre. The commercial options around this have improved (things like the Apple TV and streaming) and the DIY options have become less interesting to talk about.

So it is nice to have something relevant to say again…

Disney+ now included

Disney+ has been available as an app on Sky for a while, but recently they announced it would be included with your Sky subscription. I don’t have a Sky subscription myself, though my dad does. I have my own Disney+ account. I’d previously logged into Disney+ on his Sky TV box.

New highest break in snooker - 153 by Ronnie O'Sullivan

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:51:51 +0000

I’m not especially into sports, but I am quite into weird quirks of sports, especially rules. Snooker in particular has a few odd ones that are not well known.

One of them is that it is possible to score more than the “maximum” of 147. Which Ronnie O’Sullivan has just done.

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If you know nothing about snooker but still want to read...

Players alternate turns, potting balls to score points. Pot one and you keep going; miss and it’s your opponent’s turn.
The consecutive points scored in a single visit to the table are called a break.
Balls are either red (1 pt each) or a colour — yellow (2), green (3), brown (4), blue (5), pink (6), black (7).
While reds remain on the table, you must alternate: pot a red, then a colour. Colours are respotted after being potted; reds stay down.
Once all reds are gone, you pot the colours in order from yellow through to black.

How to get 147

Under normal circumstances, 147 is indeed the maximum possible break:

Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:20:00 +0000

I recently bought Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown, a story-driven survival strategy game developed by Gamexcite and published by Daedalic Entertainment.

In fact, I pre-ordered it. Pre-ordering is something I tend to reserve for things I feel the need to signal support for that might otherwise struggle. I was a big fan of Star Trek in the 90s and early 2000s, and while recent Star Trek has been more of a mixed bag for me, I was excited for a new game based on this era, even if some of that is nostalgia.

DirPlayer 0.4.1 released

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 10:51:00 +0000

DirPlayer 0.4.1 has been released. The headline changes are hardware-accelerated graphics, major performance improvements, and custom font parsing and rendering.

That last one is particularly relevant to Supremacy, as the previous version had broken fonts. I’ve updated the JS polyfill on the Supremacy page to the latest version, and the game does look noticeably better as a result. Most of the fonts now render properly, and all of the buttons are readable.

Supremacy added to Flashpoint

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Back in January I wrote about Flashpoint Archive and my intention to get my old Shockwave and Silverlight games added to it.

Supremacy has now been added to Flashpoint.

Supremacy is a Risk-style turn-based strategy game I wrote in Macromedia Director and originally released in 2001. It supports both single player (against AI opponents) and local multiplayer.

You can find it in Flashpoint under the name “Supremacy”.

If you have Flashpoint installed, give it a try.

DirPlayer: A Shockwave emulator for modern browsers

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I recently posted about Flashpoint Archive, a way to play old Shockwave (and other) content. I have just discovered another option DirPlayer.

What is DirPlayer?

DirPlayer is written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly and is available two different ways:

As an extension from the Chrome Web Store. This is useful for visiting any old or archived sites and just automatically loading the Shockwave content.
As a single JS polyfill. This allows people hosting the content on pages they can still edit to make their Shockwave content available to any modern browser.

Supremacy

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:13:20 +0000

This is an embedded version of my old Shockwave game, Supremacy. In theory, you need the Shockwave 8.5 plugin installed, which almost certainly won’t work for you on a modern browser.

DirPlayer

However, there is a JS polyfill available called DirPlayer.

DirPlayer is a Shockwave emulator that aims to make playing old browser games possible on modern browsers. It is available in the Chrome web store.

Version 0.4.1 is installed on the page. It is not complete. The game launches but is not yet playable.

Supremacy - Shockwave game

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:20:39 +0100

I started programming from a young age. One of the earliest programming projects I worked on that I was pleased with was a version of Risk called “Supremacy”.

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Shockwave was a technology created by Macromedia as a sort of companion/competitor/successor to the then ubiquitous Flash¹.

Flashpoint Archive

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:20:39 +0100

I’ve just found out about Flashpoint Archive, an application for playing old content created using Flash, as well as other obsolete browser technologies.

Interacting with this video is done so under the Terms of Service of YouTube

View this video directly on YouTube

The core functionality is provided by sandboxed versions of the plugins that run the content, a proxy server for games that need to believe they are run over the internet, and a launcher allowing you to browse and launch content - all wrapped up in a neat package.

Accessibility in UK retail mobile apps

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 15:20:39 +0100

I have slowly been getting more interested in the accessibility of mobile apps. This has partly been driven by finding out just how many options there are to improve accessibility of apps, both for users and developers, and realising that many developers don’t know they exist. And, even when they are known about, there isn’t always much information about how to use them well.

To make this a bit more robust, I installed a bunch of UK shopping apps just to see what the current state of accessibility was and the results were… disappointing.

How to check if a number is divisible by 14,669

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 16:46:10 +0100

The method

Here is an easy way to determine if a number is divisible by 14,669.

First, multiply the last digit by 1,467. Then, take that number and add it to the remaining digits as if they were a number that is one digit shorter. Then repeat the process until the number is “clearly” divisible by 14,669 or not. This will match whether the original number is divisible by 14,669.

Stop killing games European Citizens' Initiative

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 16:42:36 +0000

Stop Killing Games

The people behind StopKillingGames.com have launched a European Citizens’ Initiative as part of their cause.

This is essentially a petition that if sufficiently supported, would require an official response from the European Commission. Based on the reasons in my previous post, I urge all EU citizens to sign.

At the time of writing, it has reached 355,503 of the 1,000,000 required signatures, and a minimum threshold in 6 out of 7 countries. It must reach its target by 31 July 2025.

Stop killing games

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 17:42:36 +0000

You have missed your chance to play The Crew

A new campaign has started to try and preserve video games that become unplayable when the developer and/or publisher no longer wishes to support them.

This post is mostly a collection of random commentary on games that I have tried to order as coherently as possible.

For a more succinct description of the problem and what you can do to support, visit StopKillingGames.com.

Exploring the generic math interfaces and fixed-point arithmetic in .NET

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 17:35:00 +0000

In .NET 7 (previewed in .NET 6) a series of new interfaces were introduced to make work with mathematical operations easier.

.NET has had generics almost forever allowing you to write algorithms that work with many different types, but this hasn’t been possible for basic maths until this was introduced.

The main reason this has been done now is for machine learning and AI implementations where the classic computing tradeoff of speed vs. space appears - if you’re dealing with very large arrays of numbers, maybe you want to switch from a 64 bit double to 32 bit float (or even the newly introduced 16 bit half).

Mapominoes - or learning to hate islands even more than when playing Plague Inc.

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 17:22:39 +0100

A while ago I bought Mapominoes Europe on a whim, and I’m now having to fight the urge to buy its many variations/expansions.

As the title suggests it is broadly based on dominoes, but instead of placing tiles by the numbers they have in common, it is based on countries with shared borders. Also unlike dominoes the cards are played not in a line but in a grid, and all neighbours have to be compatible.

Elo rating for ad hoc teams

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 15:37:00 +0000

One final feature my expanded Elo rating needs (or at least the last I can think of) is the ability to deal with ad hoc teams.

By “ad hoc teams”, I mean teams of individual players with their own ratings that are on the same team for a specific game, but don’t generally stay as a team (established teams that always play together should be treated as their own “players” with their own rating).

Stargate viewing order

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 07:21:06 +0100

There is a Stargate movie, three TV series’ and some feature length specials. It is not necessarily obvious what order to watch them in. There is a suggested order available on several websites, but they are usually hard to read because of ads.

This is just a table designed to be easy to read.

The strategy for handling the overlapping seasons of SG-1 and Atlantis is to alternate episodes, while keeping two-part episodes together.

Glom of nit

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 16:46:10 +0100

I have four blogs running the same theme that each feature a letter as the favicon. I hoped they would spell out a word.

This is of course the motto of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office.

Neither rain nor snow nor gl om of ni t can stay these mes engers abo t their duty.

If you’d like to more consider Going Postal by Terry Pratchett.

Importing old posts from my first blog

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 18:25:39 +0100

I have now imported posts from my very first blog, which was in fact the very first content I hosted on OliverBrown.me.uk.

It is almost entirely personal content with evidence of some of my early attempts to make money online.

As with the LiveJournal content, it is available in its own section I decided to call phpdiary. I didn’t really give it a name at the time but it was implemented as a bunch plain text files for each post rendered with a PHP script called diary.php.

Importing old posts from LiveJournal

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 17:25:39 +0100

Before I hosted my own content in various forms, I maintained a LiveJournal which is still available at https://galaxiaguy.livejournal.com (although I warn you, when I looked at it today it was full of Russian Bitcoin related ads).

I have finally imported the missing posts from this.

There weren’t many so I just did it manually. I even went to the effort of updating my theme to include “mood” and “music” in my post front matter and it add it to theme (these were very important to LiveJournal back in the day).

Fixing some blank posts

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 07:42:36 +0000

My blog has been through a lot. At some point I may try and make a coherent timeline, if only for my own benefit.

Content has been migrated from platform to platform, and format to format. Some of it got broken along the way. This resulted in some of the posts just being blank. I finally went back and found them all and manually reinstated the content.

I doubt this will be of any interest to anyone except me or people who know me, but it may be nostalgic for anyone else who was doing web development in 2005.

Added Wayback Machine links

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 15:42:36 +0000

After realising that I’ve been blogging for nearly 19 years, and that I have lot of old content with many broken links, I decided to add support for Wayback Machine links.

The Wayback Machine (part of the Internet Archive) archives web pages for posterity, and importantly, tries to archive many versions over time.

At the bottom of each my posts is now a section that links to the archived version of the page, as of the date of the post. This will attempt to show the latest archived version of the page before that date.

Migrated another site from WordPress to Hugo and Azure Static Web Apps

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 13:42:36 +0000

Some time ago I migrated my blog from WordPress (hosted on WordPress.com) to Hugo (hosted on Azure Static Web Apps). Over the past week I did the same for my wife’s blog.

The process went well. The Hugo site has pretty good docs for migrating to Hugo from various other platforms. The exact steps I took were:

Export content from Wordpress.
Generate Hugo content from the export using blog2md.
Upload to GitHub.
Create an Azure Static Web app (which as detailed before creates a build pipeline and deploys to an autogenerated Azure domain).
Browse the site and fix any broken content.
Add any custom functionality desired to the theme files.
Update the domain to point at the Azure instance.

The new blog is available at www.luliriisi.me.uk (the original is still available at luliriisi.wordpress.com).

GNU Terry Pratchett

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 06:36:47 +0100

The phrase “GNU Terry Pratchett” originates from one of the Discworld novels, “Going Postal,” where it is used as a code or message passed between characters to remember the deceased.

Specifically, there is a communication system known as “the clacks”, and there part of the way that system works involves additional metadata messages being sent (known as “the overhead”).

I only recently discovered that people have been embedding that message in all sorts of things as a way to memorialize Terry. One of the places they do this in the headers of websites.

Star Trek episode title word miscellany

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 13:26:35 +0100

After investigating Star Trek episode titles with interesting characters, lets look at ones with interesting words.

Numbers

I already included this as a side note in the previous post, but many episodes have numbers as words, with each series having at least one.

Title	Series	Episode
The Galileo Seven	TOS	1x13
One of Our Planets Is Missing	TAS	1x03
Angel One	TNG	1x15
One Little Ship	DS9	6x14
One	VOY	4x25
Thirty Days	VOY	5x09
One Small Step	VOY	6x08
The Haunting of Deck Twelve	VOY	6x25
Friendship One	VOY	7x21
Shuttlepod One	ENT	1x16
Two Days and Two Nights	ENT	1x25
First Flight	ENT	2x24
Babel One	ENT	4x12

Ordinals

Title	Series	Episode
First Contact	TNG	4x15
The Nth Degree	TNG	4x19
The First Duty	TNG	5x19
Second Chances	TNG	6x24
Second Sight	DS9	2x09
Second Skin	DS9	3x05
The Seventh	ENT	2x07
First Flight	ENT	2x24

Non-English words

This is probably the collection that caused me the most difficulty in deciding what should be included.

Sortable Discworld audiobook release date list

Sun, 21 May 2023 14:32:35 +0100

New audio versions of all* of the Discworld books are being produced. I’ve made a few posts tracking the release dates. Since then I’ve updated the blog to support nice sortable tables.

So here are the the books listed on Audible as of 21st May, 2023 in a single table (now with primary narrator). All columns should be usefully sortable.

If you don’t already have an Audible membership, you can get a 30-day free trial (UK).

Star Trek episode title character miscellany

Mon, 15 May 2023 08:18:15 +0100

While doing other more systematic investigations of Star Trek episode titles, I made notes of interesting things I spotted.

Here are some collections of episode titles with interesting characters.

Q puns

Most episodes featuring Q had a pun in the title:

Title	Series	Episode
Hide and Q	TNG	1x11
Q Who?	TNG	2x16
Deja Q	TNG	3x13
Qpid	TNG	4x20
True Q	TNG	6x06
Q-Less	DS9	1x07
The Q and the Grey	VOY	3x11
Q2	VOY	7x19

See the ones that did not

Title	Series	Episode
Encounter at Farpoint	TNG	1x01
Tapestry	TNG	6x15
All Good Things…	TNG	7x25
Death Wish	VOY	2x18

Interestingly, Q has so far made a further appearance in Lower Decks and nine in Star Trek Picard, and none of them had puns in the title.

An aside for the titles of Picard

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 18:25:39 +0100

Star Trek Picard season three has just completed. It was not perfect but was probably the best live action Star Trek since Enterprise.

In honor of this, here is a quick analysis of the episode titles.

I’m not including Picard in the main analysis for consistency for now. There is also a small chance there may be more episodes (or possibly something else #StarTrekLegacy).

Title length

Picard does not challenge for overall shortest or longest title.

Similar Star Trek episode titles

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 09:12:49 +0100

With nearly 700 episodes, there were bound to be some that are similar to each other. But which are most similar? And what do we mean by similar?

Summary

Before I go into the more technical analysis, I shall begin with some headlines.

Not technically part of this analysis but there are two Star Trek movies that share a title with an episode (if you ignore the “Star Trek” part of the title):

Elo rating for unfair games

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 16:46:10 +0100

In my previous post, I described an extension to Elo that could handle multiple players. The next restriction to overcome is that Elo assumed players of equal skill have an equal chance of winning.

In most games, players don’t actually have an equal chance of winning a single game. Chess overcomes this by having a match consist of several individual games with players switching who goes first. This is a good solution for two player games but gets awkward for multiplayer games. It is also inconvenient if having a multi-game match is undesirable for any reason.

Single-word Star Trek episode titles

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 08:06:47 +0100

My earlier post included a list of all single-word episode titles. That list is long enough that it could be analyzed in isolation and still produce some interesting results. Firstly, here is a summary:

Series	TOS	TAS	TNG	DS9	VOY	ENT
Total	5	3	49	42	77	42
Percentage	6.33 %	13.64 %	29.17 %	24.71 %	48.13 %	44.68 %
Shortest	4	3	4	3	2	2
Longest	13	10	16	12	14	12
Average	7.6	7.33	7.96	8.1	7.81	7.79

Single-word titles by Series

It seems the number of single-word episode titles started low and increased over time, peaking with Voyager (although Enterprise was very close behind by percentage of total episodes).

Expanding the Elo rating system

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 17:51:44 +0100

One of the features I have planned for Tic-tac-toe Collection is a player rating system.

One such common rating system is the Elo rating system, most famously used in chess. There is a lot of discussion about how good it is, but for my purposes it seems fine - at least as a starting point.

There are two fundamental restrictions on Elo that I would have to overcome though:

It is limited to two players.
It assumes each player has an equal chance of winning if they have equal skill.

Elo

First an introduction into how Elo rating works. There are two parts:

When is Easter?

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 17:52:13 +0100

I wrote a post about calendar reuse that included an offhand comment about Easter. The common definition of when Easter is, is:

the first Sunday after the first full moon that falls on or after the vernal equinox

That isn’t quite right, and I made a vague mention of the correct definition.

Since then, someone has made a video explaining the the correct definition in depth with details about the history and why it is this way.

Star Trek episode titles: an interlude

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 12:13:16 +0100

Existing work

Firstly, after doing this much work, I have discovered someone already has done a similar investigation: How long is a Star Trek title? by Bruce Bennett, so check that out. One thing it does have that I don’t, is charts.

Improving workflow

The analysis so far has been done using a Google Docs spreadsheet. I then manually wrote the Markdown for the blog posts, which involved some tedious and error prone tables.

What is the shortest Star Trek episode title?

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 13:13:24 +0100

After starting my previous post with this question but not answering it, I’ll get straight to the point. There is a tie for first place, with two episode titles that are two characters long:

Shortest episode titles

Title	Length	Series	Episode
Q2	2 letters	Voyager	7x19
E²	2 letters	Enterprise	3x21

The shortest title per series is:

Title	Length	Series	Episode
Miri	4 letters	The Original Series	1x11
Bem	3 letters	The Animated Series	2x02
Qpid	4 letters	The Next Generation	4x20
Dax	3 letters	Deep Space Nine	1x08
Q2	2 letters	Voyager	7x19
E²	2 letters	Enterprise	3x21

Every series has several single word episode titles.

Current time abstraction coming to .NET

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 18:08:25 +0000

It is often necessary in computer systems to get the current date and time. .NET has had a straightforward way to do that since its inception. What it hasn’t had is a built-in way to customize the behavior, particularly for mocking during automated tests.

Quite why this situation has persisted for so long is a bit of mystery. The importance of automated tests has only risen over time and questions about how to deal with this crop up quite frequently. The general solution is to provide an abstraction that you can inject and mock easily.

Analyzing Star Trek episode titles

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 19:10:07 +0000

I recently found myself idly wondering what the shortest Star Trek episode title was. The first to come to mind was the Original Series episode “Arena” (the one which Captain Kirk fights a humanoid lizard in one of the most striking examples of 1960 “makeup”).

I guessed there were probably shorter ones, but was rather disappointed I didn’t know the answer for sure. So I decided to find out.

Updated Discworld audiobook release dates

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 19:09:06 +0100

New audio versions of all* of the Discworld books are being produced. They aren’t being released in order though and as far as I can tell there is no convenient page listing all the release dates.

So here are the release dates currently listed on Audible as of 15th March, 2023. There are a few different ways Discworld books get grouped. “Series” below is how Audible have grouped them (and I assume matches the narrator).

Blazor Numbers Game

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 13:10:59 +0100

Over the weekend I was playing around with Blazor and created a little number game based on part of a popular British TV show.

In the future this may expand in functionality as part of my exploration into Blazor.

You can try the number game full screen.

Mettle is probably not suitable for tech businesses

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 09:19:06 +0100

Just to avoid any confusion, everything in this post is based on how things work in the UK and is for things available in the UK.

So far I have operated various business ventures off my personal bank account. Since I’ve been doing this as a sole trader, this is allowed. It does however make tax returns take more effort than necessary.

FreeAgent

I recently had reason to interact with FreeAgent, which is some pretty cool accounting software that makes a lot of things simpler. Unfortunately to really use it to its potential, you need to link it to a bank account used solely for your business.

New Discworld audiobooks

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 09:09:06 +0100

New audio versions of all* of the Discworld books are being produced. They aren’t being released in order though and as far as I can tell there is no convenient page listing all the release dates.

So here are the release dates currently listed on Audible. There are a few different ways Discworld books get grouped. “Series” below is how Audible have grouped them (and I assume matches the narrator).

Release date

2021 December 21st

Title	Series	№
Hogfather	Death	20

2022 April 28th

Title	Series	№
Equal Rites	Witches	3
Wyrd Sisters	Witches	6
Witches Abroad	Witches	12
Lords and Ladies	Witches	14
Maskerade	Witches	18
Carpe Jugulum	Witches	23
Small Gods	Standalone	13

2022 July 7th

Title	Series	№
The Colour of Magic	Rincewind	1
The Light Fantastic	Rincewind	2
Sourcery	Rincewind	5
Eric	Rincewind	9
Interesting Times	Rincewind	17
The Last Continent	Rincewind	22
Unseen Academicals	Rincewind	37

2022 October 10th

Title	Series	№
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents	Standalone	28

2022 October 27th

Title	Series	№
Mort	Death	4
Reaper Man	Death	11
Soul Music	Death	16
Thief of Time	Death	26

2023 February 23rd

Title	Series	№
Moving Pictures	Industrial Revolution	10
The Truth	Industrial Revolution	25
Monstrous Regiment	Industrial Revolution	31
Going Postal	Industrial Revolution	33
Making Money	Industrial Revolution	36
Raising Steam	Industrial Revolution	40
Pyramids	Standalone	7

Release date - To be released

2023 April 27th

Title	Series	№
Guards! Guards!	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	8
Men at Arms	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	15
Feet of Clay	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	19
Jingo	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	21
The Fifth Elephant	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	24
Night Watch	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	29
Thud!	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	34
Snuff	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	39
The Wee Free Men	Tiffany Aching	30
A Hat Full of Sky	Tiffany Aching	32
Wintersmith	Tiffany Aching	35
I Shall Wear Midnight	Tiffany Aching	38
The Sheperd's Crown	Tiffany Aching	41

Unknown

Title	Series	№
The Last Hero	Rincewind	27

Reading order

Title	Series	№	Release date
The Colour of Magic	Rincewind	1	2022 July 7th
The Light Fantastic	Rincewind	2	2022 July 7th
Equal Rites	Witches	3	2022 April 28th
Mort	Death	4	2022 October 27th
Sourcery	Rincewind	5	2022 July 7th
Wyrd Sisters	Witches	6	2022 April 28th
Pyramids	Standalone	7	2023 February 23rd
Guards! Guards!	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	8	2023 April 27th
Eric	Rincewind	9	2022 July 7th
Moving Pictures	Industrial Revolution	10	2023 February 23rd
Reaper Man	Death	11	2022 October 27th
Witches Abroad	Witches	12	2022 April 28th
Small Gods	Standalone	13	2022 April 28th
Lords and Ladies	Witches	14	2022 April 28th
Men at Arms	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	15	2023 April 27th
Soul Music	Death	16	2022 October 27th
Maskerade	Witches	18	2022 April 28th
Interesting Times	Rincewind	17	2022 July 7th
Feet of Clay	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	19	2023 April 27th
Hogfather	Death	20	2021 December 21st
Jingo	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	21	2023 April 27th
The Last Continent	Rincewind	22	2022 July 7th
Carpe Jugulum	Witches	23	2022 April 28th
The Fifth Elephant	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	24	2023 April 27th
The Truth	Industrial Revolution	25	2023 February 23rd
Thief of Time	Death	26	2022 October 27th
The Last Hero	Rincewind	27	Unknown
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents	Standalone	28	2022 October 10th
Night Watch	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	29	2023 April 27th
The Wee Free Men	Tiffany Aching	30	2023 April 27th
Monstrous Regiment	Industrial Revolution	31	2023 February 23rd
A Hat Full of Sky	Tiffany Aching	32	2023 April 27th
Going Postal	Industrial Revolution	33	2023 February 23rd
Thud!	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	34	2023 April 27th
Wintersmith	Tiffany Aching	35	2023 April 27th
Making Money	Industrial Revolution	36	2023 February 23rd
Unseen Academicals	Rincewind	37	2022 July 7th
I Shall Wear Midnight	Tiffany Aching	38	2023 April 27th
Snuff	Ankh-Morpork City Watch	39	2023 April 27th
Raising Steam	Industrial Revolution	40	2023 February 23rd
The Sheperd's Crown	Tiffany Aching	41	2023 April 27th

* There are 41 Discworld books. The website says “40 magnificent new recordings”. The one that seems to be missing is “The Last Hero”.

IAB Transparency & Consent Framework does not meet GDRP requirements for transparency or consent

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 09:13:00 +0000

I posted a while ago about a technical standard that was being used for consent gathering on websites and in apps known as the “Transparency & Consent Framework” by IAB Europe.

Well, the Belgian Data Protection Agency (the Belgian organization responsible for enforcing the GDPR) has fined IAB Europe €250,000 because the TCF “fails to comply with a number of provisions of the GDPR”.

I don’t know whether fining IAB Europe is the correct choice, as they themselves claim they aren’t a data controller and only provide guidance (and a spec) for other companies to use. But the fine itself is not really what is going to be turn out important. The judgement requires:

Blazor custom elements

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 18:21:06 +0100

There is now a preview package for Blazor that allows creating custom elements.

Custom elements are part of the Web Components standards and are intended to be a way of defining tags that can be consumed in HTML and interoperate with each other.

The docs mostly focus on using them with Angular or React, but that isn’t why they are interesting to me.

The site for Tic-tac-toe Collection includes pages that show some information about specific game mode (for example four-player Tic-tac-toe misère rumble).

[SOLVED] Firebase Performance Monitoring in Xamarin Android

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 10:36:51 +0100

I decided to add Firebase Performance Monitoring to the latest version of Tic-tac-toe Collection.

What is it

This allows you to collect timed traces of things that happen in your app. You can set up custom traces for anything you like, but it also tracks how long HTTP requests take by default. At least it’s supposed to. On iOS it worked well, but Android had nothing.

There is an open issue on the repo with the Xamarin binding that was created in December 2018. It includes suggestions to make sure your app is set to using the native HTTP handlers (which makes sense since whatever Firebase is doing it won’t be expecting a random third party HTTP stack to be used), however it still does not work.

Accessing the UI in Xamarin.iOS

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 07:56:13 +0100

An interesting discussion happened recently, triggered by a code review of (something like) the following C#:

public class ProductViewController
{
    private UIView _detailsView { get; set; }
    private ProductViewModel _viewModel { get; set; }

    private void Process()
    {
        if (_viewModel.ProcessDetails)
        {
            InvokeOnMainThread(() =>
            {
                if (_detailsView != null)
                {
                    UpdateDetailsView();
                }
            });
        }
    }
}

One of the reviewers suggested moving the second if outside the call to InvokeOnMainThread (and then combining it with the other if).

The theory was that it would more efficient to check if we need to be on the main thread before we do it, instead of doing the check on the main thread and finding out we have nothing to do.

Charles Dunstone in the news

Tue, 04 May 2021 09:02:21 +0100

Charles Dunstone, a well known entrepreneur and founder of Carphone Warehouse has quit as chair of the Royal Museums Greenwich.

Apparently, the government refused to reappoint a trustee because they advocated for “decolonising” the curriculum. More information is available on the Financial Times.

Normally I wouldn’t be interested in posting about such things, but my blog has a bit of history with Charles Dunstone. He was in charge of UK ISP TalkTalk when it came out. Some people had problems and people complaining about it resulted in my most popular blog post.

The future of Microsoft MAUI (and Xamarin Forms)

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 08:27:10 +0000

Xamarin

Since Google seems to like my post about the future of Xamarin Forms so much (and I have a slight history of such posts), I’d figure I’d post an update about interesting things happening in the Xamarin Forms repo specifically related to MAUI.

Renaming

The change that actually made me write this post - a large PR with 5000+ changed files that changes the Xamarin Forms name to MAUI.

Not much of a thing for actual functionality, but a significant symbolic milestone.

When can I reuse my calendar?

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 15:53:15 +0000

This was a question that came up recently, and the answer is interesting enough I decided to step through the process of working it out.

A good year

There are seven days in the week. If the year had a number of days in it that was divisible by seven (say 364), then the answer would be easy: every year and every date would fall on the same day every year.

Orthogonal by Greg Egan

Sun, 27 Dec 2020 10:42:36 +0000

I was inspired to write this review after watching Christopher Nolan’s movie Tenet. The central idea of Tenet is explored in the Orthogonal series (amongst many other things) but with more rigor and detail. As such, this review contains spoilers about the premise of Tenet. I won’t cover the details of Tenet’s plot, but if you were already going to watch Tenet, do that first.

Despite ostensibly being a review, this is mostly a piece designed to persuade you to read these books. It contains a fairly detailed explanation of the initial premise for the book (while avoiding spoilers for the plot), because talking about the things that are good is difficult otherwise.

Mobile apps, ads and consent

Sun, 06 Dec 2020 09:54:50 +0000

I’ve recently spent some time adding the Google User Messaging Platform (UMP) to Tic-tac-toe Collection. The motivating factor was needing to support App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14 when using AdMob, but more generally, due to the GDPR, apps have significant requirements around consent and data management (especially with ads) and my haphazard custom implementation was a pain and probably not entirely compliant.

My effort to do this led me to learning quite a bit about the current state of this in apps and on the web.

Scottish COVID-19 contact tracing app has launched

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:11:59 +0100

The Protect Scotland app has launched and is now available to download for iOS and Android.

It is using the exposure notification API jointly developed by Apple and Google.

I recommend anyone in Scotland (or more specifically, anyone likely to get a COVID-19 test administered by NHS Scotland) with a compatible device to download and install it.

Games with Gravitas

Sun, 09 Aug 2020 12:37:31 +0100

After holding on to the domain for ages without really having anything on it, I’ve now launched GamesWithGravitas.net.

It is currently an archive of content related to Gravitas.

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New site for my music YouTube channel

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 12:37:31 +0100

I created a new website to go with the music visualization YouTube channel I launched.

There is not much content there yet, besides details of everything that is on the channel. But those details are probably the most interesting part.

I created a tool using the YouTube data API that generates Hugo content based on the channel.

The process started simple and got more sophisticated over a few days. First I generate a page for each video. Then I get a list of all the channel playlists, and add a tag to each video page for each playlist. I also create a page for the tag that links to the actual YouTube playlist. Finally, for each video I parse the description adding YouTube chapter links where appropriate.

Blog moved to Hugo

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 10:48:28 +0100

After spending most of its time on Wordpress (initially a self-hosted version and then Wordpress.com), the blog is now a static site generated with Hugo and running as an Azure Static Web App.

Ever since I created the Tic-tac-toe Collection site on Hugo I’ve wanted to move the blog, but I never had the time. The recent events related to COVID-19 have, however, given me random bits of free time, so here we are.

Privacy policy

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 15:13:20 +0000

This website is operated by Oliver Brown. For more information about how your data is handled in general or this policy in particular, please contact galaxiaguy@gmail.com.

Collected information

No personal information is collected directly by using this website.

Cookies

Some necessary cookies are used for maintaining session information.

Third parties

YouTube

Some pages embed videos hosted externally by YouTube. Accessing these videos is done so under the Terms of Service of YouTube.

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Commenting is available through Disqus. If you are logged in to Disqus, or post a comment, you do so under the Terms and Policies of Disqus.

Theme for 2020 - Land of Shame and Despair

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 08:10:39 +0000

One of the reasons I started retuning pieces to different modes was the hope that something good might come out of it by chance. One example has appeared. I don’t think “good” is the right word, but it at least sounds intentional (most pieces just sound accidentally out of tune).

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Land of Hope and Glory retuned into Ultra Locrian.

Visualization of the Duke Nukem 3D theme

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 08:07:22 +0000

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One big advantage of doing this to the Duke Nukem 3D theme is that the original was already a MIDI file. That means people familiar with it are already used to hearing slightly different versions, and the version I generate is no more or less authentic than any of the others.

Visualization of the score of Imperial March from Star Wars

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:36:25 +0000

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About Me

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 15:57:37 +0000

Professional

Software developer specializing in mobile development. After many years of experience with Xamarin on both Android and iOS I now focus on native iOS development with Swift.

Currently working as a senior iOS developer for Numan, and recently as lead iOS developer for Next.

Strong believer in accessibility.

Personal

Avid gamer, occasional dancer, and a fan of automating things. Reader of (and listener to) science fiction. Fluctuating interest in professional wrestling.

Gravitas

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 15:57:37 +0000

Gravitas is an Xbox Indie Game I made for the Xbox 360 using XNA.

Challenge the AI and up to three of your friends in a game of galactic artillery. Whom will gravity defeat?

Find more information at GamesWithGravitas.net.

New YouTube channel for exploring music in different keys and modes

Mon, 25 May 2020 18:19:48 +0000

I posted a link to a video of Jingle Bells in the 7 different modes of the major scale.

I’ve now improved my process for generating the videos so much that I’m confident I can generate enough content to maintain a channel.

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The future of Xamarin Forms

Tue, 19 May 2020 17:57:41 +0000

Microsoft have just announced the future of Xamarin and Xamarin forms - the .NET Multi-platform App UI (or MAUI for short). As a name, it’s not great. The highlights are as follows:

It’s an evolution of Xamarin Forms. It basically is Xamarin Forms, but finally accepting some breaking changes. To be honest, I’m hoping for a lot since there is a lot of weirdness in Xamarin Forms that has been holding it back.
Single project, multi-targeted. It took a long time to get to the point where this was possible. From shared projects, to PCL projects, through .NET Standard. This should make things a lot easier.
Still based on platform renderers using native controls. This is a mixed bag. Using native controls has long been a selling point of Xamarin (with or without Forms). With the rise of Flutter this has been shown to be less important. Many people have been asking for consistent platform agnostic renderers instead.
The end of “Xamarin” as a name. Some time in the .NET 6 timeline (end of 2021) Xamarin.iOS will become .NET for iOS and Xamarin.Android will be .NET for Android. I have mixed feeling about this since this was a fairly succinct way to describe by top skillset.

I also already have my own enhancement issue submitted.

Tic-tac-toe Collection AI battle videos

Sat, 09 May 2020 16:04:46 +0000

I’ve started making videos of the AI-only games of Tic-tac-toe Collection with interesting settings. More information available at the Tic-tac-toe Collection Showcase

Playlist.

Jingle Bells in different modes

Mon, 04 May 2020 15:57:04 +0000

Partly because I like seeing things in different permutations, and partly to just try different things with semi-automated video production, I arranged a simple version of Jingle Bells and transposed it to different modes:

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Accepting money on the iOS App Store - acquiring an EIN

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 21:11:42 +0000

To sell an app (or an in-app purchase) on the iOS App Store as a non-US citizen, a tax ID is required* to fill in a W8 form. That is either an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) or EIN (Employer Identification number).

As an individual, the ITIN would appear the most correct option. The last time I investigated it, it was a slow process that would require notarised copies of supporting documentation.

My second through fifth contributions to Xamarin Forms

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 16:43:21 +0000

Xamarin Forms took part in Hacktoberfest, an effort to increase contributions to open source.

Like my previous contributions, three quarters of my PRs were targeting macOS. The main reason is the changes were straightforward (which makes it more disappointing how long some of the issues have been around).

I would like to say I wasn’t doing it for the t-shirt, but that wouldn’t really be true. I wouldn’t do it just for stickers though.

My first contribution to Xamarin Forms

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 12:24:35 +0000

Sadly it is not that exciting. It fixes a bug on macOS which prevented ListViews from correctly having a background color that included an alpha view besides 1. [macOS] Fix transparent ListView background

Tic-tac-toe Collection released for iOS

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 10:10:43 +0000

I win

You can now enjoy all the features of Tic-tac-toe Collection, including cross-platform multiplayer on your iPhone and iPad.

