Interesting to note that the US and UK TV schedules are starting to become very close together. The usual “months” of time between show A starting in america and england have dropped a lot. Take a look at Prison Break - Season 3, this is out tonight in the US and follows on the 24th September in the UK. Seems like the online world has forced a lot of change.
Add comment September 17th, 2007
I’ve just recieved the Humax 9200 TB PVR Freeview Recorder.
Initial impressions (visually)
First impressions are good. The case is good quality with easily accessible points though I’d be happier if the USB connection was at the rear of the device as opposed to the front (within the pull down flap). Those of us with PC’s acting as media machines could have a constant and hidden access.
The remote control is a breath of fresh air given the usual rubbish which comes with some freeview recievers. It’s large but it seems easy enough to use though the design doesn’t seem to meld itself with the black pvr.
In terms of size - the device is around the same size as a VHS player or one of the larger DVD players. It’s not sleek but it isn’t bulky either.
Installation
The installation is a breeze. Connect the wires and the box takes care of itself. It’s wise to run through the documentation and study the remote control pages.
Operation
I can’t recommend this device enough. The picture quality is superb (and recorded), the sound is great and the operation is easy. I think there are some elements where the UI could be improved but as a general rule it’s awesome. Streaming recorded files from the device to a the PC was a little slow but they worked however they come through as TS files (Transport Stream MPEG-2 Video Stream) which are large and will probably require converting at a later stage to something like xvid or mp4.
If you’re looking for a great PVR for freeview get this 
Add comment September 17th, 2007
Microsoft Surface aims to be the ultimate home system. The multi-touch system is essentially a glass topped table with a touch screen interface allowing you to directly interact and achieve “stuff”. The similarity (especially the photo manipulation) is strikingly similar to Jeff Han’s multi-touch demo which I know caused a lot of comment back in 2006. Much of the demo focuses on image manipulation, games, mapping, music etc..
Obviously a lot of companies have been working in this area and Microsoft’s latest product (good name by the way) is an attempt
to bring it into the family environment. It’s attractive, sleek and potentially quite good fun. At a cost of around $3000+ for a
30″ system I think this will be the playtoy for the very well off and not a mainstream product. As with all things the price will tumble and eventually achieve “normal people” penetration.
I must however comment on the “demo” on the MS Surface site (link above). Yes it looks attractive, yes some of the things it does look fun but heres two some (1) gripes about the demo and (2) concerns
Gripes:
1. Placing “random” hardware items (read camera/phone) onto a glass table computer and within a millisecond pulling off and placing all photos onto the desktop seems totally unrealistic. Firstly, you have to assume the item is already connected “somehow” to the system be it by bluetooth or wifi. Second to connect, find, access and read “data” from these devices is never a millisecond job - the demo tries to convince you it is..
2. The credit card scene is just nuts. I cant begin to say how much i hate this. Maybe it is possible but the giant “leap” of advancement from our current method to this…
Concern:
Whats the point? I understand its a new interface to work with computing but it’s limited in scope. Looking down at the screen and not actually being able to face it directly means you’re more than likely not going to be able to use this as a workstation/proper computer.
I can only conclude it’s destined to be an entertainment centre of sorts and even then who wants to watch video on a screen in the middle of a table, its not like you can sit back in your chair and watch a movie..
Add comment May 31st, 2007
I was watching some videos over at Google Code and I came accross Dasher which is an attempt to do away with the good old keyboard.
Now, I understand the idea behind it and I also like the idea of moving ahead with newer ways of getting information from our brains into computers but I just couldnt really get this to work.. at any speed atleast. The idea is good but for me the suggested letters start to take up too much of the view whilst the actual letters I wanted tended to stay hidden.
For instance typing “I am not going to be af” was easy and very quick but when I want to complete the last word to say “afraid” I am presented initially with options they think are more important thus loosing the focus on the letters I want and in turn making me slow down my approach. Now, next I wanted to write “of” but on entering “o” Im presented with N, R and U as priority letters and “f” is hidden away. I think this is an interesting idea but I would prefer the letter all FLAT allowing me to quickly shift into the correct location because I know exactly what direction to go given a symetric A-Z vertical list.
Im not sure this will take off as I dont really think its any faster and the keybaord is to … easy by comparison - I dont even have to look at the keyboard anymore to type so its not a hardship to write.
What are your thoughts?
