What is a VPN I hear you ask? Put simply, a VPN creates a secure and private tunnel across the internet between your computer/device and somewhere else. This enables you to access data from the “somewhere else” as if you were connected directly into the network at that location. Work offices (like mine) use VPNs so that remote workers can still access network shared documents and email from home – but now, services like this are becoming available to the public which will allow you to access previously restricted services (Such as Hulu or ABC) wherever you are!

How does this help you access US-Only services like Hulu from outside of the US? Simple. The Free VPN service that SuperVPN is offering will allow you to create a secure connection to a US based network, essentially tricking the service into thinking you are accessing their service from inside of the US. But don’t worry, no voodoo magic is going on here and this is all 100% legal.

So what are SuperVPN offering, and how do I get it you should be screaming at me by now? Well, here are the features they are touting:

VPN account is for unlimited period of time

Connection using PPTP&L2TP protocol. For OpenVPN you must order our SSL/Deluxe VPN package

Servers are located in United States and Germany

Unlimited amount of traffic

High speed internet connection

128 bit encryption

Bypasses your ISP’s firewall

No provider logs or any trace of your Internet activates

Your IP is hidden while using Super VPN services

Works for PC on Windows /Linux/Mac OS

Works for mobile on Android/Windows/Mobile/iPhone/Blackberry/Symbian

Easy to install and use

Instant VPN account activation

If your interested in getting your hands on this awesome, and free, service – simply head on over to SuperVPN.net to find out more!

I figured that since I rarely have the time (or the will-power) to write a full blog post here, that I would start a Tumblr blog so that I can start posting random musings (ones that don’t fit into the 140 character limit of a tweet!).

I haven’t quite decided what Tumblr is… We have Wordpress (And other bloggins/cms software) which is “Blogging”… Then we have Twitter/Facebook Updates which is “Micro-Blogging”… Now we have Tumblr, what do we call that?!

Anyways, enough of that. I will probably start using Tumblr to post updates about Aries Engine development (My 3D open-source, cross-platform game engine, written in C++), videos and the likes. So until next time!

Update: I forgot to link my Tumblr. So get clickin’ here and follow me over at Tumblr!

What the hell is Usenet I hear you cry? Well, back in the good old days when the word ‘internet’ wasn’t even recognized by most, a service was created called Usenet. Usenet was essentially the earliest bulletin board system on the internet, with one difference – no one central server hosted it. Instead, messages were broadcast to multiple servers and each server kept a copy of the message for a certain period of time.

Today, Usenet is still widely used as both a communication medium and as a file distribution platform. Files can be encrypted and compressed into individual text files, transferred through Usenet, and recompiled on the other side. Since Usenet “messages” are stored on thousands of servers across the internet, multiple connections can be made to give insanely fast file download speeds.

So what’s the catch you ask? There isn’t one, except that access to Usenet requires a monthly fee from one of many providers. Each provider has their own perks, but my personal favourite is Newsdemon. They store data on their servers (also known as retention) for over 600 days! Not only is this one of the best retention rates available, but they offer incredibly cheap packages. Starting from £4.76 for 15GB monthly data transfer, to £9.53 for UNLIMITED monthly data transfer.

So once you have Usenet access, how do you use it? Well there are various Usenet readers available for almost all operating systems. On Windows I like to use Newsleecher, on Mac OS X I love Unison.

I’ve been a member of Newsdemon since 2007, and I can honestly say the service they provide is second to none! Oh, and they sent me this cool Tee… nuff said!

I thought this would be a great list to share with other developers, so that you can safeguard yourself against a lot of potential spam accounts.

You can download the list of 500+ Email Domains here.

My first solution was to manually go into wp-includes/general_template.php and hard-code in the code that would do that for me. However, this broke when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.9. Therefore, I have created a new function specific to my theme in wp_content/themes/theme_name/functions.php. I thought this function might come in handy to other developers who are using Wordpress as their content management system, so below is the code.

function latest_posts($limit = 5)
{
    ob_start();
    wp_get_archives("title_li=&type=postbypost&limit=" . $limit);
    $original_content = ob_get_contents();
    ob_end_clean();

    $lines = explode("\n", $original_content);

    $final_content = "";

    for($i = 0; $i < $limit; $i++)
    {
        // Workout the class parameter value
        $class_string = "";
        if($i == 0)
        {
            $class_string = "first";
        }
        else if($i == $limit - 1)
        {
            if(($i % 2) == 1)
            {
                $class_string = "odd last";
            }
            else
            {
                $class_string = "last";
            }
        }
        else if(($i % 2) == 1)
        {
            $class_string = "odd";
        }

        $final_content .= str_replace("<li>", "<li class=\"". $class_string . "\">", $lines[$i]) . "\n";
    }

    echo $final_content;
}

This function takes the output of the wp_get_archives function (by making use of the PHP output buffer, since wp_get_archives echos it’s results rather than return a string), loops through each line (by using explode) and then works out what class names to add to the li element and adds them accordingly. It then echos the modified output and voila.