New Tic-tac-toe Collection website

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 16:40:13 +0000

Tic-tac-toe Collection has a new website: [https://www.tictactoecollection.app/].

I switched from using Wordpress.com to using a static site generator, specifically Hugo.

ListView improvements in Xamarin Forms

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 08:17:32 +0000

Since becoming open source, it has become possible to find out potential upcoming features in Xamarin Forms by just poking around the active branches in the repository (macOS support was visible in the repo before any announcement).

One of them is lv2spike. From just reading the commit messages, it seems this is a new CollectionView, based on UICollectionView for iOS and RecyclerView for Android. This is something that has been needed for a while, but is a big enough undertaking that I understand why it has taken a while. After all the branch suggests this is still just a spike. There are quite a lot of feature requests for the Xamarin Forms ListView that are just not possible (like this one for horizontal layout) mainly because the iOS implementation is based on UITableView.

Tic-tac-toe Collection release on Android

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 15:28:57 +0000

I win

Tic-tac-toe Collection is now available on Android on the Play Store. Additionally, I’ve started a new blog to host random content about the game (initially just release notes, but I actually keep thinking of interesting things to write).

Tic-tac-toe Collection Blog.

Tic-tac-toe Collection open beta

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 10:45:53 +0000

For various reasons I decided to write a Tic Tac Toe game in Xamarin Forms. At the moment it supports variable board sizes, variable win line size (so it implicitly supports Gomoku) and a few custom rules like misère, a pie rule and disallowed overlines.

It currently functions on Android, iOS and Windows, but is only released on Android for now.

Apart from experimenting with various features of Xamarin Forms (as well as managing Nuget packages), my goal is to try and add all the options. Features I’m planning:

[SOLVED] Unable to cast object of type 'Xamarin. Forms. Xaml. ElementNode' to type 'Xamarin. Forms. Xaml. ValueNode'.

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 10:20:55 +0000

When writing XAML for Xamarin Forms, you may across the error: Unable to cast object of type 'Xamarin.Forms.Xaml.ElementNode' to type 'Xamarin.Forms.Xaml.ValueNode' This is nearly always caused by assigning a value to an event in XAML, instead of specifying a method name. A common example is: <Switch Toggled="{Binding IsToggled}" /> Toggled is the name of an event. The property that was probably intended is called IsToggled. <Switch IsToggled="{Binding IsToggled}" />

Overcooked - Fun Coop Multiplayer Action

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 10:26:46 +0000

I recently a recorded a bunch of videos of the game Overcooked on Xbox One.

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Your goal is to assemble meals out of various ingredients, cook them, and serve them. Over time the meals get a bit more complicated and the levels get a lot more complicated. It is strongly designed to be played cooperatively with up to four people, and even supports two players on a single controller.

A new YouTube channel for Gravitas

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 12:09:53 +0000

After finding YouTube doesn’t support moving videos between channels, I figured I should try to organize things properly sooner rather than later. Also, here is a brand new freshly recorded video of the original Gravitas on Xbox 360.

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Games with Gravitas on YouTube.

Visualizing Gravity

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 20:27:18 +0000

Unity has a pretty cool feature called “gizmos”, that are things rendered only in the scene view of the Unity editor. Many built in game object types render a gizmo of some sort, but you can freely add your own. This can be very useful for debugging.

This is a visualization of the gravity (more precisely it’s the low resolution grid of gravity mentioned in the previous post).

The direction of the line is the direction of the gravity, and the length is the strength.

The Gravity of the Situation

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 13:25:25 +0000

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The most important feature in Gravitas is clearly the gravity, so getting it right is crucial. One important principal to be aware of when making games though is that “right” doesn’t necessarily mean “technically perfect” or “scientifically accurate”. “Feeling right” and being fun to play with is often more important. Despite that, the gravity in Gravitas is essentially correct. By correct, I mean a numerical approximation of Newton’s law of universal gravitation. The formula for calculating the gravitational force between two masses is:

Gravitation

where:

[SOLVED] The BindableProperty "Triggers" is readonly

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 12:24:23 +0000

TLDR: When setting the Triggers property in XAML, use the actual type of the parent tag, not a supertype.

After recently updating Xamarin Forms from 2.3.2.127 to 2.3.3.175, I started getting an InvalidOperationException: The BindableProperty "Triggers is readonly" inside InitializeComponent. Unlike many problems, this was quite easy to track down. InitializeComponent errors are generally XAML, and in the page in question there was a single Trigger. In this case the solution was simple. The Trigger was on a custom Button type, but I was setting it specifically using Button.Triggers. Changing it to be the actual type fixed it. So, I changed it from

Gravitas approaching playability

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 16:24:22 +0000

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Gravitas is rapidly approaching something playable, now that ships can be destroyed and new levels are generated.

“Something playable” is still quite far away from being an actual game. In terms of features required for even an alpha release, it still needs: scoring, match state, player lobby, AI, and better level generation.

Gravitas X

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 16:13:11 +0000

I previously developed a game called Gravitas that was released as an Xbox Live Indie Game on the Xbox 360.

A new cross-platform version (with an as yet undetermined subtitle), made in Unity and supporting multiple platforms is currently under development.

I am producing frequent videos documenting the progress.

Multi-platform - The real advantage of Unity

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 16:53:45 +0000

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There have been quite a few mechanical additions since my last update, but the most significant thing in my latest video is it is the first on a non-Windows platform.

Atonement (Star Trek: Voyager)

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 09:07:21 +0000

Although the title suggests this is just a review of Atonement (and is biased towards it), this is really a review of the three Voyager novels The Protectors, Acts of Contrition, and Atonement which essentially make up a single story.

As a warning, this book (and by extension this review) contains heavy spoilers for the Destiny series, and the earlier Voyager relaunch stories (Full Circle to Eternal Tide).

Voyager and its crew and allies face some of the consequences of their first trip through the delta quadrant, while Seven of Nine struggles with the changing attitudes of the Federation following the events of Destiny.

Unity Cloud Build

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 10:18:03 +0000

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhbri7XIdo&w=640&h=360]

First, a video of the latest progress. Now includes aim lines.

Second, if you aren’t using Unity Cloud Build, you should be.

Over the past few years, the importance of automated builds in software development (and the wider concept of continuous integration) has grown in importance. In my day job, setting up automated builds is one of the first thing that happens on any project. The details tend to be different for different platforms and it generally requires a fair amount of maintenance. The good news is, Unity do most of the hard work for you, and across most of their platforms, and surprisingly, for free.

Ongoing progress with Gravitas in Unity

Sat, 10 Dec 2016 17:22:09 +0000

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Writing a blog post (nearly) every day is not something I can maintain. But making quick videos of my progress is apparently easier.

Technical Spikes vs MVP

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 20:29:47 +0000

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In software development (and product development in general) is a concept called MVP or Minimal Viable Product. According to Wikipedia it is “a product with just enough features to gather validated learning about the product and its continued development”.

Embracing Unity

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 11:24:07 +0000

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For a long time, I’ve avoided Unity. The biggest reason was inertia from working with MonoGame, but I was also put off by the prospect of old versions of Mono and C# as well as being generally suspicious of development being so “editor focused” (I’ve tried quite a few drag-and-drop game development tools and ultimately found them frustrating).

Xamarin Forms frame is the wrong color

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 09:44:29 +0000

screenshot

Xamarin Forms uses a naive conversion from it’s platform independent Color class to iOS’s CGColor, and as a result, Frame controls end up with inconsistent background colors. I’ve added a demo here.

Xamarin Forms coming to macOS

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 10:01:03 +0000

Since .NET and Xamarin were open sourced, I’ve kept a casual watch on their repositories for interesting things.

Recently I noticed this pull request “Change appearance of NSTabView”. This immediately stood out since NSTabView is an AppKit (i.e. macOS) API as opposed to a UIKit (i.e iOS) API.

A quick read of the details and is indeed about some difference between NSTabView and UITabBar. The pull request is targeting the branch “macos” and it seems it’s been in development since at least August 17th.

[SOLVED] Xamarin Android and no-version-vectors

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 08:14:02 +0000

TLDR: An error containing “–no-version-vectors” is probably fixed by updating your Android SDK Build Tools to at least 23.

I recently upgraded a project to the latest version of Xamarin Forms and got the following error: /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/External/xbuild/Xamarin/Android/Xamarin.Android.Common.targets: Error: Tool exited with code: 2. Output: ERROR: Unknown option '--no-version-vectors'

A quick $ grep -ri "no-version" . on the project revealed it was being used in a dependency brought in by the Forms update: ./packages/Xamarin.Android.Support.Vector.Drawable.23.3.0/build/Xamarin.Android.Support.Vector.Drawable.targets: $(AndroidResgenExtraArgs)--no-version-vectors

Betrayal at House on the Hill - Betrayal Character Cards for Android

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 14:14:22 +0000

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a board game published by Avalon Hill and designed by Bruce Glassco. The game is split into two parts. In the first, the players become trapped in a haunted house which they must explore, revealing rooms as they do. At some point the second part, the “haunt”, begins in which one player (generally) becomes a traitor and everyone plays out one of 50 scenarios pitting the traitor against the others.

Stellaris release date -May 9th

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 16:04:44 +0000

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Stellaris is an upcoming game from Paradox based on the same engine used in Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV. They have launched a strange little minigame to promote it: https://launchpad.stellarisgame.com/r/a7bdsg1xcd

Enterprise 3D Project

Wed, 23 Sep 2015 15:16:39 +0000

A guy called Jason has decided to create the entirety of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D in the Unreal Game Engine.

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I felt this is something that definitely needs as much as attention as possible. Everyone should check out the Enterprise 3D Project

How to start "Hearts of Darkness" quest middle step "Stop Tanval" (Elder Scrolls Online)

Mon, 07 Sep 2015 10:57:08 +0000

TLDR: Go to Kragenmoor to the Grandmsters Palace and find Grandmaster Omin Dres to begin the quest Aggressive Negotiations.

Elder Scrolls Online on consoles has an achievement/trophy called Hero of Ebonheart which requires you to complete all the in game achievements relating to the Ebonheart Pact.

As I was checking through the list of ones I completed, I noticed that for the achievement Hearts of Darkness, the middle step - Stop Tanval from unleashing the second Brother of Strife - was incomplete. When I checked the map there were no black markers normally indicative of an incomplete area, nor did I have any incomplete quests in Stonefalls.

[SOLVED] System.ExecutionEngineException: Attempting to JIT compile method

Tue, 01 Sep 2015 15:49:54 +0000

TLDR: Check multiple references to the same nuget package are all on the same version if you use the Mono linker.

Since my ability to post regularly on things I’m interested in is not great, I figured I could at least post stuff that might be useful.

I recently upgraded a Xamarin iOS app from the “classic” (32bit only) API to the Unified API. After doing so I got the error message:

Star Trek book reviews

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 10:06:11 +0000

Since I’ve now reached the point that I’m reading new Star Trek books as fast as they are being made, as well as slowly picking up older ones here and there, I figured I should start sharing the knowledge I have gained.

The first review I wrote is now available here (I actually wrote this several years ago - I just updated the formatting) and I intend to write more.

Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

Sat, 11 Apr 2015 18:34:56 +0000

Star Trek novels have improved a lot since I read them previously many years ago. Not necessarily the stories themselves but that there seems to be a serious concerted effort to maintain continuity between them, but without requiring too much knowledge of other books to read any given book (although there are more series now which obviously do require you to read them all for it to make sense).

With that in mind, before reading DTI: Watching the Clock you should definitely read the Destiny series and possibly the Typhon Pact series and the Titan series. Everything you need to know about them is explained in the book but it does spoil them a little if you do intend to read them at some point.

Video Game Characters

Sun, 05 Apr 2015 16:12:44 +0000

At least as much for my own references as for anyone else…

Neverwinter (Xbox One)

Mari Galana of Gray Vale Female half-elf hunter ranger. Oghmanyte of the Dalelands.

Star Trek Online

K’chiQ Female Klingon Perim Female Trill science officer. Dazra Vice Admiral Tal Female liberated Borg human engineer.

It's alive

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 10:02:54 +0000

After languishing on a badly maintained Amazon EC2 instance for so long, I’ve finally made an effort to resurrect this blog and moved to Wordpress.com.

Indie-pocalypse Giveaway

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 09:02:17 +0000

You can win a free copy of Gravitas as well as 31 other games by entering the INDIE-POCALYPSE GIVEAWAY.

All you need to do is download some Xbox Live Indie Games (or a few other things).

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Gravitas Trailer

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 08:19:59 +0000

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Remember to visit Gravitas on Google+.

Gravitas has been released!

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 12:36:14 +0000

Gravitas is now available on the Xbox Live Marketplace for 80 MS points.

An artillery game, somewhat akin to scorched earth, but in 2D, set in space and featuring different planets with gravity you have to slingshot your shots around. Primarily a multiplayer game supporting four local players it’s excellent for parties and an absolute bargain for $1.

Although I may have a slightly biased opinion.

Cardassian Galor class cruiser

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 16:00:07 +0000

Star Trek Online recently gained a new loot drop that has been generating strong opinions, a Cardassian Lock Box. Inside each lock box is a random item. Possible items include a special tribble, some special team commodities, some cross faction consoles, a DS9 uniform set, or a few others. On the whole people aren’t interested in those, the only item they actually want is the Cardassian Galor class cruiser.

The actual odds of getting a cruiser are unpublished but assumed to be very low, possibly in the 0.5% range. This wouldn’t be very interesting in itself without one final piece to the puzzle: you require a “Master Key” to open the box and the keys have to be bought on the C-Store for real money. They cost 100 c-points each, or 10 for 900, making them £0.72 each (I think).

Gravitas in final review

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:57:05 +0000

It’s been a while since I reported that Gravitas was in final play testing. To be honest the process didn’t actually take that long, I just became busy in the meantime. But I have now finally submitted Gravitas for peer review and it’s currently marked as “60% complete”. Based on what I’ve seen of other games as a reviewer that means it should be a few days before it’s eligible for release.

Gravitas in final playtesting

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 09:08:21 +0000

I’ve submitted Gravitas for what will hopefully be a final playtest.

Here are some screenshots: https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

DUST 514 will be a Playstation 3 exclusive

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 07:41:57 +0000

CCP have just announced DUST514 will be exclusive to the Playstation 3. Which is a shame (check out the EVE Online forums for some stronger opinions). Unfortunately it makes sense for a few reasons (well making it exclusive to one console makes sense - whether the 360 or the PS3 was the better choice is more debatable).

Developing for a single console is quicker and easier - especially important for a game that will probably have more updates than the average game.

EVE Online adding real money item store

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:07:48 +0000

CCP recently announced that their long awaited “walking-in-stations” feature will now include an item store selling character customization options exclusively for real money (actually for Aurum another in game currency only available for real money).

Some people have lamented the idea of EVE finally entering this area and selling items for real money. After all today you can buy a monocle, tomorrow a ship. This is a slippery slope that will lead to death of EVE Online as we know it. Except, of course, it won’t. Since PLEXs were introduced anything in game has essentially been purchasable for real money. Take the price in ISK, devide that by approximately 350 million and multiply by half the price of a 60 day gamecard. These items are slightly different since they aren’t available in game without using real money at some point (but it is possible to trade them between players so you don’t personally have to spend real money).

Clarifying my position on ASP.net

Fri, 27 May 2011 08:29:01 +0000

One of my most read (and most commented on) posts was the one claiming “ASP.NET sucks”, which only goes to show being a little offensive goes disappointingly far on the internet. Since it has now been five years since I posted that, I thought a quick follow-up was in order.

I stand by most of what I said my initial post, but with a little specificity. It’s not ASP.net that’s the problem but Webforms. Unfortunately at the time Webforms was all you ever saw. There are alternatives around today (and may have been back then but none were especially high profile and none were by Microsoft). These days of course Webforms are very much out of fashion. Following on from the success of Rails Microsoft realised that Webforms weren’t an idea that could keep up with modern web development. A quick glance at the ASP.net home page today shows four out of five articles talking solely about ASP.net MVC and one article talking about both MVC and Webforms (of course that will vary by day I but I doubt the result will be very different).

Google Docs Motion

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 08:59:39 +0000

Google continue to improve upon Google Docs today with the release of Google Docs motion which will “introduce a new way to collaborate - using your body”. Anything else I saw will be underwhelming compared to the article form Google, especially some of the pictures of some of the more advanced gestures it supports.

XBMC Partnering with Sony, going closed source

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:48:14 +0000

I figured any effort to get back to regular posting would only be helped by starting on today of all days… XBMC have announced a new partnership with Sony.

It will include the assimilation of the XBMC team into Sony’s Home Theatre and Console division and the closing of the XBMC source. Presumably a PS3 port will be forthcoming.

Site5 are pretty cool

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 08:55:59 +0000

Since the switch to Amazon EC2 I cancelled hosting with my previous provider Site5. Now due to unfortunate timing I cancelled a day after being invoiced for (and paying) a months hosting. But in an unexpected move, in the email confirming my cancellation I also got a full refund for my last payment.

So if anyone needs web hosting, consider Site5.

Moved to Amazon EC2

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 09:23:45 +0000

I’ve just moved the blog over to Amazon EC2 and so far everything seems to be going well. I’d been considering the move for a while and a new feature (well I’m not sure how new it is but I only just noticed it) is a new smaller instance type.

The virtual servers Amazon offer used to come in three sizes, small medium and large starting at $0.10*. Pretty quickly they added some bigger sizes (going all the way up to $2.00 per hour for quadruple extra large) as well as some more specialized types like GPU clusters. But it still meant the minimum price per month for a server always on was about $74/month which is expensive for simple web hosting. Now however, their new micro instances are available at a pretty cool $0.02/hour (about $15 a month). For the performance you’re likely to get it’s still probably not the most cost effective solution for plain web hosting, but for having complete access to a server with high availability (and the extra features hosting on Amazon’s infrastructure provides like being able to clone a whole server with one click) it’s pretty good. One final note is to remember that these numbers are not the final costs you’ll have to pay. You still pay for storage and data transfer which in my case look like they’ll be about an extra 10% extra.

Gravitas in Silverlight

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:25:15 +0000

A version of Gravitas available to play right in your browser using Silverlight is now available.

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Buy Minecraft

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 08:23:12 +0000

I’ve had a few things recently I’ve thought of posting but didn’t quite have enough enthusiasm to actually do it. Now I’ve found something I do have enthusiasm about.

Buy Minecraft.

Minecraft is a clever indie game that has developed something of a cult following of late. It’s an odd sandbox game of building random stuff and surviving attacks by skeletons. Or something. To be honest I’m not really sure (except for the building) since I haven’t actually played it. The reason I bought it (and would like you to buy it) is largely unrelated to the game itself. Apparently a group of self righteous players are unhappy with the progress the game has made recently and have issued an ultimatum that they will launch a DDoS attack at the games servers until there are signs that development is continuing at a speed more to their liking. The assumption is that with the game down the developer will have a lower income and no choice to give in to their demands.

Improving Crafting in Star Trek Online

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:27:51 +0000

The following is almost my own idea. It’s actually a combination of several ideas I’ve see thrown around on the STO forums made a little more concrete.

First I’m going to provide a quick overview of how equipment in STO works:

Most equipment comes in ten levels, starting at “Mk I” and going up to “Mk X”. The stats increase through the levels and which you can use is restricted by rank. Lieutenants can only use up to Mk II, Lt. Commanders up to Mk IV etc. all the way up to Rear Admirals using anything up to Mk X.

Swype is amazing!

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:54:25 +0000

One of the things that worried me about touchscreen phones (before I got one) was typing with an onscreen keyboard. Therefore, the first touchscreen phone I got was the T-mobile G1, a phone with a hardware keyboard. Since then I had an opportunity to get a Nexus One which I couldn’t ignore. And I generally dislike the onscreen keyboard as much as I expected. That has just changed however.

I just downloaded the beta of Swype for my Nexus One and the improvement is tremendous. Instead of tapping letters, you press and hold the first letter and then drag over the other letters. With a combination of seeing when you pause and a dictionary lookup, it picks up the word you wanted to type (it works a lot better than you’d expect). There are a few issues, specifically it has difficulty with very short words (mainly because there are generally more possibilities) and there is the pathological case of pit/pot/put being difficult to differentiate. But on the whole, it’s definitely an improvement.

Improving sector space in Star Trek Online

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:28:55 +0000

Perhaps I should just go ahead and rename my blog “Star Trek Online Forum Highlights”…

Pendra37 on the STO forums has come up with the first idea to improve sector space in Star Trek Online that actually seems it could be done without majorly overhauling the game engine.

The coolness basically boils down to one change: “If you hit the Drop out of warp button, you drop out of warp. A random deep space instance map loads up. The map may be completely random.” For more detail, read the post Sector space makes sense.

The Voyage Home and BOff Story Arcs in STO

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:53:43 +0000

The Voyage Home

Another pair of interesting ideas for STO I found on the forums.

The first is “The Voyage Home”, a framework around exploration type missions based on the story of Voyager.

The second is Bridge Officer Story Arcs, missions based around your bridge officers, after you set up some personality options (most importantly, sympathies to certain factions and vendettas against certain factions).

BOff Story Arcs

EVE breaks PCU record again

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 08:10:29 +0000

Yesterday EVE Online broke the peak concurrent user record again for an online game with 60,453 players online simultaneously.

Just for the record, the reason World of Warcraft doesn’t hold this record (despite having by far the most subscribers of any MMO) is because of it’s sharded nature. All sixty thousand EVE players were in the same game world.

Star Trek Online Gold Edition going cheap at Zavvi

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:25:39 +0000

Yes, it seems I’ll be obsessed with Star Trek Online for a while…

For those of you (at least in the UK) who would like the chance to become obsessed, Zaavi are selling the Gold Edition of STO for £17.95 £23.95 (oddly enough the normal version is £29.95).

The Gold Edition comes with loads of extras including a T-Shirt and download code for DS9 style uniforms. Of course you should try the free Star Trek Online demo first :P

Star Trek Online minigame ideas

Thu, 27 May 2010 15:51:12 +0000

A few people on the Star Trek Online forums (notably ThomastheCat) have come up with ideas for minigames (discussed here). The idea is that they would replace the “find an item and press F” mechanic with something more interesting and situation specific.

The forum post has more detail, but a lot can be communicated with just the mockups that have been made:

And if you’re not already a player, remember you can get a free trial of Star Trek Online.

Some cool ideas for Star Trek Online

Fri, 21 May 2010 12:24:20 +0000

I’ve been playing Star Trek Online since the open beta at the end of January and my opinion of it is generally positive. That isn’t to say there aren’t problems, in fact I agree with most of the complaints about it (and the forums have a lot). The difference with me is I still think it’s fun to play in the mean time (I still think the space combat is the best any Star Trek game has ever had).

Introducing Gravitas

Sun, 09 May 2010 18:33:37 +0000

I’ve uploaded some screenshots of my upcoming Xbox Live Indie Game, Gravitas.

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Play Star Trek Online for free (for a bit)

Fri, 07 May 2010 20:15:49 +0000

Cryptic Studios have just launched the Star Trek Online referral program. They encourage old players to bring in new players by giving them free in game stuff (specifically the future Enterprise from All Good Things with three warp nacelles as a ship option). To make it easier to persuade people, referred players get to try a demo of the game for free. It does seem the demo will be made freely available in the near future anyway though. The demo has the following restrictions:

Open Graph protocol seems pretty cool

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:20:18 +0000

A few days ago Facebook announced their new Open Graph Protocol.

It’s basically a way for people to interact with pages on the internet (in theory pages representing real world items, but it will be hard to moderate) in basically the same way as they do with existing Facebook pages. For a page to be eligible all you need to do is add a few meta tags to it specifying its name and type (film, book, actor, product, game etc.). To actually do anything useful, you then add a Facebook “like” button. Once some people have liked it, it appears in their Facebook news feed like any other item (with the data you added in the meta tags).

Gravitas (360)

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:40:22 +0000

Gravitas is a game I released, made using XNA.

Challenge the AI and up to three of your friends in a game of galactic artillery. Whom will gravity defeat?

Available on Xbox Live Indie Games for $1!

There is now an official site for Gravitas.

A new cross platform version made in Unity is now in development.

Salvaged Relationships in the Neutral Zone

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:23:04 +0000

There is a mission in Star Trek Online that is causing no end of problems. It caused problems in the beta and people assumed it was bugged. It was the same in headstart, and it is the same now. Everyone assumed it was just broken. But apparently someone submitted it as a bug and got a reply saying it was working as intended. It’s just confusing :P

This mission is called “Salvaged Relationships in the Neutral Zone”. It’s in the Ker’rat system in the Eta Eridani Sector block. It has two parts, the first part is to scan 8 Borg encryption nodes. This part is easy and fine. The next part is to destroy 4 Repair Hulks. This is where it gets confusing. There are many Borg vessels around as well as several Repair Hubs. The problem is Repair Hubs are not Repair Hulks. Destroying 4 Repair Hubs leads to the mission being failed (at least for Federation players).

Star Trek Online end of open beta event

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:15:28 +0000

Some screen shots I took during the end of beta event for Star Trek Online.

Star Trek Online

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:28:59 +0000

For the past week or so I’ve been playing the open beta of Star Trek Online. And I have to say, after some initial concerns my overall opinion is very positive.

There has been quite a lot of negativity about the game on the forums, and on the whole I agree with most of it. But the things that are good about far outweigh the bad in my opinion. The most overwhelming positive note for me is the space combat engine is probably the best I’ve seen in a Star Trek game. The only other one I can think of that is close is the one from Starfleet Command, but that loses points for having far too many non-canon elements (missiles?).

Google Maps with Navigation available outside the US

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:21:16 +0000

Some enterprising folks have release a modified version of the Google Maps app for android with navigation enabled that can be install on any Android 1.6 (or higher) device. Best of all is that it doesn’t require any hacking or even root access. It’s simply a matter of downloading the app and installing it.

Full tutorial on Electric Pig.

Heli Rescue now available for Android

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:01:12 +0000

Our recently released iPhone game, Heli Rescue, is now available for Android handsets! It’s almost identical to the iPhone version. There are fewer sounds and no clouds, but the highscores work (and are shared across both versions). Also, Android 1.6 or better isrequired since we make use the native OpenGL ES bindings. To quote the Android Market:

If you’ve been looking for a ‘Flight Control’ style game then this is it! Join the elite team of Search & Rescue helicopter commanders and save lives. Take control of up to 4 helicopters and direct them to people in need of rescue by drawing a path with your finger. You’ll need to manage the flight paths and fuel load.

Sky Player coming to UK Xboxes 27th October

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:15:44 +0000

Some time ago (at least a year or so) Sky launched Sky Player. Similar to iPlayer, it allows Sky subscribers to watch Sky content online. As of October 27th Sky Player will be available to UK Xbox 360 owners.

This seems only slightly useful at best. If you already have a Sky subscription (and an Xbox Live Gold account) then Sky Player will be free. With it you’ll be able to view some of what is available on your Sky subscription with live as Video-on-Demand. Except for the possibility of getting Sky in another room, I don’t really see the point.

I have Google Wave

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:35:07 +0000

Google Wave

I received a Google Wave invite this morning. I’ll post more after I’ve had a play.

This also means I have invites available…

Heli Rescue update is live

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:40:30 +0000

The update to Heli Rescue is now available on the app store. There was a problem with the 1.1 release that was released recently so it was withdrawn. That has now been fixed (and in opposition to some people’s complaints about Apple and the App Store, they approved the bug fix version in under two days).

Here’s a video of it (without the new maps unfortunately):

Interacting with this video is done so under the Terms of Service of YouTube

View this video directly on YouTube

Google Wave update is live - still invite only

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:38:37 +0000

Google Wave

Google Wave went live yesterday but it still invite only.

It seems the people with access are the people who previously had sandbox access (everyone who went to Google I/O and a few others), another 100,000 people who applied early on and select paying Google Apps users. That number will grow slowly however as they also revealed that existing users will be able to invite others (similar to when GMail launched).

Stargate Universe coming soon - complete with Robert Carlyle

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:40:11 +0000

October 2nd sees the launch of the third Stargate series, Stargate Universe.

The basic premise is very similar to Star Trek Voyager. A crew find a nine chevron gate address which takes them not to a planet, but instead to the Ancient ship Destiny in another galaxy. And then they can’t get back.

It will apparently be darker and edgier than previous Stargate series (which makes the casting of Robert Carlyle - most famous for Trainspotting and The Full Monty) seem a little more sensible.

Anytime Pool iPhone released internationally

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:32:32 +0000

Anytime Pool for iPhone (and iPod touch) is now available on the app store outside America. A quick marketing blurb:

Now you can play Pool against your Facebook friends anytime you like. Anytime Pool is the first social game to allow you to play no matter whether you are sat at your PC or out and about on your iPhone, iPod Touch or mobile phone.

Not only does Anytime Pool have an incredible and robust multiplayer game, but you can also take part in a single player game against 14 cool characters in 5 exotic locations, from the UK and USA to the Philippines to China.

DUST 514

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 09:35:25 +0000

The biggest news in the EVE Online World recently (and in my opinion, some of the biggest news in gaming) is the announcement of DUST 514, a console FPS/RTS being developed by CCP and based in the EVE Universe.

On the surface DUST looks a lot like a slightly grittier Halo 3. Basically a futuristic first person shooter with a strong focus on vehicles. The big point comes from it’s interaction with the EVE Online universe. The combat in DUST will take place on the surface of planets in EVE. As a consequence the result of battles will effect EVE. How big this effect will be (and in exact nature is not yet known). What we do know is that it will tie in with the upcoming changes to sovereignty in the Dominion expansion to EVE.

Get the Drop in Fight Klub

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:16:01 +0000

A new newsletter for Fight Klub is now available called The Drop. The first issue isn’t that exciting to be honest. It has a little information about the next set, Three which will feature (among others) Terminator and Robocop. The most interesting part is a piece about the Decipher This! puzzle.

PS. If you’re new to Fight Klub go here and tell them GalaxiaGuy sent you.

Paving the way for Wave

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:21:27 +0000

Google released a new plugin for Internet Explorer today called Google Chrome Frame. It’s a simple but clever idea to bring the latest HTML 5 technologies to IE by simply embedding the Webkit based Google Chrome rendering engine.

It’s opt-in per site. You have to add a specific meta tag to your pages to make it take advantage of the plugin if it’s installed. There is also a Javascript way of detecting if the plugin is installed and inviting users to install it if isn’t.

Anytime Pool Update

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:24:15 +0000

The latest update to Anytime Pool on Facebook is here. Anytime Pool is a cool Flash game I was involved in making on Facebook that lets you play pool against your friends. Changes and new features in the latest version include:

Chat mode is back. People asked for it’s return almost from the moment it was taken out. Can be disabled and can also be limited to ‘friends only’.
Practice mode. Perfect those tricky shots or just hit the ball around.
Power remembered between shots. A time saver everywhere, but mainly for shaving those last couple of seconds off your weekly challenge times.
Improved ‘ball in hand’. Moving the white around the table no longer feels like a wrestling match.

New snowy levels for Heli Rescue

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 09:31:51 +0000

Our new Heli Rescue fan page on Facebook includes an early look at two new levels in an upcoming update.

Heli Rescue Snowy 2

Heli Rescue Snowy 1

Nokia N900 - with Maemo

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:00:30 +0000

Despite becoming the sole owners of Symbian, Nokia have gone ahead and announced the N900. The N900 is the next in the 770/N800/N810 line of devices based on the Debian-derived Maemo platform. Unlike it’s predecessors however, the N900 is in fact a phone.

One of the best things about the previous Maemo devices is the lack of restrictions on what you could do. Enabling root access to the underlying Linux system was possible (and easy) allowing a lot of access. Even updating it with unsigned firmware images was allowed. In theory this will all be possible with the N900, but in practice, things might not be so open. I remember a quote from someone at Nokia some time ago along the lines of “As soon as you put a sim in it, the operators want a piece of it”. Although you can get a sim-free unlocked N900 (the UK price is advertised as £499.99) I’d guess any operator subsidised N900 will have restrictions.

New Look - New Features

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:00:22 +0000

I finally decided to start posting to my blog with some regularity again. Whether it will last, I can’t say.

As part of the relaunch I’ve finally upgraded Wordpress to a more respectable (and secure) version, found a new theme and added some cool stuff, including OpenID support for comment posting. All the posts and comments should be intact and everything should be working properly, but random behaviour for the next few days shouldn’t be unexpected…

Heli Rescue for iPhone

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:48:37 +0000

Heli Rescue

A game that I was involved with making called Heli Rescue has just been released on the App Store for iPhones and iPod Touches.

It’s a line drawing game similar to Flight Control and Harbour Master that has you drawing paths for helicopters to pick up people and return them to safety. There are three types of helicopters, three different maps and online highscore table (featuring highscores which are frankly higher than we could manage during testing). Simple, fun and only 99¢/59p.

Anytime Pool

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:14:33 +0000

Anytime Pool

I just thought I’d announce a game that I’m involved with at Distinctive Developments called Anytime Pool has just relaunched.

It’s a flash based pool game that lets you play against your Facebook friends. There is a also a mobile version (to be released soon) that includes a full single player game as well as the social play through Facebook. Have fun.

Fight Klub coming soon

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:01:55 +0000

Slightly off topic compared to most of what I’ve written about, but I thought I’d quickly mention Fight Klub (wiki).

Fight Klub is a new collectible card game shortly to be released by Decipher. Decipher previously produced card games based on Star Trek, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings (and others). Fight Klub aims to be significantly different from previous games in a number of respects. It will be multi-licence, meaning interesting combinations are possible (although it means many game mechanics are a little more abstract). It will also only be available online direct through through the Decipher website (which they intend to make it cheaper).

The Movie DB

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:57:53 +0000

I found a new website through the MythTV mailing list a few days called The Movie DB. It’s essentially aiming to be an open version of IMDB.

Many projects (such as MythTV and XBMC) have depended IMDB for a long time to provide metadata. Unfortunately this has usually been against the rules and was often difficult any since it relies on rather fragile screen scraping.

So in steps the Movie DB. From what I can tell from reading around the forums and stuff (and apologies if any of this isn’t accurate) it was started by the guy who wrote Meligrove, a database of fan made movie posters to replace a similar effort called Movie XML. The content is a little limited right now (about 8000 movies apparently) but the database from Movie XML is soon to be imported adding another 150,000.

Introducing Elisa

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:28:25 +0000

I’ve keeping my eye on a project called Elisa a lot recently. It’s basically another attempt to produce a cross platform* media centre solution. At the moment its features are fairly limited, it’s essentially just some nice media playing software. It does have plugins to handle Youtube and Flickr though with lots of other stuff planned.