Add comment April 26th, 2007
I have one Great device, good playback (note: this device has serious issues with supporting certain DIVX/XVID codecs and wont go near AC3 sound).
Anyway, I was at the pub, I stepped on mine and smashed the screen 
So! Creative offer a £125 price for exchange of the device - not a bad deal since a new one will set me back another £220.
1 comment April 1st, 2007
I’ve seen one I’ve touched one I’ve played with one!
So what do I think? Not bad, small and descreet with typical Apple styling. They get hot, quickly, but overall I think they are a nice design and the plug and play straight into the HDMI of your nearest HDTV is quick and simple. I had a go on the 63″ Samsung Plasma (720p) and it was nice.
Connectivity to ethernet or wireless is easy (though the keyboard and nav stuff to enter passwords is… interesting . iTunes needs to be v7.1+ to work with iTV. I’ll play around more with it when I get the chance - so far the resultion of the media clips available via the web are.. poor when you consider that Apple is specifically aiming this product at the HDTV market where we expect HIGH resolution content.
Personally I’m going to wait and see. Ill only give this thing the slightest hint of my OWN money when there are reliable hacks for XviD, DivX, maybe H.264 and MPG. I have no interest in paying Apple a bean until the content I have plays without issue. Nice try, but eventually they WILL learn. It’s funny that Apple has no issue pushing out MP3 playback on it’s devices but denies XviD and such which are the most popular media codecs out there.
Ill post a pic when I get a chance.
Add comment April 1st, 2007
FOWA (Future of Web Apps)
I was at the conference this week and it was pretty good. Some interesting things were shown and said and I’ve come away with perhaps a few more ideas and new things to try out.
I have to say that the conference does seem to be a lot about the sponsoring companies getting significant air time to big up their own products which isn’t something I really appreciate.
Chris Wilson did a decent talk about Internet Explorer, it’s evolution and where it is today but I was more interested in his ideas for the next generation of web browser. For me personally, I felt as though this was more a talk and promotion of MSIE 7 than a talk about where we are going next. He is obviously influential in the development of the browser and it would have been great to hear about what things he thinks and perhaps we are going to see in future revision of the browser.
Rasmus was awesome, I thought he gave a decent enough talk and the tools he was using to profile PHP loads was very interesting. If you can get a hold of his notes then you should, I scrawled down references to KCacheGrind, Valgrind and Callgrind, all of which combined to profile the load times within a PHP script. Very cool.
Simon Willison was good too actually. He was enthusiastic about openID (which looks good) and he gave a decent rundown of what’s involved and why its good but also bad. I think we’re a long way off from seeing this adopted in the mainstream but I think with some time and development it will become big. I think the best question from the floor came at this point when asking about single logins from non-web applications. Simons answer was that we should solve one thing at a time (UNIX style) and he has a point. Bringing up a small browser window in an application is no big deal so login could be easy and information easily obtained back into the main application – actually I may try this tonight.
Anyway, it was a good day and it’s good to see other people hyped about all this stuff and ending on Brice’s talk about contactoffice.com was great – he was awesome
Add comment February 22nd, 2007
I’ve been writing a few ajax objects, but im pretty fed up of rewriting ajax stuff to suit specific onreadystate changes. The following object I’ve done basically pushes the ajax onreadystate process to a new object which you pass into the core ajax object. The source is here, take a look.
Simply put, the following is how it works.
function ReadyStateHandler1(){
this.parseparseAjax = function( __ajaxobject ) {
if ( __ajaxobject.readyState==4&&__ajaxobject.status==200){
//etc etc
}
}
var handler1 = new ReadyStateHandler1();
var ajax = new Ajax();
ajax.setCallingReference(handler1);
ajax.setUrl("/Some/Url");
ajax.process();
Anyway - it might be of some use in something you do.
Add comment February 13th, 2007
So I was playing with the Sony FX1E HDV Video Camera (one of the first to record at 1080i) and the request was to push video out to the 63″ Samsung Plasma at work (yes, 63 )
We got an S-Video lead and it worked fine but the question came as to why the resolution seemed a little blurry/low. I didn’t know this but S-Video only outputs at 480i or 576i resolutions (so basically standard def resolution). To actually push out the content at a cool 1080i you needed to connect up the composite out and then into the composite IN on the TV. It looked lovely and was running at a cool 720p - the quality difference is significant to say the least. For those of us in England, high def stuff is still fairly new and not common place so actually seeing a film of yourself and people you know in HD is very cool
ON a complete side point I’m going to be wiping Vista from my hard disk (i hate it - i’ve been through all the versions since longhorn previews and the final thing is far from finished). I will be creating a lovely XP SP2 system with a partition for Ubuntu 6.10 EDGY. Im probably going to push myself to start using Ubuntu permenantly - I did for a bout 6 months a few years ago but I fancy going back to it!
