Just testing moblie blogging.
Archive for the 'Geek' Category
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/ just goes to show that Absolute Power and real life have so much in common 
Apart from their inability to proof-read, Auntie are great. For decades they have been at the forefront of technology and broadcasting. The DG has once again pushed forward with their vision, and they are wanting the communities they serve to help.
If you haven’t seen it already take a look at http://backstage.bbc.co.uk and http://open.bbc.co.uk/reboot/
I’ll try and get some more detailed thought when I’m not at work.
Well the site is finally starting to fall into place. A few things are still broken, and I’m trying to change the theme a little. Nothing major, just a few changes. The site is now hosted at Dreamhost things appear to be ok…. A little slow perhaps, but I’ll see how it pans out.
At work this morning I got the best bit of spam so far
My dog Toxi has to be happy again.
I only write this mail, because it is my last hope.
I am 16 years old and have a small puppy which I got 2 months ago.
His name is Toxi. Toxi was hit by a car 2 days ago and now he is just lying in his corner not getting up.
My father says, Toxi should be put to sleep, but the Doctor said there is a chance to operate.
But the operation is just to expensive for me.
What can I do, who can help me
Please write to me.
Don’t it just pull at your heartstrings
Early Thursday morning was punctuated by several power spikes at work the last one of which fried my motherboard. That left me in the position of being able to do very little work for two days 
Very annoying. On the plus side I will get a very nice new machine. RAID mirrored, 4GB of RAM ( Most of our tools aren’t 64bit ready ), Dual cored. Should play Swat4 nicely 
Well it’s been a long time coming, and it certainly hasn’t had the easiest of births, but NARC is apparently now available from Midway.
It’s got an interesting price point of $19.99 which should hopefully build up some sales, although I’m a little suspicious that there haven’t been any reviews yet. Time will tell I guess. I’m not sure when the UK release is, but I’ll be sure to get a copy just to see how long the credits are
Went to the first TLUG meeting in ages on Monday. Had an interesting talk from cmb. Afterwards, the usual pub trip to Mickey Coyles.
Afterwards met Susan, Helen, Lorna, Doug and Greg, for a pint beforeheading home. Not been upto much else really… need to get out more 
Fixed the perma links now. Changed some of the MySQL permissions too. Trying to be aware of security more. Probably failing :p Thinking of being geeky this weekend and doing stuff on the CCTV DB that I’d like to setup.
Just got back from a camping weekend up near Pitlochry It’s been a great weekend, although I’ve been full of cold. Highlights include:
)I started to upload the pictures but I’ve run out of room on my server. So I need to need to get a bigger hard drive or two. Gives me a reason to get things working ‘properly’ I’ll get the photos uploaded as soon as possible…
Yesterday I got two calls asking for computer assistance. One from my Mum, and one from my Aunt. The one from my mum just annoyed me but the one from my Aunt has got me thinking about the Torrent stuff I was mentioning. It has made me reconsider a few things.
Now I’m not 100% sure what went on, I can only make educated guesses from what my Aunt said to me. Basically she accidentally deleted about 200 of her digital photos. From what I can gather she saw the pictures under “My Pictures” on a WinXP Home machine (I think), and in a Kodak package she uses. I’m assuming that she has a Kodak digital camera. Now using this package she said that she can still see the thumbnails of her images, but when she tries to access them it reports an error saying that they have been moved/deleted.
It appears to me that two things have happened one being vastly more important than the other. Firstly my Aunt was not aware of the location of the files, but secondly the Desktop metaphor has been broken by this Kodak package! I can only assume that in an attempt to make things easier it has tried to present file/folders in it’s own way and confused the user* Adding to the confusion for my Aunt is the fact that she can still see thumbnails of her images, thus confusing her more (One would assume that the program isn’t using the Thumbs.db since that would of been deleted in the mass photograph purge too). Recently I’ve become aware of a few programs that are doing similar things, firstly a package that you can get from Adobe, and a program that has just been bought by Google.