The main reason I’m interested in it though is that it feels likes it’s constantly making progress (and they make the progress very visible). They have weekly releases and every one actually has some cool new feature. It’s also written in Python which I think lowers the bar a little for community contributions (as opposed to C++/Qt required for MythTV).

Google Chrome

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:21:40 +0000

Well this came way out of left field for me, but after reading their thoughts and plans on the matter makes a lot of sense: Google have released a browser, called Chrome. Main highlights: based on Webkit and using a spanking new Javascript engine called V8.

I’m using it right now to type this and everything seems in order. It feels faster than Firefox 3, the interface is nice and clean and I’m generally revelling in the nice newness of it all. Interestingly it seems to have a spellchecker built-in that doesn’t recognise the word “Google”…

Empyrean Age bringing Factional Warfare to EVE Online

Thu, 15 May 2008 09:02:21 +0000

Factional Warfare will soon be upon us. I stopped playing EVE several months ago with the plan to return once Factional Warfare was in (which I figured would be a couple of months since it was suppsed to be part of Revelations. Well the next expansion, Empyrean Age will finally bring it to us. It’s not going to be quite as drastic as my hopes but they were pretty drastic :P

Basically you sign up for FW with one of the four factions - that is Caldari, Minmatar, Amarr or Gallente (they’ve said other factions will probably be added later). You then have kill rights on that factions enemies anywhere (0.0, lowsec, highsec - even Jita, which will be even sillier than it has been). The factions enemies will obviously have kill rights on you. At the moment it seems it’s just going to be Caldair vs. Gallente and Amarr vs. Minmatar.

Silverlight is pretty cool

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:28:51 +0000

More than two months since my last post. Which means I suddenly have a lot to say. Beware, rambling may follow… Nearly five months ago I claimed to be making “rapid progress with language learning”. Well obviously not rapid enough to actually reveal anything. Well that might be at an end soon.

One of the problems of writing the app using things like LINQ means most people will have other things to install to use the app (.NET 3.5 specifically - and possibly .NET 3.0 for non Vista users) and even then it’s limited to Windows users as Mono support for Windows Presentation Foundation will be a long way off (if they do it all). Since Silverlight 2.0 is supposed to be really cool and now supports a big chunk of the widgets from standard WPF (and has has quickly developing Moonlight support), why not write the app in that? So that’s what I’ve been doing. And it was a lot easier than I thought.

Mythbuntu is even simpler

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:55:10 +0000

One of the newest developments in MythTV land is the development of “multirec”. Multirec is the name of the SVN branch of Myth where code to handle the recording of multiple DVB streams from a single tuner (providing the streams are on the same multiplex). This means any DVB users (in the UK this essentially means Freeview users) have the possibility of recording many more channels at once. In fact if you had six tuners (three Nova-T 500s for instance) you’d be able to record the whole of Freeview (if you had enough hard drive throughput at least).

Google Docs rule - if you use them right

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 23:29:00 +0000

I’ve been vaguely using Google Docs (specifically Spreadsheets) since it came out but never to do anything actually important. Most of the time I just had a list I need sorting, or if I was feeling sophisticated I’d use it to decide on what was best value for money (how much £/GB a range of hard drives were for instance). Recently I started using it to plan lessons for the language learning app. The ability to use it from work (or any other computer I might be on - including viewing it on my Nokia 770) was useful, but in the end I was only really writing a list with it.

Rapid progress with language learning

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:20:33 +0000

Thought I’d offer a quick status update regarding the language learning app. After a short break I’m back at it. Appart from enough Finnish content to generate ten 15-minute lessons the biggest progress is outputting MP3 files. My original plan was just to output M3U playlists but it seems iTunes and therefore iPods don’t support M3U files (as far as I can tell iTunes can only create playlists of files in it’s library - who wants hundres of files in their library consisting of a few words each?).

EVE Online for Macs!

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 16:38:03 +0000

As of Tuesday it seems EVE Online will be officially supported on Macs and Linux. The Linux version seems to be just improved (and official) support for running EVE with Cedega (a commercial WineX fork). At the moment only Ubuntu, openSUSE and Linspire are supported (and come with nice packages). The Mac version was developed using Cider (a modification of Cedega for Macs) and only supports Intel Macs.

The minimum hardware requirements are interesting. Processor and RAM are the same at 1.8GHz+ 1GB respectively. Mac users require a better graphics card than Linux users but the Linux version doesn’t support ATI graphics cards. I would guess 6 months to a year down the line when AMD have finished releasing open source versions of the ATI drivers then ATI support will exist for everything in Cedega.

LINQ is magical

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 22:24:53 +0000

The secretly named language learning app has been revamped to use LINQ for most of the XML handling. For those that don’t know, LINQ is a new technology that provides querying functionality in the .NET world. In my case I’m using LINQ to XML and it has seriously cut down on the size of the heaviest methods. Also, the part of LINQ to XML that I found least interesting when I read about it is actually the part I’ve found the best - the new XDocument API. Anyway, LINQ combined with a new USB headset that provides some actually quite good audio means that the important fundamental features have been implemented and work. At the moment it can:

Back to vanilla MythTV - Part 2: Fiddling

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:06:23 +0000

After installing MythDora, there were a few extra things I had to do that took a while to figure out.

Upgrade to mythtv-trunk from ATrpms

I figured I just enable the “bleeding” repository and then do yum install mythtv. This worked fine. But nothing was different. It seems that “mythtv” is a meta package that just says you have Myth installed without actually containing anything. So then I tried yum install mythtv-frontend mythtv-backend mythtv-setup mythweb mythplugins. This worked up until a point but then failed a transaction test. The actual failure was a mismatch between themes that different parts provided. I decided this was unimportant but couldn’t force yum to install. So I installed apt (yum install apt) and used that (apt-get install mythtv-frontend mythtv-backend mythtv-setup mythweb mythplugins and it all went fine.

Back to vanilla MythTV - Part 1: MythDora Rocks

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 09:29:46 +0000

Well I tried LinuxMCE but didn’t really get very far.

After deciding everything was too much of a hassle, I downloaded MythDora 4.0 and installed it. I have to say that unless you have a specific reason otherwise, MythDora is definitely the way to go for a MythTV installation. It was really easy and actually worked (something that seems not to have happened a lot when I’ve tried Linux). One of the big advantages of using MythDora is since it’s Fedora based you can update (usually) painlessly from ATrpms. It has MythTV packages based on regular SVN checkouts. Importantly for me it also has packages from from mythtv-trunk (the latest version). Although they’re marked as “bleeding” they are usually stable.

LinuxMCE 0704

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 12:49:29 +0000

A new version of LinuxMCE is out. And from what I’ve read (I haven’t installed it yet) it looks like a big improvement.

The biggest factor is improved MythTV support (which to be honest I feel is the most important part of it). They also claim the DVD quick install only requires three keypresses (but that’s only for the install, no setup). There is thankfully a new video as well that is considerably less annoying than the previous one - complete with disclaimers about things that may only work on specific hardware.

FreeNAS

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 17:32:13 +0000

In an effort to get more storage to share between the three computers at home (two Windows and one MythTV) I setup yet another machine running FreeNAS.

FreeNAS is a small (about 30MB) operating system based on FreeBSD designed just to be a NAS (Network Attached Storage). You add hard drives to it and it makes them (optionally) available in several different ways, including:

CIFS/Samba
NFS
rsync
HTTP
FTP

After a few minor problems setting it up (like a power cable breaking and installing from an old CD-ROM drive that didn’t work) it works great. Copying a large (~40GB) chunk of files to it at once took a while but writing to and reading from it at more sensible levels isn’t noticeably slower than using local files (on a gigabit network).

Windows Vista

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 22:50:05 +0000

Well for various reasons I now have Windows Vista. I installed it myself and to be honest everything went smoothly. That’s not to say everything went perfectly, but nothing unsurmountable happened.

The first problem was the fact that I bought the upgrade version. I’d previously bought Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 but I was doing a clean install. Previous version of Windows just asked for you to pop the disk of the previous version in this situation - Vista didn’t. It would only let me install from Windows. So I had to install Media Centre first.

Revelations II for EVE Online

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:04:39 +0000

Tonight (well tomorrow morning) Revelations II is deployed. Lots of changes affecting everyone from solo players up to major alliances. I’ll summarise the things I find most important personally (for a non-alliance (and at the moment non-corp) player).

Revamping the loyalty system for agents. Instead of agents giving you offers, NPC corporations will let you “buy” things with your loyalty points meaning you no longer have to wait for a specific offer to be available - if you have the LPs, you can have it.
A lot of static deadspace sites have been moved to the exploration system which anyone can scan with a new low quality on board scanner on each ship.
Heat (which may or may not be important to me) has been added allowing you to overpower some modules at the risk of damaging them.

If you’re not already an EVE Online player, get a free EVE trial account, and if you already a player, get some EVE Game Time Codes :P

N73, 770 and the Internet

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:26:08 +0000

I recently finally got a new mobile phone contract with a Nokia N73 with T-Mobile (UK), complete with “unlimited” Internet access. I have to say it is actually more useful than I thought it would be.

I have a little app called GCalSync which synchronizes the calendar with Google Calendar. I also have the official Google Mail client which is almost perfectly (it doesn’t seem to show whether messages in my inbox have a label or not - but it’s a minor concern). The best bit though it accessing the internet from Nokia 770 using the N73 as a bluetooth modem.

LinuxMCE 1.1

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 11:23:23 +0000

Last month a new version, of LinuxMCE was released bringing with it some much needed improvements. The most noticeable is a switch from Ubuntu to Kubuntu (and an upgrade to Feisty) which apparently the KDE people are so happy about they want to bundle LinuxMCE with KDE 4. The most important in my opinion however is better integration with MythTV. From what I’ve been reading on their forums it’s not mature enough for general users (even less so than MythTV on its own) but it definitely has potential and if you’re comfortable with Linux and have a spare machine, you should go try it.

Google Checkout is cool

Thu, 03 May 2007 10:01:03 +0000

Google Checkout is an online payment processor. It was originally billed as a “PayPal killer” but there are important differences. Checkout is more shopping orientated whereas PayPal is for general payments. Checkout is also available in far fewer countries at the moment. The best part is their tactics to gain users.

For a limited time Google Checkout will give you £10 off any order over £30 (excluding delivery). Not just your first order, but all your orders while they keep the offer open. This is as much to attract businesses as users (the increased custom from charging £10 less for a lot of different items).

Handling regional variations in language learning

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:13:24 +0000

Warning, this post is long and rambling. You have been warned! :P

Part of the design philosophy of my language learning app is to reuse as much as possible. This brings up an interesting issue regarding regional variations of languages (I’m talking mainly about somewhat standardised variations) and how much should be shared between them.

For example in Belgium, French is an official language. This is almost the same as French as spoken in France but with a few important differences. Firstly there are minor vocabulary variations (Belgian French has specific words for 70 and 90 for instance). There is also a lot of Flemish and Walloon vocabulary used in addition to the French vocabulary. Finally there are pronunciation differences but these seem no greater than differences in accent.

So much for Gtk#…

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 17:55:12 +0000

Well I’ve abandoned my plans to use Gtk# in the language app (which actually secretly has a name now).

The main reason for changing is simplicity. I had a look at the TreeView control in Gtk and decided it was too much work. Although the theory of good MVC separation is good, the user interface is such a small, simple part of my app it wasn’t worth it. The stuff I need from System.Windows.Forms should work in Mono (and .NET 1.1 and hopefully even the Compact Framework).

Language learning app is back on

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:43:17 +0000

The language learning app which I went on and on about a while ago is now under development again. When I say again I mean I started again in a completely different way (at least from a technical implementation point of view - the user experience is intended to be the same).

You see I recently started a large project in C# at work (a desktop app by the way, not ASP.NET) after saying I was somewhat familiar with it and it should be easy to learn. The good news is after two days I realise it actually is really easy to learn, providing you let it do the work for you. (To any programmers intending to learn it, you’ll spend most of your time at first not actually writing code but finding whereabouts in the huge class library the functionality already exists is. Once you get used to it and get the hang of how it works it is surprisingly relaxing.)

Brazilian PayPal Phishing

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 11:45:29 +0000

I recently got an PayPal phishing email. It looked like most of the others I get but I usually visit the page anyway just to see what’s there. This time I was surprised by the address: http://smtp.funsau.saude.ms.gov.br/manual/www/paypal.com/ cgi-bin-webscr.cmd.account-login.userid-912834.link-limited-account/ websrc\_cmd=resolve\_process-run/account\_verification-process-run/ paypal\_account/limit-issues/index.htm gov.br?

A quick check on Wikipedia confirms that gov.br is reserved for Brazilian government entities and that smtp.funsau.saude.ms.gov.br is the official website of the state of Mato Grosso (site in in English). Assuming that the phishing site isn’t actually authorised by someone in the Mato Grosso government I’d hoped they’d be more careful about what people with access to their system can put up.

Pluto Home

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:15:25 +0000

Pluto Home is the project that LinuxMCE is based on. They are essentially the same thing, the different is Pluto Home is supposed to be a black box application that takes over your computer (with the advantage of stability) whereas LinuxMCE is designed to coexist with everything else a little better. Pluto Home is also offered as a commercial solution preinstalled and configured (but the software itself is still open source).

LinuxMCE

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 21:46:32 +0000

Could this be the ultimate home entertainment system? There’s a video dotted around the Internet that firmly says yes but I strongly suggest that video is not your first source of information about LinuxMCE since its uber-fanboy nature will just annoy you.

It’s basically a wrapper for MythTV, Asterisk and a few other things brought together with a snazzy interface and user accounts. The third party reports I’ve read suggest it’s not as easy to setup as the website suggests, nor perfectly stable. But the list of features it claims to support (and hopefully will completely support soon) is quite amazing.

GMyth - a MythTV frontend on a Nokia 770?

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 13:05:03 +0000

Someone on the MythTV mailing list recently announced GMyth, a library based on ANSI C and GObject to provide access to Myth backends in a GTK environment. Their ultimate goal is to have MythTV accessible from a Nokia 770/N800 complete with live transcoding.

You can find lots more info over on MoRpHeUz’s Blog.

No TalkTalk unbundling

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 23:08:16 +0000

I just got an email announcing that due to some sort of technical difficulties, my unbundling has been put back. No word on a new date either.

More Maemo Mono

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:41:58 +0000

There is now a single click installation route for getting Mono on the Nokia 770 and Nokia N800. Basically it sets up installation repositories and installs the runtime. From that any apps you install will install only the components they need. Whether there are any really cool Mono apps for Maemo yet is something I don’t know. But I’m sure there will be :)

EVE Game Time Cards - Blatant advertising that’s good for you

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 09:47:38 +0000

If you play EVE, pay with time cards. Especially if you’re European.

Basically it comes down to the US$/€ exchange rate. I also happen to be part of an affiliate scheme selling them through Shattered Crystal, but even if I wasn’t, I’d tell you anyway (in fact I waited a little longer to post this while I found a good affiliate scheme :P).

I’ve explained the whole exchange rate thing a bit better as well as given more info about Shattered Crystal on my EVE Online Time Cards page.

I Finally have MythTV

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:14:08 +0000

After talking about for quite a bit, I finally have a computer setup running MythTV.

I decided to go for MythDora. It has the advantage of being straight forward to use and still leaves me with a fully functional desktop computer (which KnoppMyth doesn’t really do. It did leave me one slight headache - I didn’t have a spare DVD drive (MythDora is 1.2GB) so I had to borrow the one from Windows desktop). The hardware I have is pretty moderate (well, really low end for most applications - a Sempron 3200 and on board GeForce 6100 with a Hauppauge HVR 1300) but it runs as a combined backend/frontend without any problems, even when recording, transcoding and viewing TV (an “advantage” of living in a country where HDTV is still not a thing).

BBC interested in TalkTalk

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:04:05 +0000

I got an unexpected email today from Catherine Wynne of the BBC. Apparently they are doing a piece about TalkTalk on the 6 o’clock news tonight and during the research came across my TalkTalk problems post (the one with 500+ comments - mostly about problems people are having).

They would like a number of comments from TalkTalk users regarding the service. If you’re interested (and read this quite a bit before 6pm 27th February), call:

Soon to be unbundled to TalkTalk

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:25:35 +0000

Yesterday I received a letter from TalkTalk announcing their equipment had been installed in my local exchange and that I would be connected at the end of March. Which according to some people may be the same time that I lose my internet access and phone line. They say it should only go down for twenty minutes and make big deal out of the fact that BT engineers will be doing the actual changeover. Luckily I have internet access at work so I’ll let you know either way.

Some baaaaad service from Pizza Hut

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 16:55:30 +0000

Yesterday I was in London meeting a friend. We decided to go to Pizza Hut (the one on Strand near Trafalgar Square. 45 minutes later we left not even having had our order taken.

In hindsight I’m not even sure why we waited so long to be honest. There was a certain level comedy to it, after all once you’ve been waiting for half an hour there is part of you wanting to see just how long it could possibly take. There worst thing was that we weren’t the only ones. At least one of the group left (who hadn’t been waiting as long) and another was still there that arrived about minute after us. We eventually decided to leave after reasoning that considering how much food had been brought through, even if we did order there’d be a ridiculous wait for the food.

New feature from PayPerPost

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 18:04:52 +0000

Some people love them, some people hate them. Either way it seems PayPerPost are hear to stay.

They have just released a new feature to try and get more sign-ups that simultaneously gives publishers some exposure while giving out more money to them (they must be doing really well or have some confident venture capital behind them).

The new feature, “Review My Post”. You’ll notice the links at the bottom of my posts for the time being. Basically you click the link, join PayPerPost and get a special opportunity just for you in which you have to review my post. I get free exposure as you promote my blog, you get $7.50 and PayPerPost get another (hopefully) loyal postie. The odd bit is I also get $7.50… So it’s basically PayPerPost paying $15 for each new sign-up.

How to get TalkTalk broadband working

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 15:14:30 +0000

Phil Jones has written a guide to getting TalkTalk broadband working.

Importantly the guide tells you how to do it without using the setup CD - quite a few of the problems people have had might not have happened had they not used the CD.

It’s in depth, complete and for the most part anyone should be able to follow it. I’m not sure the average user would be up to fitting a network card (something only a few people would have to do) but as he says, you may know someone who could help.

Yahoo! Pipes is great, isn’t it?

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 12:58:56 +0000

Yahoo! have launched a new service called Pipes.

It allows you take user input, grab web feeds, do clever stuff to the result and output it either as RSS or JSON - all with a nice graphical interface. I had a quick play with it and decided there was loads of potential for this. Although I couldn’t really think of any specific examples, but I’m sure people will start coming up with cool stuff eventually.

Steve Jobs doesn’t like DRM

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 12:46:28 +0000

Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple has announced that the “best alternative” for consumers regarding digital music downloads is the removal of digital rights management. Implications from previous interviews have strongly suggested that he personally doesn’t like it and having the largest share of the personal music player market means it would be good for business too.

The music industry (and the movie/TV industry to a less extent) have to be worried by this. The sales from iTunes are now significant enough that if Apple threatens to remove DRM anyway then they would lose too much by not complying.

EVE Voice is here (almost)

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 10:10:22 +0000

EVE have announced a second stress test on Singularity, their test server, to see how voice chat holds up in EVE. For a long time people have used external programs such as Ventrillo and Teamspeak to talk. Now (for a small fee if I remember correctly) users will be able to chat in game, hopefully in a way that is nicely integrated into the UI (and the new fleet system).

Google gets hacked - kills the web

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 11:47:50 +0000

This morning Google went down in a big way, and in a disturbing way slowed down the most of the world wide web. Well it may not actually be most of it, but it was most of the stuff I was browsing.

The whois output for google.com this morning was:

GOOGLE.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM GOOGLE.COM.ZOMBIED.AND.HACKED.BY.WWW.WEB-HACK.COM GOOGLE.COM.WORDT.DOOR.VEEL.WHTERS.GEBRUIKT.SERVERTJE.NET GOOGLE.COM.VN GOOGLE.COM.UA GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM GOOGLE.COM.SPROSIUYANDEKSA.RU GOOGLE.COM.SA GOOGLE.COM.PLZ.GIVE.A.PR8.TO.AUDIOTRACKER.NET GOOGLE.COM.MX GOOGLE.COM.IS.NOT.HOSTED.BY.ACTIVEDOMAINDNS.NET GOOGLE.COM.IS.APPROVED.BY.NUMEA.COM GOOGLE.COM.HAS.LESS.FREE.PORN.IN.ITS.SEARCH.ENGINE.THAN.SECZY.COM GOOGLE.COM.DO GOOGLE.COM.BR GOOGLE.COM.AU GOOGLE.COM

It seems to be back up now although you may still have problems depending on who often your ISP updates its DNS records.

My first experience with TalkTalk customer support

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 21:12:37 +0000

As many of you may be aware (most of you judging by the search engine keywords people use to get here with), I’m a TalkTalk customer. Now quite a few people are having problems with TalkTalk. Luckily I’ve had no problems with TalkTalk (although that might change when I’m unbundled. And for the most part that’s still true, although I did recently have a minor problem that led to me calling TalkTalk support.

Firstly, the problem I had was nothing to do with the Internet. It was a problem calling Julia in America. I would call and get nothing but silence. After a while it would ring but someone else would answer the phone who apparently couldn’t hear me. After talking to Julia over the Internet I discovered that she could hear me and she could also hear the third person. Very strange. Another point is that to call Julia and it be free (well at least included in the £10 a month we pay) I have to dial a prefix. Without the prefix everything was fine. So it was probably some obscure routing problem specific to TalkTalk.

Mono brings everything together - MythTV, PS3, Nokia 770

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 19:48:27 +0000

MythTV finally runs on a Playstation 3. Linux has been running on PS3s for a while doing all sorts of cool things. Well Takeshi Yaegashi has now got a USB TV tuner working for it making MythTV essentially complete.

So where does Mono come into this? Well Mono runs on a PS3 as well. Actually that’s not the link. In a cool coincidence, I first found out about MythTV on a PS3 after subscribing to a Mono RSS feed.

Revelations 1.3 - Castrating Jita

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 19:31:07 +0000

CCP have announced the patch details for Revelations 1.3. Nothing new as such is being added but it is a a pretty cool update nonetheless. Below are some of the points I feel especially important or cool.

Firstly, Jita should be a little less crowded afterwards. It will probably still be a trade hub but it’s asteroid fields are being removed and the school stations are “under new ownership” (and hence no longer selling skills). A bunch of other stations are suffering similar consequences.

Streaming video to the Nokia 770

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 20:26:02 +0000

I recently managed to get video streaming (and transcoding in real time) to my Nokia 770 :D Here’s a guide for anyone wanting to do the same thing. This assumes you have a wireless network with a computer on it.

The first thing you need to do is install MPlayer on your 770. The media player that comes with it is too limited with regards to what it can play. The interface to Maemo MPlayer is a bit limited but I tend to start it from the command line anyway.

Play Supremacy

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 13:00:59 +0000

The first game I ever did in Shockwave is now available on my site! It’s basically a Risk clone but with a fewer features and reasonable AI. Play Supremacy

Supremacy

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:31:02 +0000

Supremacy is a Risk clone I wrote in Shockwave a while ago. I recently found it and decided to put it back for the world to see :)

Play Supremacy

It used the original 42 countries from Risk, has no continent bonuses or Risk cards. And has a few bugs regarding the number of reinforcements it says you have. It’s also quite fun to watch six computer players play against each other.

Transcoding DVDs

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:02:33 +0000

Following my post about ripping DVDs, here is a method for transcoding the DVDs into something more manageable. I should point out that is probably for the more technical amongst you - there are certainly easier ways to do it but this has the advantage of being very automatable.

Since MythTV (and Linux in general) seems to like ffmpeg for video encoding/decoding, I figured I’d use that. You can get a binary version for Windows and read the documentation.

Ripping DVDs

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 17:06:24 +0000

Since I’ve decided to try and set up a MythTV system I figured getting my DVD collection on to hard drive(s) would be a good move for convenience.

There’s a lot of information on the Internet about copying DVDs, whether to other DVDs, to CDs or to a hard drive in their original format or transcoded. I wanted to get the main movie only from a disk and transcode it to XviD for space saving. Here are the steps I have that worked (for Windows incidentally):

Fun with Google calculator

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 18:10:10 +0000

I’ve talked about the clever calculator features built into Google before. Most of my examples then were rather silly. Well I’ve started using it a bit more seriously recently. The great thing it does is allow unit conversions to be done effortlessly at the same time as the main calculation.

For example, I have a video clip that is about 350 MB and 45 minutes long. I want to know what the average bit rate for the encoding is, in kbps. 350 MB is 350 * 1024 * 8 kbits. 45 minutes is 45 * 60 seconds. Works those two out, divide the first by the second and I have my answer. Or just type [350 MB / 45 minutes in kbps](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-22,GGGL:en&q=350+MB+%2F+45+minutes+in+kbps) into Google and I have my answer with far less effort.

The future of Stargate

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 17:22:33 +0000

In case you didn’t know, Stargate SG-1 has been “cancelled”.

To be specific the Sci-Fi channel in America has decided not to pay for another series after series 10. But all is not lost. According to Wikipedia they will be making two straight-to-DVD movies by the end of the year (filming in April and June). The first will wrap up the Ori storyline and the other will be unrelated (check Wikipedia for some spoilers).

A plethora of Myth distributions

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 14:18:46 +0000

Like Linux in general, there are few MythTV distributions you can get. Unlike Linux in general, most of them have specific purposes they work best for. The three popular ones I know of are:

MythDora is just Fedora with MythTV (and its dependencies). This is intended to leave you with a completely usable Linux installation that includes MythTV. It comes on DVD and is certainly the largest of the three.

Some progress with MythTV

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:05:35 +0000

I finally (technically) installed KnoppMyth (a Debian based Linux distribution designed just to run MythTV) today. I say technically since I installed it somewhere where I couldn’t connect any sort of TV signal up to it. So, although it works fine, I haven’t actually managed to test any of the important features. The only part of the installation that was a problem was that the hard drive KnoppMyth uses must be the master device on the primary IDE channel.

Finally a rival to Google?

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 18:38:13 +0000

Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia has decided to launch a search engine.

In a move reminiscent of the Open Directory Project, Wikia Search will be human edited. Beyond that, not much is known, but it will be. One of the core philosophies, according to a recent interview with Jimmy is that everything should be as transparent as possible - definitely a long way from the current search engines.

Star Trek: Legacy sucks

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 23:46:59 +0000

Star Trek: Legacy is a space combat game featuring the voices of all five Star Trek captains. The damage effects on the ships is good; in fact the graphics overall are very good.

But unfortunately the game is rather simplistic and terribly crippled by a dodgy control system. Which is a shame since it had potential.

Zudeo and the BBC

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 01:32:46 +0000

Apparently the BBC will begin offering programmes for download though Zudeo, a movie sharing service similar to YouTube, owned by Azureus, the developer of a popular BitTorrent client.

Although the downloads will contain DRM, the very fact that the reputation of BitTorrent for illegal downloads hasn’t put the BBC off partnering with a company that relies on it says a lot about them.

Exploration in Revelations

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 19:15:49 +0000

A recent update to EVE Online has made exploration (brought in a couple of weeks ago with Revelations) easier. How much easier? I don’t know since I was never successful before the update. But today I had my first success.

If you look around the EVE forums there is an in depth guide to scanning. I’ll give you short guide. First bit of info, you’re going to do most of your scanning on the solar system view. Get to this by clicking on the map and selecting solar system view from the top of the overview. Secondly you’re going to need a few skills, specifically Astrometrics III and whatever it’s prerequisites are. As with everything in EVE there are others that will help you.

Sky TV without a Sky box

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 12:14:56 +0000

At the moment I have a Sky subscription with a Sky box. The Sky box outputs to my computer which is running Media Center which can change channel on the box using an IR blaster. This isn’t ideal and also means that I’ll never get HD since the Sky box only sends an SD signal out of the scart/composite output. Surely there must be a way to connect the computer directly to the computer and receive TV that way?

Carphone Warehouse

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 11:32:19 +0000

Ooh, drama. I recently received an email from a Carphone Warehouse representative asking me to remove the personal information about one of their employees I had published. Specifically, two of Charles Dunstone’s email addresses.

If one or both of the email addresses are actually personal addresses of Mr Dunstone and this is an attempt to protect them, then it’s rather futile. Firstly because I first heard of them from a commenter so someone else obviously knew it a while ago and as probably told others. Secondly, the fact that they were published for even a moment on the web means they’ve been scraped and stolen by hundreds of bots. So if they are being bombarded by emails offering cheap OEM software, fake Rolex watches, dodgy claims about various stocks or warnings about losing access to a PayPal account, I apologise.

Improving EVE - Part 2

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 15:50:22 +0000

There are obviously more NPCs in the game than just pirates and Concord - there are all the factions. The rest of what I suggest is essentially a way to do factional warfare. And because I speak from a programming background there are a few technically implementation details.

The first step is to have some sort of invisible “power rating” for every NPC faction in a system. This power rating represents the control that faction has over a system and would be completely dynamic. The rating would control how quickly ships (and sentry guns for instance) controlled by the faction spawn. As more ships appear in a system, they could move into other systems and (in the case of war) attack the ships in that system. Losing ships in a system lowers that faction’s power there. By default they’d all be equal (on their borders) thereby ensuring it’s player involvement that tips the balance. With enough support a faction could gain sovereignty of a system from another faction (or perhaps a player alliance? The mechanics of system sovereignty would have to be expanded). The Caldari stamping out the Gallente for instance :P Since the factions need to survive they’d have to be some scaling factor giving more support to factions that have lost a lot of space so they don’t disappear completely.

Improving EVE - Part 1

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 15:20:09 +0000

Sorry about the recent EVE fixation. It will pass :P

There has been a lot of debate on the EVE forums recently about high security space vs low security space vs 0.0 space. Basically CCP (the company that makes EVE Online) prefer 0.0 space and would like everyone to move there. This is for a few reasons. Since it’s all player controlled it is a more accurate example of a world controlled by players. This also means that CCP don’t have to create content for it to be interesting (although they still do).

Some random revelations

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 11:05:52 +0000

Well I’ve now been playing Revelations, the latest update for EVE Online for a couple of days now. At the moment I’m hastily training skills to use the new features. Contracting for instance lets you have multiple contracts (I do a lot of lazy trading with spare ISK - buy something, pay for it to be shipped, sell it).

I nearly trained Survey V for Salvaging since that is one of the listed requirements. But in their patch notes for the downtime today EVE announced that the requirements for Salvaging will be dropped to Survey III (and Mechanic III).

Cross platform games on the PS3 and the Xbox 360

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:16:46 +0000

In case you didn’t know, the PS3 can run Linux. Not only that but it’s officially supported by Sony. You can download (for free) a utility to put a boot loader on to some media (most likely a hard-drive but memory cards, memory sticks and anything else the PS3 can read (and can hold 10Mb) are supported) and set it to boot “Other OS” (that’s what the menu says).

There are already videos on the Internet of it running Fedora. Zac Bowling already has one running Mono, a task simplified by the fact that the cell processor appears as a PPC. So where does the Xbox 360 come into this? Well Microsoft are releasing something called XNA, a modified/extended version of the the .NET 2.0 run-time with emphasis on Managed DirectX that is available for Windows and the Xbox 360. A version of XNA called Mono.Xna that is built on top of the Tao framework is in development. The end result is that in theory, games developed using XNA will run on Windows, Linux, Macs, PS3’s and Xbox 360’s. A few problems still exist. The processor that the PS3 uses is rather strictly an in-order processor so most stuff that isn’t written specifically for that will run slowly (although video playback will be pretty zippy) and so far there is no hardware 3D support for an “Other OS” so XNA (if it were available now) would run slowly.

Revelations (Kali part one) for EVE Online is here

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 22:29:22 +0000

Well Kali is finally upon us. I haven’t really had chance to play yet. But the first thing I noticed was 29,000+ players online, the most I’ve seen personally (although I was apparently online when they first broke 30,000 - I was stuck in Jita with 700 other players).

They did post a dev blog about yet another cool idea they’ve had for the release beyond Kali - the ability to walk around stations in a nice 3D rendered world. Although they pointed out it will be mainly cosmetic at first. And to be honest isn’t high on my list of wanted features…

A week in America

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:01:18 +0000

I’ve now been in America a week. That’s why I haven’t posted. I can’t really think of anything especially interesting to say except about the fun I’ve had with luggage.

The flight to here (Missoula) went via Minneapolis. I made the connection fine (a 5 hour wait in the airport made bearable by the fact that with my Nokia 770 I could talk to Julia using Google Talk - internet access was $7.95 for 24 hours with Boingo) but my luggage stayed in Minneapolis.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft working together for the good of mankind

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:26:06 +0000

Okay, so it’s not quite that grand. But apparently Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are going to be using the same sitemap format some time in 2007. Google Sitemaps that is. Infoworld article.

Will Wiktionary ever be more than a mess?

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 12:58:52 +0000

Wikipedia is great. You can find out almost anything. The only criticisms of Wikipedia are strenuous at best and tend to either be: a) It’s unreliable (you shouldn’t use a single source anyway - that’s why Wikipedia articles are supposed to cite references) or b) It’s somehow elitist or a “members only club” - a view often held by banned users.

One of its oldest sister projects, Wiktionary on the other hand is not so good. I think it’s a marvelous idea that should be done and should definitely continue, but at the moment it is frankly a mess.

Getting paid to review

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 20:30:13 +0000

Well it seems that PayPerPost isn’t unique as a few other people are jumping on the bandwagon.

One of the notable ones is ReviewMe from the people at TextLinkAds. Although the theory is essentially the same as PayPerPost, the implementation is different. In PPP advertisers list opportunities which bloggers can the accept. The price paid ranges from about $2.50 to $10 (with the most common being $4 or $5).

ReviewMe works the other way round. Bloggers list their blogs with a price (determined by ReviewMe) and advertisers choose which ones they want to review their product or service. The price paid is dependent on the blog (how exactly they determine I’m not sure but it seems to be some sort of PageRank, Alexa, back-links type combination) and seems to be significantly higher. Of course you’re likely to get fewer offers though.

So Java is open source

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:41:36 +0000

It’s not really something I personally care about but I figured I couldn’t claim to be a technology blog without mentioning that Sun have open sourced Java.

How to get more visitors to old content

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 19:32:22 +0000

One of the main advantages of blogs as a publishing medium is also a big disadvantage at times - the time sensitive nature. The fact that the information is about as up to the minute as you can get (in general) means blogs are a better source of news (or more importantly opinions about news) than search engine results for instance. But this means that some of your content can be come rather pointless after a short time.