Current setup: AMD 64 3400 - Fatality ABIT board - 2×200GB Maxtor SATA II - 2×350GD Seagate SATAII (1.1 Terrabytes ) - 2 GIG Corsair - 6800 GT Nvidia (Note: I dont play games much so I dont really need a great GFX).
I’m tempted to go forward to the Intel Core Duo but Im going to wait a while and see what happens - I hear that AMD is going to push out QUAD core soon so I am waiting on this.. I am an AMD fan boy!
Add comment February 9th, 2007
Charlie Brooker over at the Guardian writes a great piece on why Mac’s are crap. Loved it and more so since those truly useless adverts currently being aired.
Charlie missed out a good point too.. Mac’s are apparently so cool and amazing that Apple decided to launch boot camp to enable people to load Windows on Mac hardware.. hmm… sounds like they recognise Windows and the PC are pretty good. Utterly lame adverts. Next!
Add comment February 5th, 2007
Please, take a look at UncleGuy.co.uk and contribute. The best shots of every month will get a free uncleguy t-shirt sent to them!
Add comment February 1st, 2007
This is why the internet is great. A while I go I found a Javascript implemention of converting an easting/northing to latitude and longitude written by Roger and Carabus.co.uk. I decided to port this to java for my work and now Adam Retter from the “Devon Portal Project” has pushed this out to XQuery for his work. It’s good example of community Anyway, below are the links to the original JS version aswell as the ported ones.
Northing/Easting to Lat/Lon in XQuery - Adam Retter
Northing/Easting to Lat/Lon in Java - Me
Northing/Easting to Lat/Lon in Javascript - Roger @ Carabus
Appologies to Adam for not seeing his email, my account gets SPAMMED to death.
Add comment February 1st, 2007
Take a 40″ Samsung F71 (LE40F71BX) 1080p LCD TV and mix it with a XBOX 360 - the result?
Frankly, pretty damn good. It’s often dependent on the game in question but so far it’s difficult to not be impressed with the combination.
For those of you thinking this will be ultra amazing, you may be a bit dissapointed - the graphics were pretty good but for me personally, they didnt hold a patch to a PC game running at full 1080p resolution. I haven’t played with the XBOX enough yet to give any meaningful blurb about it apart from the sound is amazing and the screen holds up really well when running games.
I also noticed the LE40F71BX is now available for around £1200-1300 which is reasonably annoying - but I think i’ve had a few hundred quids worth out of it so far
After seeing the TV my parents are now on the big screen hunt and despite my arguments they are probably going for a 42″ Pioneer Plasma (The Pioneer PDP 427XD). Reviews are pretty good and since they’ll be doing the TV thing more than any PC stuff I can understand..
Link to PDP-227XD
Add comment January 24th, 2007
It’s shame you cant borrow a TV for a time. We have a debate going about the pros and cons of the Plasma versus the LCD. I’d love to be able to actually run a Samsung Plasma along side the F71 and actually test the differences. In shop demos are always poor with ill informed staff and a total inability to display screens side by side.
You also need prolonged use of a product to really give it a proper test. Magazines are fine but I dont think they have enough time to really put a screen through it’s paces. For instance, the F71 has awesome picture quality on standard definition when playing movies, dramas and such but it does fall down slightly when viewing studio content such as the news.
Now, if I was Engadget I could use my clout to borrow one - but alas im not!
Add comment January 15th, 2007
I got the Media Centre up and running on the Samsung F71. It looks lovely. I used the Hiper Media case which is awesome. It’s the size of an average DVD player and houses the entire system without issue.
The only issue is the coolermaster low profile CPU heatsink which whirls away and makes far too much noise. The best way to counter this was a quick trip to Maplins to purchase a 12 to 7V converter (£1.99) for the fan which reduced the noise by half and obviously the fan speed.