To use this function, simply call latest_posts() somewhere in your Wordpress template. You can also pass in a numeric parameter to specify the number of posts to return, for example latest_posts(10).

I would love to hear your thoughts/feedback on how this could be improved, or if you have used this and it has helped, let me know in the comments section below!

I will admit, this has been the goal for my site since I first created it a few years ago. Somehow I managed to get side tracked along the way and through neglect it has become a rarely used personal blog, nothing more. However, a few weeks back I decided that this needed to change and I went ahead and designed the new look in Photoshop. This design had been sitting on my desktop in PSD format for the past few days, when yesterday I decided to actually get down to some hardcore coding!

No more than two days later and here we are with a finished, and gorgeous (even if I do say so myself!), dark themed, clean and professional site design which focuses more on me and my portfolio – rather than the blogging side of things. I even got round to adding the new portfolio section and have already begun filling it with my projects!

All in all, I am extremely pleased with the way it has turned out. I will probably still continue to tinker with it over the next few weeks, but I believe it is a damn sight better than the stock templates I was previously using! I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback, so please do leave your comments below!

Since leaving University, I have managed to bag myself a software development position back at Marishal Thompson (Where I used to work before University!). This is awesome, as I know everyone there and I know how things work etc. I will be developing web applications (both in-house and external) in ASP.NET and also developing a range of software applications both for the web (Silverlight) and desktop (C#). The pay is much higher now that I am qualified too, which is always a bonus!

As well as managing to get back into work, my girlfriend and I have managed to get a place of our own. We haven’t moved in yet, but we will be moving in on the 15th January, so we are really looking forward to it! We’ve been spending the past week or so buying bits and pieces (Dinner sets, Fridge, etc!).

As a final note, I have been toying with the idea of turning this site into more of an online portfolio and having the blog sort of in the “background” so to speak. The reason being, my original plans for this site were not so that I can write a regular blog (Which is why I don’t post here that often) and I would now like to begin reworking the site to fit those plans. I don’t know when I will be making these changes, but expect them over the next few months. The blog will remain in tact, as will all of the blog posts I have made to date. I will most likely just create a Wordpress theme based around my goals, and then have a link to the blog (As I would still like to use Wordpress as my CMS).

Anyway, that’s all I have to say for now, so until next time!

In the months prior to our holiday, the entire family frequently discussed the possible private villas that were available. Our final decision was a villa called Casa De Los Suenos. From the pictures it looked extremely nice, and located just outside the center of Benalmadena, perfect for going out in the evenings. However, it was a decision we soon found out we would live to regret. The following blog post is not meant as malicious slander, but an honest review of a holiday most of us would like to forget.

Review of Casa De Los Suenos

When we first arrived, we were greeted by a very irate “cleaner”, namely Larraine, who informed us that she was running late as the last occupants had broken things and left the villa in a mess and that it needed to be sorted before we could come in. She told us to come back in an hour. This was fair enough, but it meant all of us (16 in total) had to wander around aimlessly for an hour. Given that we had an overnight flight and had waited in the airport for hours before the flight, we were all very tired and this was an annoying start to the holiday to say the least.

When we finally managed to enter the villa, we did a quick inspection of all the bedrooms. As it turned out, one of the three “Twin Bedrooms” was in fact not a bedroom at all! Instead, there were two sofa-beds in the living room. As you can imagine, this caused a lot of frustration as no one wanted to sleep in the living room! Now I am pretty sure it is not strictly true to state there are, and I quote: “1 Double Bedroom, 3 Twin Bedrooms, 1 Family Bedroom.”, when one of them IS the living room. I would not class that as a bedroom, but maybe thats just me and the rest of my family?

The second thing that struck us was the state of the villa itself. Given that we had been initially greeted by the cleaner and told to come back in an hour when it was ready, the place was filthy! For starters the floor had not been cleaned at all (walking around in bare feet resulted in the blackest feet I have ever seen!), the sofas and bed sheets were absolutely disgusting, the pool was filled with balls of hair (presumably from the previous occupants!) and most everything, like the TV were caked in a thick layer of dust. See the gallery below for pictures.

Dirt aside, during the holiday we began to notice these “broken” things that Larraine had first mentioned, regardless of the fact that she claimed she was “sorting it” before we arrived that first morning. Bed slats were broken, flexes and wires on a few electrical appliances were exposed or badly covered up with duct tape, there were numerous large chunks of GLASS on the balcony and a few IN the pool, and the lampshade in my bedroom actually fell on my head one night and I soon discovered it was held on by cellotape! Again, see the gallery at the bottom of this post for pictures of some of the above.

One thing that really tickled us was the fact that there were several framed “poems” dotted around the villa, with things such as “Do not poke holes in the mural, doing so will mean you… LOSE YOUR DEPOSIT” and “I don’t know why people insist on using the kitchen tops as chopping boards, doing so will mean you…. LOSE YOUR DEPOSIT”. Perhaps people would be less inclined to treat the place with little respect if the owners treated their tenants with some!