Nokia 770

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 21:45:55 +0000

My recently ordered Nokia 770 has arrived :o)

For those that don’t know, it isn’t a phone - Nokia market it as an “Internet Tablet”. Basically it’s a PDA running Linux with WLAN, Bluetooth and an 800x480 touchscreen display.

There’s too much about it that’s cool for me to go into right now, so I’ll leave you with the picture :)

Apparently the term “UMPC” is being used by a few people to describe the 770 (and similar devices) - “Ultra Mobile PC”.

EVE Online events are real…

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 00:12:30 +0000

Ooh, EVE Online has suddenly become a lot more interesting to me. When you log in to EVE you get news stories from within the EVE universe. For example there was something recently involving the Gallente and a convoy delivering aid to a planet and something blew up or something.

I never really paid much attention figuring it was just some light fiction to keep the universe “real”. Well apparently they are a little more than that. They are actually acted out by a group called Aurora, part of the Interstellar Services Department (a volunteer group responsible for things like the buddy program and forum moderation).

Web Television

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 19:30:44 +0000

My interest in MythTV has also sparked my interest in TV over the Internet. Many companies offer it “secretly”, for example movies on demand from cable operators in the UK are actually streamed over the Internet and loads offer small chunks of it. But are there any companies actually transmitting top content “live” over the Internet (free or subscription)? If it’s transmitted live (i.e. everyone receives the same thing at the same time), bandwidth some of the possible bandwidth problems can be mitigated with things like IP multicasting. And if you do have something like MythTV recording it for you the problem of people not wanting to see things at the same time go away too. Well to answer the question (there was one), yes. Unfortunately for the most part they aren’t the big channels, but there are quite a few for niche areas and some countries even make their government subsidised national station available.

Gang warfare in EVE

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 18:48:12 +0000

There’s a new blog entry about the overhauled gang system in EVE Online. It’s basically gone all hierarchical.

You can still create gangs as normal, but they no longer receive gang bonuses. To get the bonus the gang must be upgraded to a fleet. A fleet contains wings, wings contain squadrons and squadrons contain members. And each level has commanders. And all the commanders give gang bonuses (meaning a player can get a bonus from all three of his superiors).

Back in EVE Online

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 14:21:53 +0000

Well after taking a little break from EVE Online (damned real life getting in the way again :P), I’m back in. And although I haven’t been playing for a couple of weeks, since this is EVE Online I’ve been able to keep my skills ticking over :)

Of course when the JETA counter reaches zero (that would be Julia ETA - cute eh?) I’ll have another two week break. But I have a skill that needs 16 days to train so I’m prepared.

PayPerPost is getting a lot of flak

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 22:24:06 +0000

PayPerPost are a fairly new company offering yet another revenue stream for bloggers (although for most blogs the existing ones probably aren’t earth shattering). This one’s a lot more controversial on the surface however. You get paid to write content about something specific. And you get paid quite a lot (at least in blogging revenue terms), usually about $5 per post. It has however pissed quite a few people off.

Microsoft playing nice?

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 10:12:33 +0000

Well it seems despite the massive market share (approaching monopoly status in certain markets), Microsoft are realising that working with other companies can actually be a good thing. Windows Live Messenger’s interoperability with Yahoo! Messenger is a small step, their latest announcement is much bigger.

Ron Hovsepian and Steve Ballmer take the stage together to announce a new collaborative relationship between Novell and Microsoft.

Apparently the deal involves some patent sharing, setting up a research team to work on improved virtualization and Microsoft indirectly selling Novell support to it’s customers who also have Linux servers. Read about the whole deal on Novell’s website.

iDoom - Doom on an iPod

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 14:20:58 +0000

I’m not entirely sure why you’d want to - I mean I can’t imagine what the controls are like for instance - but you can now get Doom for your iPod.

Unfortunately it requires you to install iPod Linux making an unsuitable option for more people. But I think it’s one of these things that more impressive than practical from the beginning…

Disclosure Policy

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 15:34:47 +0000

This policy is valid from 30 October 2006.

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. For questions about this blog, please contact Oliver Brown. This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation. The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.

Language Search

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 11:15:26 +0000

The following search box will return results emphasising language learning resources.

Google Custom Search - Language Learning

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 11:11:32 +0000

Google just launched a clever new custom search thing.

The idea is for people to create their own “custom” search engines that automatically give weight to certain sites, restrict others and silently append search terms therefore improving accuracy for niche topics. For example imagine an ornithologist searching for “a pair of great tits”.

So, I’ve created an engine for finding language learning resources. And it’s surprisingly good.

ClearType and IE 7

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:20:59 +0000

Internet Explorer 7, which will be pushed to users in an almost forced manner shortly, will use ClearType by default. ClearType essentially uses a clever technique called sub-pixel rendering to provide clearer text at low resolutions. Like anti-aliasing, another technology to achieve similar results, it can make things look blurry but on the whole it looks okay.

One of the side effects is that vertical lines get a coloured “halo” which can be a little off putting. On the whole you get used to it, but after leaving it on for a while I noticed something: the problem is essentially a side effect of using “high readability” fonts like Verdana. Verdana was designed to be readable at small sizes and such has a lot of straight lines (since curves either look dodgy or need anti-aliasing at small sizes). These straight lines (specifically vertical ones) are the ones that have the most pronounced halos. Use fancy curvy fonts (even if it’s just a little) and the problem is greatly diminished.

Learning a language over Jabber/XMPP

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 12:59:54 +0000

The language learning app of mine is still under development, but I doubt I’ll be spending too much time on it until after my trip to America (and by extension, until after Christmas).

In the meantime I’ve reading about XMPP, the protocol used by Google Talk and several others.

One of the extensions that Google is largely responsible for is Jingle which essentially allows voice communications. There are also a couple of XMPP clients written in PHP. So it may be possible to deliver lessons over XMPP through a chat bot.

Nokia N93 not as good as it should be

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 10:37:02 +0000

We recently got a new Nokia N93 at work and had the fun task of benchmarking it.

In raw processing power when running Java it outperforms the second best phone we have (the Nokia E61) by about 50%. Unfortunately, like all the Nokia handsets, it’s not so good at image handling and so unfortunately loses out to Sony Ericssons overall.

The big disappointment though is the hardware acceleration. 3D graphics in J2ME should theoretically be done using JSR 184 (an API for 3D graphics - there is at least one other but JSR 184 is the most supported). The N93 has hardware acceleration supporting OpenGL ES and according to the documentation the JSR 184 implementation automatically uses hardware accelerated OpenGL ES if it is supported.

Wine Is Not an Emulator

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 12:50:57 +0000

After my post about ReactOS I felt I should mention Wine.

Wine has similar goals to ReactOS, namely to give users the ability to run Windows applications without buying Windows, but goes about it in a different way. Wine is an implementation of the Windows API designed to run in Linux.

This seems like a better approach since a lot of the features of an operating system which have to be implemented by ReactOS already exist in Linux. And of course it can run native Linux apps too. Since it isn’t an emulator, applications theoretically run at the same speed, but the fact that all the library code has been written from scratch this is rarely the case.

AOL misleading with wireless broadband

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:13:40 +0000

AOL UK (that would be Carphone Warehouse now) are advertising wireless broadband for the same price as regular broadband.

What this means is instead of getting a free ADSL modem, you get a free combined wireless router/ADSL modem allowing you to create a wireless home network with the Internet accessible from all the computers. Quite a few companies advertise a similar service as wireless broadband.

There are companies slowly appearing however offering genuine wireless broadband via WiMAX, for example now. Once the availability increases the issue of what “wireless broadband” means will become more important.

Performancing.com - Ads for Bloggers

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 18:04:28 +0000

Performancing.com have just launched a new ad network type thing for bloggers. Ads are sold per blog for a flat fee per month and you get 70% of total revenue. Could be quite good.

ReactOS

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:19:06 +0000

My investigations of MythTV and Mono has led me to a few interesting things regarding Linux and operating systems. One of the more interesting, although not immediately useful to most people, is ReactOS.

It’s simply an attempt to create an operating system from scratch that is binary compatible with Microsoft Windows. That is it will be able to run Windows binaries (executables and DLLs). It’s far from feature complete but there a few key apps it can run. For a relatively unimportant but visually impressive example, have a look at Unreal Tournament.

Quake 2 Coop

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 08:26:23 +0000

After discovering a universal binary patch for Quake 2 (a friend has an Intel Mac), I’ve started playing it again.

We had fun with deathmatch for a while and then figured we’d give coop a go.

Since Quake 2 doesn’t have coop built in I had a look around for a mod. There were quite a few but unfortunately I couldn’t get any of them to work. It seemed they were all designed to work with version 3.1, but we were running 3.2 (and 3.21 - a fix of OpenGL support to make it work on Linux and the one the Mac patch was based on).

TalkTalk buys AOL UK

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 21:30:35 +0000

In an interesting move, AOL have old of their UK business to none other than Carphone Warehouse. This will not mean in re-branding so it seems AOL and TalkTalk will remain separate. It also seems that AOL will take control of advertising through TalkTalk as part of the deal. More information is available from BBC News.

Habeas Corpus

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:01:13 +0000

First, read this blog post.

A law has almost been passed in a the United States (the Military Commissions Act of 2006, passed by Congress on September 27 - just needs signing by Bush) that allows aliens to be detained indefinitely without access to legal counsel and without even having anyone notified of their detention simply by having been declared an enemy combatant. And this declaration in itself doesn’t require any serious evidence and has no serious oversight (meaning in reality it requires no evidence).

QED Wiki and the Zend Framework

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 18:46:55 +0000

IBM are working on an impressive looking product called QED Wiki, developed with the Zend Framework.

Fundamentally it’s a wiki like any other. But there is a cool layer on top of it that could be revolutionary (although like many Web 2.0 concepts will probably fall short and just be “cool” - we can hope). The interface allows you to create “situational applications” that can link different components together with the ease of a wiki. It doesn’t really make much sense just reading about it so go watch the video about it.

Google Video Ads

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:18:54 +0000

The very eagle eyed amongst you may notice I’ve altered the layout of the site slightly. One of the most prominent changes is switching to a smaller ad size for old posts (before I had a large rectangular ad above any post that is more than seven days old figuring that anyone visiting old content on a blog really wanted to be there and would get over it).

The new 200x200 size immediately started showing video ads on a few pages. For an example, visit my post about the cartoons of the prophet Mohamed.

Google PageRank updated

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 19:22:38 +0000

It seems Google have updated PR of their index - I’ve finally reached a PageRank of 6 for the homepage :)

The future of television

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 19:09:15 +0000

I just found an interesting document released by the European Broadcasting Union (their most prominent activity is the Eurovision Song Contest) regarding the future of television, specifically relating to PVR systems.

Free-to-air Television and other PVR Challenges in Europe.

It’s quite long but definitely good. Suggests revolutionary ideas like broadcasters making EPG and programme meta-data publicly available and that they should embrace “new business models” relating to content viewed through a PVR since traditional advertising is far less effective.

More Kali Goodness

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:27:49 +0000

Yet another dev blog entry includes more information on what will be in the first two phases of Kali. Since it’s all there I’ll just summarise.

The seamless map is integral to the new scanning format and exploration. It seems the scanner interface is now built into the normal view. Lots of hidden things will now be available everywhere for people to find.

Related to the seamless map is improved combat awareness including hierarchical gangs. Have fleets of squadrons of ships along with better gang situational awareness and apparently built in voice chat.

Kali Coming Soon

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 21:28:55 +0000

The current problems with EVE Online mean that Kali, the next big update will probably be delayed at least a month. But some more details have been released in the latest blog, including screenshots of the new seamless zoom feature.

The idea is to integrate the map into the main display and simply let you zoom out - from your ship, through to solar system, region and finally all the way to the whole galaxy.

Could TalkTalk software be the problem?

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 11:45:23 +0000

A few recent entries to the list of problems with TalkTalk seem like they could be software related.

People not being able to use MSN Messenger or having problems getting their TalkTalk email for instance. The first one could be caused by a badly configured firewall which the TalkTalk software installs and the second by an apparent typo in the default mail settings. The reason I bring this up is because installing the the TalkTalk software is one thing I never did. Since I was going to use a router with a modem built in I didn’t bother waiting for my welcome pack and just tried from the day they said the broadband would be active and everything worked fine.

The most specialized ship in EVE Online

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 08:58:56 +0000

I was just looking through the ships and found the most specialized ship in there. By “most specialized” I mean one that is suited really well to a single task and really badly to anything else.

There is vaguely a choice of four (one for each faction) so I went for the best one. It is the Charon. The Charon is a freighter designed for carrying stuff. And that’s basically it. It’s very good at it though. A Badger, the Caldari industrial can carry about 5,000 cubic meters of stuff. The Charon can carry 785,000 cubic meters. All this comes at a price. Firstly, it’s very slow - 60 m/s without skills. And you can’t even put a microwarp drive on it. And it’s not that the Charon has limited CPU or power or anything (which it does) but that it has no fittings. That’s right, not a single slot. There are a couple of other sneaky uses for it though. It has high shields and very high armour and hull which means it might distract the enemy in a big fight. You’d hope that they’d assume it was carrying something important. Or along the same lines you could use it as bait maybe but there are much better ways to do that.

Life is getting better in EVE

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 08:27:05 +0000

A new post has been made in the EVE Dev blog by a guy called Redundancy about the EVE economy. Lots of interesting thing about GDP and stuff. The most interesting is that GDP per capita is on the increase - that is the average amount of money a player earns is going up. In fact is has double since January.

MythTV better than Media Center?

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 18:41:15 +0000

I’ve been reading about MythTV and considering it as a replacement for Windows Media Center. Overall it has more features, has better support for multiple computers and is completely free. Unfortunately it’s only available for Linux. Which also means you have to be picky with hardware because of the lack of drivers. I’ll write more about it shortly.

MythTV.

TalkTalk unbundling

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:37:11 +0000

Firstly, some of the posts about TalkTalk problems are getting a little heated, especially now some TalkTalk call centre workers have posted. Try and keep everything vaguely cordial.

Secondly I have an update (sort of) regarding unbundling. I recently posted that the unbundling dates were 31st August. Well another post on Sam Knows said they were the dates Carphone Warehouse originally posted and haven’t actually been updated since. As such some people already are unbundled - most people aren’t.

I could have a Titan in less than year

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 18:08:48 +0000

I just downloaded an excellent little program called EVEMon. It’s basically has an item/skill database for EVE and tells you how long it will take you to train skills. You can either select the skills specifically or select an item and it selects the skills necessary for that item. It also reads the XML format that the EVE website makes available so it knows which skills you already have. It also tells you if training any learning skills would make things quicker and the optimal order.

Factional Warfare in EVE Online

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 11:28:55 +0000

The next big update in EVE will be called Kali. This will include a few things, including contracts - an overhaul of the missions/escrow/market system as well a big graphical update. The thing that I think most people are waiting for is Factional Warfare. All I knew about it until recently was vague implications that the name give. But I just received issue 2 of EON (the quarterly EVE magazine) which has a more in depth description of what the developers are hoping for with Factional Warfare.

Farewell Steve Irwin

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 11:48:29 +0000

Steve Irwin, Australian wildlife expert most famous for his TV series Crocodile Hunter has died after being stung by a stingray. Although appearances can be deceiving I would have considered stingrays fairly low down on the list of most deadly animals he’s faced. In fact he’s apparently only the second person to be killed by a stingray in Australia.

Find more info from BBC News.

Deadspace complexes in EVE Online

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 12:33:14 +0000

Besides missions, deadspace complexes can be a good way for a new player to earn money in EVE Online. If you completed the tutorial (which you really should) you will already have visited a deadspace complex. If you haven’t, they’re basically EVE’s version of dungeons*.

I wouldn’t suggest trying deadspace complexes (complices?) if you’re really new since level Is aren’t really worth it. And to be honest I never tried level IIs, but level IIIs definitely are. I can do them in a badly-fitted cruiser without much of a problem so a well-fitted Frigate shouldn’t be out of the question, and if you can get a friend in there with you you’ll be fine.

Respect for the Advertising Standards Authority

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 12:05:55 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I posted about an advert for ntl:Telewest offering unlimited broadband that was unlike other providers - despite small print saying their services were subject to a fair use policy. Since then I have discovered that their unlimited service is actually unlike others. The fair use policy actually makes no reference to bandwidth limitations at all.

The reason I bring it up now is there is one part of the issue I didn’t mention. I actually sent a complaint to the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) about the advert. Yesterday I was amazed to actually receive a reply about it. Not only that but a personal reply.

I won’t need a visa

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 19:12:30 +0000

I recently said I might need a visa to visit America because of new rules regarding biometric passports. Well it seems I’m okay. You’ll only need a biometric passport for passports issued after October and not just for traveling after October.

This page at the UK US Embassy site has more info.

Beware of Worlds Collide in EVE Online

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 19:18:41 +0000

I just got the Level I mission, “Worlds Collide”. The story is that some civilians got caught up in a fight between Guristas and Angels and you have to rescue them. It was offered to me for about 250,000 ISK (including bonuses) so I accepted.

The first part was easy. Lots of pirates and my Moa (a Caldari cruiser) freshly fitted with heavy missiles barely got scratched. Unfortunately the acceleration gates (there were two - one Angel and one Gurista) only accepted frigates. I tried in a badly fitted out Condor and lasted about three seconds… Luckily NPCs pirates don’t go for pods and the Condor was given to me free by an agent. Since I couldn’t be bothered to properly equip a frigate that wasn’t going to use again I had to give up on the mission. So beware of that one.

Mini client for EVE

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 09:35:21 +0000

EVE needs a mini client. Something that can run as a normal window without taking up lots of resources that lets you do most thing you might want to do in a station. Things like sending/receiving EVE mail, accessing the market (setting up orders or just plain immediate buying/selling), changing skills, possibly accessing player missions (or contracts as they will become) and corporation management.

There’s lots of times when I don’t want to play EVE as such but I’m waiting for something to happen. And in windowed mode EVE takes up a lot of system resources and performs far less well.

I might need a visa

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:01:21 +0000

Julia is currently on an exchange program in America and I plan to visit in November. Which unfortunately means I need to get a visa.

America (like a lot of the world) runs a visa waiver programme whereby people in certain situations don’t need a visa to enter the country. At the moment holders of a UK passport listed as British Nationals going for business or pleasure trips of less than 90 days that haven’t been arrested don’t need a visa. On October 24th that will change. As well as the above requirements you will need a biometric passport.

Better missions in EVE online

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 08:40:34 +0000

A new patch called “Dragon” was deployed to EVE recently (it took a whole day and they still have an extended downtime today to fix some problems it introduced).

The biggest change for new players (or anyone hanging around Empire space) will be the new agent missions. For anyone really new, on board stations are agents. These are NPC characters who hand out missions to players. Early on, missions are the best way to make money. To be offered a mission by an NPC you need good standing with the NPC (or with the NPC’s corporation such as Lai Dai or even the NPC’s faction such as Caldari). New players will always have a good enough faction standing to find an agent who will help them. Before, most missions were courier missions. Go somewhere, pick something up, go somewhere else, drop it off. Courier missions have new been almost completely removed. Instead you get combat missions. For the low level agents (I and II) these involve killing pirates and rogue drones. Occasionally you also have to fetch back some loot or blow up a structure as well.

How to learn a language

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 09:33:32 +0000

I found an interesting post through Technorati tagged Pimsleur about how to learn a language. And for once it actually seems quite sensible and plausible. It’s also made me think about grammar and how it should be handled in my language learning app.

At the moment it plays the audio at you without anything on the screen. Perhaps the screen could display explanations of interesting or important points about what you hear? I’m worried about distracting people from listening and limiting the offline usability of precompiled lessons though…

Dubiously good cause

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 22:46:41 +0000

One of the Mono developers apparently had a problem with Northwest Vanline, a delivery company that managed to delay delivery by about a week, twice. In other circumstances, it would be a very funny story, at least the way the guy phrases the “punchline”.

Anyway, go read his complaint about Northwest Vanline.

More R&D in EVE

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:39:08 +0000

Ooh, after reading the forums I found a way to increase the number of research points you get when doing R&D in EVE Online.

After starting R&D you can also ask the agent for missions. The rewards for the missions are extra research points instead of ISK. The reason I had to go to the forums to find this out is because it apparently isn’t available until a day after you start the R&D.

Collocation

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 10:26:40 +0000

Collocation refers to a phrase or small group of words used together in normal speech with restrictions not explicitly imposed by grammar.

Quite an odd concept, but vitally important to language learning. Correct use of collocation is probably the best way to identify a native speaker from a near native speaker. I bring this up now because Julia made a wonderful example of an incorrect collocation for English.

She came up with the phrase “two and a half hundred”. In English you can say “two and half thousand” and “two and half million” but for some reason it doesn’t work with hundreds (it does in Finnish incidentally).

Language learning pricing and making it pay for itself

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 14:40:29 +0000

If I’m considering paying for voice talent for the language app (which let’s face it, I’m going to have to do) I have to be thinking about getting the money back somehow and I have an interesting idea that essentially equates to everyone helping each other learn languages.

Basically when learning, you pay per phrase (phrase in this context means any named element. Usually a phrase but could also be a specific term). The cost would be something really low (say for example $0.01 each). You only pay for a phrase once regardless of how many times it gets repeated or how many conversations it appears in. Just to provide some sort of concrete example, the material I’m testing with (which covers the first two Pimsleur lessons) has 82* different phrases/terms. Quite a few simple conversations can be put together with that material. As the number of phrases increases, the number of conversations increases exponentially (the mathematician within me has to point out that strictly speaking it’s probably not exponential).

How much fluff is needed?

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 23:08:03 +0000

I’ve been sorting out exactly what needs recording for the language app (which I finally have an idea for a name for) and I was trying to decide how much extra instructor speech is needed. Situations aren’t described for instance (no “Image an English man sitting next to a French woman”) and you aren’t asked to say things explicitly (“How do you ask someone if they speak English?”). Will this harm the process at all?

Let the research begin…

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 23:01:57 +0000

As a follow up to my post about becoming a scientist in EVE Online I can now report I am now officially researching.

Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be generating any cool tech II blueprints for a while though. I am generating 3.8 research points a day. Although I don’t have anything to compare that with, it doesn’t sound like many to me. So right now I’m busy doing agent missions for Lai Dai - the corporation that my research agent belongs to - in an effort to increase standing and therefore the number of RPs I get.

Any voice talent out there?

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 19:59:44 +0000

Foreign language voice talent needed for the still-unnamed language learning application.

I have a series of phrases I need recording with a total audio time of about five minutes. I need them in as many languages as possible (although if it isn’t English, German or Finnish then I’ll also need them translating - they are really simple by the way). My main requirements are that the recording is good quality and that you are a native or fluent speaker of the language.

TalkTalk service could change

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 09:25:35 +0000

To all those people with TalkTalk problems, the quality of your service may change.

I found this page on Sam Knows that is apparently a list of telephone exchanges with scheduling dates for TalkTalk unbundling. According to the information there, no exchanges have actually been switched completely to TalkTalk yet. When they do switch there should be a difference in quality. For most people it apparently couldn’t get worse so this should be seen as a good thing.

Multilingual pretty URLs

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 15:16:53 +0000

There is more and more emphasis on pretty URLs these days. With things like Ruby on Rails around to easily support it and better knowledge and use of things like mod_rewrite the days of horrible query strings is going away (excluding of course the most used websites - search engines). But how do you make your multilingual website have pretty URLs?

My language learning app uses the Zend Framework and so uses pretty URLs by default. I need the interface available in many languages, but then the URLs should be pretty in a localized way.

Charles Dunstone’s email address

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 19:30:15 +0000

Some of the people trying to cancel their TalkTalk subscriptions have apparently had success email Charles Dunsonte, Carphone Warehouse’s CEO, directly. Two email addressed have been suggested. I haven’t personally tried either so I can’t guarantee any sort of result.

Unlimited is getting sillier

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 08:32:14 +0000

The Metro, (the only newspaper I read since it’s free) had an advert from ntl:Telewest for their broadband service that said:

Cable broadband has unlimited downloads…unlike BT, Sky, Orange or TalkTalk

BT and Sky at least (and possibly Orange, not sure) definitely offer “unlimited” packages that are restricted by a fair use policy. The fine print at the bottom of the ad said that the ntl:Telewest also had a fair use policy. So how exactly are they “unlike” each other?

Galaxia ♠ Renaissance

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 20:00:30 +0000

Galaxia as a game may be dead, but it’s definitely not forgotten. Head on over to Galaxia ♠ Renaissance to read a lengthy (and getting lengthier) piece of fiction by former Galaxia player, Ashley Rayburn. It contains most of the well known players, the Consortium, the UGC as well of course yours truly, Q. If you don’t know what Galaxia is, it won’t mean much to you, but go read it anyway. It’s funny.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 14:17:09 +0000

It’s so crazy it just might work.

I heard about AMT a while ago and thought it looked cool. But not much was happening with it.

Well now it’s beginning to take off more and it might be usable in my language app.

It’s essentially a work marketplace wrapped in a web service API. Your application creates a job request (called a Human Intelligence Task) which someone then completes with the result being sent back to your application. So far it’s commonly used for processing lots of small tasks (for example there’s one about verifying info about some restaurants that only pays $0.03 but there are over two thousand individual tasks available), but it can be used for anything.

Using XHTML, XSLT and XForms for Xemplorary performance

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 22:37:23 +0000

Alliteration and bad pun. Good start :)

One of the features the language app will need is some sort of module editor. Although the XML format of the scripts is straightforward to anyone used to hand editing HTML, a lot of other people will not have a clue. Therefore a WYSIWIG would be a cool addition. And lots of X’s may be the way to go.

Although XForm support in browsers isn’t exactly stellar, the fact that only script editors will require means that needing a plug-in or extension isn’t such a big thing. And I get brownie points for being Web 2.0 as well.

Almost ready for a public viewing

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 19:11:25 +0000

The still unnamed language learning app is almost ready for a first public viewing. I’m just trying to get some audio of some other than myself. Firstly because I don’t like really hearing my own voice (and for this purpose my less than perfect pronunciation is too obvious) and secondly I need at least two people just for it not to be confusing.

In the meantime I thought I’d share an example of the script file I’m using: EntschuldigenSie.xml. It primarily contains English translations although one phrase is done in a few more languages. It does highlight one possible issue. I had to change the German ß to ss. Although Windows seems perfectly fine with Unicode file names (internally it uses Unicode for storage (either UCS2 or UTF-16 - not sure which)) PHP refuses to open them (fopen, file and file_exists for instance just don’t work) and Apache 2 seems to have issues as well. For German there are workarounds but for other languages it will get fiddly. This might not even be a problem on Linux where it will ultimately reside and it only affects file names which only have to give you a rough idea of what’s inside. But still, it’s annoying…

Best bits of the language app are done

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 11:55:04 +0000

The most important bits of my cool language learning web app are done. Here’s quick overview of how it works.

Everything is split into modules which are XML script files and accompanying audio files. Currently one type of script is supported, a “conversation”. This contains a short (less than 10 sentences) conversation with sub elements all marked up in XML. Sub elements are phrases, terms and notes. At the moment phrases and terms are handled almost identically. Notes are little explanations or possible stumbling points (for example the test script I have alerts the listener to the difference in the ending between “Ich verstehe” and “Sie verstehe_n_” in German). Any element of a conversation that is to be repeated is named (literally - the XML tag is given a name attribute). The system keeps track of the number of times a name phrase/term is played to the user and when it was last played so the automatic repetition system can work.

Linux is neither popular nor valuable

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 10:34:38 +0000

Controversial statement? Well that’s the point. There is a hilarious article over at XML.com about the traffic advantages of controversy on blogs.

The funniest part of course is the number of comments from people who read the title of the post but not the content and just threw a normal anti-anti Linux rant. Unfortunately these things only work if you have a fair amount of traffic in the first place and I probably don’t quite qualify.

Audio in Linux

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 13:34:01 +0000

I’ve started writing the page to actually play the audio clips in my language learning app.

At the moment it loads the Windows Media Play plug in. This obviously won’t work on Linux so I have to ask, how do you play media files in a web browser when not on Windows? Flash would be the obvious answer I suppose but I have an uncommon requirement - I need to be able to access the object via Javascript. Specifically, I need to know when a track is finished and the next one begins (from a play list) and none of the freely available Flash media players do that.

Being a scientist in EVE Online

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 17:14:23 +0000

A large part of EVE Online is the player driven economy. Nearly everything can be crafted by players and then sold. To create items all you need is the materials and a blueprint. The blueprints are where the scientists come in. Just to clarify, when I say scientists I mean R&D people. R&D involves “working” with an NPC agent to produce Tech-2 blueprints. The way it’s implemented isn’t ideal but it certainly makes the Tech-2 blueprints rare.

TalkTalk down to £8.99

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 08:27:19 +0000

As I was looking at the website I suddenly realised they’d dropped the price by £1 a month if you don’t take the free international calls.

Odd move since I doubt it will increase sign ups much. Before you jump ship you may want to read about some of the TalkTalk problems or look at the alternatives such as Orange Broadband or Sky Broadband.

Shiny new credit card

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 10:13:36 +0000

My first blatantly personal post for a while - I now have a new Cahoot credit card. My main reason for getting one is to get an extra month’s interest on most of my income. And that idea is even easier to implement than I thought since you can set up a direct debit to pay off your balance automatically.

And a day after activating the card I got an email saying their default charges (for exceeding spending limit or late payment) have been reduced from £25 to £12.

More info on Sky Broadband

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 12:09:53 +0000

As well as another article, the Metro also carried a double page ad today about Sky broadband. There will be three levels available:

2GB a month for free. 40GB a month for £5. Unlimited for £10.

The “unlimited” part is subject to a fair use policy but it’s presumably higher than 40GB a month.

I can’t remember what the speeds are except for the highest one which is “up to 16MB”.

An EVE Signup

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 16:44:33 +0000

Hurrah! Someone signed up to EVE Online following an affiliate link from my site (like the banner above if you’re reading this on the actual post page).

Seems like a perfect opportunity to encourage more. EVE Online is a persistent universe MMORPG. This means it’s a multiplayer game played over the Internet with thousands of other people. Since “thousands” is vague, I’ll be more specific. There are over 100,000 players subscribed as well as many other free accounts. When I go on (about 18:00 GMT) there are between 15,000 and 20,000 logged on.

Sky to offer free broadband?

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 12:08:03 +0000

I read in the Metro that Sky may be offering free broadband to it’s “top subscribers” in a move similar to Orange’s. Personally a shame for me since we probably qualify as a top subscriber (with all the Movies and Sports).

Zend Framework

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 09:52:12 +0000

Zend, the commercial endeavour of the people who brought you PHP have a produced a framework, cleverly called the “Zend Framework”.

It’s basically a lightweight MVC framework for PHP. Lightweight in this case is good. It doesn’t do as much as Rails does for Ruby (although it is significantly younger) - the most notable hole is a object-relational-mapping system. But it does provide URL rewriting for Rails-esque view/controller access. I started writing my clever language thingy in it.

Back to language learning

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 08:22:44 +0000

After spending a couple of weeks dealing with foreign text and Unicode at work, my interest in foreign language learning with the aid of a computer has returned.

My main goal is a Pimsleur style system but with the repetition handled by computer - i.e. with just the individual phrases (and words and syllables for earlier lessons) as audio files, the program should generate complete conversations with sensible parts repeated and useful instructor comments in between. That sounds like it requires some sort of script in some sort of markup language. Since it needs to be highly structured I guess that only leaves XML as a sensible possibility. So I marked up a conversation from Pimsleur’s German I.

Zidane - The son of a terrorist whore

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 09:21:07 +0000

At least one tabloid newspaper here in the UK is reporting that Materazzi called Zidane the son of a terrorist whore (he has Albanian roots - presumably on his mothers side) to cause the headbutt.

If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, Zinedine Zidane, apparently one of the best footballers in the world ended his career on a low note by getting sent off for headbutting an opponent in the final of the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

Don’t get cocky in EVE Online

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 09:05:16 +0000

I’ve been playing EVE for a few weeks now. I ventured into low sec (0.3, 0.4) space a couple of times and killed some NPC pirates. So I got arrogant and decided to hang around to mine some better ores. I’ve since lost two ships (well four technically - one of them was a freighter with two shuttles) to player pirates and moved back to safer space. Although I didn’t lose my escape pod during either attack.

No more outages

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 20:02:34 +0000

Some of you may have noticed the blog being down regularly. Well I haven’t fixed it yet. But I finally got the script to work that was supposed to restart it. I eventually diagnosed the problem as an incorrect path setting for the cron daemon. Anyway, it should now never be down for more than a few minutes.

EVE Online and Pimsleur

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 08:31:27 +0000

Pimsleur makes the perfect companion to EVE Online, especially when you’re doing cargo runs or other things that don’t meed much concentration. Why not learn Spanish nipping out to buy that new Battleship? :P

I’m not sure if you can alter the in game music that EVE uses (and changing it to Pimsleur would probably be a hassle since you’re only going to play each track once) but you can run EVE in a window and therefore use whatever media player you like in the background.

10% off dedicated servers

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 08:28:12 +0000

Ooh, my host now has a referral scheme. It doesn’t seem that good for businesses but great for users since they aren’t giving money but USB pen drives. Anyway if you take up the offer on any Miniserver or dedicated server you also get 10% off.

Miniserver or Fully dedicated server.

The Miniserver is what I’m hosted on. It’s half way between virtual hosting and a dedicated server. The server is essentially partitioned across all it’s resources with each user getting a guaranteed usage depending on the number of users. Of course you usually get more than this since most users don’t use a server to it’s limits. The advantage over a dedicated server is simply the price - they start at £19.95 a month. The advantage over virtual hosting is you can do almost anything to it that you could do to a dedicated server except change the hardware or alter the kernel (they’re running Linux). You can even install a different distro on them (they come preinstalled with your choice from a small selection).

New player corp in EVE Online

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 20:39:38 +0000

Okay, it’s a dangerous thing to do and of dubious use, but boy do you get loads of buttons to press, I am now the CEO of a 2-man corporation in EVE. In slightly dodgy space no less. But between us (that would be me and the other guy) our capability to defend ourselves is ever increasing.

One thing I’ve noticed is an apparent lack of information regarding running a corporation. Most of it I can work out, but what the hell is gold for instance? If anyone could point me at a guide I’d be much a appreciative.

Command and Conquer Generals and synchronisation

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 12:21:45 +0000

I had a three player game of C&C Generals last night at a friends house. Close to the end a big box appeared saying the computers were out of sync and it closed. Generals isn’t the only game to do this, many do (Star Trek Armada was a bad one for it) and there really is no reason. If the game goes out of sync and the clients can tell they’re out of sync why not just pause and it request the current game state from the host? It can’t be that different to everyone else and it’s better than quitting.

Google Checkout

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 09:08:56 +0000

Google Checkouts has a launched as a rival to PayPal. Competing with PayPal will be difficult, especially with the eBay integration. That could end when GBuy is released though (a competitor to eBay that will obviously integrate with Google Checkout).