Here’s current pics (tv is pushing out standard def..):
Add comment January 15th, 2007
I should be getting the “Hiper Media Case” from the guys at xcase.co.uk. It looks like it’s going to be a decent addition to the AV setup as it’s pretty slim. I also had to get the shallow CPU heatsink/fan for a P4 as the current one is far too big for the new case.
I already have a Windows Media Centre PC but the case is pretty bulky and my choice of power supply etc created a higher noise level than I would of ideally liked. Given that I bought a ton of new kit this case was actually pretty cheap (49 quid?) and it will slot well with the other stuff.
Although the current PC (P4 2.5Ghz/1.5Gig Ram/250GIG IDE/MicroATX MSI) isnt great I want it primarily for the media centre aspect. I may however upgrade a few things as the Samsung F71 has a lovely picture and thought of playing some PC games on it makes me dribble a little bit
I’ll post some pictures of the rig once Im done
1 comment January 12th, 2007
This is just something I’ve been experimenting with as a bit of fun, it’s in no way proven nor optimized but I thought i’d share it. Essentially it allows a series of images to be shown and when the mouse is hovered it will slightly scale them and if clicked they will move. A demo at the moment but it has some interesting possibilities for future stuff we are doing.
Ta ta
Add comment January 11th, 2007
The Sony NS76H HDMI DVD upscaler is a really good piece of kit. The one I bought plays alternate format (divx) and suprisingly XviD (which is not stated on the spec sheets). The upscaling seems to work very well and I suspect, given the quality on some stuff that it also attempts to upscale xvid/divx as well as dvd’s. The remote control is ok but it’s frustrating in that you cant display what mode the player is pushing out content in. For instance, I cant tell what upscaling mode it is using for media and this would be nice. Overall, a good piece of kit and a nice price.
Add comment January 8th, 2007
The TV arrived. It’s amazing. A really good choice for all the things I wanted to do with it. I think the Panasonic 600 series may have made a better TV in general but overall for movie/tv/PC use this thing is truely amazing - no question. Using Google earth via this screen is like a new type of PC expierence!
One of the problems with regards to buying this kind of kit is that you quickly see the flaws and where you need to “upgrade”. This being said I bought a Sony NS76H HDMI DVD upscaler (this is a bit of fun as I dont expect a huge amount of difference but the price wasnt too bad) and I also got a Sony HDMI AV Amplifier and a set of Sony 6.1 Suround sound speakers. One would think that this is it and I hope so - I cant imagine purchasing anything further for Video/TV until the price of Blu-ray comes down and the war between the two formats is more…. done. I think blu-ray will dominate but who knows..?
Add comment January 3rd, 2007
I took the plunge and got a Samsung F71 Series 40″ 1080p LCD TV.
If you know me then you’ll know that if I’m interested in anything then I will make it my mission to understand it all and really try and get good at something before I proceed. I may not spend the most possible but I try to at least get a grip of it so I can make a better decision than just turning up at Dixons and buying something.
Buying a TV is HARD. There isnt any other way to describe it. The gigantic choice currently available makes buying very difficult and the conflicting opinions throughout the web and via the specialist HD TV magazines doesnt help. Up until a week a go I had decided than a Panasonic 42inch Plasma (600 series) would probably be the TV I bought. It has rave reviews and it’s consistantly liked. I had a nagging feeling about it (and I do still have one with the samsung) but the Panasonic is Plasma - which to be truthful I didnt want. Aside from the usual pros and cons of Plasma the one thing that got me was the resolution.
Standard television singles in the UK run at 576p which essentially means than vertically there are 576 pixels. HDTV runs at 720p and can go up to 1080p. You can easily deduce that as the vertical pixel count goes up so to does the horizontal and subsequently the resolution and picture quality increases.
If we look at the Panasonic Plasma we can see that it’s resolution for a 16:9 format screen is 1024×768 pixels. This is the classic 4:3 scape used on many PC monitors and I believe that it’s turned into 16:9 via the shape of the pixels used, in this case Panasonic use “rectangular” pixels. Additionally if you look at the resolution chart on wiki (here) you’ll notice that 1024×768 is considered an XGA resolution and not HDTV of which 1280×720 and 1920×1080 are. This is probably easily disproved but when you’re researching a new subject this is the kind of information you base decisions on.
For me, i wanted three core things out of the purchase.
First, I wanted a decent TV which would play well with current Satelite content.