Speaking of respect, one morning when the rest of my family had decided to go down to the nearby supermarket and I was still in bed, there was a knock on my bedroom door. It then opened, and Larraine (the cleaner) walked in and in a raised voice she proceeded to “tell me off” about leaving the front door unlocked as “anyone could have walked in”. At least she knocked, eh?!

However, all of the above does not come anywhere near the accidents that were caused by faulty equipment and furniture during our stay. The first of which was due to the positioning of the sprinkler system, which meant that everytime they turned on, they would soak the stairs at the entrance of the villa. This made them extremely slippery and caused my Auntie to fall down them and bruise her leg (Pictures of the wet stairs in the gallery below).

The most severe accident however, happened to my 71 year old Grandad. On the balcony of the villa were a set of white plastic garden chairs surrounding a table. On one particular day, my Grandad (who again is 71 years of age) was sat on one of these chairs, with my 1 year old (at the time) baby sister on his lap. At this point, everyone else was inside and I was still in bed. All of a sudden, I heard a huge bang against my bedroom wall, which was actually the wall of the balcony. I quickly jumped out of bed and ran out onto the balcony, to find my Grandad slumped in a heap against the wall with my baby sister held out in front of him. There was blood all the way down the wall where he had banged his head, and when we picked up him he was so shaken that he could not walk and all he kept saying was “Is the baby ok?”. The chair had actually shattered (not just collapsed, actually shattered into pieces) beneath him whilst he was sat there. We quickly rushed to get the First Aid kit that was in the villa, only to find out that it was empty besides a few plaster wrappers and a single rubber glove!

At that time, the two maintenance staff were attending to the pool and quickly ran up onto the balcony also. One was quick to clean up all traces of blood and discard of the shattered chair, whilst the other took my Grandad to the nearest Spanish hospital. At the hospital, he received 6 stitches and 2 injections to the back of his head and was told to come back in a few days time to check for infection or other possible head injury. Luckily, there was no serious damage done. However, Larraine (the cleaner) was contacted about this incident, and she acknowledged that the chairs were infact broken and said that she had simply forgotten to inform us of this! In the gallery below are pictures of the wound to the back of my Grandad’s head, as well as the stitches and a note from the Spanish hospital.

We have since been in contact with the owner of the villa, seeking compensation for everything that went wrong on the holiday – especially the accident involving my Grandad and 1 year old baby sister. No apology for any of the above mentioned incidents was made and we have been informed by both Jenny and her insurance company that they have come to conclusion that my 71 year old Grandad must have been rocking (Yes, rocking?!) on the chair for it to have shattered… My Grandad is not a child, nor would he be so careless as to rock back and forth on a plastic garden chair with a baby on his lap. Also, whilst the cleaner (Larraine) had already acknowledged the broken chairs and her failure to inform us, the owner of the villa later told us that the cleaner had stated that she never said anything of the sort.

Overall the holiday was an absolute nightmare, the very definition of a holiday from hell. Jenny also owns another villa in the Benalmadena area called Villa Vita Nova and an apartment called Apartamentos Monaco – however I cannot comment on the state of these as I have not seen them, though my family and I will be staying well clear of any other properties owned by Mrs Jenny Hoy.

I have also attached a picture of the “management staff” for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

Overall I feel my final year at University went great! I have not yet had my results back for semester two, but I managed to get some pretty awesome marks for semester one. My best being Web Development where I got 92% for the system I developed!

Semester two was a toughy. With the main bulk of implementation to do on my software engineering project (A replacement file explorer for Windows XP), a 2D game to create for the Advanced Programming for Computer Games module (See video below!) and more.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So with University over I am left thinking… “What next?”. Well, I have a fantastic holiday to look forward to on the 13th July – going away to Benalmadena in Spain for 3 weeks – which should be fantastic!

Meanwhile, I have been spending a fair amount of time learning even more C++ and some 3D game engines such as OGRE 3D. Web development is also on my list of things to keep up, so perhaps expect to see some additions to http://tdy.me

A final note for those of you who follow me on Twitter (if you’re not, why the hell not?! Click here and hurry up!) I apologize for the lack of activity of late. Now that I have time again, I will get my act together and get the tweets rollin’!

So until next time!

iSpeedReader is an iPhone/iPod Touch application that (funnily enough) lets you speed read. The application allows you to enter your own text, import text from the web, change the Words Per Minute speed on the fly, rewind, pause, forward and play your text.

RazorianFly.com (A great iPhone app review site) recently wrote a great preview of iSpeedReader as writer James took it for a spin.

The great news is that iSpeedReader has just hit the App Store! I am incredibly excited as this is my first ever iPhone/iPod Touch application and seeing it in the App Store is just simply amazing!

I hope you will all go and take a look. I think you will like what you see!