On the surface Google Checkout is more expensive - 2.0% + $0.20 per transaction (PayPal is 1.9% + $0.30). However Google will let sellers have $10 of free transactions for every $1 spent on AdWords. The big disadvantage is that it’s only available in the United States. But that won’t last forever.

Google Mail and Spam

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 08:24:35 +0000

Well I’ve been using my Google Mail account for about a week and I have to say the spam filter is really good. A couple of hours after putting my email address on the blog I was getting spam and all but two messages have been correctly marked. More importantly, none of the messages marked have spam have been wrong.

There is one slightly entertaining fact. When I read the spam messages I still get Google ads related to the content. I thought perhaps they’d treat the spam folder as a special case. Although I guess it does make sense - I read a dodgy email with “Looking for the best value in discount software?” and get a nice Google ad offering me genuine Microsoft Office for £235.

Yet another XML based AJAX toolkit

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 23:02:02 +0000

Jitsu is another AJAX toolkit.

Like Backbase and Atlas it supports an XML based declarative format that is parsed by JavaScript and converted into real HTML.

This one is open source and free.

More free broadband from Orange

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:33:26 +0000

Now Orange (new owners of Wanadoo) are offering free broadband. It’s essentially the same setup as TalkTalk but more expensive and with a more limited service. If you have a £30 a month mobile contract with Orange you get free broadband with 2GB transfer a month. Although that isn’t as good as £20.99 a month and 40GB that TalkTalk give you, you do still get the £30 a month mobile phone contract so it could still be better for many people.

Making money as an arms dealer

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:24:34 +0000

After picking up a cheap blueprint (a DRMed copy of course) I am now an arms manufacturer and dealer in EVE Online.

I read that making money from selling self-manufactured items was difficult without Production Efficiency skill of 5 and I’m managing with 3. Although I’m not buying all the raw materials though. I buy the Tritanium which I needs loads of and mine the Nocxium myself. I think if I had to pay for the Nocxium then I’d be screwed…

Web access to MCE

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 12:14:50 +0000

One of the coolest features (well reasonably cool but practical) features of Windows Media Center is the ability to go to MSN TV and remotely set programs to record.

Unfortunately it’s not available in the UK (in fact I don’t think it’s available outside of North America). There is a less than ideal workaround though. You can run Media Center through remote access. You can’t play videos but the interface works well enough to set programs to record.

ASP.NET Atlas really is like Backbase

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 11:24:31 +0000

It turns out that ASP.NET might not suck after all. Atlas for ASP.NET is a toolkit for doing AJAXy stuff.

Well in fact it is quite a bit more than that. It has many features of the Google Web Toolkit (except in ASP.NET instead of Java) including serializing server side objects for use client side use. Interesting it also has a lot in common with Backbase. It allows you to embed some nifty XML to define a user interface which is then interpreted by the Javascript to render real (X)HTML.

DRM is everywhere - even in EVE

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 09:22:42 +0000

Considering the attention that Digital Rights Management is getting these days I found it funny that DRM is actually present within EVE Online.

To build things in EVE you use blueprints. There are originals which can make any number of items and copies which are licensed and only make a certain amount. Certain blueprints are very rare and this way the players controlling them can keep them rare.

Crack Craig Charles

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 12:56:48 +0000

Apparently Craig Charles was filmed smocking crack in a taxi. The most annoying aspect is the tabloids used headlines referring to him as a Coronation Street star.

Surely some clever Red Dwarf pun wouldn’t have been that difficult to come up with.

EVE Online theme

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 10:17:20 +0000

Since I joined the EVE Online affiliate scheme I figured I’d create one of my mini-themes for EVE. It has to be my favourite so far :D

The important part of the theme is the flash banner (it only appears on the actual post pages). Clicking this takes you to a free 14 day trial so you can try EVE out. Warning, it can become addictive very quickly!

EVE, EVE Online, MMORPG

Using MCE to make video DVDs

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 08:45:11 +0000

Whether Windows Media Center can create video DVDs (that is DVDs that will play in a normal DVD player and not just a computer (or certain “posh” ones)) is a little hit and miss, mainly because of the complicated OEM nature of MCE. If you buy a media center PC from a shop you’re probably okay. If you buy the OEM version of MCE and install it yourself you’re probably out of luck. You see, MCE can’t do it by itself, it requires an extra piece of software called “Sonic” something. If you buy the normal OEM version of MCE you don’t get it - you have to buy the three pack which contains an “extras” disk. If you do buy the Sonic software separately (available from Sonic.com) it does work fine - albeit apparently not from the MCE interface. There is the distinct possibility I did something wrong so I’ll keep fiddling with it.

Suspiciously devoid of TalkTalk problems

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 11:31:36 +0000

Well the comments by people having problems with TalkTalk are still trickling in and I’ve still yet to experience any of them. Although it does seem the biggest problem is customer service which I haven’t had reason to encounter yet.

Interesting possibility in the World Cup

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 14:46:09 +0000

I recently asked a football loving friend what would happen if the teams were tied at the end of the group stages. I mean completely tied (i.e. if there were no goals for instance). He didn’t know. Well unfrtounately the answer is that acomittee draws lots to decide who goes through.

Well in an interesting twist if England beat Sweden 2-0 and Trinidad & Tobago beat Paraguay 1-0, then lots will be drawn to decide which of Sweden and Trinidad & Tobago go though. Group B after such a result would be:

Give blood

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 09:11:13 +0000

After finding a permanent blood donation place near where I work, Julia and I finally got round to giving blood again on Tuesday. And unless you have a very good reason not to, you should too.

There’s more info in my previous post about donating blood.

EVE Online

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 10:48:41 +0000

I knew it would happen eventually. Once I got an income it was only going to be a matter of time before I found a massively multiplayer online game to play.

EVE Online is such a game. It’s in space, has a single persistent universe (i.e. all players are in the same world - no sharding), has a completely player run economy, has the record for most number of simultaneous players (over 25,000) and is tremendously fun. And now I have an income, the monthly fee of 14.99€ is looking very affordable.

ECW One Night Stand

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 09:12:31 +0000

Since I got MCE working I’ve been watching TV on a one day delay - that way I don’t have to actually remember when things are on. One such show was ECW One Night Stand, which has definitely been the best “WWE” pay-per-view* in a long time. And 90% of the reason was the fans who just never shut up. The funniest example was the Cena/RVD match. After a whole match of the fans tearing Cena apart, he manages a good move that I haven’t seen him do before. The crowds response? “You still suck”.

Schild’s Ladder by Greg Egan

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 11:21:33 +0000

Greg Egan is a “hard sci-fi” author. Hard sci-fi is a vague term referring to science fiction with a strong founding in complicated, plausible (if not real) science. He released a few really good novels that deal with several recurring themes including people living entirely as software (and the interactions between such people and those with bodies) some of the issues surrounding duplicating people if they exist as software and some exotic possibilities for life (some not even based on the idea of particle interaction).

Confusing Google Mail

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 10:39:22 +0000

Google Mail (no longer Gmail) has a confusing feature.

I recently got a Google Mail account to test out Google Talk. Since I was already logged into my Google account it asked if I wanted my new email account to be part of it. I said yes. Then I couldn’t log into my Google Account for anything else. The problem is they’ve decided my new Google Mail email address is my primary address and that’s what I need to use to log in.

The US Embassy

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 10:33:25 +0000

Julia is going to America next year on an exchange and she needs a student visa obviously (a J-1 if you’re interested). So we had a nice trip to London to the US Embassy this week.

The first problem we faced was finding it. Using Google Maps gives different results depending on whether you use the address or the postcode. I figured the address was right since it at least showed a road with the right name.

Sky+ and Media Center

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 16:03:32 +0000

Sky+ and Multiroom were installed this morning and everything works great :)

First I have to say the actual installation was done well and the engineer guy wasn’t even phased by the idea of connecting up to a computer instead of a TV. He did point out that they don’t supply an S-Video cable (which came with the TV card).

Anyway MCE is talking to my Sky box fine. The only niggle is that the IR transmitter is a little in the way (it’s picky about placement - get it wrong and it doesn’t always change channel). There may be a solution though. You can buy a cable that connects from the IR unit (the box that contains the IR receiver and that the IR blaster is connected to) directly to the Sky box. This works in exactly the same way as Sky’s own remote IR receiver. The device was actually originally created to allow TiVo boxes to control Sky boxes.

Bulldog Broadband

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 15:48:56 +0000

I saw an advert for Bulldog Broadband today on the London Underground. In large letters it offers 16 MB broadband for £9.75 a month plus telephone line rental of £10.50 a month - “cheaper than TalkTalk”. That price is indeed less than TalkTalk, but what you pay isn’t. That price only applies for the first three months, after that it’s £14.75 a month. Not only that but you only have a 1 gigbyte/month download limit, that’s about 34 Mb a day.

Cards and cards and cards…

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 16:10:06 +0000

We are long time Sky customers and recently ordered Sky Multiroom so I could connect Sky up to my new Media Center PC. On Thursday they sent us two new viewing cards. I knew we’d need a new one but I didn’t expect two - I just figured that the change in our subscription meant the old one needed changing. Except on Friday they sent us another one. So now we have four, our old one and the three new ones.

AdSense baiting

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 08:46:07 +0000

Some adverts for loans appeared recently, probably because I mentioned an interesting deal from Lloyd’s TSB.

So I wondered if I could make more appear by mentioning things likes loans, finance and mortgages. Just mentioning loans once isn’t going to do it so I should mention loans a few times. A stray mention of debt management might also help.

Of course my demographic isn’t really geared towards finance topics like loans or money lending. So just think of this as an experiment.

Another Firefox cleverity

Sat, 03 Jun 2006 01:30:35 +0000

Cleverity? Something that is clever. If that word really exists I should get an award.

A lot of people love Firefox and seem to think that loving it is “obvious”. This is despite the fact that it just eats up memory. Not only that but it keeps it regardless (if you minimise most programs on Windows they free up most of their memory).

There are uses for it, most of them for developers. The DOM explorer and JavaScript debug consoles are absolute necessities. But another cool feature I’ve found is “View Selection Source”. Highlight part of a web page, right-click and you can view the source just for that bit. Yay :)

Cheap International Calls

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 09:04:52 +0000

When I came up with the idea for mini themes it occurred to me that it could be a reasonable possibility for advertising. Reasonable in theory only since my limited traffic would be a problem. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t affiliate stuff up :P

So here’s the first one: a fairly unobtrusive advert for a website of mine offering cheap international calls. I say unobtrusive simply because the layout of the content of the page is identical to before. And if you browse at a low resolution you don’t see the advert at all.

Windows Media Center with a TV tuner

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 08:38:04 +0000

My TV tuner arrived yesterday :)

Installation and Setup

Installation was straightforward - after putting the card in just pop the CD in and let Windows detect it as normal. It didn’t even have to restart (which is good because it installed drivers for about 6 different devices (audio tuner, digital TV tuner, analogue TV tuner, MPEG encoder etc.).

Then on to the MCE setup. Lots of questions, most of which had the correct default value so lots of clicking “yes”. The only sticking point is it asks you which transmitter you want to pick up if you choose to use the digital (Freeview) tuner. The first one I selected resulted it bad picture quality and a bunch of missing channels. I went through the setup again and chose a different one (I had a choice of three) and got much better results.

3D gaming in Firefox and Safari

Wed, 31 May 2006 15:13:20 +0000

Using the canvas element with some clever JavaScript, someone has written a basic ray-traced 3D graphics engine that runs in Safari and Firefox.

Okay so “3D gaming” is overstating it slightly, but it’s clever. What’s double clever is that you can get a pure JavaScript implementation of canvas for Internet Explorer from Google Code. Which means technically you can now do 3D graphics using JavaScript and a browser.

PCs are the new UFOs

Wed, 31 May 2006 09:08:31 +0000

What does UFO mean? In theory it’s “unidentified flying object”. Of course it doesn’t really mean that; at least when people say it they tend not to mean that. People say UFO and mean “alien ship”. This really annoys me. There are shows with quotes from people along the lines of, “Oh I definitely believe in UFOs”. You believe in UFOs? UFOs by the very nature of the definition exist. What they really mean is they believe in alien spaceships.

Manhattan is messed up

Tue, 30 May 2006 08:58:42 +0000

The satellite view in Google Maps is obviously made up of many different images. Not all of these images were taken at the same time and not all from the same position. Sometimes this leads to slight inconsistencies. These inconsistencies are most apparent with tall buildings - which is why Manhattan looks so funky.

WinTV TV tuner despatched

Mon, 29 May 2006 17:03:30 +0000

I’ll be able to extend my short Media Center review into something a little longer and more useful when my TV tuner arrives :)

I ordered the Hauppuage WinTV HVR 1300 MCE Kit from Overclockers (the place I got the second video card from).

HVR stands for “Hybrid Video Recorder” - it has an analogue and a digital tuner (although it can only use at once I’m assuming). This means I can watch Freeview until I get Sky plugged into it.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 review

Mon, 29 May 2006 11:47:28 +0000

Well since I tend to use Firefox here at work I figured I could install IE7 without too much risk. And I must say it’s actually quite good.

Initial impressions

The most obvious feature is thye really minimalist chrome. The back and forward buttons are a little smaller and now to the left of the address bar; refresh and stop are to the right and then underneath that are tabs. By default there is no application menu (File, Edit, View etc). which strikes me as odd. But to the right of the tabs are other buttons to do common things that you’d normally use the menu for. Speaking of opening new tabs, there is a special thin blank tab to the right of the others that you click to open a new one.

Rewriting binary prefixes

Sun, 28 May 2006 15:14:16 +0000

Computers work in powers of two. This is because everything in a computer (well possibly not quite everything) is stored as 1s and 0s. As a result, any large numbers used in computers were generally expressed as powers of 2, the most notable is 210 = 1,024. This was close to 1,000 so it gained the metric prefix for 1000, kilo. This allowed people to think of 1 kilobyte as “about 1000 bytes” - The difference was only 2.4% Of course as the prefixes got bigger, the differences got bigger. 1 megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, off by 4.9%. Go all the way to a terabyte and you’re off by almost 10%.

Lots of people in Civilization IV

Sat, 27 May 2006 13:57:41 +0000

Since my new computer is working again (and is quite a lot better now), I figured I’d start playing Civilization IV again. I also decided to give CivFanatics a quick browse to see if there were any cool mods.

The one that caught my eye is called Regiments. It changes the graphics (and the graphics only) to include more people (so you’re infantry for example consists of 11 people) as well as rescaling them appropriately. Since it only changes graphics you don’t risk starting an unbalanced game and you should even be able to load an existing game without a problem.

Multiple themes, sort of

Fri, 26 May 2006 15:34:24 +0000

To counteract the fact that I’m using Kubrick, the single most common Wordpress theme (by virtue of being the default) I’ve started to develop different themes for different categories. The first I’ve implemented is PHP which now has a different colour scheme and a different header image.

Lloyd’s TSB interest not as good as it sounds

Fri, 26 May 2006 12:40:05 +0000

Lloyd’s TSB are current offering “over 150 more days of Interest”. The will you pay you interest from the day money goes in until the day it goes out. Since most banks don’t do this sounds like a good deal, but a lot people won’t gain from this.

It only applies to current accounts you see. The Lloyd’s TSB Classic current account offers 0.1% AER. If you pay in more than £1000 a month you can get the Classic Plus current account which offers 4% AER but that requires you to use online banking. And even then that rate is only on balances up to £5,000 (back to 0.1% after that). If you get an ISA or high interest savings account with an AER of 4%, 4 days interest is more than 150 days interest at 0.1%.

When is Boxing Day?

Thu, 25 May 2006 20:26:12 +0000

I should have a category for “odd things I’ve found out” perhaps.

To all you non=British people, this post may make little sense.

When is Boxing Day? The popular answer is December 26th. Which is usually true. What most people don’t realise is that Boxing Day is a mobile holiday. Technically it occurs on the first weekday after Christmas Day. Boxing Day could conceivably fall on December 27th or 28th then.

Talk Talk and Sky by Broadband

Thu, 25 May 2006 11:49:40 +0000

Sky offers movies and sport content to subscribers with a service they call Sky by Broadband (clever name). The downloaded content is DRMed and you can only keep it for 28 days but it’s good quality. The interesting thing is it uses a private peer-to-peer to distribute it.

It’s a smart move by Sky since it saves them lots of bandwidth. I was worried about whether TalkTalk would limit Sky by Broadband. It all depends on their reasons. If they truly have bandwidth problems then they should since it’s quite a large consistent bandwidth hog (since even after downloading it can continue uploading). If they actually just want to limit illegal behaviour with P2P file sharing then they’ll leave it alone since it’s legit.

Windows Live Mail dies a little

Wed, 24 May 2006 11:36:49 +0000

Windows Live is the name for the new set of technologies software and computery goodness Microsoft is developing.

A lot of the components aren’t especially related, it’s just a brand name of sorts. Part of it is Windows Live Mail, designed to ultimately replace Hotmail. As of this morning, it doesn’t work on Firefox. You are greeted with the normal Hotmail interface and a message saying due to various problems they’ve rolled back to a previous version meaning Firefox users have to use Hotmail Classic. Well it is beta (and they’ve said it’s beta instead of releasing it and then finding these problems) so I’ll let them off.

A silly programming language

Wed, 24 May 2006 10:11:23 +0000

Following my theme of silliness, 2L is a programming language with only two operators. And since these operators act on a virtual data store without accepting any operands, it only allows three characters (the two operators and space).

You could argue it has five operators since the first one is overloaded four times…

Some very silly domains…

Tue, 23 May 2006 15:10:05 +0000

Ever heard of Internationalised Domain Names? They allow you to register domains with non-Latin characters (i.e. Unicode). They actually do a bit of cheating but I’ll let you find that out. In the meantime check out these interesting addresses showing that just using Chinese or Arabic characters is not the limit IDNs.

Quick warning, they don’t work in IE without a plugin and to see them in their true glory you need Opera…

PSP browser support

Mon, 22 May 2006 12:41:57 +0000

With my broadband connection came a wireless network. So I tried browsing with my PSP. And it is a lot better than I expected. Except when browsing my own blog :(

I figured the easiest way to make it work was to send it the XHTML Basic version. So you should now be able to browse my site with a PSP without any hassle :D

Detecting the PSP browser**

Detecting a PSP is really easy. It sends a custom HTTP header: HTTP_X_PSP_BROWSER which contains the firmware version. Just check if that header is set. In PHP you just need to do:

The new 555

Sun, 21 May 2006 18:02:06 +0000

You should have noticed that the area code 555 is used a lot in films. Hopefully you also know this area code does not exist. It’s there just to be plausible but not actually require a real phone number.

Well the film Silent Hill may have a funky alternative for the internet. When people browse the web in films you can often see file:// at the beginning of the address bar, a sign they’re loading files from a hard drive. The ones with a little more thought use a real domain that really exists that can also be used for marketing.

Orb video streaming

Sat, 20 May 2006 23:24:42 +0000

Have lots of video, audio and/or a TV card? Got a good internet connection (more importantly) with a good upstream connection. Going on holiday or otherwise away from your computer but still somewhere with access to the internet? Then get Orb.

Orb is a cool utility for streaming media from your computer to the internet. Essentially it’s just a program that acts as a web server and a web interface that connects to it. With it you can stream any media on your computer (including TV tuners and web cams) over the internet. Most legal problems go away because the media can only stream to one person at once.

TalkTalk internet active

Sat, 20 May 2006 18:00:35 +0000

Well with my various posts about problems with TalkTalk I should probably point out that I did sign up. Less than a month later and it’s now live. And contrary to my expectations everything seems fine.

My router reports a connection speed of about 2.2 Mbit/s and I’ve had a combined download speed of about 120KB/s (including about 50KB/s from a peer-to-peer program). The only negative thing is that my modem and start up pack hasn’t arrived (my official go-live date was yesterday) but since I have a router and I’m perfectly capable of setting it up that’s not a major problem).

Now Google push AJAX development

Fri, 19 May 2006 12:27:24 +0000

I recently posted about BackBase, an expensive (for commercial use) AJAX development thingy*. Well Google have produced something similar for free Google Web Toolkit.

Although the end results are the same (as far as the user is concerned) there are important differences. The BackBase software is entirely client side. You write server stuff as normal, output BackBase code and the browser with JavaScript handles everything. The Google system is client and server orientated and odes more work on the server. The server also has to be running Java. It also has better browser support.

Windows MCE 2005 - First impressions

Thu, 18 May 2006 12:56:05 +0000

I said I’d write about it yesterday. Well I was so busy actually using it that I forgot :P

The first thing I should point out is that Microsoft do not officially support home users installing MCE themselves and as such I have an OEM copy. Despite that the installation was painless although it does have it’s oddities. Most notable is that the installation makes no mention of MCE, it just says “Windows XP Professional”. Also unlike other versions of Windows this comes on two disks, the second disk containing the media center stuff as well as some tablet PC stuff. One final comment about installing is the disks are labeled (system-wise) incorrectly). It will ask you to install “Windows XP Service Pack 2 disk” when it really means “Put disk 1 back in”.

TalkTalk problems

Wed, 17 May 2006 08:37:32 +0000

My post about free broadband from TalkTalk has got a fair bit of traffic, in fact it’s been the most popular page since a day after I posted. I don’t think that implies the post is any good but just that lots of people are looking for info about the offer. According to the Register, Carphone Warehouse have had to withdraw their advert claiming “free broadband” since it’s bundled and therefore not free. Personally I disagree. Since the service it’s bundled with was available before at the same price, the broadband is still technically free. The same people that made this ruling by the way also said that unlimited doesn’t have to actually mean unlimited (as with most broadband “fair use” policies) if the terms are displayed. This is far easier to disagree with since calling it unlimited is wrong both simply and technically. Anyway the comments have revealed the following issues it seems:

Video card woes

Tue, 16 May 2006 12:39:59 +0000

I now have all the parts of my new computer.

Unfortunately all is not well. After waiting two weeks for my video card, I cancelled the order and ordered a different one from someone else. Both arrived today. Other than the loss of postage to return the first one, it’s not a major problem though. But slightly aggravating. It does mean I should be able to post comments on Windows MCE tomorrow.

German flip cards Google gadget

Tue, 16 May 2006 11:34:59 +0000

I’ve created a clever German flip card gadget for Google homepage. It displays a German word for a few seconds and then shows it’s translation. And then repeats with a new word. The vocabulary is very small at the moment but it will increase by at least one per day.

At the moment it also limits itself to 5 words per viewing. That is after showing five cards it loops (if it didn’t you’d never actually begin to memorise them).

PSP + MCE + LocationFree TV

Mon, 15 May 2006 11:14:49 +0000

LocationFree TV is one of Sony’s new ideas intended to revolutionise the way we watch TV. You buy a LocationFree base station, connect it to your TV and internet connection and then watch your TV on any internet device, say your PSP.

Well of course you could plug an MCE computer into the Base Station instead. But this is where it gets a little silly (but in an oh so fun way). The Base Station has an IR blaster that allows it to control other IR devices, in this case your media centre PC. Your PC is incidentally controlling your set top box with it’s own IR blaster.

Will Wright is making the god game

Sat, 13 May 2006 09:07:09 +0000

Will Wright, creator of the Sims and SimCity is working on a game called Spore. Spore will not only be a god game, but will be the god game. In fact it may become the best game ever.

It sounds like a combination of Sims, SimCity, Civilisation, Populous, Humans, Command & Conquer and 3D Studio Max.

The game starts with you controlling a little micro-organism (a spore perhaps) that has to survive and eat things and not be eaten by other things. You have a nicely textured but relative simple top down view of your little creature swimming around. Survive long enough and get enough food and you can lay an egg. This is the central theme of the game - your creatures evolve. But you choose *exactly* how they evolve. Need another tail or a couple of spikes? No problem. Put what you like where you like. The game works out how your creature should move and attack. Evolve a few more times and the game switches to 3D (well it was actually in 3D before but you were limited to a fixed camera angle and movement in a single plane).

Google Trends

Fri, 12 May 2006 15:15:59 +0000

Just thought I’d announce the rather funky new tool from Google (yes, another), Google Trends.

It’s lets you see volume of search results against time for search terms. Best of all, you can use it to compare multiple search terms at once.

So where are the Google gadgets

Fri, 12 May 2006 11:13:15 +0000

If you use Google personalised homepage, you can add Google gadgets to them. A Google gadget is just an XML file (or more usually the XML output of some dynamic page) that is displayed. There is a well developed API and you can do quite a lot of nifty stuff with them. But they don’t seem to be that popular (searching for Google gadgets, with Google gets very few relevant results).

There are quite a few in their gadget directory but very little mention of them outside Google…

OrbWars

Thu, 11 May 2006 22:01:28 +0000

OrbWars, my online game which I closed last year due to money and time concerns, will be returning soon! By soon of course, I actually mean I’m not sure when exactly, but that it will be in the near future - probably a month or two. The old website is back, nothing much on there at the moment, just a teaser image, but I’ll put updates on there as I get things finalised! Link: http://www.orbwars.co.uk

Some Stargate stuff

Thu, 11 May 2006 11:03:41 +0000

I’ve started a new page listing some of the story arcs from Stargate.

That is, it lists all the relevant episodes for the story arcs (useful if like me you own most of them and want tory and make sense of them without other stuff in between).

Stargate story arcs

Wed, 10 May 2006 15:57:37 +0000

I now own most of Stargate SG-1 on DVD (everything up to series 7 so far). One of the reasons I wanted to buy it was to fill in the gaps on some of the episodes I missed. SG-1 features many multi-episode story arcs and missing one in the middle can be confusing. So just for reference for anyone who might be interested, here are some lists of episodes for some of the more important story arcs.

I wrote a bash script

Wed, 10 May 2006 13:23:48 +0000

You may possibly have noticed the intermittent availability of the site during the last hour. Well I’ve been fiddling around trying to get my clever “restart Apache and MySQL if they crash” script working.

To that end, I did something unexpected: I wrote a shell script in bash. Not something I ever came close to trying before but it was surprisingly straightforward. The implicit availability of regular expressions everywhere definitely made things easier.

A safe language on a safe OS

Wed, 10 May 2006 10:08:52 +0000

Have you heard of “managed” code? Generally it refers to code that has no direct access to memory and instead has to access everything through a protected interface of sorts. The main advantages are that a program can’t go poking memory that it shouldn’t and useful rules can be enforced like type safety.

The most prevalent example of managed code is nearly everything running under .NET/Mono. Admittedly you can mark parts as “unsafe” letting you use pointers and stopping the garbage collector arbitrarily moving your data around but most of the usefulness comes from avoiding this where possible.

Multiple forms in ASP.NET

Tue, 09 May 2006 11:52:42 +0000

I previously ranted that being unable to have two ASP controlled forms in a single ASP.NET page is a serious flaw. They may be a way round it though. I would assume that ASP.NET can’t output two “smart” forms (the ones with runat="server") on the same page but I’m pretty sure that there is nothing stopping a HTML page itself actually holding two of them. Of course that could be wrong.

The computer has now arrived

Mon, 08 May 2006 10:59:27 +0000

Almost immediately after I said the computer still hadn’t arrived (and when I had I just sent another email to the company), the computer arrived.

No computer - no internet

Mon, 08 May 2006 09:38:56 +0000

Not having a computer also means that I don’t have internet access outside of work.

I say this just to make it look like I’m still updating the blog.

Explaining the Matrix

Fri, 05 May 2006 15:55:52 +0000

The Matrix was quite a good series of films. But without any extra interpretation left most viewers reasonably underwhelmed.

Well see what you think of this theory.

It’s specifically about the second movie, The Matrix Reloaded (there is a link to one about Revolutions too) but I think the second is where the most understanding is required.

It also has a prediction about what could happen in the third movie (it was written before it was released) and I think I like it more…

Money for Picasa

Fri, 05 May 2006 12:56:54 +0000

Google are now offering $1 for anyone you get to install Picasa (their clever photo organisation software thing) as part of their AdSense referral program.

So first, go install Picasa and then come back and go join AdSense so you can benefit yourself. And if you haven’t already, get Firefox: You can get AdWords if you want but I doubt you’ll spend enough to get me anything.

BackBase really pushing AJAX

Fri, 05 May 2006 11:59:55 +0000

BackBase is another AJAX toolkit. This one is different though. It’s not really an AJAX toolkit, more a toolkit powered by JavaScript taking advantage of AJAX.

The clue is the price. Yes it has a price - $2000 to be exact. There is a “community edition” that is free for personal use though. Anyway, I don’t have time to run down all the features but basically it defines a whole new bunch of tags allowing you to create complicated content in a declarative HTML style way. These tags are then translated into proper XHTML on the fly by the back end JavaScript engine. Since the clever work is actually handled by the browser, you’re free to use whatever you like on the server (PHP, Ruby) including static HTML pages - outputting BXML is no different to outputting HTML. In fact BXML has a very ASP.NET feel to it and embedding BXML into an XHTML page along with ASP content could have the ultimate cleanness about it (syntax isn’t one of my complaints about ASP.NET).

Computer not here…

Thu, 04 May 2006 08:32:23 +0000

My new computer has still yet to arrive. I was expecting to be able to write a hands on review of MCE by now.

Silly things with JavaScript closures

Tue, 02 May 2006 13:20:51 +0000

From a theoretical programming point of view, JavaScript is immensely cool. You can do some amazing things with it. Although I’m not entirely sure whether you should.

For example I had a bunch of elements on a page I needed to update using AJAX. I needed a function I could pass the URLs and ids of elements to replace with those URLs and then have it perform each replacement in turn (I’ve seen IE have problems with simultaneous AJAX requests).

Coop gaming

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 17:25:40 +0000

Finally someone in the mainstream agrees with me.

There is a section in PC Format magazine that says cooperative play in upcoming games will be a bigger part. Coop gaming, especially in first person shooters is tremendously fun. I spent a lot of time playing Duke Nukem 3D and Doom coop on my PlayStation. Very few games after that supported coop modes (although I realise that it brings some complicated design issues).

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 10:45:13 +0000

I’m getting a new computer. Well most of a new computer. And I’ve been considering whether to get Windows Media Centre Edition or not.

The first two versions of MCE were rather lacking but after reading a lot I’ve decided 2005 is actually quite cool.

What is Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005?

Good question. One I didn’t know the answer to until recently. It’s Windows XP a with range of new utilities for working with video, music and images (as well as bits of hardware associated with them) all wrapped inside one interface. The idea is to have your computer as the hub for your whole home entertainment system.

Even simpler searching

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 13:10:13 +0000

I decided to take my idea for nicer searching in Wordpress one step further. Now if you try to get to a page that doesn’t exist it automatically redirects to the search page. So http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/galaxia will return search results for “galaxia”.

If you want to do it yourself, you need to do two things. First you need to redirect error pages to a custom PHP page so add the following line to the top of your .htaccess file: ErrorDocument: 404error.php Now you need to create 404error.php and make it redirect to the search page by adding the following to it: header('Location: http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/search.php?s=' . $_SERVER['REDIRECT_SCRIPT_URL']); After doing this it had me thinking about status codes. By default that will generate a 302 Found HTTP status code. A bit of reading led me to decide that 303 See Other was a better response since the request might correspond to a page in the future (and presumably a relevant page) but for now should be redirected. 3XX are somewhat confusing.

ASP.NET sucks

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 12:49:19 +0000

I recently bought a book about ASP.NET: Pro ASP.NET in C# by Apress, mainly because when I was looking for jobs there were lots of ASP.NET jobs advertised. And I have to say I have no idea why. Part of the problem may be that is book isn’t very good (there are bits of vague contradictions and a general obsessive (and inaccurate) preachiness about it) but I think there are major limitations to ASP.NET.

And we’re back

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 08:44:38 +0000

The Wordpress wp_options table manage to get corrupted. I tried MySQL’s repair but the table was still not well so I had to copy the table from another installation and reset everything.

For one scary moment nothing was displayed on the site but then I realised that was because it was trying to load a theme that didn’t exist. Everything is happy again now.

Google AdSense showing Vodafone Ads

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:23:09 +0000

Have a look on my “Reactions (a sci-fi story) page. If you’re quick you might see a Flash advert for Vodafone in the AdSense spot. Quite a high paying client I’d have thought…

And if you haven’t, check out the info how to get yourself some free advertising.

Blue screen of death

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:54:38 +0000

My computer is now essentially dead. Luckily I have internet access at work and an hour lunch break :D

It’s been getting increasingly unstable for the past month or so giving me random blue screens of death. Sometimes I get a driver reference that caused the problem (and they are different drivers each time) and sometimes I don’t. Yesterday it managed to crash while trying to display the Windows log-in screen and I was left with just a cursor on black screen.

JavaScript debugging with Internet Explorer

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:31:22 +0000

Ever had a problem with JavaScript? If you don’t realise that’s a rhetorical question then go away now…

I had a simple script that worked fine in Firefox and Opera but not in IE. I got the amazingly useful message “Object expected” at line 0, character 0. So after looking around for a bit I found the Microsoft Script Debugger. And it’s actually quite good. Not as convenient as Firefox (since most of my problems are syntax errors) but it solved my problem. And in a way, I can blame Firefox and Opera for the problem. Maybe.

Star Trek XI announced

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 12:57:01 +0000

Ironically I found this out while reading an article on a wrestling site.

Apparently the new movie will be directed and produced by J.J. Abrams, a guy famous for Lost, Alias and Mission Impossible: III and is scheduled for a 2008 release. In a risky move the story will apparently focus on Kirk and Spock’s first meeting at the academy during the early days of the Federation. How they do that with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as old as they are is a beyond me, unless they use new actors which is an immensely bad idea.

t.A.T.u - How Soon is Now - Stepmania Simfile

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 09:24:55 +0000

t.A.T.u - How Soon is Now

One of the reasons for my sudden mention of Stepmania will now be revealed: I’ve created some Stepmania step charts for “How Soon is Now” from the album “200 km/h in the Wrong Lane” by t.A.T.u..

The download is available as an smzip file so it should be a matter of downloaded it and running. It contains the steps as both .sm and .dwi files as well as a background image and banner image. It does not include the music file. Although I realise that technically the images are just as subject to copyright as the music I’m more confident about my host not being bothered.

Switching to a Mac is getting easier

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 18:09:57 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks (possible admittedly - you could have been on holiday) you’ve probably heard that you can now run Windows XP on an Intel Mac using Boot Camp. This could be a great step forward for Apple with regards to capturing Windows users.

Firstly I don’t think Apple will capture the casual market, at least not in the near future. However much certain Mac enthusiasts may claim Macs are easier to use, a Windows machine does everything the casual user wants it to do (and because of the market share of Microsoft it does it the way the expect it to. Not only that but some of the details about installing Windows on a Mac are too much for the casual user (look for the confused look when you explain to them that if they use an NTFS partition to put Windows on the Mac won’t be able to write it. Then see how they laugh when you mention FAT32 as an alternative). The slightly more technical fraction of the market is much more obtainable.