Second, I wanted a TV which would be good enough to cope with Blu-Ray/HD-DVD at high quality and HD television. I realise that this isnt economically possible for me yet (blu-ray players are £1000) and HD television is in it’s infancy. I at least wanted to set myself up with something which would be good enough for the future until SED comes out .
Lastly - I want a decent PC monitor - something which will turn playing games via a PC or and XBOX into something amazing.
The plasmas just dont cut it. They have poor overall resolution which kills the PC monitor aspect and they dont cater (yet) for the high quality HD players. Since I wanted the TV now I had to get what I thought was the right one.
So there we have it. Ill put up with the possible motion blur and such - overall I am happy about it but it will take a while to decide if I made the right decision - yay!
1 comment December 26th, 2006
Just finished my first program for Windows Mobile in C#. Ill post more when im done but I want to test out a few things - has a lot of cool potential..
Add comment December 24th, 2006
The Beeb’s “Have your say” feature is good. It’s got some seriously good content but the approach used to view the information is slightly difficult. The web page has a small central comment area and it can be quite hard to follow all the conversations. Anyway, this brings me nicely around to a new project I’ve been working on. I decided to utilise the BBC’s RSS feeds for Have Your Say an additionally the search system which they implemented in XML. Using the two areas I was able to create an application for monitoring all the “Have Your Say” areas plus adding “Related news articles” based on the topic of the “Have Your Say” title..
I haven’t finalised a lot of the bits and bobs yet so this is not currently “released”, however if you fancy testing it out then give me a mail and ill see what I can do!
1 comment November 28th, 2006
This project just keeps on getting better. By really taking advantage and pushing the boundaries on javascript it’s very possible to start creating some truely inspiring systems which really interact with the user in real time. The boundaries of stateless web are disappearing and this new era is really rather interesting and has so much potential. Part of my thought does also go towards search engines and how they plan to adapt to the content generated in real time (ajax). A lot of us work hard towards targeting information we publish being used by search engines to give results and attract audience. Anyway, the mymaps project for LondonTown is seriously cool. The concept of being able to purchase your hotel via an interactive map is very nice but the added features really bring this app into it’s own place.
Add comment October 7th, 2006
I’d also like to add my best wishes to Richard Hammond and his family and freinds. Yesturday, Richard was trying to break the land speed record (300mph) in a “Vampire”. On one of his runs the jet powered car hit the grass and rolled for a long distance with the final resting place apparently upside down burried in the ground.
The “Hamster” was taken to Leeds hospital where he was critical overnight. He is now critical but stable. There isnt any news on what is currently wrong with him but one would hazard a guess at head and back injuries being the major concern.
Richard is one of the lynch pins for the awesome Top Gear program and im sure I am one of many that hope he has a speedy recovery. He seems like a great guy.
Add comment September 21st, 2006
Microsoft have rolled out Vista 5536. Its a good build with a lot of potential but there are some REALLY annoying things going on which are turning me off very quickly.
1. Playing video and then doing something which requires an admin confirmation resets the aero interface to the plain and boring one.
2. Everytime I full screen moving video in Media Player 11 the sync goes completely, by seconds. Its rubbish.
3. Whats the deal with the specifying of headphones or speakers and things not playing sound..? I had to specifically set the headphones to the default device before they would play through them - then switch it back to play via speakers. Rubbish.
4. Wireless network discovery isnt great and the general wireless ease of use is poor.
5. I dont want to start on how much I hate the interface for Media Centre. It does not work, full stop.
6. The system seems to really slow down after video use. Dragging windows is slow.
7. I had three processes “control.exe” which were 100% use on the CPU. There was nothing amazing running.
8. Battery consumption was gigantic! Also, and I dont know if this is true, but my laptop was SO hot when running vista -my assumption is the graphics card was going nuts.
9. When you RDC to vista from another machine and log back into the vista box the sidebar has gone.
10. Network file transfer times are laughable. INitial prediction on a 1gig movement is 30 minutes which after 2 minutes comes down to 3 minutes..
Control.exe (The Control Panel) now looks screwed. Running this eats the CPU at 50% and never stops. It’s also managed to kill the aero interface completely and I cant revive it. Complete shutdown doesnt resolve the issue.
I’ve also had major issues with copying files over wireless. Im currently getting little progress on transferring 300 megs from one PC over to another. The copying dialogue refuses to come up and its reporting 2 hours and 31 minutes in the task bar. This kind of basic thing is really important to making users feel confident - currently im hovering in the middle as I do like some of the features but it isnt good.