So where does this all fit in with my Torrent thoughts? Well I was thinking of creating a Namespace Extension that shows the currently shared Torrents in a folder similar to “My Pictures”. .Torrent files are just normal files, that contain meta data. In the system I was thinking of I was going to create a NSE, and when parsing the files in the folder (Even though the NSE can sit anywhere under the root ( The Desktop for those not familiar with NSE’s) it has to conform to certain standards if it is to be displayed in the common dialog boxes) I was going to ignore the .Torrent files, and just display the files that are associated with the .Torrent. This obviously breaks the Files/Folders metaphor again (Well I think it does)
Anyway I’m starting to ramble and that previous paragraph doesn’t read so well… so I’m going to go to bed now and reread it in the morning. Perhaps then I can be more articulate
* Can I just say this is all conjecture, I don’t actually know for sure. So if you happen to work for the UI designers of Kodak software please don’t come after me with a pitchfork.
Spent the last few days helping one of Kerry’s friends setup a domain name etc. So Alex Humphreys is now the proud owner of humphreysglenthorne.co.uk. At the moment just forwards emails and aliases to a user account on my machine with gallery setup on it. I want to setup a load of other stuff for her too, just a case of getting around to it.
I’m also finally thinking of moving my shand.org.uk domain over to my actual machine. I’d need someone to act as secondary mail server for me
It might come as a suprise to some readers, that Scotland actually has a vibrant copmuter games development scene. Specifically clustered around Dundee. Charles pointed me to a Yahoo Group which I joined the other day. There has been the usual moaning about various things but it looks like it might actually spawn something fun in the Scottish Stickman Challenge.
The idea is to concentrate on gameplay, a bit like the Indiegamejam. Simply create a game with a stickman and two buttons, using only two colours! Target system is unimportant. I think the hard bit is going to be the buttons, unless they mean two buttons for actions and a d-pad/joystick. Got a few ideas so might have a go at them and lets see what Scotland’s finest can produce.
At lunch time I had a quick look at the MSDN docs regarding services. They look pretty simple overall, so once I get libTorrent compiled correctly I’m gonna have a bash at writing the service side of things. I’m also trying to get something running as a service at work. It’s proving to be a right pain the arse. And it’s far too hot in the office Currently it’s sitting at about 29C. The WHO suggest a maximum of 24C. We demand ice cream damn it
I’ve been thinking more about the idea I’ve got for the torrent client. I need to perform a few tests, but essentially it would consist of two parts. First a Windows Service that actually does the job of sharing the torrents, and secondly a Namespace extension, something akin to “My Pictures”.
There are still a few things I need to think about, firstly the whole permissions thing. If you think about the layout of user directories on your average Win2K/XP machine, you should see something like
c:\Documents And Settings
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents
C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\My Documents
Unless I can think of another/better way the current idea is to have a service running that sets up all of the torrents that are common. Then when a user logs on interactivly go to their torrent storage location and add those. That isn’t explained very well Anyway I’d better sit down and do some work.
Well my uptime reached the year level! But my ADSL died at sometime yesterday, I tried everything I could think of to get it back but in the end I just rebooted. At least I got to that year level. Now I can go about changing things I’ve wanted to on the server for ages. 2.6 perhaps, and maybe time to get my webcam working
Current uptime
On a bit of a whim I went out today and bought a new Pentax S4 digital camera. It was going for £299, but I manged to knock PhotoFactory down to £286.?? with a 128MB SD card. It’s stupidly small.
Well I setup awstats and now I can see just how much my server has been hit…. oh eck rather a lot Nice one norm. I need to get a load of all stats processed, and setup a cron job to generate the stats.
Ouch. My poor little ADSL connection has been feeling the pain of lots of people using it. My friend from uni days has an account on the machine that he uses to host photos. Well he uploaded a load of new ones, and obviously spread the word.
Things appear to be settling down a little bit now, but I think it’s the most hits the server will see in a long time Shame I didn’t have MRTG setup. I wonder if I can parse the apache logs to get a nice graph of the spike in connections