Free advertising

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 08:52:30 +0000

TextLinkAds are offering $100 of free text link ads. The catch? You have to buy $125 of advertising. The catch isn’t as big as you’d think. I assumed it meant you spend $125 and get another $100 free, but it doesn’t. You order $125 worth of advertising and only pay for $25. You still need to be careful though. You’re actually ordering a subscription and if you don’t cancel within a month you will be charged again.

Going more mobile

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:30:38 +0000

I announced limited support for mobile devices viewing the blog recently. That support basically only covered phones with Opera Mini.

Well now I have a WML theme installed so you should be able to view the site with any WAP device.

You can force WML output with any browser though (although most browsers do not understand WML).

Detecting Mobile Phones

You’re first instinct is probably to check the user agent. Although it’s true there are fairly consistent ways to detect a phone from the user-agent there is a better way.

XHTML Compliant - Thrice!

Sat, 22 Apr 2006 12:47:59 +0000

I tried validating the markup and my site and found a few errors (nobr tag not allowed, span tag not allowed inside a ul and few others) so I fixed them and I’m XHTML 1.1 compliant once again. That is the home page and a few random pages I tried are compliant. There are probably some posts with random stuff that isn’t…

The main reason I did it was for the sake of any mobile browsers that might complain really loudly about bad markup. So I started reading about XHTML Basic what exactly was and wasn’t allowed. Well I couldn’t find anything useful so I just tried validating as XHTML Basic 1.0. I had to remove script tags, style attributes, replace i with em and again, a few other minor things. The end result is that an XHTML Basic version of the site is available to mobile browsers. Since I don’t have a mobile browser to test it on I can’t guarantee I’m detecting them properly yet. If you want to see what it looks like though, just go to Oliver Brown - Basic.

AJAX problems in IE

Sat, 22 Apr 2006 08:41:38 +0000

One of the things I’m working on right now (at work interestingly enough) uses a fairly simple JavaScript function that takes a url and an element id and replaces the content of that element with whatever the url returns.

This worked well until I started getting an odd error from IE - Unknown runtime error. Firefox and Opera both handled this fine. After some fiddling I discovered the problem was the type of element I was replacing into - Internet Explorer doesn’t like you replacing the innerHTML of certain elements.

StepMania

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:30:50 +0000

Think of this as an introductory post into something I may mention more in the future. This way I can just send people here instead of explaining everything from scratch every time :P

Ever heard of Dance Dance Revolution (Dancing Stage in Europe)? Well it’s a funky arcade game you control by “dancing”. Arrows scroll up the screen and when they reach the top you press the corresponding button.

The really cool thing is a an open source PC version of it called StepMania. Generally StepMania has more features and allows you to add as many songs as you want (assuming you can get the media files and step charts). In fact there are arcade machines around that are actually a computer running StepMania inside a DDR cabinet (which is a little overwhelming to play because of the sheer number of songs available.

Looking good in every browser

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 09:22:33 +0000

Okay, “every” is overstating it. The site has always looked how it should in Firefox (and Mozilla variants) and Opera as well as almost right in Internet Explorer. And although I didn’t look in depth it seemed fine on Safari when I used a friend’s Mac.

Well now it looks how it should in IE too. Although I did have to do a pretty nasty hack of sorts (but I remain XHTML compliant).

Going mobile

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 11:28:50 +0000

Screenshot of OliverBrown in Opera SSR

Following my recent discovery of Opera Mini I fiddled around with stylesheets trying to make the site presentable on mobile phones (well ones running Opera at least). And I seem to have success. The image on the left is how it the page appears in Opera’s small screen mode using the “handheld” stylesheet I defined. That’s about 240px wide but it displays okay at anything down to 176px (the screen width of the Nokia N70). Since the modifications are only to the stylesheet the page is still the same size as before (which is rather bloated) Of course if you use Opera Mini this isn’t a problem since it formats and compresses the page before it gets to your phone. For anyone wanting to do something similar, here are some of the things I did specifically:

Comment spam 4

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 08:42:33 +0000

First of all I should point out that I think I now have 4 posts called “Comment spam”. I just got 200 spammy comments in 12 hours. Luckily most of them are coming from the same IP address so they were easy to deal with.

Fahrenheit Indigo Prophecy

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 08:46:01 +0000

I just bought one of the games I mentioned a couple of weeks ago (actually I bought both but I’m only talking about one right now): Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in America). You should probably read the other post first.

To summarise, the game is well cool. You don’t need fast reflexes or a large amount of skill as such but you do need to be able to think fast. A lot of the time you have a time limit to do something which is three times longer than you actually need - but it includes the time needed to work out what to actually do. Failing to do something isn’t always as bad as you think since the story seems quite flexible: there are times when you realise just what an impact your past actions have on the story.

Random traffic according to Analytics

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 08:49:51 +0000

Firstly, after using it for a week I’ve concluded Google Analytics is good. I can’t reasonable access any of it on a dial-up connection but that should be an increasingly small problem. (Increasingly small? Almost as good as “it’s looking more and more less likely”.)

One thing it reveals is random search engine traffic I get for almost no reason. I posted about the April fools gag on GameFAQs and I’m now on the second page of Google if you search for GameFAQs. The funny (although understandable) bit it is that it’s my internal search page for GameFAQs that is actually in the results.

Language learning ideas - bringing it all together

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 15:54:34 +0000

This post, like many of my others on the topic ramble a bit. You have been warned :P

Any regular readers I might have will know how much I like Pimsleur products for learning experience. I believe the basic idea can be greatly enhanced with computers. I did in fact try a short time ago but suffered from a lack of voice talent which is where speech synthesis could be useful.

Cepstral voices

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 13:32:03 +0000

I just thought I’d provide examples of the higher quality voices available for speech synthesis.

They aren’t perfect but they’re a lot better than the voices that come with Windows XP.

Cepstral voice demos

One year anniversary

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 13:55:32 +0000

Ooooh, the blog has been up for a whole year :D

Free broadband from TalkTalk

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 13:03:27 +0000

TalkTalk (from the Carphone Warehouse) are offering “free” broadband.

The deal is you sign up to TalkTalk as your phone provider (£11 line rental a month - the same as BT), take out one of the call plans for 18 months (£9.99 a month which includes unlimited* local, national and international** calls) and pay a £29.99 setup fee. For this you get up to 8Mb broadband (very likely to be lower though) with a 40Gb download limit and an ADSL modem.

An introduction to SALT

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 13:06:39 +0000

The speech engine that I was talking about in my last article about speech synthesis is an add-in for Internet Explorer. Follow these instructions to install it yourself (you can get Microsoft Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK) Version 1.1 now though).

To actually create speech enabled web pages, you need to use SALT. Speech Application Language Tags is now fairly standard and being supported by Microsoft means it is almost guaranteed to survive in some form. SALT is an XML markup so you would generally embed it straight into a HTML (or more usually an XHTML) page.

Silly company

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 08:38:52 +0000

I have content from various ad companies on my site that I get paid for. It’s not much but it can add up and at least pays for the hosting. I realised I was owed some money from one of them that I hadn’t logged into for ages. So I logged in, checked my details were correct, set payment to “PayPal” and left. Unfortunately I changed it over too late. They sent my first payment as a cheque. As I said it isn’t that much; yesterday I received a cheque for $4.33. I’m not even sure I can deposit that in my account - whenever I’ve done it before with foreign cheques there is quite a large charge (larger than $4.33).

Learn a language with synthetic speech

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 13:42:02 +0000

I’m currently working out how feasible computer based language-learning-type software using synthesised speech would be. Speech synthesis has improved a great deal recently and although it’s still not as good as a real person (although I believe it could be soon - at least for non-emotive situation) it could just good enough.

The traditional way to generate speech with a computer is algorithmically. Essentially someone works out how to overlay tones with different pitches and wave-shapes to form each sound. The newer way is to actually record each sound manually and essentially play them back one after the other.

Google and bad markup

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 18:45:03 +0000

I had quick look at the source HTML on Google Analytics (specifically the first page: executive summary) and saw a piece of really bad markup: They had the whole page (HTML, HEAD, BODY, the lot) wrapped in a DIV tag… Naughty Google.

More stable server

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 09:16:15 +0000

The server should now be up far more often.

I can’t work out why MySQL and/or Apache keep crashing so often so as an interim solution I’ve just written a PHP script that is run by the cron daemon that checks each if they are running as they should and restarts them if they’re not. Hopefully this means if the server is down it shouldn’t be for more than an hour.

Download Firefox

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 15:05:14 +0000

Download Firefox for a better browsing experience.

More Google Analytics

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 09:19:41 +0000

Well I now have to say that Google Analytics certainly looks impressive. It has all the stats that you would expect from anything and a heck of a load that you wouldn’t. The real gain is the way it is presented. All the stats can be quickly restricted to date ranges, you can compare two date ranges, most of the details can be combined arbitrarily (just see visitors from Spain using Internet Explorer on Macs for instances) as well as lots of other nifty things. It also has support for e-commerce tracking (including defining custom goals and ROI calculations) as well download and outbound link tracking.

Google Analytics

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 08:45:45 +0000

Ooh, I’ve just been sent an invitation for Google Analytics. I can’t really say much about it yet since it takes 24 hours for data to appear.

No Bret Hart at Wrestlemania

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 09:16:13 +0000

Somewhat disappointingly, but not exactly surprisingly, Bret Hart was not at Wrestlemania 22. There was some vague announcement by Howard Finkel before the Hall of Fame inductees were present about Bret being uncomfortable with the show.

Putting dating in context

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 14:08:54 +0000

It’s that day again, April 1st, and boy the internet make it more fun. And of course Google are at again. Personally I don’t think they’ll ever beat Pigeon-Rank but they have to try.

The first thing I have to point out about Google is be very careful around April 1st. They have launched a number of genuine services on April 1st (including Gmail) that turned out to be real. None the less I’m fairly sure Google Romance is less than sincere…

Patently not here

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 11:39:49 +0000

I was reading about DotGNU recently and there interesting idea for getting round software patents. Outsource some calculation that requires patented software to a country that doesn’t recognise software patents and access it as a web service.

Well obviously that won’t work. If a government is serious about the patent law it will just make that sort of thing illegal (the same way Garry Glitter can be convicted of child sex offences here once he returns).

Netscape for web developers

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 12:53:21 +0000

There is an article on MSDN about how to get round the ActiveX activation issues that will be introduced into IE shortly. On that page it mentioned something I didn’t know - the latest version of Netscape Browser (version 8) can use Internet Explorer’s rendering engine (Trident) instead of the Mozilla rendering engine, Gecko.

If you develop web sites these days you need to make sure you can support at least IE and Firefox and preferably Safari. Testing Safari is often not possible if you primarily use Windows but testing in IE and Firefox can now be done from the same browser - you can actually change rendering engine at any time with CTRL-SHIFT-E. It also supports all the cool developer features of Firefox (like the DOM Inspector (although if you are using the IE rendering engine you can’t just click an element to select it).

Eolas, plug-ins and stupidity

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 08:42:00 +0000

Internet Explorer (and possibly every other browser including Firefox and Opera is about to become a lot more annoying. Apparently a company called Eolas has a patent on browsers with plug-ins. Or to be more precise they have a patent on:

“Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document”

The result is Microsoft having to come up with a way round it to avoid paying license fees. Any plug-in content on a web page (Flash, Shockwave, the dodgy XForms support or any ActiveX control) will have to be explicitly activated before you can interact with it. In most circumstances this isn’t so bad - except for those annoying floating ads: you’ll have to click them twice to get them to go away.

XForms

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:24:25 +0000

Although I haven’t been writing much about programming and computers lately, I have still been reading.

XForms is another thing, like Mono, that I found out about quite a while ago that has recently resurfaced as possibly useful. XForms is a whole rethink about how information should be collected and sent of the web. The keyword here is information. HTML forms don’t really send information, they send data. There is no real structure to what is sent - all you have is name/value pairs (although depending on the capabilities of the server you can at least send variable length arrays with the foo[] naming convention).

Got Mono?

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 13:03:32 +0000

A few years ago Microsoft released the .NET platform. It was supposed to be an open standard that anyone could implement although in reality only Microsoft did. That’s all changed now as Mono is gaining momentum.

Mono is a cross-platform implementation of .NET complete with a execution environment (JIT compiler, garbage collector and so on) as well compilers for C# and VB.net. There are sections of it that a largely complete but all the important stuff is there.

Distinctive Developments

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 07:55:49 +0000

I just thought I’d say a little about the company I now work for, mainly because they’re bigger than I thought. Well not bigger as such but more successful, a bigger player perhaps.

Distinctive Developments is a leading developer of games for mobile phones. I really should emphasise the leading part since one of their games, 3D Pool was actually nominated for a BAFTA (I didn’t even know they had a game section). They’ve also done titles with top licences including the FIFA series on mobile phones as well as Shrek 2: Puss In Boots and Madagascar. There are two problems with this personally though - firstly I myself don’t care for mobile phones games and secondly most of their games are sports based, which I’m also not especially bothered about…

A couple of PS2 gems?

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 19:56:43 +0000

I did something I haven’t done for years recently: I bought Official PlayStation Magazine UK for the demo disk. No particular reason except now having a job I’m not so worried about the price of a magazine…

I was glad I did. It has two demos of games that look really cool (and they’re already out).

The first is Fahrenheit (although it was renamed before the launch - search GameSpot for Fahrenheit and it comes up). You control a guy who has just done a murder and you have to (basically) escape from the police. But it is so much more than that. Firstly, the genre is closest to point-and-click adventure à la Broken Sword, except it’s in 3D - you just move near objects and push the right analog stick in different directions to do different context-sensitive actions. Another point is the emphasis on story - you get to see things that are happening elsewhere that you wouldn’t normally know about (like the cop approaching the door of the men’s room where you committed the murder) if it is good for drama. Finally you get to control most of the important characters throughout the game (although not in the demo).

Another interview

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 02:05:42 +0000

Just as an update, the interview I had before had an odd outcome. It was a success but they didn’t have a position for me. In the meantime I got another interview with somewhere else.

Within three hours of the end of the interview I got an email offering me the job :D

It gets better: the following morning (less than 24 hours later) the original place call me and offer me that job too :D I took the second one.

More Michel Thomas

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 21:51:50 +0000

Sorry to seem obsessed :P

My opinion of learning a language with the Michel Thomas CDs has improved - as well as the “Complete Course” 8 hour sets you can get the “Advanced Course”, an additional 5 hours designed for people who have done the first 8. Although I think he only does it for French and German…

13 hours of material. Considering the density this begins to rival Pimsleur’s 50 hours (only available for Spanish and German).

Galactic Horde goes Gold

Sat, 25 Feb 2006 21:28:51 +0000

Version 1.0 Gold of Galactic Horde went live today. Top new feature would be the Universal War. I think it’s top because I helped write it :)

Although I think Universal War is a bit of a strange name - makes it sound like a war that is compatible with everyone or something…

Michel Thomas rocks - maybe more than Pimsleur

Sat, 25 Feb 2006 10:38:07 +0000

I picked up Michel Thomas’s 8 hour German course from the library today. And it’s cool. It might even be better than Pimsleur. The learning idea is basically the same as Pimsleur with no writing and no memorizing but the format of the audio itself is different.

Firstly in Pimsleur I’m guessing they use voice actors reading out a script for both the English and foreign speech. In this Michel himself talks. Also this is not scripted word for word at all. I’m assuming he has notes of some sort to keep him on track and there may be judicious editing that we don’t hear, but basically everything is presented as is.

My first feed flare

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 21:09:18 +0000

Oooh, Feedburner have put my new Item Age feed flare unit thingy on their 101 Flare Ideas for a Better Tomorrow page (#10).

It lets you display the age of an item in a Feedburner feed in a nice human format (17 minutes old, 4 days old) etc. It’s really dead simple but I figured Feed Flare might be useful and it was good idea to practice before writing something really cool.

Google PageRank updated

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:19:34 +0000

Ooh, I checked another site of mine and suddenly noticed it had a PR of 4, instead of none.

Very regular Google earnings

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 00:12:26 +0000

For a long time my earnings with Google AdSense were very erratic - now they seem to have settled down. In fact for the past week I’ve gotten the equivalent of almost exactly $0.01 per impression. Now all I need is more traffic :)

P.S. Google spellchecker corrected “Adsense” to “AdSense”…

On a lighter though related note

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 14:51:55 +0000

According to Reuter’s “Oddly Enough” Iranians have renamed Danish Pastries when sold locally. They will now be called Roses of the Prophet Mohammad.

Can anyone say freedom fries?

Holocaust cartoons

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 22:09:19 +0000

Apparently Iran is holding a competition to find the “best” cartoon depiction of the holocaust as a test of Western principles and ideas of freedom of speech.

Firstly I’ll make my stance on freedom of speech clear. With rights comes responsibility. Although I think that people should be allowed freedom of expression and that people should be allowed to draw cartoons of what they like, that doesn’t mean that I think it’s necessarily a good idea to. A lot of unpleasant situations in the past have arose because of freedom of speech ideals.

Comment spam 3

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 02:59:33 +0000

I did a bit of comment moderation for Oliver today, since he had a few obvious spam ones. Firstly I didn’t know I could actually moderate comments, but there you go… Secondly, why do people try to submit such obvious spam, I mean it didn’t even try to get around the spam filter! Plus its not even remotely tempting to click on them, so what the author aimed to get out of it I just don’t know! Anyway, three cheers for the WordPress spam detector! :D

Mohamed cartoons

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:05:29 +0000

This will be a somewhat controversial post.

The violent reaction to the cartoons depicting Mohamed continues to escalate. The form and severity of this reaction is wrong for several reasons.

Firstly, Islam forbids the persecution of non-believers. That is people who just disagree with the teachings of Islam should not be punished or treated any less than a Muslim. Unlike the invasion of Iraq for instance, nobody (Muslim or otherwise) was actually hurt by the cartoons. They simply didn’t believe that drawing them was wrong. This represents a difference in beliefs and the cartoonists should not be punished (according to Islamic beliefs).

Happy Birthday to Me

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:01:44 +0000

The Great Me is 22 :D

Er, that’s about it really…

Nerd test

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:06:39 +0000

Apparently I’m 37% nerd. Probably about right. :) Thanks to Rylon for the link.

The end of Hitchhikers

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:37:35 +0000

Just to let people know, the ending to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Quintessential Phase is actually pretty good. The ending is far more “together” than the end of the fifth book, Mostly Harmless since it includes both Zaphod Beeblebrox and Fenchurch. Any fans who haven’t heard it yet, should go out and buy it.

Sirius Cybernetics Corporation now make pizza

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 23:34:53 +0000

I had a frozen pizza today, Goodfellas Delicia. And much to my surprise their slogan is the same as the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

AJAXy Scriptaculous goodness

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 15:44:08 +0000

Scriptaculous is a Javascript library used for doing AJAX stuff and certain visual effects.

It’s very well written, has excellent cross browser support and best of all there are cool functions in Ruby on Rails for using it. One of the coolest features is drag and drop. I’ve already implemented it in Galaxia Ruby for adding ships to fleets :)

Saddam Hussein to sue George Bush and Tony Blair

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 14:01:53 +0000

In an interesting twist, Saddam Hussein is trying to sue George Bush and Tony Blair for a range of offences related to the invasion of Iraq.

Some of the points seem valid, some are rather silly. To read more detail, check out the Washington Post.

Tree structures in Ruby on Rails

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 14:32:34 +0000

This is becoming a trend - another built-in feature of Rails that will seriously help Galaxia development.

You can use acts_as_tree in a model to make it, well, act as a tree.

What this means is you add an extra field to the database called parent_id that tracks object’s parents. Rails automatically manages this for you and adds extra methods for dealing with trees (things for accessing parent, ancestors, children etc.). Just like the post on type, this is something I was already doing with Galaxia but managing myself.

Using “type” in Ruby on Rails

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 16:13:11 +0000

By default Rails applies special meaning to certain fields in a database table. One of these fields is “type”.

The type fields is used by Rails to create a “single table inheritance model”. This sounds fairly complicated and is best explained with an example:

Imagine a forum system. A forum will have threads and replies. Threads and replies are different and have different functionality, but certainly share a lot of characteristics. So you might create a class message with two sub classes: replies and threads. In Rails you can store all these in one messages table with a type field set to either reply" or thread. When you load a message it will actually create either a reply or thread object (in stead of a message object). When you create a new object it stores it in the messages table with the correct type.

Making the most of dial-up

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 21:13:02 +0000

Ooooh. We’ve just set up an ad-hoc wireless network and are now sharing a 56k dial-up connection between three computers… Clever but not that useful.

Ooh, birthday soon :)

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 18:18:40 +0000

Just thought I’d randomly point out that it’s my birthday soon :) Birthday

Dancing with Stars like Stacy Keibler

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 19:03:43 +0000

Interesting crossover - female wrestler Stacy Keibler is apparently doing well on Dancing with Stars, the American version of Strictly Come Dancing.

Galaxia Ruby

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 18:12:50 +0000

Okay, Galaxia on Rails would my be a more apt name for a version of Galaxia in Ruby on Rails. But Galaxia Ruby sounds better to non-programmers.

This follows the tradition I’ve been recently following of learning new languages by writing bits of Galaxia in them. There is a real possibility I might get a version out this time :P

This version may even have AJAXy goodness and things. But don’t hold your breath…

Ruby on Rails may rock

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:49:05 +0000

I’ve been vaguely aware of Ruby for a while but never really gave it more than a cursory glance. If you didn’t know Ruby is a language that has been around for a while that got far more interesting when Rails, a framework for it was released.

After reading around I don’t think I’m really a fan of Ruby syntax per se (I’m definitely a fan of the punctuation heavy C-style syntax as opposed to the keyword heavy Basic-style syntax) but Rails seems to be an amazing framework.

Books galore

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 17:34:22 +0000

The advantage of having an imminent interview (and ultimately of having a job) is I can buy computer books without worrying so much about not having much money. They’re an investment you see…

The Wall Street Journal has a sense of humour

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 00:48:30 +0000

A post on the WSJ blog (which is running on Wordpress incidentally) actually references an article on the Onion. The Onion by the way is a satirical online newspaper type thingy that I never thought a serious journalistic endeavour would talk about.

The WSJ points out that it’s “hard to write satire, but it’s even harder to write satire about corporate taxes”. In fact it’s so good that I might even read it despite the fact that I understand alarmingly little about what it’s talking about.

Happy Birthday Jade

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 17:22:05 +0000

On the off chance that she reads this… I’d like to say Happy Birthday to Julia’s sister Jade :)

Happy Birthday

Oooh, “extended interview”

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 23:11:54 +0000

Well the interview went well. Although it didn’t feel like it at first since the first thing I had to do is optimise a SQL query which I kind of fumbled my way through. The result - they want me in for an afternoon to perform some programming task to see how I actually work.

Although I keep thinking of ways for it to go badly, I did that before the first interview and everything worked out fine…

I’m going to Belgium again!

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:45:16 +0000

Yay!

I’m going to Brussels on the 9th to see Julia. She’s going later today for her little sister’s birthday. We’re staying until the 15th then coming back. And then I get Julia for another 10 days until she’s goes back to Aberystywth.

Just thought I’d share :D

On a scarier note, I have that interview later today…

Windows Metafile vulnerability

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:15:49 +0000

Ooooh, I just read on Wikipedia about a vulnerability in how Windows reads WMF files.

The reason why I find this so interesting is because apparently the vulnerability exists versions of Windows all the way back to 3.0! Doesn’t that mean that a serious bug that allows malicious code to be executed has actually existed for 15 years without being exploited? That has to be some sort of record.

Civilization IV rocks

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 21:39:24 +0000

I bought Julia Civilization IV for Christmas. It’s something I wanted myself but my computer only just reaches the minimum specs. But we installed it anyway and on the lowest settings it does run (although it runs “fine” it’s really unstable after about half an hour and prone to crashing).

If you don’t know, Civilization is a game where you control a civilization from ancient stone age times through to the near future (the last technology you develop allows travel to Alpha Centauri). This version adds a lot to the basic idea though. The biggest addition is religion. It was always going to be a touchy subject but since religion has had a huge impact on Civilization they couldn’t ignore it forever. All the religions in the game are basically handled the same, the only differences being what you need to do to found them. The fact that you can found them can cause events that are vaguely blasphemous (like founding both Buddhism and Christianity in London) but this is really no worse than warfare between two countries that never fought each other in the real world.

Happy New Year

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:02:11 +0000

Happy New Year!

I have an interview

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 19:04:51 +0000

Woohoo, I have an interview.

Before they offered me a face-to-face interview they wanted to do a telephone interview first. This consisted of a series of technical questions I really wasn’t prepared for (“What’s the difference between an inner join and an outer join in SQL?”, “What are the restrictions on cookies?”, “What do the HTTP status codes 302 and 303 mean?”).

But since they offered me the interview I guess I did quite well :)

Comment spam 2

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 21:47:30 +0000

Oooh, I’m now getting between ten and twenty spam comments a day. They’re all obviously from the same source but all for different sites, from different names and different IP addresses. They still all have a very obvious form and content so the spam filter in Wordpress is catching them. One final odd part, they’re all on the same post too…

How inconsiderate

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 16:38:33 +0000

Me and a friend of mine came up with an idea a while ago for a new website. Basically it would document really annoying things people do in a semi-anonymous way.

The motivation came mainly from people being completely unable to park their car properly. The most distinctive is one I unfortunately I have no evidence of. There was a minibus parked in a disabled parking space. Fair enough; it was probably carrying old people. The bad part is it was so badly parked that it actually blocked four parking spaces!

Anyway here’s a couple of pictures of some rather bad parking (not quite enough space to fit a car in there). It’s tough to know who to blame since we don’t know who parked first, but that white van seems quite far from the white line to the right. This may become a regular thing… just search Technorati for inconsiderate :)

New Galactic Horde blog

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 13:25:30 +0000

The creator of Galactic Horde has started a new development and news blog.

Go check it out :P

GH, Galactic Horde, new blog, online games, shockwave, shockwave games

Silly server

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 17:49:01 +0000

I recently applied for a job and they wanted some URLs of examples of my work. At the same time my server went down :( But it’s up again now obviously.

Timesplitters Future Perfect

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 16:27:20 +0000

I just got the new (well it’s not that new now) Timesplitters game for the PS2, and wow is it cool.

It’s sort of a cross between Timesplitters 2, Halo and the Goldeneye sequel on the N64 (Perfect Dark?). Think Timesplitters 2 but add the ability to get into vehicles and separate grenades and deployable guns. The graphics are improved and are less cartoony but the whacky sense of humour is still there - whenever you kill a monkey it shouts “Chimpicide!”.

Happy December :)

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 23:42:43 +0000

Not much to say except, yay, it’s December.

Sky is becoming bad quality…

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 00:02:09 +0000

For anyone outside the UK, I’m referring to the digital TV broadcast by British Sky Broadcasting (if that is still their name).

They are stuffing far too many channels on there and as a consequence the quality is dropping. Before, you could occasionally see compression artefacts on the images, now they are everywhere. It’s especially noticeable with full screen changes when it’s dark. And once you know what it looks like it is impossible to ignore.

Wikime :)

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 22:33:48 +0000

I’ve started editing more on Wikipedia. Not entirely sure why, but it’s quite fun.

If you don’t know what Wikipedia is, it’s a free online Encyclopedia that is editable by anyone. Also all the content is completely redistributable providing the license is kept with it. It’s theoretically multilingual too but only a handful of languages actually have content to rival print Encyclopedias. But the others are coming along.

I’ve also written a couple of articles that I don’t really know anything about - I just distilled stuff from various online sources. It’s easier than I thought too.

Nice searching in Wordpress

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 03:08:58 +0000

You may have noticed that all the tags on my posts point to URLs of the form /ob-search/_search+term_. That’s a reasonably simple bit of mod rewriting. This article is aimed at people who can do that.

I wanted a way for the search box to point to the same pages. I figured I could point the search form at a fake page and redirect (it with a HTTP status code of 302 so it is sent to the browser and the user sees it in his/her address bar) to the nice URL (which would secretly redirect to the real one).

Wordpress.com Themes

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:24:11 +0000

For those of you who don’t know, Wordpress.com is a Blogger type service run by the creators of Wordpress based on Wordpress.

I have to warn you I have no experience using Wordpress.com, and these comments are based on what I’ve heard.

There have a been comments about how theme support in Wordpress.com is very limited since they obviously can’t let people run arbitrary PHP code. I’m not sure what they do let you do but there is a way that will give almost the power of normal Wordpress templates.

Finally fixed my template…

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 01:16:34 +0000

I’ve finally fixed the template. I didn’t realise that the damn thing was switching background images depending on whether this was a single post or not (I added the sidebar to all pages you see).

That’s a lot of links

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 21:32:38 +0000

Quite old by now but still amazing to see: a reasonably long blog post in which every single word links to a different blog. Quite an achievement. Jeff Blanco

And one service to bind them all

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:22:31 +0000

Google have a new project that could well replace half of their services, Google Base.

It’s a rather vague project designed to pursue their goal of organising the world’s information in the most direct way possible. Anyone can submit (almost) any information they want along with various attributes and labels describing the information and Google will make it searchable.

In theory Google Sitemaps and Froogle could just became specific version of this idea. The only limits on can be uploaded are fairly obvious matters of “decency”. Adult material does seem to be a allowed in general. The most eye catching item not allowed: “Posting is not permitted for the promotion of body parts or human remains.”

More features for Extending SimpleXML

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 20:51:46 +0000

I’ve added two new public static function to [ExtendXML](/exml.txt). The first one is registerTagClass. This takes two arguments, the first is a tag name and the second is a class (that extends ExtendXML. This will make all children of that tag name become that class instead. The second is registerTagCallback. This takes one argument, a callback. That callback must take one argument, a tag name and must return the class (as a string) that those tags should become.

Overloaded functions?

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 00:59:18 +0000

Will PHP ever support overloaded functions? I mean properly - I know you can painstakingly fake it using __call.

If I was on a mailing list I’d probably be able to ask someone who could answer.

Ah well.

PHP, programming, coding

Getting started with Galactic Horde

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 23:34:36 +0000

Galactic Horde is an online strategy game that I’ve helped program. But I’ve only recently started playing. Unfortunately it can be quite a daunting idea since the game is rather complicated. This provides endless entertainment for people who have mastered it, but problems with regards to getting new players.

As such I intend to write a series of posts containing hints and tips for new players - something I am at the moment.

Linguaphone rocks less

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 20:28:51 +0000

I just picked up Linguaphone German from my local library. 4 books and 9 CDs in a large box certainly looks impressive but I don’t think it’s as good as Pimsleur. Looking through the books it clearly goes to a higher level and has far more explanations of grammar in it. But I think it does it too quickly and I’m not convinced a beginner would find it much use on it’s own. For someone who already has familiarity with the language it may work quite well. Watch this space.

Buying text links…

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 14:37:14 +0000

There are quite a few marketplace-type sites out there facilitating text link trading. I don’t mean link exchanges, I mean buying and selling text links.

I’ve read a few reports of high profile sites having their PageRank-passing-on-ability removed by Google because of this, but for the most part it’s probably safe. The main reason being so many sites are doing it that the skew caused by removing those sites could well be bigger than the skew caused by leaving them in. On the other hand, it may not be that much of a problem. Although it is a very suspect argument, you could say that a site willing to pay that much (and we’re talking upwards of $15 per month per link) must have something to offer.

Star Wreck

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 14:35:54 +0000

It’s about time I mentioned Star Wreck.

It’s an amazing spoof of Star Trek. Quite how amazing has to be seen to be believed. Some of the special effects are actually better than the real thing. Go to the site and at least download the trailer now (I’m on dialup and managed - it’s only 18Mb).

There is one catch however, it’s in Finnish…

Competing with Pimsleur

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 14:37:06 +0000

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve written the framework for a language learning system similar to Pimsleur. Well the approach is similar but the mechanics are different.

Basically each phrase (in English, the target language, what the instructor says) is a separate audio file. The system then chooses what you listen to automatically handling things like the right amount of repetition or you. How often something is repeated is time based meaning if people do things slowly they will find themselves repeating more often (which makes more sense since slower equates to using the system less often). I almost have a demo ready. The big thing I need however is voice talent. I’ve just about accepted that I will have to suffer by hearing myself but it’s not very clear what’s going on if the instructor, the English voice and the foreign voice are all the same person.

iMode and cHTML

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 10:57:52 +0000

I’ve seen adverts around for iMode recently, with no idea what it was. Well I found out last night by coincidence after looking around Google Sitemaps. Well sort of. Although I didn’t look at the details it seems like some sort of alternative to WAP. What interested me more was cHTML, iMode’s equivalent of WML.

cHTML, or Compact HTML, is basically what WML should have been. Instead of completely new tags and new way of looking at things it’s just a subset of HTML that makes sense for mobile devices. There are a few extensions to normal HTML but these aren’t required and are very simple anyway (like using tel: in a link the same way you’d use mailto:).

Galactic Horde

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 12:00:57 +0000

You may have seen the link for Galactic Horde, an online game, in the links bar but never thought to visit. Well the link is not there randomly, it’s something I helped in. Specifically I wrote the PHP back-end for it.

Well I never really had time to play it myself and never knew exactly how the client interacted with what I wrote. The result is that I can read the forums for the game and have no idea what people are talking about. It’s really scary.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 18:47:44 +0000

How dare they!

In 2004 they released original cast (near enough) dramatisations of the third, fourth and fifth Hitchhikers book without telling me! I always thought the book version had the better (and more developed) story and hoped (in vain I thought) they’d make an film/TV/radio/anything version of it. Well they did!

They’ve also given them interesting titles.

Tertiary Phase - Makes sense since “tertiary” comes after “secondary” Quandary Phase - Annoyed me at first since “quaternary” comes after “tertiary”. All is forgiven since they weren’t being serious, see below for the Quintessential Phase

End of Pimsleur

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 13:42:09 +0000

I’m now very close to the end of Pimsleur’s German III. I’m up to lesson 20 which overall is lesson 80 out of 90.

I have just realised however that there is a 10 lesson set called German Plus designed to go after German III but my library doesn’t have it. I still recommend it to anyone wishing to learn a language, at least if you can get access to it for free.

Google has updated Pagerank

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 13:39:01 +0000

Well it seems Google just updated it’s pagerank database. And to my eternal joy I’ve gained across the board. Every site/page is either higher than before or at least the same (in fact it’s only the few PR5 pages I have that haven’t gone up).