Add comment August 30th, 2006
I dont know how to tell you how much I hate this website and its offerings. The idea that placing a current “terror” level on your website is just scare mungering, oppurtunistic and pretty tasteless. Keep the people afraid, very afraid!.
Add comment August 15th, 2006
Following on from the weather feeds I did supported by backstage.bbc.co.uk I’ve now added a slightly modified XML feed which should be compatible with RSS readers out there. The feeds gives a daily summary for a specific location.
http://server-2.webcoding.co.uk/feeds/weather.htm
1 comment July 24th, 2006
Wow, the heat just keeps on going in the good old UK.. This week the weather is going to be:
30,30,34,32,30 (celcius)
86,86,93,90,86 (faran)
Dave Winer thinks its hot in his neck of the woods!
Myspace is down due to a power problem. Sorry, I don’t think this is the full story. Firstly, the worlds number one website only exists at “one” datacentre with zero redundancy? Secondly, what datacentre only has a sinlge power feed coming in? Datacentres always have multiple redundant power, net, air conditioning links etc etc.. Lastly, if myspace is down then surely a host of other sites should be affected, given that the data centre which hosts myspace must host some other high profile sites.
Add comment July 24th, 2006
I missed this first time around, very interesting letter from the MPA to the Swedish Government essentially demanding the closure of the Pirate Bay torrent site..
More and more coverage of the rival mp3 player coming from Microsoft. The Microsoft ZUNE is going to compete directly with the ipod.. this is excellent, lets hope apples propriatary stuff starts to end, its old news and getting too costly.
Add comment July 22nd, 2006
Interesting and very important move coming from Yahoo! as they release an unrestricted MP3 of Jessica Simpsons new single, more at the bbc
A picture can say a thousand words, this does it well
Valleywag got mugged last night, I bet Scoble was involved
Add comment July 21st, 2006
Bought a pair of KOSS headphones - what a complete waste. I bought some about 4 months ago and they broke (the hearing of the left side failed).. I thought that this may have been down to something I’ve done so bought a new pair.. Two weeks later and the new pair are broken again, this time the right side hearing. Flimsy, easily damaged and not worth the investment - ill be taking my money elsewhere.
Add comment July 19th, 2006
BoingBoing pushed out a feature on the _very_ old story about the Microsoft/Sound Forge (deepzone) pirating things. Seriously, did you guys even bother to check up on this, Slashdot featured it in November 2004 after a German online magazine made some noise. Really OLD news.
Slashdot article from November 2004
Add comment July 19th, 2006
Haven’t seen the Google Parks before, they’re very funny.
Probably well known but I thought I would point out Travel Wiki, this is an excellent travel resource for finding out about different countries and such.
Kids are cool, look at this
Jayne and Richard are up for eviction this Friday in BB7. Mikey also being investigated by police for sexual assault (WTF??)
Add comment July 19th, 2006
Wierd and wonderful video of insects doing circus tricks [youtube]
Guardian reporting of the London based “Wank-a-thon“, odd.
Given the current middle east state, this bible code piece is interesting. No I don’t believe it but its interesting anyway.
Scoble points out the current noise being made about the IT calendar. If they want to do it, then let them.
Sad to see India has joined the growing number of nations to censor the internet for its citizens. Currently a number of blogging outfits are blocked.
Suprised by the new interface for Google Earth Beta 4. Not sure this is a good idea, each time you use the nav you have to think about which element you’re using..
Went to podtech.net, site got me confused, then got bored, then left.
Add comment July 18th, 2006
I’m not an overly big fan of Scoble but he does a good job of presenting (along with Jessica Arnold) some pretty good features of outlook 2007. I’ve tried it, and its _slow_ but apart from that its a decent piece of software and I have to say the video piece has shown me a few more things I didnt know outlook 2007 could do?
Add comment May 20th, 2006
So it’s about to start again. It’s one of those things which takes a lot of flak when its on but lots of us tune in to see whats happening. Im sure this year they will try and find the worst possible people in the world and im sure they’ve succeeded. Thing about it is that after seven years and the massive amount of press and negative publicity contestants have recieved you’d imagine that knowone would want to enter the competition but alas it seems there are muppets out there that do.