The most notable is Luliriisi’s (Julia’s site) increase from no PR to PR4. :)

Whether I’ll notice an increase in traffic is yet to be seen however. We can but hope :)

Taxing the stupid

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 21:43:52 +0000

http://cgi.ebay.com/New-60-inch-Sony-Plasma-Tv-gmail-com-L-K-NR_W0QQitemZ5815875671QQcategoryZ116205QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem Anyone who bids that much on something without reading deserves everything they get…

Unfortunately I doubt eBay will force payment.

Wordpress and phpOpenTracker problems…

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 20:52:33 +0000

Has anyone else tried to use phpOpenTracker with Wordpress? Whenever I do I get strange DB error messages. If you have used the two together, either unsuccessfully or not, please let me know.

Comment spam

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 12:46:41 +0000

I guess every blog owner posts an entry like this sooner or later. I just had my first serious bout of comment spam. About 50 or so pointless messages about mortgages and refinancing. But since the spammer used the same IP it was really easy to delete them all using Wordpress. Of course other blog software probably has the same features…

Scouse Dutch

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 01:58:54 +0000

I picked up the “World Citizen” edition of Pimsleur’s Dutch. Two lessons in and I sound like I’m from bloody Liverpool. Quite how that happened I don’t know…

No mac viruses?

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 14:41:41 +0000

Twice in a row I’ve posted a link to another blog… I doubt this is a trend.

Apparently there are no viruses for Macs. Disagree? Then get some money…

http://www.macobsession.com/2005/09/27/make-500-by-proving-your-mac-was-hit-by-a-virus/

A post in a blog

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:01:15 +0000

I rarely mention other blog posts, but this one caught my attention:

Just Ideas.

The quote that I specifically liked was: “A kid that dies from a bad case of diarrhea in the third world would pleasure 60 year-olds with heart disease for the chance to become a 60 year-old with heart disease getting pleasured by a young boy.”

Silly Linux

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 21:35:49 +0000

Sometimes Linux is downright counter-intuitive. I have SSH command line access to my server and I wanted to rename a directory. Now I know that cp is used to copy files so I try rn. No luck. So I think perhaps they are being nice so I try rename. This seems to work. But the file is not actually renamed. When I type the command on its on it says call: rename from to files. Nice but not useful. After a quick search I find out how to do it: you need the move command. Well to be precise the mv command. After a moment’s thought it does make sense but it is not intuitive…

Aber, Aber, Aber…

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 11:41:45 +0000

I went with Julia to Aberystwyth to university on Saturday. Six hour train journey. Aberystwyth is nice except for the one hill the university sits on top of.

Pimsleur’s German steps up a notch…

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:23:27 +0000

Well I’m now on unit 3 of German II (i.e. the 33rd lesson in total) and it’s definitely moved up a gear. It has finally mentioned “du” the informal version of you (which even if you never say it you certainly need to recognise) and nearly every thing you say has “interesting” grammar as well as new vocabulary

(By interesting I mean things like subordinate clauses and modal verbs which play with word order).

Sonic Mega Collection Plus

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 21:48:49 +0000

I found a cool little PS2 game recently, Sonic Mega Collection Plus. It’s a collection of Sonic games from the Mega Drive/Genesis and Game Gear, including Sonic The Hedgehog (for each), Sonic 2, Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic Spinball, Sonic Chaos, Sonic Blast, Sonic Drift, Sonic 3D and Dr. Robotonik’s Mean Bean Machine (for both).

For anyone who likes Sonic it is well worth getting. There are a few notes first though.

Playlists in Windows Media Player

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 00:41:26 +0000

Windows Media Player will only play .m3u playlists two levels deep…

You can include a playlist inside another playlist and it copes fine. If you include a playlists inside a playlist inside a playlist, the innermost one doesn’t get played.

Why do I tell you this? I decided to try and create a Pimsleur-style CD for Finnish. But to save on effort and increase modularity everything is done in bits and joined together with .m3u files. Since Windows Media Player can’t cope with the nesting though, I had to write a PHP to dump them all in one file (I’m expecting to hit a limit on the amount of songs in a playlist soon).

Code generator update

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 03:39:21 +0000

The PHP Code Generator now handles docblock style comments properly as well as method keywords. For static, abstract and final keywords, if one is present in any definition of a method it will in the output. For visibility keywords the method will have the “most public” specified. See my previous code generator post for more info.

Pimsleur Russian

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 20:17:05 +0000

Pimsleur really does rule. After trying the first lesson of Russian, a language I have no previous experience in, I can confidently say Pimsleur is great. If you want to learn another language find out if your local library has the Pimsleur course in it first.

Actually I think Pimsleur should make the first lesson of all the courses freely available on their website or something. I really think that people are skeptical about how useful they could be and a lot would be convinced after trying them.

Antique SNES?

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 01:00:59 +0000

I was in a computer game shop today.

It was own of those places that does trades and has a lot of preowned stock. Much to my surprise they have a second hand Super Nintendo with one game for the same price as a GameCube with 4 games! Admittedly the one game was Legend of Zelda but still…

PHP code generator online

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 16:56:35 +0000

I’ve just finished a very early version of the PHP code generator I mentioned a while ago. The code for it is rather messy at the moment so I’m not releasing it, but a web form is available to demonstrate it:

PHP Code Generator

At a simple level it takes class fragments you define and includes them in the file. The only fragment defined at the moment is Singleton. To include it you would use:

A working Microformats extension to SimpleXML

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 18:44:56 +0000

I’ve completed a basic version of a class that (sort of) extends SimpleXML. When I say sort of I mean it extends a wrapper class (ExtendXML) that inlcludes all the functionality of SimpleXML.

Download the following to try it out:

The object is created the same way as ExtendXML. After creating it you must also call:

// $mf is a MicroformatXML object 
$mf->mf_init();`

This adds a new property, $mfHCards, which is an array of hCards. You can access the various hCard values as properties of these objects. As an example:

Extending SimpleXML

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 15:07:57 +0000

I posted a while ago about problems with extending SimpleXML (which I intend to do so I can add automatic microformat support). Well I think I’ve come up with a solution.

I’ve created a class called ExtendXML that is completely extendable (see the other post for an explanation of why SimpleXML isn’t extendable) that provides all of the functionality of SimpleXML.

The initial call is similar to using SimpleXML (except I made the functions static class methods instead):

Google Adwords CPM campaigns

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 01:17:39 +0000

I’m experimenting with a CPM site-targetted campaign on Google Adwords and so far the results are promising. I have two campaigns advertising the same site one with a max CPC of 20¢ and the other with a max CPM of $2.00 targetted to a single site.

So far the CPC campaign is producing more traffic, but it’s costing me on average 18¢ per click whereas the CPM campaign is only costing me 4¢ per click.

PHP5 book review

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 19:45:10 +0000

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=galaxia-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1590593804&fc1=000000&lc1=0066cc&bc1=ffffff&lt1=_blank&nou=1&IS2=1&f=ifr&bg1=ffffff&f=ifr

PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice

Put simply, after reading this book I finally “got” how to use OOP usefully in a web application. Too many OOP tutorials use examples of objects too abstract and literal to be useful (like animals or shapes). This book takes real world examples and explains what sort of things really should be objects and how to use them.

The book is basically split into three sections, as the title suggests. The first part is a very quick overview of OOP and the new features of PHP5. This is thankfully short (and as such this book is aimed at people with a fair bit of PHP experience).

Issues with extending SimpleXML

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 12:45:29 +0000

I wrote a post about my attempts to extend SimpleXML to support microformats. Well it’s not as it easy as it seems.

You can’t define new properties of a class extending SimpleXMLElement. Well you can define them but they don’t work - when you access them they always return a SimpleXMLElement object (or actually an object of whatever class you defined).

I’ve tried overriding __get and __set and neither work so the only thing I can think of is to create a new class that delegates most of it’s work to SimpleXMLElement.

Ads by Google

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 15:05:48 +0000

An image ad for Adventure Quest (an RPG) keeps appearing at the top of my blog in the Google spot. But, it doesn’t show the “Ads by Google” link. It also has a little cross in the top right hand corner that makes the ad disappear…

WWE too real?

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 23:51:42 +0000

There was an bit on the news today about UFC. Apparently brutal cage fights are being banned in various states in America because they’re too dangerous. At the end the reporter said that even where it is banned, you can buy DVDs via mail order and the internet with footage of the action. He then held up the “WWE Bloodbath - The Most Incredible Cage Matches”.

WWE!? I’m sure that WWE would be offended to be accused of the brutality of UFC and UFC would be annoyed about being compared with fake pro wrestling. Not only that but the DVD contains matches from 1975 to 2002. Early WWE (or WWF as it was) was even sillier in the past.

Sims 2 is complicated

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 11:35:27 +0000

Unrelated to almost anything I’ve written, I just thought I’d suggest anyone remotely interested in god-games to buy Sims 2 now. It has managed the same thing as the Grand Theft Auto series. There is a reasonably structured game in there now to guide you in your actions, but the game is still wide open if you want to do something else entirely.

Most of this structure revolves around the new wants and desires your sims have. They’re tasks or events that reward or penalise you and are decided by your Sim’s aspiration. The funniest is the “romance” aspiration which has wants such as “Have 2 loves at once” or “Make out with 3 different Sims”…

Risk variants

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 18:13:51 +0000

Ever heard of the board game Risk? If you haven’t then unfortunately I’m not going to be the one to tell you about it so go away now :).

If you have heard it, this post is going to mention a quick variation on the original rules I tend to play with friends. There may be more in the future.

The modification we play most of the time is to Risk cards themselves. We found suddenly receiving 8 or 10 troops in a country of your choice too powerful (how anybody plays with the progressive-risk-card-reinforcement rule I don’t know). So we decided that you only got the two reinforcements in the country on the card. The alteration is that it applies even the country is an oponent (we call it the Paratrooper rule). If you have paratroopers they just attack that country like normal.

Silliest Google conversion

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 10:19:46 +0000

If you didn’t know, Google can do clever unit conversions. Example conversions include:

1 mile in km 4 weeks in days 4.9 lightyears in au

You can even use compound units:

55 mph in m/s 20 N/(m^2) in Pascals

In fact you can use arbitrary compound units. The silliest I managed to find is:

2 great gross speed of light in bakers dozen furlongs per year

A great gross is 12 gross (a gross is 144). A bakers dozen is 13. A furlong is 220 yards.

Microformats extension to SimpleXML

Sun, 28 Aug 2005 01:19:03 +0000

I’m writing a PHP5 object that extends SimpleXML to automatically add various microformats. So you could do, for instance, the following:

$xml = SimpleXML\_load\_file('test.xml');
foreach ($xml->hEvent as $event) {
    print $event->original();
}

This would print the original HTML of every hEvent found in the HTML document. XML, PHP, PHP5, microformats, hCard, hReview, hCalendar

Code generation in PHP

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 18:08:55 +0000

I’ve started working on a class-based code generation utility for PHP (in PHP). Like the scripting engine it’s working out simpler than I expected. Quite how powerful or indeed useful it could be is yet to be seen. The way it works is by allowing you to define fragments of classes. For example the Singleton fragment is:


class !className {
    static private $instance;

    private function \_\_construct() {
        // Code Start
        // Code End
    }

    static public function Init() {
        if (!self::$instance) {
            self::$instance = new !className();
        }
        return self::$instance;
    }
}

You create a class with some number of fragments. Each successive fragment adds specified method and properties to the class. If two (or more) fragments define the same method (probably common with constructors for instance) the the code for the second fragment get’s added in the //Code Start ... //Code End sections. Ultimately you will be able to change your model (defined in XML and it will update your code accordingly, maintaining all the code within the //Code Start ... //Code End sections.

DOM foolery

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 16:24:38 +0000

Since I’ve been making random DOM and JavaScript posts recently I thought I’d share a clever bog post I found cleverly called DOM-foolery. It describes a relatively simple way to make images in web pages have curved corners.

Overpopulation as a cure for healthcare

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 15:32:25 +0000

Something interesting occured to me recently. Evolution of the human species has been basically halted by healthcare. Since the weak no longer die before reproducing, the makeup of the genes of subsequent generations is random. The good news is the cure needs no effort as such. If we let the population grow until we no longer have enough food then people will start dying more. The people who manage to survive will pass on their genes and evolution will begin again. The only question remains is whether the survivors are the sort of people we want continuing the species. They will predominantly be the rich and although many rich people get that way by being smart or more productive somehow, some of them definitely don’t.

How about Cash City Wars

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 02:34:15 +0000

That’s the name I’ve come up with for the game since it’s vaguley based on Cash Wars. Or at least will be. I’ve started adding descriptions to towns. There are a few issues still though, most notably the existence of multiple towns with the same name which I am eliminating (I’m only intending to have the largest 100 towns).

Cash City Wars

Online Poker

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 02:28:13 +0000

I decided on a whim to try PartyPoker.com (for free) and ended up having far more fun than I expected.

Unfortunately the minimum deposit to play for money is $50 which is far more than I’m willing to spend…

Cash City Wars

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 20:49:41 +0000

Here’s a demo of what may become a game: Cash City Wars.

There are various reasons for the title I won’t go into right now… Basically the game will involve you moving from city to city in some way (quite exactly what the mechanics of the game will be I don’t know yet). The cool thing is that it will use real geographic data. At the moment there is only data for the UK but depending on availability I could add the whole world.

Reading style info with JavaScript

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 16:00:39 +0000

Part of the online game I’m now developing (which needs a name - I was thinking of “Cash City Wars”) requires some Javascript that alters the style of a DIV and then puts it back as it was. Changing the style is easy. For example to make the text green:

// Some code to get the DIV object and  store it in obj.

obj.style.color = "green";

Storing the old style information is a little difficult. I tried:

Make money from links people don’t click on

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 02:43:28 +0000

I found a site a while ago that was willing to pay for text links on your site. The wanted them not because they thought they’d get more direct traffic but because they’d get an increase in PageRank.

It’s quite a popular idea these days with a few sites offering text link brokering services. You pay them and they get several high PR sites to link to you. Doesn’t matter if the sites content don’t match, just that Google finds the link. I never had a site with a high enough PageRank until now to actually join. Now I do, I thought I’d give it a spin; I joined Text Link Brokers.

Adsense section targeting

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:29:12 +0000

I spend a couple of days away from the internet and things happen!

Google now allow you to split a page into sections with the idea that Adsense ads are only targetted to the text in that section. A couple of comments is all you need: <! -- google_ad_section_start --> <! -- google_ad_section_end -->

Apparently Google only take this as a suggestion but in some situations it could help. Of course sticking to one topic per page is better nearly all the time anyway.

Demo of GIS thing

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 16:18:38 +0000

Here’s a work in progress version of the online game based on real geography idea I had. Demo.

New MPOG idea

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 17:48:57 +0000

I was reading a tutorial on using PHP and GD with GIS data, that is how to draw maps with PHP using real life data. There has to be a cool way to make on online game out of this although I’m not sure what. I was thinking something along the lines of the old CashWars game…

Using blogs, tags and trackbacks to replace forums

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 17:37:05 +0000

The following is a quick idea I had. It isn’t fully though out and may not actually be that useful. But read it anyway - you should be intrigued by now.

I used to run an online game called Galaxia. And it had some forums. And the game changed and it moved and my forum software changed and all sorts of things happened to make me lose the forums. It occurred to me that blogs could be used to essentially distribute the forums.

Google Adwords change

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 16:08:49 +0000

Well I got the email last night announcing the anticipated change to Google Adwords inactive keyword policy (but couldn’t check my account since my computer was too slow). This morning when I logged in, half was good and half was bad. I only have two campaigns running. My important is using the budget advertiser and is unaffected. My not-so-important one had every single keyword (that had actually had a view) disabled. And as I said it’s not-so-important - I’m not preared to pay more than $0.05 per click (they wanted $1 for one keyword).

A problem with Firefox

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 15:53:32 +0000

For a while I’ve noticed my computer running slower and slower for no apparent reason. Although I have a fairly old computer (Athlon 1.2GHz) it was running far slower than it should have been.

A (not so) quick look in task manager revealed a possible culprit - Firefox was running and taking up 80Mb of memory and it was increasing. Anybody any ideas what could cause a sudden and persistent memory leak in Firefox? The only extra I have installed is LiveHeaders. Until it’s fixed I’ve had to revert to IE.

A tacky competition

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:38:55 +0000

I’ve decided to run a silly little competition in an attempt to get people looking around the site more. The traffic I’ll be getting is probably going to be of a pretty low quality but if you sling enough mud, some must stick.

So check it out and you might just win $10.

Finally a use for Netscape!

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 17:23:56 +0000

I’m a Mac user (and proud). When it came to the ‘big switch’ there were several things that I needed: my documents, my music, my pictures and my internet (emails and bookmarks and so on). All of these were easily copied across using a cross over cable, no problems there - but shock horror, my emails were another story. Microsoft Outlook Express stores emails in a non-standard format which can’t be read by Apple Mail - disaster! It was then that I remembered once installing Netscape to test compatibility of my web site. Netscape had very nicely offered to import the Internet and email settings from Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Checking up on this I found that when it does this it stores the resulting emails in a standard .mbox format - which can then be read by any sensible email client. Wohoo! So the basic steps to import your emails from Outlook Express on Windows to Apple Mail on the Mac:

Wow, Wil Wheaton

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 16:48:38 +0000

I was idly wandering around Technorati and found the 16th most popular blog on there is apparently Wil Wheaton’s blog.

Playing possibly the most annoying Star Trek character of all time doesn’t seem to have been a problem after all. A quick glance around at the stuff on the page suggests a person far more web aware than I imagined: Firefox supporter, Onion reader, blogads user…

I might just have to buy that book of his (a review of which on Amazon reveals I’m rather late in discovering his blog).

Target denied

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 16:07:09 +0000

I found something out today that really caught me by surprise. It makes sense in theory but in practice I think it’s a bad idea. Not doing it would just be a slight niggle on purists.

The target attribute of a tags is no longer allowed in HTML (HTML 4.01 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict). This is technically correct since HTML is for marking structure of a document and opening things in different windows is a user-interface issue and hence is within the domain of javascript. What’s really odd though is the suggested workaround. Mark tags that need to open in a different frame or window somehow (rel="external" for instance) and then use a javascript function to give all those links a target attribute. Seems silly to me.

Progress in Finnish

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 15:15:24 +0000

Unfortunately Pimsleur don’t do Finnish so I’m having to learn it manually. I have a couple of Finnish course books but the bulk of my effort at the moment is aimed at learning vocabulary. According to the flashcard software I have I know 700 Finnish terms (mainly words but a few short phrases as well). I’m hoping to get to 5000 by New Year (an average of 30 a day).

Start semantics simply

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 23:27:46 +0000

You may or may not have heard of microformats. They’re basically along the lines of the semantic web project but in a more practical way that is more likely to take off. It basically involves adding extra bits of semantics to web pages (or any XML-based documents) in a consistent way that doesn’t limit what already exists. But there are much simpler good practices that need to be encouraged regarding semantic markup first.

Making progress in German

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 23:00:42 +0000

I’m now officially one ninth of my way through the Pimsleur German course (that is I’ve finished Unit 10 of German I - Beginner). It’s still as good as I said previously. Although I think perhaps they should rename “How to be annoying in German”. Towards the end of unit 10, you have a conversation with a woman about having a meal.

“She will suggest a series of times to you. Refuse each time in turn and suggest an hour later.”

Bad DOM

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 21:47:09 +0000

The Dom Scripting Taskforce says adding non-standard markup to page using Javascript is OK. Well I wouldn’t call it a “best practice” but from a personal point of view I can’t see a practical disadvantage.

For me the problems with bad markup come from trying to parse it automatically (using PHP’s SimpleXML object for instance). Since the javascript will basically only affect the page a human sees and not a machine, many of the disadvantages of non-standard markup fade away.

How I wrote the list thingy in Javascript

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 21:17:42 +0000

It is assumed you know basic Javascript before reading this and know what the DOM is.

First the source code:

function setUp() {
    var myULs = document.getElementById('tree').getElementsByTagName('ul');
    for (var i = 1; i < myULs.length; i++) {
        var toggleObject = document.createElement('a');
        toggleObject.innerHTML = '+ ';
        myULs\[i\].parentNode.insertBefore(toggleObject, myULs\[i\].parentNode.firstChild);
        toggleObject.onclick = eventCaller(toggleObject, myULs\[i\]);
    }
}

function eventCaller(toggleButton, list) {
    list.style.display = 'none';
    return function() {
        if (list.style.display == 'none') {
            list.style.display = '';
            toggleButton.innerHTML = '- ';
        } else {
            list.style.display = 'none';
            toggleButton.innerHTML = '+ ';
        }
    }
}

onload = setUp;

First, how function setUp works.

var myULs = document.getElementById('tree').getElementsByTagName('ul');

To use the code you need an element with the id of “tree” surrounding the list you want it to work. This code just gets a collection of ul tags with in the id="tree" tag. This collection is looped through using a for loop.

Cunning closures

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 20:56:02 +0000

I just wrote a nifty bit of Javascript to allow nested lists to be displayed as a tree with little buttons to hide and show parts. It’s incredibly simple to use.

Firstly include the javascript file with a script tag (obviously). Then put a span element around the list you want to be undisplayable that has the class tree (in fact it can be any element with the correct class).

The clever bit (for me at least) is that it uses a closure to do this. Explaining what a closure is is difficult to do quickly but it involves a function returning a function that is altered by the values passed to the function (the first one). It’s being used right now in my sidebar to display “pages”.

The power of coincidence

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:10:33 +0000

In March I spent a weekend in Blackpool with my girlfriend, mainly to go to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, a theme park. While we were there we briefly met a guy trying to sell us a CD of “monk rock” or something (one of those people collecting for a good cause basically.

Well yesterday we met him again in Rotherham. Same person doing the same thing. Quite how unlikely it is that one of us could meet the same guy twice is amazing, but we spend a lot of time apart so to think we could both meet him together is even more amazing.

I think I’ve found my traffic

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 13:24:18 +0000

Have you heard of hReview? It’s a microformat aimed at marking up reviews of things in a consistent way with web pages (or any XML based document). The wiki discussing it links to implementations and SiteReviews.org implements it and so gets a link.

Whoopee!

PHP Security Checker

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 12:34:38 +0000

Here’s an interesting utility (that most WordPress users will have seen already since it’s mentioned on the news part of the dashboard: a PHP Security Checker.

I’m not sure how it works; it sounds like it just scans PHP scripts and returns references to possibly dodgy bits of code. Donncha O Caoimh of Holy Shmoly! raised a point that I never really thought about - the security of WordPress themes. However much the creators of WordPress like to point out that their template files don’t require knowledge of PHP, that doesn’t mean you can’t put PHP in them to do whatever you like… Maybe this utility will help.

Let there be colour

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 14:25:59 +0000

I decided if Ryan is going to post more often there needs to be an easier way to tell our posts apart, so I decided to fiddle around with the theme a bit. Basically all I did was put a div tag around all the posts setting the class to the author of the post and then added style information for .Ryan and .Oliver. I also changed the top header slightly too.

OrbWars Has Closed!

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 11:56:03 +0000

Well Oliver mentioned this briefly below, but I thought I’d just point it out again, as I just realised you can’t post comments to Pages, only Posts!!! So now at least anyone wanting to comment can do so! Anyway, check this out for details: http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/orbwars-closed/

Donate Blood!

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 21:28:18 +0000

I gave blood today and I thought I’d quickly ask you all to give blood! A lot of people I talk to who don’t give blood tend not to have a good reason not to other than vague apathy (i.e. just not getting round to it).

So if you can give blood (and you probably can), you should give blood!

Some links below for information about donating blood:

UK America Scotland Ireland

Or just search Google for donate blood and your country of choice for information.

PageRank 5?

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 21:20:46 +0000

According to the Google Toolbar in FireFox www.oliverbrown.me.uk now has a PageRank of 5.

My conclusion is that tags are a good way to get links to your blog since a quick search on Google for oliverbrown.me.uk returns mainly sites indexing tags in some way.

So if you aren’t using them already (and apparently two thirds of blogs aren’t) then get using them!

PHP tutorials

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 11:51:22 +0000

I’m contemplating writing a mini-tutorial about OOP in PHP. I know there are many out there already but I have a friend in particular I’m trying to get to get to grips with this so he can help with parts of Galaxia Reborn (some parts are superbly modular; I may put the specs for such online and maybe have an online editing option of some sort for anyone who wants to help).

Pimsleur Rules

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 01:47:37 +0000

I made an interesting loan from my local library a couple of days ago; Pimsleur Complete German I. It’s a lot better than I expected. Whether it really is as good as it seems I can’t really judge since I haven’t really got to any material that is completely new to me.

The progress feels fairly slow but to be honest it isn’t any slower than most book-based courses should be since it forces you to do the exercises you might normally just gloss over.

Pay-per-click advertising getting interesting

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 01:06:54 +0000

A quick search on Technorati for “ppc” reveals lots of cool information I didn’t know about.

MSN, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! have all either recently released a competitor to Google Adsense or about to and Google are about to considerably change their keyword state algorithm. You will soon be able to keep badly performing keywords active by simply bidding higher (meaning if you “pay” $50.00 per click you can rank number one - even if you get no clicks).

Back again…

Sun, 07 Aug 2005 20:12:48 +0000

Well after being incredibly busy for a few days I actually have time to do stuff now.

Unfortunately blogging is not a priority since I have work to do for IVDC.

The most important bit of news is the indefinite closure of OrbWars.

OrbWars 6 Coming Soon

Sun, 07 Aug 2005 19:56:41 +0000

Update This page previously contained a statement regarding the closure of OrbWars down over a year ago - BUT OrbWars will be returning soon, check the website over at http://www.orbwars.co.uk for more details once I get it all finished!

Simple caching in PHP5

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 22:08:50 +0000

I’ve just written a script that reads from a few webpages and I faced a problem of the servers sometime being slow and delaying my page display, so I decided to write a simple caching object:


class cache {

    function __construct($path='.') {
        $this->path = $path;
    }

    function cache($name, $callback, $args) {
        if (file_exists("$this->path/$name")) {
            $this->callbacks[$name] = array($callback, $args);
            return implode('', file("$this->path/$name"));
        } else {
            return $this->save($name, $callback, $args);
        }
    }

    function save($name, $callback, $args) {
        $text = call_user_func($callback, $args);
        $fh = fopen("$this->path/$name", 'w');
        fwrite($fh, $text);
        fclose($fh);
        return $text;
    }

    function __desctruct() {
        if (is_array($this->callbacks)) {
            foreach ($this->callbacks as $name => $callback) {
                list($callback, $args) = $callback;
                return $this->save($name, $callback, $args);
            }
        }
    }
}

You call it using:

Why people think Finnish is a hard language

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 20:05:16 +0000

This page lists the 2253 forms of the word “kauppa”, Finnish for “shop”. Finnish is highly agglutinative so having a lot of forms for each word is expected . But this is rather more than most people would predict I think. It isn’t as bad as you think since Finnish suffixes embody concepts most languages use several words for. i.e. Finnish uses longer words in most sentences but there are fewer of them.

Beam me up Scotty

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 19:20:16 +0000

Well it seems a bit late since it’s everywhere else, but I thought I should at least mention the recent death of James “Scotty” Doohan. For more information visit CNN.

Google Moon

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 15:45:38 +0000

Google have put a load of satellite images of the moon along with data of various moon landings to provide us with Google Moon.

Plugins

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 15:19:59 +0000

I’ve apparently installed two pugins for Wordpress. One is simpletags allowing me to add Technorati tags to posts easily, and the other is bstat, a nice stats plugin. So we’ll see if they work.

New OrbWars/Galaxia Forums

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 23:07:18 +0000

The Galaxia and OrbWars forums have merged. Not terribly apparent since there haven’t been any Galaxia forums for a long time and as such it only has one actual forum. But still, check it out: http://forums.orbwars.co.uk.

IC to host IVDC

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 20:49:01 +0000

Imperial College’s bid to host the Inter Varsity Dancesport Competition in 2006 has been succesful and I’m on the “support team”.

Wohoo!

Public development version of Galaxia Reborn

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:55:47 +0000

The current version of Galaxia Reborn is now available to play with. You can’t actually do that much but some things are still fun to play with.

Signup works but doesn’t actually give you anything you can use so just login as “Q” with password “q”.

You can move ships around and build more at the colony (you have to find the colony first though :P) although you can’t send them into space just yet. Also, the entire interface has been translated into Finnish (well almost. Two little bits were added afterwards but they’ll get done soon enough). Thanks for that go to my girlfriend Julia. If anyone is interested in translating the interface into a different language let me know . You’ll get a permanent link on the info panel at the bottom for people using your language as well as a mention in any credits.

PHP5

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 18:52:03 +0000

Another installation that was easier than I expected.

I now have PHP5 installed alongside PHP4. It lowers efficiency a bit since it’s installed as CGI instead of an Apache module but for testing it’s fine :)

For anyone planing on doing this who isn’t too familiar with installing stuff via the command line on Unix-like OSes (like me), there is a very usefulguide from Scott Huring.

Wohoo, MySQL 4!

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 13:26:08 +0000

Not that it really makes much difference yet, I’m now running MySQL 4!

The upgrade was easier than I expected with the only problem not strictly being an upgrade problem (I had to manually kill MySQL and restart it to get it to recreate my socket file). This is all preparation for installing PHP5 so everyone can actually see Galaxia Reborn.

More on OpenID

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 10:18:42 +0000

Just to clear things up about why I mention this when there are a few other similar things out there. This one truly is decentralised. Somewhere on the page you use as an ID is the address to your OpenID server. This site has a diagram explaining it all.

OpenID in GR

Sat, 09 Jul 2005 23:45:53 +0000

Well I have OpenID working at a basic level in Galaxia for signing up and logging in.

For signups though a user still needs to provide a username eventually to replace the url which will generally be too long.

OpenID

Sat, 09 Jul 2005 20:08:07 +0000

I just noticed something on LiveJournal I hadn’t noticed before… OpenID. It’s a clever idea - a truly distributed identity management system. The idea is to allow you to login to websites using just a URL (in my case http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/) and have everything done automatically.

In detail:

You login into a website that supports OpenID (like LiveJournal). The browser then checks that URL you gave for a bit of HTML that specifies your home server. The website then redirects your browser to that server and logs you in (and because of the joy of cookies etc. this should be automatic). The server then asks if you really want to share your identity with the site you specified and if so redirects back to the original site which now knows you are who you say you are (i.e. the owner of the url and actually registered with the server you specified).

Scripting in Galaxia Reborn

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 13:02:24 +0000

Introduction to XGS

This won’t sound that impressive since noone has seen any of GR working but I have scripting working at a minimal level in Galaxia Reborn.

I gave a ship the following script:

<xgs> <script event="entersector"> <savetomemory name="w" value="($w+1)%4" /> <setcourse target="$waypoints.$w" /> </script> </xgs>

$waypoints is simply an array of four coordinates. The function savetomemory just saves data to the ship which is read back in when the script next executes.

Bombs in London?

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 10:03:24 +0000

Not something I want to go into in depth, I just figured I should mentioned it before I post something since it’s all over the news while I type. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050707/140/fmtu4.html

Guess I picked the right time to leave London.

Working user scripting

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 22:51:33 +0000

The user scripting I mentioned before I went to Brussels is now basically done. The most amazing part is that I did most of it while I was in Brussels on a computer without PHP (amazing because apart from a few minor typos it actually worked).

The whole thing is actually simpler than I expected it to be and as such it can do stuff I didn’t plan. The first is maths expressions. This is something that may cause a problem however since it just just evals the code (after substituting variables and stripping possible harmful stuff).

I’m not dead

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 22:04:47 +0000

I’ve been in Brussels for two weeks and didn’t get internet access long enough to write anything.

But I’m back now.

User scripting in Galaxia Reborn

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 12:29:46 +0000

Something I’ve wanted to put into Galaxia for a long time is user scripting. i.e. allowing users to attach scripts to objects that are triggered by certain events. Ultimately this could lead to interesting computer players (but that’s a long way off).

Well I’ve been playing around with it a little and the easiest complex data to parse seems to be XML. So the scripting engine will be XML based. The following is how a script will (hopefully) look:

Dancing in Trafalgar Square

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 10:34:39 +0000

As anyone who saw the local London BBC News yesterday (and possibly others) will know, there was a large open air tea-dance in Trafalgar Square yesterday! One possible highlight was setting the world record record for the most couples involved in a open air tea-dance - 195.

I also got sunburnt on an unluckily sunny day.

Google SiteMap

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 16:05:15 +0000

If you don’t know about it already, checkout Google SiteMap.

Proof of the existence of Albinaaaaaaaghs

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 15:05:17 +0000

For some reason we were talking about albinos and specifically whether albino polar bears exist. Imagine someone on expedition to look at polar bears. The only way you could tell it was albino would be to look at it’s eyes. And by that time it would be too late for you.

“So is it a polar bear?” “Actually I think it’s an albinaaaaaaagh!

Fun with XML

Wed, 25 May 2005 22:59:14 +0000

Have a look at:

http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/vocab/reading/en-fi-1.xml.

You will need a fairly new browser to see this properly.

Whether I can be bothered to make a whole website out of this, mirroring (and possible helping) my own attempt to learn Finnish, who knows…

Gary Lineker in bad taste?

Wed, 25 May 2005 01:33:21 +0000

Firstly, I think the flurry of people reading this from XHTML Friends has calmed down so I’m more confident in posting complete crap now :)

I was watching They Think it’s All Over on UKGold last night when Gary Lineker of all people came up with a nasty joke, outdoing even Rory.

In the round they had to identify which of a series of grunts came from Monica Seles:

Guest: “Are these grunts from when they were playing tennis?” Rory “When else do women grunt?” Gary “Well, when they get stabbed…”

BBC gives new talent a chance…

Mon, 23 May 2005 20:35:56 +0000

Anybody watching the BBC today will notice how they have decided to give all their up-and-coming talent a chance to shine today. From announcers to news reporters (and no doubt production crew too) the less experienced ruled the roost today.

The fact that the proper staff are on strike obviously has nothing to do with it.

Free stuff from Microsoft…

Mon, 23 May 2005 20:19:58 +0000

Microsoft are now offering free versions off some of their Visual Studio products. And although they are slightly limited compared to the complete version they seem to allow commercial use (from the FAQ: “Create fun and interesting applications for their personal enjoyment or to share with their friends, or even commercially distribute your programs. “)

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/

They won’t stay completely free though. Once the products leave beta they will supposedly be available for $49 each. Which is still affordable for us students though :)

Mobile phones send people insane…

Mon, 23 May 2005 15:30:13 +0000

Why is it so hard to get people to pay for things over the internet and so easy to get them to pay for things on their phone?

Well the two aren’t really related I suppose. Most of the people who buy stuff over the internet are under 18 and don’t havea credit card so they don’t really have a way to pay for stuff over the internet. So I’ll rephrase:

Hooray for Galloway

Thu, 19 May 2005 14:55:36 +0000

George Galloway is the member of parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow, the constituency I happen to live. Now I personally find him very annoying. He’s part of a new political party called “Respect” that is aimed at unhappy Labour supporters.

Despite this, his appearance in front of a committee of senators in America was hilarious:

Washington Post

I think the best part was the accusation that he’s met with Saddam Hussein several times. As he points out he has met Saddam the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld . Unlike Donald he wan’t there to sell him weapons though… Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld, Labour, George Galloway, election, Saddam Hussein, America, senate

Odd PHP problem

Wed, 18 May 2005 14:11:49 +0000

The following produces an error:


function hex2rgb($hex)
{
    for($i=0; $i&lt;3; $i++)
    {
        $temp = substr($hex,2*$i,2);
        $rgb[$i] = 16 * hexdec(substr($temp,0,1)) + hexdec(substr($temp,1,1));
    }
    return $rgb;
}

function hex2rgb($hex)
{
    for($i=0; $i&lt;3; $i++)
    {
        $temp = substr($hex,2*$i,2);
        $rgb[$i] = 16 * hexdec(substr($temp,0,1)) + hexdec(substr($temp,1,1));
    }
    return $rgb;
}

But not the error you might expect. PHP doesn’t even get to complain about redeclaring a function with the same name since the second function is full of parse errors.

I have a vague idea what the problem is but I’m not sure. Any takers? :P

I quite like JavaScript

Wed, 11 May 2005 01:30:42 +0000

For a long time I hated JavaScript. I think I’m beginning to like it now. The following works perfectly in Firefox and works slightly less well in IE6. http://brownab1.miniserver.com/reborn/demo.php.

To use just click and drag. Or in IE6 press the button, drag then press again.

Let’s get personal again…

Mon, 09 May 2005 22:11:18 +0000

Well it’s been a while since I made a person post so here goes. Julia is coming over on Thursday. In fact she’s bringing her sister Jaz too. In fact it would be more accurate to say Jaz is bringing Julia since Jaz is coming over to meet a guy (something they apparently have in common is a thing for British guys).

This will lead to a few interesting situations: Firstly they’ll be both be staying in my room on at least one night (two I think). This isn’t actually that interesting inherently (from my point of view it will make Julia’s stay less interesting) but it may look odd to anyone who notices us enter my room.

Things you notice

Mon, 09 May 2005 22:02:12 +0000

I’ve noticed a few odd things about certain sites while I’ve been developing XHTML Friends. I think this is the site with the longest title:

http://www.xhtmlfriends.net/xfn/page/http://www.vikingkarwur.com

SiteReviews.org supports hReview. I think

Mon, 09 May 2005 18:37:20 +0000

http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/hReview

A clever idea for distributed reviews of things. Well I think the reviews at SiteReviews.org (on the main HTML pages) follow the standard. Bits of it confused me though.

Either way it meant I finally made the site XHTML compliant. Although considering how much user-contributed stuff there is on there (like most of it) various pages will undoubtedly fail…

XHTML Friends is now about people

Mon, 09 May 2005 01:45:03 +0000

XHTML Friends (or so it seems) now correctly reads “me” links and associates sites by author. It will take a while for it to crawl all the extra info it needs to get this properly up to date though.

Be my guest and have a look though :)

Ooooh, pages…

Sun, 08 May 2005 19:29:47 +0000

I’ve added the second chapter of my story, Reactions.

The story by the way is my attempt to write a time travel short story with no paradoxes (or should that be paradocies?) in it.

I’ve also added some info about Galaxia Reborn. I must remember, whenever I lose the urge to write Galaxia, just go look at Planetarion and think “I could so do better”.

Objects

Sun, 08 May 2005 19:26:40 +0000

Almost everything in Galaxia is an object. In hindsight this was a bad choice of name (from a programming standpoint I have objects of type Object), but I’m basically stuck with it. And I still can’t think of a better name.

The most interesting type of objects in the game will be vessels. The reason I chose vessel over ship is because not all vessels will actually be ships. Space stations for instance will be vessels that don’t have engines.

Galaxia Reborn

Sun, 08 May 2005 19:12:42 +0000

This will hopefully become a nice place for all the info I currently have on Galaxia Reborn.

I realised putting stuff in normal blog posts was silly since the GR info isn’t really supposed to be time sensitive and once it falls off the front page, former Galaxia players who stumble over here won’t be bothered to find it.

The current version is now available: Galaxia Reborn Login with “Q” as your username and “q” as your password.

Agregating me in XHTML Friends

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 22:40:46 +0000

Well I think I’ve got it sorted so all pages of the same person can be aggregated properly. Unfortunately since my internet access at “home” is down at the moment I haven’t be able to test it properly so I’m not uploading it yet.

Just a couple of notes. The page based info will still be available. At the moment the site trusts everything it finds (so if you link to Google with a ‘me’ attribute it will believe you). I also need to make it follow a site’s internal links to find links pages and so forth (but that will mean resolving relative URLs.. ack).

Silly .htaccess

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 13:24:50 +0000

Wordpress seemed to be not updating my .htaccess properly but not telling me. Which is why none of the permalinks work. It’s funny, I was about to comment that none of the new visitors to XHTML Friends had made their way over here. Of course they probably did and just couldn’t comment…

Thanks to Ryan for pointing out the complete failure of all the internal links on the site…

Traffic from somewhere

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 13:07:47 +0000

XHTML friends suddenly had a lot a of traffic… Not sure where from though. But when I checked today the number of sites added jumped from 900 to 1100 and the number of queued sites went from 200 to 1000! I’m making it crawl them all now.

Upcoming features for XHTML friends

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 15:32:43 +0000

I think the most useful feature for helping propagate XFN would be a list of sites with incoming links but no outgoing links. i.e. sites that should add XFN attributes to their links :)

Of course the graphics should also actually display different relationships and stuff but that’s just prettyness :P

Should Galaxia use Ajax?

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 03:47:56 +0000

I used JavaScript once succesfully and it goes to my head…

I read a book on doing XML stuff with JavaScript and thought “Very clever. But Why?”. Well apparently it’s taking off. It’s how Google Maps works.

And if you didn’t know (I didn’t; reading blogs is actually helping me) Ajax stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML.

It would mean you’d just drag the map to scroll in Galaxia… :D

Google Adsense is getting very clever

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 03:09:16 +0000

I was over at XHTML Friends looking at the info for this site and noticed dance ads. At first I didn’t think anything of it, I see dance ads all over this page. But thenof course it occurred to me there is not a single mention of dancing on that page. It gets better when you realise there isn’t even a direct link from that site to this site.

I was ready to put it down to coincidence, but noticed ads relevent to the sites I was listing on their pages…

Ooooh, ICBMs…

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 02:50:23 +0000

Did you know some blogs contain ICBM data? That (as I’ve now discovered) is a euphemism for latitude/longitude. Well XHTML Friends now displays a map for sites that provide the data :)

Bloody hell!! It worked!!

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 03:54:26 +0000

I added some nifty (and I mean nifty) Javascript to XHTML Friends and it bloody worked! It works in FireFox and IE!

I think http://brownab1.miniserver.com/xfn/page/http://photomatt.net is the most dramatic example.

Use DB indexes

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:42:44 +0000

Indexes or indices? If this was anything but an article on databases I’d use indices. Anyway, XHTML Friends was taking about 3 minutes to load a page. I added three indexes to two tables and now it takes a few seconds. I have never seen such a speed increase come from adding indexes to a database. So let this be a lesson to me…

XHTML Friends

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 22:17:58 +0000

Wohoo! I’ve just “finished” the XFN site. Go take a look :) XHTML Friends

More XFN

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 16:09:42 +0000

Well if you have a URL you want crawled go to http://brownab1.miniserver.com/xfn/crawl.php.

If you want to have a look at the pages already there in a nice graphical network display, go to http://brownab1.miniserver.com/xfn/image.php.

This displays 26 random sites and the links between them. If you click on a site it “holds” it so subsequent requests always contain this site (this way you can slowly buildup an image of sites that actually link to each other).

Pretty XFN

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 04:06:54 +0000

XFN stands for XML Friends Network. You basically define human relationships between webpage authors by adding an extra atribute to links.

Well I decded to write a nice XFN crawler/search engine thingy. The crawler part works. I also decided to do a nice graphical representation of the links between sites.

Red is “crush”, blue is “met” and green is “friend” (just three properties I picked at random).

XFN Network

Google will take over the world…

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 22:08:49 +0000

Google are going from strength to strength. Their take over of America is well documented on my old blog, but they the move towards global domination today, releasing UK versions of Google Local and Google Maps. The rest of the world must surely follow.

For those of you who do not believe me and haven’t read my previous posts on the matter, check the following:

maps.google.com
maps.google.co.uk
local.google.com
local.google.co.uk
video.google.com
catalogs.google.com
froogle.google.com
froogle.google.co.uk
froogle.google.de

Google Catalogs is possible the most impressive. Although the fact that Google Maps in America now has (completely free) aerial photo data is cool. One funny thing is to go look at the Whitehouse with the mysteriously edited image erasing it completely (not Google’s doing; in their blog they were just as surprised to find it).

Exams soon…

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 21:44:09 +0000

My first exam is in ten days… Galois Theory. Worst one of the lot… but at least I only have seven to do instead of eight.

I’m struggling to find something to write. That’s not to say I don’t have things to write as such I’m just not sure I should share them.

Julia’s letter hasn’t arrived yet…

I’m sure I’ll actually say something interesting next time :P

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside…

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 23:40:15 +0000

We impulsively went to Cleethorpes today. By we I mean myself, Ryan and Darren. Not that exciting but still a laugh. We went on lovely illegal imported DDR machines…

On a more personal note (since this is marked personal) I’m awaiting a letter from Julia. Apparently there’s some stuff in it that would be hard to explain by phone. I’m sure it’s not as ominous as it sounds.

Also if you haven’t realised there is a link to the first chapter of a story I’m writing called Reactions on the menu to the right. Go on, have a look (unless you are one of the two people who actually read this regularly in which case you’ve already read it).

Users in Galaxia

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 23:37:21 +0000

Well one can now create an account and login. So far it doesn’t give you anything but it does respect users with regards to what object orders you can perform. i.e. you can’t rename objects that aren’t your own.

An idea for Galaxia

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 21:27:23 +0000

It just occurred to me (not strictly true but we’ll let that go) that I may not get the current version of Galaxia finished. This time it really would be a shame since the code in it is actually quite good. So I’ve come with an idea I would like feedback on (which will be an achievement considering the attention this site gets).

I might open up Galaxia at least partially. Nothing fancy like a public CVS, but the generated documentation complete with annotated source listings. This will obviously impact security of the game once it’s available to play but it might be worth it since it opens up lots of possibilities:

Stars

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 22:26:04 +0000

I thought I’d finished on Galaxia for tonight… But I came up with stars:

GR

Double map

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:14:25 +0000

Instead of adding truly useful stuff to Galaxia I decided to added a nice cool feature.

The interface will use two maps (so you can look at two places at once). The disadvantage is you need your display set to 1024x768 for it to work properly but that would have been true anyway since there is still the control frame to display under the map that I haven’t done yet.

GR

Reborn progress

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 01:50:32 +0000

You can now build colony ships and transfer ships between facilities. The next thing to do is to allow orders to be chained so one is done after another. That way ships can be transfered from the shipyard to the launchpad automatically after being made (as well as lots of other cool things).

Of course the big thing to do is add users to the game since everything I write now needs to be slightly different depending on object ownership.

It’s-a me!

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 20:16:47 +0000

Read that in a Mario voice, it works better :S

Anyway, Oliver gave me a section on here, which is cool. I’m just admiring the very cool software it is powered by, all these smooth curves and clean lines - very nice!

OrbWars is great by the way. And if Oliver will continue writing bits of it it will become the best! mwuhahahaha!

-Ryan

Bloody mobile phones

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 13:32:52 +0000

Apparently Julia sent me a message on the 9th and another on the 10th. Neither arrived until this morning…

Dum di dum...

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 04:12:29 +0000

It’s now been a week (well in 5 hours it will be) since I saw Julia. After we spent 4 weeks and a day almost never apart (not including my occasional trip to Pizza Hut). The worst part is being unable to contact her.

Someone once said I didn’t mention Julia enough on here…

Well I’m really not sure what else to say :oP

Galaxia Reborn is coming along well. It displays the same in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. The reason I keep posting updates about Galaxia here by the way is so at some point I can tell Galaxia players that this exists and then they’ll read it to stay updated.

New name

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 03:49:17 +0000

The new version of Galaxia will be called Galaxia Reborn.

Things done:

Map display, including:
- Resizable/rescalable grid
- Planetary terrain
- Planet surfaces wrap
- Inside colonies (and other structres)
Basic object info
Ship movement, in realtime

I’ll post some screenshots in my next entry.

Welcome

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 03:45:36 +0000

Cool. I’m now hosting my new blog . The old stuff is available at http://www.livejournal.com/~galaxiaguy

Anyone want any space?

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 03:45:00 +0000

I have far more space and bandwidth on my server than I need… if anyone is interested in it in exchange for some nice linkage (or something else; I’d rather you not pay since I definitely won’t guarantee service in any way) let me know at galaxiaguy@hotmail.com.

I have PHP and MySQL.. is there anything more people really want these days?

Galaxia Reborn screenshots

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 03:21:00 +0000

Galaxia Reborn will be plain HTML through a browser. A step back technologically but it is for the best I assure you.

I’ve been working on keeping the game as graphical as possible still though:

gr_space.gif gr_earth.gif gr_colony.gif

Things to notice:

Multiple planets (and any other objects for that matter) scale nicely when in the same sector.
The coords on the planet wrap.
The grid is a different scale when inside structures (this can be set to anything in theory; players may be able to alter is as a zoom feature.
No scrolling arrows inside a structure; they are limited size and son’t wrap.

Galaxia Reborn

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 02:25:00 +0000

The crazy smilie is a wink.

And in a change to tonights advertised post of ‘Galaxia’ I’ll post a link to a picture of me dancing.

The picture was taken at the Inter Varsity Dancesport Championships by Laurie Young (his blog), the Imperial College team photographer. The girl was my dance partner for the year who it just occurred to me it might not be polite to name. Hmm… I’ve just realised I’ve already named her in another post.

I'm not dead...

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 11:57:00 +0000

I just haven’t had much time while Julia’s been here. Which is a shame considering everything that has happened that I could have talked about.

Whether I’ll talk about them later or not I don’t know, but notable events since my last entry include IVDC 2005, dinner at Zero Degrees, a weekend in Blackpool with two-day passes to the Pleasure Beach, a weekend at home and progress of sorts on Galaxia of sorts.

I hate oversleeping...

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:34:00 +0000

I was supposed to talk to Julia this morning. Unfortunately I overslept. And not just a little. I was supposed to be up at 7:00am (I had my alarm set for 6:45am) and I eventually woke at 10:42am. I went online on the off chance that she was still on to discover I was apparently supposed to be at another IVDC meeting today. So I got a shower and went straight there.

Earnings from Google

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 14:24:00 +0000

This post is more to see if I appear on the front page of BlogWise than anything else. But it is nice to point out that for the past week my earnings from Google Adsense have been amazingly consistent. i.e. with $0.50 of each each day.

Team practice could have gone better...

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 14:11:00 +0000

Firstly, http://www.blogwise.com now links to me. Which is cool.

Hanna and myself had out first falling out of sorts yesterday. Which is good since that is less than most couples. Bad since it is exactly a week before IVDC. At first she was annoyed that we kept colliding with people, which is sensible enough. Except she strongly opposes any possible changes the routine I suggest that I could use to get out of other couples’ ways. She also thinks I should have more stamina in Quickstep. Sensible again but by this stage I thought being pragmatic would be best and me developing more stamina is at least as unlikely her being able follow changes I make to the routine to avoid people.

What they want me to do...

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 16:39:00 +0000

I finally have to actually write some software for the IVDA technical committee. And get it done for Tuesday.

They need a nice web based app that will go through all the photos in a folder, let the user crop the photo to a specific aspect ratio and then move the photo into another folder depending on whether it is portrait or landscape.

Then they need another app that goes through all the photos and lets you assign a number (the couple number) to them. And for ones that don’t have a number it needs to read an XML file to get the list of all couples on the floor at the time and then display picutres of those that we have pictures for, so you can guess who it is.

I should have gone to bed...

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 02:54:00 +0000

I decided to stay awake for various reasons. But it’s meant I’ve started worrying about Julia. Which is silly since that could just upset her when she finds out. On the other hand their could be something serious (although she at least said she was still happy; amongst other things). The point is of course is that I don’t know and the only reason I don’t know is because I wasn’t online.

They want me to do something...

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 02:13:00 +0000

I missed speaking to Julia tonight. Which is doubly annoying since I pretty much missed her this morning.

Things get worse when I read her LiveJournal. Either she was upset that I wasn’t online or something else has happened and I wasn’t there to talk to. Either way isn’t good. I’ve somehow lost the inclination to say what I was going to say…

My present arrived

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 15:16:00 +0000

Julia’s Valentine’s day present (from me to her) arrived today. It’s not quite as good as I hoped but I doubt I could have gotten better.

Right now I’m downloading a 68Mb file with all the (scanned from paper) results from SUDC so I’ll know exactly how well I did. 66% to go…

Silly Cryptography lecturer

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:07:00 +0000

I was doing an assignment for Cryptography last night and ended up stuck on a question for a really silly reason: I knew the answer straight away. All we had to do was decrypt the following cipher:

53‡‡†305))6*; 4826)4‡.)4‡); 806*;48†8¶60))85; 1‡(; :‡*8†83(88)5*†; 46(;88*96*?; 8)*‡(;485); 5*†2: *‡(;4956*2(5*-4)8¶8*; 4069285);)6†8)4‡‡; 1(‡9;48081; 8:8‡1;48†85; 4)485†528806*81(‡9;48; (88; 4(‡?34;48)4‡; 161; :188; ‡?;

Which is all very well and good except that is possibly one of the most famous pieces of encrypted text there is. It’s froma story by Edgar Allan Poe. In fact a quick search on Google for 305))6*;4826)4 reveals 56,700 results. All but one of them on the first page are about the decrypting the damn thing.

Still awake again

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 01:21:00 +0000

Well here I am awake really late again. Oh well, I got lots of stuff done with various websites. Including WebSearch which is the stupidest.

I now have the following sites active:

Julia was online earlier. Which is a relief, I thought I’d missed her. She’ll be online again tomorrow too :o) We didn’t really talk about anything that exciting. Or at least nothing that other people would find that exciting ;o)

SUDC was fun :o)

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 18:23:00 +0000

Well mixed results for SUDC (in general in fact, not just us).

We got knocked out of Intermediate Ballroom which was largely due to me getting too nervous and forgetting stuff. Although I actually enjoyed the Viennese Waltz.

As a major shock we got through to the second round of the Novice Latin. Hanna’s slight costume problems may have helped though. The straps over her shoulders wouldn’t stay up so it looked like her dress was about to fall down (which it was never in danger of doing).

Stargate Rocks

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 20:59:00 +0000

I just watched the second part of SG-1’s eighth season’s finale. That was cool. It brought everything together and explains what happens in the the final episode of Atlantis.

On a completely unrelated note there is documentary about chavs on at the moment.

Wandering from topic to topic I feel I should also mention they decided to close half the damn underground today. I had a lesson that finished at 5:30 and needed to get to my sister’s for 6:30. And every bloody route was blocked by “planned engineering works”.

Still posting

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 15:12:00 +0000

I only had four hours sleep last night and I’m wide awake. Always helpful I guess.

I added a new friend to this thing. Friend is probably overstating things slightly but she qualifies as being the only person I know who uses LiveJournal and is posting (since someone else can’t get enough internet access :( ).

I want to make this entry reasonably long so those pictures aren’t the first thing people see when the page loads.

Use single quotes not backticks

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 01:57:00 +0000

It’s nearly two o’clock. I should sleep. Even considering the 18 hours I had yesterday. I havetotidy up first though, the cleaner will be in tomorrow (how stupid is that). The cleaner arrives at 10:00am though and I hate having to get up so early.

Why do some localisations use backticks instead of single quotes? ’ is a single quote. ` is a backtick. Backticks have specific meanings in some situations (admitedly most people won’t come across these situations but still). Grrr.

PR2 PR2 Yippee

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 01:43:00 +0000

For some reason I have a PageRank of 2. God knows how. I can’t even find a link here in Google.

Odd coincidence. Or perhaps not, perhaps it’s planned. One of the ads is in English but pointing to a Finnish domain.

My paragraphs are getting shorter.

Oooh, ooh, ooh, SUDC on Sunday. For those not in the know, SUDC is the Southern Universities Dancesport Championships. Everyone calls it SUDA though (Southern Universities Dancesport Association is the group that run the comp; it’s easier to say). We (Hanna and myself) are dancing in the Team Match for IC (probably C-team Waltz), Intermediate Ballroom (Waltz, Quickstep, Viennese Waltz) and Novice Latin (Cha cha cha and Jive). By the way our Latin officially sucks. But it’s Novice so who cares. I would have preferred to enter Intermediate just so I could dance Paso Doble but we didn’t have time to get the three routines we needed.

Bob's Markup Language

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 01:35:00 +0000

I’m currently on LiveJournal’s website (obviously) and I noticed the pages are BML pages. I’m sure I read somewhere on the site what BML was but the first thing I thought just now was “Bob’s Markup Language”. Oh well.

What you just read, or about to read, or may well ignore is the first chapter of a story of mine I might just finish eventually.

I just added this website (http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk) to my UDS (http://www.universitydancesport.com) profile. They have a PR5 domain and they have the damn thing frame their website. They really need to sort it. But of course since Caroline is in control it won’t happen. I’m thinking of proposing the website is added to the IVDA constitution. Probably not good to complain now there is a chance of someone from over there reading this. On the other hand how bad would it be to piss people off? They can’t do anything anymore (although I’m not sure what John’s would be to negativity about Caroline).

Google will take over the world

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 01:10:00 +0000

Google for instance have wonderful text processing skills. And their spell checker actually learns. Although the human side leaves a little to be desired.

This neatly brings me to one of the reasons I’m posting this (as hinted at two entries ago). I recently started a new website, http://www.condoms-cheap.co.uk which sells things (I’ll leave it up to your imagination to guess what. Again I’m, not sure who I’m telling exactly since the only person reading this knows about it anyway). And it has very few inbound links(ah, I get to explain how Google works; something the person in question might not know about). When I say very few I sort of mean none. As in it has some but they aren’t in search engines yet. And since this page is not in a search engine this won’t really help much.

More and more...

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 01:00:00 +0000

This is a continuation of the previous entry but I like the wonderful computer advice of “save often”.

Anyway today we had a half hour Viennese Waltz class. After a migraine I’m usually dazed and dizzy for a day. Spinning around for half an hour didn’t help. But we’re getting quite good now. If the judges see the first thirty seconds of us dancing we’ll be fine. After that we’re just too tired.

I'm back

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:54:00 +0000

Well it’s been a long time since I posted anything. Partly because very few people read this and at least one complains :P Therefore I can’t guarantee that I will keep posting here regularly so you better like what you get.

Why exactly I’m posting now I’m not sure. Well that’s not true I have one reason but I’ll get to that later.

I had a migraine yesterday which was not good. It occurred right at the start of team practice which is even worse. To anyone who has never had a migraine (to anyone? Only one person is likely to read this but it’s therapeutic to assume lots read), please don’t assume it is “just a bad headache”. Search the internet for “migraine” and read about it.

Awake at last

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 16:29:00 +0000

For some reason I didn’t wake up today until 1pm. Which meant I missed my only lecture of the day but it’s not a big problem. I think I’ve finally caught up on all the sleep I’ve been missing.

Greg Egan is an amazing author. I’m currently reading “Diaspora” which basically seems to be a collection of ideas on philosophy, quantum mechanics, ethics, the nature of consciousness and cosmology all rolled up in a neat plot. At the moment he’s describing the experiences of these beings that suddenly have to cope with moving into a five dimensional universe and the emotional stress it causes…

Galaxia Plus

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 13:58:00 +0000

Having something I can throw random thoughts at whenever I at a computer is probably a bad thing… especially considering how much I’m at my computer.

At the moment though I genuinely have some free time… I have to wait two minutes to see if the GP server will start itself automatically. Ooh look, the two minutes are up. And unfortunately it didn’t start… I’ll sort it eventually.

Two weeks to go

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 12:12:00 +0000

I just discovered I left my back at the IVDA techie meeting at Laurie’s. Not exactly a big problem if I get it back before my dance lesson on Tuesday (it has my dance shoes in it).

Speaking of IVDA some of the ideas they have are very ambitious and it will be an amazing day if it all works out.

It is now exactly two weeks until I go to Finland (well to the nearest few hours at least). Unfortunately I have too much going on in the mean time to think about it which is unfortunate. And the really weird thing is I have to keep reminding myself that sometime in between being busy and going to Finland, Christmas fits somehow…

OliverBrown.me.uk

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 01:12:00 +0000

Well since I already had the domain I decided I’d put it to use. Viewing my journal should redirect you to OliverBrown.me.uk which should display my journal properly. It’s probably buggy though so watch out…

Welcome!

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 21:47:00 +0000

I really think I should write something exciting for my inaugural entry. The fact that I did this at all is quite amazing. I’ve thought about it a few times but kept deciding I could write my own that was better; but never got round to it. Well I could always just embed it into a website of my own if I wanted to.

Odd coincidence. I spell checked my entry and it came up with “ve” (from “I’ve”) as an error. “Ve” is a gender-neutral personal pronoun used by Greg Egan; an author whose books I’m reading at the moment. Very good books by the way.

2004-01-22 - 23:53

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 23:53:00 +0000

Just added a new Artwork page!

2004-01-22 - 23:17

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 23:17:00 +0000

More people playing QWar. Whoopee!

Wahhhh, frustrating! I used to run a website with a decent amount of traffic, but no serious way to monetize it. Now I have a way to monetize it but not enough traffic. Google AdSense rocks by the way (although my click-thru rate is suspiciously high).

2004-01-22 - 22:53

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 22:53:00 +0000

I put QWar on the forums at OrbWars. Within minutes, Thundercat had set a high score. Hopefully someone will try and beat him and they’ll be a little feud. Either way it should get popularity up a bit (at the very least it’ll fill out the highscore table a bit).

2004-01-21

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 15:09:00 +0000

Not only are QWar and Supremacy now online, but you can now have QWar on your own site, complete with your own high score table! I’ll be putting a demonstration of this on this site soon.

2004-01-20

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 13:21:00 +0000

Galaxia has a nice new front page with a background image I made myself. I’ve also now got Google AdSense links on there which is cool. Progress on Galaxia is going slowly, mainly because I don’t have enough time to work on it (my life suddenly seems very busy).

I also decided to put the AdSense link on here, mainly as a way to get the site indexed by Google

2004-01-19

Mon, 19 Jan 2004 15:43:00 +0000

I’ve decided to restart this thing concentrating solely on my online activities. Which seem to be increasing a lot lately. This will also serve as the news part of the main page when I write it.

2003-12-15

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 16:46:00 +0000

Just for the record, it was Martin Kirk’s and Andrew Sherwood’s birthday yesterday.

I now have 6 referrals on Clickthru, two of which are earning me something. I’m up to about $0.40 a day between the two main domains, and I’m now earning Clickthrus faster than I can spend them. So I’ll have to start using the other domains (with much lower CPC earnings :o( )

I ended up talking to Rachel, Sara’s friend, last night for a while (just a little while). Unfortunately I don’t have the clever privacy thing setup yet (since this is all still file based and manually edited :o( ) so I won’t be telling anymore. Sorry.

2003-12-12

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 23:23:00 +0000

I had an absolutely pathetic mid-term test today. Complex Variables. It was open book and the lecturer kept giving hints throughout the test until he eventually told us the answer to one of the questions and gave us extra time to write it down!

Then onto the ULU Salsa class. More girls than guys there (as usual) but fewer people in general since some universities have already broken up. I got to know one of the guys there called Jeremy. As a weird coincidence he’s the equal opportunities officer for Queen Mary’s.

2003-12-11

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 16:03:00 +0000

Not really a fun day so far. A bit of hassle with Donna Castle paying my rent - mainly my fault. And generally not fun in university today.

On to hopefully happier things, it’s Ballroom Bronze and Silver classes today. Hopefully I’ll be able to spin turn without accidentally doing a V6 today.

The classes were fun. Bronze was especially fun because Camilla as there and she’s just generally cheerful. Silver was fun because I actually managed to do what they were doing (a fishtail in the Quickstep) as well as getting to dance with Alice which is just sooo easy.

2003-12-10 - 23:20

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 23:20:00 +0000

Wow, what a surprisingly fun evening. First, 3 hours of team practice. Managed to mess up Waltz and Quickstep completely with both Anne Marie and Phyllis by getting confused by the V6 and overturning all my spin turns. Some of time was also spent chatting to Jennifer about how annoying Andy (the team captain) can be - especially to beginners (ironic really). And then (and this is the fun bit) I went to a casino with John, Alex Kostas and Jennifer.

2003-12-10 - 13:53

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 13:53:00 +0000

I got all impulsive again and bought a Christmas present for Mel. Not sure when it will arrive as I ordered it from America. Should be cool though :o)

No free referrals with Clickthru, but almost $1 Clickthru cash a day - that’s twenty visitors. And that’s for not doing anything. Pretty cool. Of course it only works because I happen to have found one of the few things on the internet that actually monetizes crap traffic.

2003-12-09 - 22:48

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 22:48:00 +0000

Well I was impulsive and signed up to Clickthru Rewards for $16.95. So I need to make approximate $40 in two years of these domains to get my money back. Should be a doddle :o)

More about dancing :o) Yesterday I saw a girl there who I met at the very first class I went to - never seen her since. And I think she has a girlfriend. The guy Rosy is always with turned up today without Rosy (but she did turn up later). Not really conclusive either way. A strangely adulant woman was there again - I don’t remember seeing since the second Salsa IC Salsa class. And I still prefer dancing with Anne Marie.

2003-12-09 - 21:58

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 21:58:00 +0000

The beginners’ team practice was a bit odd today. Dorothy seemed to be having a go at everyone a lot, but was doing so cheerfully. Although there was one thing she said that to me seemed way out of line: One of the girls who hasn’t been going very long was having trouble with the V6 and was dancing with Sherwin. Dorothy pointed out that Sherwin had managed to get it right with everyone else he danced with so it must be her fault. Probably true but still nasty…

2003-12-09 - 16:57

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 16:57:00 +0000

Last night after the Latin sliver class (an hour of solid Jive by the way) I did an odd psychology test for Jennifer. It was basically to see if your emotional state affected what type of words you remembered. I said I performed worse than I should have done because I had to count for five seconds myself per word (when I should have been concentrating more on remembering the words). She said it was to counteract my abnormally high IQ. What the? Okay so I’m doing a Math’s degree, but I’m not doing it at Imperial. Which means anybody else there has a better claim to that little piece of fame.

2003-12-09 - 16:29

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 16:29:00 +0000

Hmm, getting traffic to gambling-online.me.uk from ClickThru. Worthless traffic normally but for this it works.

Ballroom Beginners’ Team class today. This should be the day Phyllis finds out she has been partnered with me - a decision based entirely on height.

2003-12-08 - 23:22

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 23:22:00 +0000

Well I’ve started marking the domains with ClickThru. Not as bad as FFA pages but not wonderful.

The dance classes were fun today. Salsa was same as usual - not enough moves to do to make the dancing really fun. Latin is getting better though. We’ve nearly finished the silver Jive routine. So far we have the following routines: bronze Jive, bronze Cha Cha, silver Jive, silver Cha Cha and silver Rumba. As well as bronze Waltz and bronze Quickstep. I’ve decided I will start turning up to the silver Ballroom classes as well.

2003-12-08 - 16:40

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 16:40:00 +0000

This one isn’t pointless :o). Since I’m going to be writing some PHP scripts to automate a lot of this, I’m going to end up with a reasonably well featured blogging site. Now here’s a clever bit: Find some high trafficked UK blog hosted on a free blog service. Then contact the author offering to host it for free along with a domain (.me.uk of course) with a small amount of advertising put on it. Then repeat. Whadya think everybody? Of course this will be after we get the new server.

2003-12-08 - 16:16

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 16:16:00 +0000

I feel I should point something out: the time and date shown refer to when an entry was written. This only loosely coincides with when events happen. Basically I write things down when I think of them which sometimes confuses the order a little bit

Wohoo! Apparently someone visited love-online.me.uk and clicked a link. My account has been credited with $0.49. Wow.

I’m running out of things to say. Unfortunately I don’t really have anything to do until my dancing classes tonight (Salsa, Latin Bronze and Latin Silver. All at Imperial College) at 6 o’clock. So expect a lot of pointless rambling.

2003-12-08 - 15:09

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 15:09:00 +0000

Just had an odd experience. I was leaving the Octagon at university and was pleasantly surprised to meet a girl from the ULU Salsa class last Friday. Didn’t really say much and to be honest it isn’t that significant an event. It’s just the first time I’ve met someone from a dance class outside the dance class.

2003-12-08

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 14:14:00 +0000

The 2nd Calculus mid term test was today. Harder than the first but I should have done okay.

Logged on to Clickthru and seem to have randomly got lots of bonus cash. Whether that will translate into real money remains to be seen.

And I’m now waiting for someone to logon to Lycos chat. :o)

2003-12-08 - 14:06

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 14:06:00 +0000

Just to let you know, the entries are coming fairly rapidly because I’m in a computer room bored at university. Well at least now I know I definitely have something to do while I’m bored.

Hmm, once I get back home I’ll be able to automate this a bit and make it all database driven and stuff. And then have the private bits that nobody can actually read. Of course this presents a slight problem. To explain it, I will have to digress slightly:

2003-12-08 - 13:57

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 13:57:00 +0000

Oooh, I’ve been trying to get traffic to the domains. I’ve been involved (yet again) in the rather unpleasant and almost seedy underworld that is FFA pages. Just to let you know, the domains are:

gambling-online.me.uk
love-online.me.uk
heart.me.uk
rpg.me.uk
webga.me.uk

So have a look, check out the links, marvel at the pointlessness of it all…

2003-12-08 - 12:32

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 12:32:00 +0000

Wohoo, my first entry. First let’s clear up a few things. Since I don’t have reliably frequent access to my own computer I decided to continue my diary on the web. At some point I will summarise everything that has happened in the last three months (a heck of a lot to be honest). Until then, I’ll write about what is happening now.

Firstly, I’ve become obsessed with .me.uk domains. As well as this one I registered five others. I’m parking them with SedoParking.com in the (probably misguided) hope of actually making some money with them.