So, lets prepare for a few months of big bro television and no doubt some small talk at the office about the wankers being let into this years house. For those of you who deny watching it I dont believe you, in fact you are all closet big bro enthusiasts no doubt adding sqillions of messages to the forums out there!
Update: Indeed, they are all f****** morons. What a shocker. If Big Brother wants to encourage sex ans such why do they insist on getting a bunch of people who are obviously so incompatible. Odd. Anywho, my current favorite is Peter “Tourette’s” boy. His first words to posh boy George “Hi, how are you.. WANKER!” were perfect. Finally, why o why do the audience love camp gay man? They are grating and should just get the fuck off the TV
Add comment May 18th, 2006
Sitting at Waterloo today I was suprised to see that ReadyToSurf doesnt close all its ports before you pay. Web access if blocked and you are redirected to another “pay now” page but suprisingly accessing a remote webpage on a random port number (I have one setup) allows me straight through as does Groove and a bunch of other things. I would of thought that they would shut down access to everything but it seems not! Next step then is to setup a proxy via a alternate port web server and run mod_proxy to the beebs site or something. Small things.
I might actually try some bit torrent to see if they are blocking specific common ports or just the standard web/mail/news ports.
Add comment May 18th, 2006
Snap.com has made to the headlines with a new style of search engine, based (it would seem) on the Google Suggest site. For me personally I think they’ve gone to public too quickly. The level of results is very small and the interface is (whilst ajaxy) not great. Google depth of results, exisiting suggest system and clean interface makes it a worthy winner everytime. Thinking about it some more I’m not sure what the point is given that there is nothing Snap.com offers to me as an extra.
Add comment May 18th, 2006
A pretty good summary of the events can be found at Valleywag. But seriously, sometimes blogging seems to be massively over-the-top. So, Michael posts up a design he likes, it really isnt that big of a deal. Arguments, resignations and such all done over the web via blogs just seems wierd, how about actually talking to the person face to face first? Thats the problem with blogs isn’t it, you react straight away and dont let things calm down and put in any thought, its all write write write.
Add comment May 17th, 2006
Google have released the “Google Notebook” which looks promising, however I cant help but feel that notes not accociated with a specific URL or domain will soon get muddled. Personally I think it would be great if they assigned a domain (e.g. labs.google.com or www.google.com) to each note you make and they only appear when you are at that page - for me its MUCH more useful. Im sure being able to search through the whole lot will be a good idea but my proposed addition makes sense to me.
IN addition, the ability to have the notebook as a sidebar would also be beneficial, I appreciate the small icon and such but a permenant sidebar which doesnt interfere or overlay on the browser would be better.
In all it’s good but I wont be using it until some changes are made.
Edit: Also, WHY do Google consistantly develop applications for Microsoft Internet Explorer first? The reality is that the majority of those who WANT to test these apps first and spread the word are usually devout Firefox users or any other browser than IE.
Add comment May 16th, 2006
“England boss Sven-Goran Eriksson has admitted he picked Arsenal teenager Theo Walcott for the World Cup despite never having seen him play a match.”
Good on you Sven. Sometimes these type of pickings whilst on the face of it look odd and probably stupid are also the moments of inspiration which lead to good things. Lets hope that he picks the good teams and leaves out the waste of space that is David “Im only playing because I make the team money” Beckham.
Seriously, Beckham is a strain on the team and he should be left behind in England to advertise Pepsi some more.
Add comment May 9th, 2006
Is this the best show on the planet? I think so.
Clarkson, Teeth and Hippyboy just go from strength to strength in what is probably the most funny TV show on. This week sees them create a convertible people carrier which is tested at a zoo and in a car wash, the stig crashes a £400,000 car and James Hewitt is unknown when he races the modestly priced car. Is it any wonder this is one of the most downloaded UK shows out there? It’s brilliant and if you have watched it you should. Roll on episode 2.
1 comment May 8th, 2006
Microsoft have released the latest IE7 Beta 2 Preview, heres my first impressions and thoughts as a developer:
More soon…. when I manage to uninstall the first version. I have to save this now as im worried the PC is going to crash..
A complete waste of time - uninstalling IE7 just killed any use of IE Explorer 6. Typing an address in the IE nav bar just says “Unable to load object”. Crap.
1 comment April 25th, 2006
The new Office 2007 is nice. The previous pre-release was lacking but the new version, well, i take my hat off to Microsoft. It’s visually attractive, well rendered and whilst it might be a bit slow in areas its a nice piece of software.
The menuing system has been improved a hundred fold and things seem to flow very nicely. Visually it’s impressive. I feel like im using an improved (albiet similar) version of Office 2003. It would of been great to have a slim line version for computers which arn’t up to the challenge but overall its good.
Add comment April 22nd, 2006
The BBC is reporting that a large number of “security holes” in Firefox have been fixed and are now available in a new update.
This alone isn’t really any news or of much interest however the comment “Programs like Firefox have been thought to be more secure than other browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer” whilst true is also misleading.
The truth is that Microsoft is famous for releasing critical updates that appear to fix a problem but quietly solve numerous other issues in different areas. That Firefox has an open approach to listing ALL security problems is of benefit to us all. Hiding security issue fix after fix in a single unlabelled security update from MS means its impossible to actually compare the number of actual security issues that exist in MSIE.
I’m also interested in thier statement that some 80% of browsers are still MSIE. Whilst I believe that this is the case for the BBC site one wonders if this is actually a complete NET trend. Surely browser statistics are meaningless unless related to the type of meterial they were measured against. One would expect that a higher percentage of people who utilise The Register (for instance) would actually be using Firefox given the nature of the content. Sweeping general statements arn’t great and “if” 80% of the BBC’s users utilise IE then make it clear.
In other completely unrelated news:
1 comment April 20th, 2006
As a little project I’ve setup a pretty comprehensive feed set of weather data available in XML format for both 24 hour and five day forecasts (note that some 24 hour forecasts are not available).
The feeds are now live and working well so if you are after some sort of XML feed for weather then give them a try. I am still messing with the idea of creating additional slim line RSS feeds for the weather but fitting the information is potentially difficult.
More info at the weather part of my site
Two last points, I’ve also implemented the top 40 chart (uk) to XML and im also providing RSS feeds for ARIA.co.uk’s product list (which is ace).
Add comment April 13th, 2006
I get a lot of requests for Ajax Ticker and BBC TIcker and most of the tickers ive done are either in c# or java so I thought I would knock up a simple ajax/js ticker which people can simply add into a website.
Building this type of ticker is split into three small parts. The first is to create a server side file that can grab a remote RSS XML feed. Ajax doesnt want you to access remote URLS which are not part of your domain, for security reasons. As such we need to create a very small server side file that can act as a proxy between your domain and the RSS feed you want, e.g.
Ajax Requests BBC News Feed -> A serverside file (e.g. php) is called on your domain -> This requests the BBC feed and hands it back to the ajax caller
To sum it up, whilst you are getting a remote feed it appears to ajax as though its coming from the local domain.
The second stage is to create the two portions of javascript we’re going to need. We need an ajax processor to obtain and process and RSS feed and we need a controller to handle the ticker aspect.
Third stage is the HTML, this is really simple and essentially you setup the correct elments and call the javascript file.
I’ve put all the files you need in this all in one ajax ticker file (rar)
Also, you can view a live example of the Ajax RSS Ticker using the BBC News Feed.
1 comment March 30th, 2006
I’ve taken the Top 40 Singles chart provided by the BBC at bbc.co.uk/radio1/chart and with a bit of scraping and shaping I ‘ve managed to produce a pretty decent XML feed for those that want it.
If anyone wants to see modifications or has any good ideas on how to push this into an RSS feed then give me an email.
UK Top 40 in XML (Singles Chart)
4 comments March 28th, 2006
Since I detest most batch image convertors I thought I would write my own. An easy to use image conversion tool for you to use.
Freeware of course. Simply takes the entire contents of a directory (image files of course) and batch converts them to a number of image formats (png, gif, wmf, emf, jpg, tif). You can resize by percentage scaling, specific width and height or by specifying a specific width and the system will auto calculate the height.
Try it by downloading here
Add comment March 18th, 2006
I’ve just downloaded the Royal TS replacement for Remote Desktop which is supposed to be excellent however I’ve come across what looks to be a problem with .NET installers.
Im currently running the latest and greatest .NET CLR 2.0.50727 however this application requires 1.1.XXX. The result is that when I attempt to run the application the installer barks saying i must install this .NET distro but I have the latest version! Totally stupid - you would of thought it would be happy to continue but it seems I must have the exact version of .NET it needs. Come on!
Add comment March 17th, 2006
