Display Madness

For once i have a little time, which makes a huge change. In the last hour or so i've been exploring my options around getting a new display to help support my Mac lovin life style. However what should be a joy filled ride through the online e-commerce world, is turning out to be a little less simple then i had imagined.

I have a budget of around £600.
My current setup is two 19" @ 2560 * 1024

However there is a major problem with my current setup, My Blackbook only supports one display. However with a little box from matrox it can support two, but at a maximum resolution of 1024 * 768 each or 2048 * 768.

Current i share the setup with my nix box, but that is getting axed (Yes blu-ray is dead/dying) in favor of consolidating all my development onto one physical machine, and running nix, solaris, windows via parallels.

Now normally i would the following choices given the price.

2 x 22" displays (3360 * 1050)
1 x 24" display ( 1920 * 1200)
1 x 27"
1 x 26"
Now two 22's would be nice, not only cause because it's big but it's also a Jay-z song(well in reverse)!

Now based on current machine specs i've actually got three choices
1 x 24" display ( 1920 * 1200)
1 x 27"
1 x 26"

These are all below my current resolution, so maybe it's the machine that needs changing ...

Ok, lets do the math

Macbook pro (legit) £1149 with student discount
2 22" displays £ 500
matrox dual head to go £140

total £1700!

sweet price point, not. What makes it worse, is that i love the macbook's form factor and would hate anything bigger. ie MB pro.

Plus for that price i could get a mac pro which i have often considered and drooled over with phil. (the computer not phil).

The other solution is to build a osx86 machine, however as developer, and with Leopard coming doing all my work on a unsupported, illegal, in-frequently updated, hacked platform strikes me as dumb.

So that leaves the single units

All of which mean i lose about 1/2 million pixels, and a couple of inches.

Heres the price breakdown
24" £430
26" £ 500
27" £ 680

So on price the 24" is a winner models in that range, that have 8bit color panels, good response times, and adjustable stands, and multiple inputs are ...
Dell's 2407wfp
Benq's 241 wp ( HDMI included!)

On the 26"'s there is one that i know of
Acer 2604
It's got a crapy stand, and no Digital inputs, infact it's only got a VGA input

And then there is 27's

Dell 2707wfp

Which is basically the 24" dell with a phat-er panel and no rotation. And a pixel pitch closer to a 19" lcd (0.294 vs 0.3)

Now we consider the pros and cons of the 24 vs 27

1. I have personal issues with spending seven bills on a lcd display, that i don't really need while people starve to death, and go to war over food.
2. The pixel pitch of the 27 is ideal, the high pixel pitch of my 19's is why i sprang for them over the 17"'s.
3. No rotation, how do i show off those cool XGL effects without being able to rotate the display as well!
4. Both give me less working resolution then i have currently.

Conclusion...

I'll wait to see if apple brings out a super notebook next week, that razor thin macbook pro that all mac geeks dream about, and if it's what i want i'll upgrade.

BTW

i recently bought my name (www.jonathandalrymple.com) as well as a couple of domain names for some projects that are in the pipeline.

CSS research

I'm completely knackered, but research is my life. One of my many clients wanted a semi transparent div. Now i say div, but they just want it to look shiny.

Basically then want an element with appox 20% opacity. Easy right, use a PNG. But that cancels out all ie versions apart from 7. How about a gif instead, you dont get alpha transparency! Well genius how about css, great, there are ways to do it on webkit, gecko, and ie, however they apply the same amount of transparency to their children.

the trick here is to think outside the box, literary...



Thanks to relative positioning, i made a solid div below my transparent div, and moved it over the transparent div, creating a the above effect. The cool things is that by modifing the z-index you can create a ghosting effect!

Best of all, there are no images used to create the above, (well apart form the obvious background pattern on the body), more testing is needed, but i think i might be on to something here.

The CSS
*{
text-align:center;
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
body{
background: url("pattern.gif");
}
div#wrapper{
margin:0 auto;
width:70%;
text-align:center;


padding:1em;
}
div#panel{
opacity: .50;
height:200px;
background: #ddd;
width:100%;
margin:0 auto;
}
div#wrapper p{
padding:1em;
background: #000;
color:#fff;
width:90%;
position:relative;
margin:0 auto;
top:-180px;
z-index:1;
}

The html

Transparent div

content goes here

Now if you excuse me, i'm off to bed

Introducing Absolution

Yes i'm alive, it may have been months since the grand plans of facebook widgets and such, but i'm back. Today i'm unleashing on the world something new(ish), A PHP framework. Now don't get me wrong it's no piece of cake, but it's not meant to be. Absolution place in the world is on shared hosts, and B grade websites, where speed of development is more important than MVC patterns and OO principles.

Well OO is always good but you know what i mean.

Currently it consists of 4 classes, that contain helper functions, that enable you to do things like print an un ordered list from a sql query in one line of code!, get a pre-sanitized variable from the query string with one line, even filter out bad characters with one line.

I plan to add more classes, and more functionality, as the framework grows up, however it's 0.01 alpha at the minute! Eventually i want this to grow into something like prototype for PHP, a lean, mean framework machine.

Also i think this place could do with a redesign, ajaxian styleee, now if only i had time.


Till another time

Quote of the Day

"We knew that when we gave it to him, that it was never gonna end up as just a simple webpage!"

My love of Jquery is starting to give me a reputation

Reverse Engineering: Facebook poking

Since i declared Poking war on all my facebook friends, i've been thinking of doing some R & D. So i'm developing a Greasemonkey Script that would enable me to reply to all the pokes simultaneously.

Well thus far, heres what i've discovered.

A poking request is made by sending the user id of the person you wish to poke to a php page.

http://(networkName).facebook.com/ajax/poke.php?id=(userID)

with this request, goes a cookie with your login credentials.


Host: solent.facebook.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061223 Firefox/2.0.0.1

Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5

Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

Keep-Alive: 300

Proxy-Connection: keep-alive

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Referer: http://solent.facebook.com/profile.php?id=511999790

Content-Length: 70

Cookie: login=[Login credentials etc. Need to workout the encoding on these]

Pragma: no-cache

Cache-Control: no-cache

As you can see i did this on my mac, using Firefox to take advantage of firebug. If you drop in the refer url it will take you that persons profile page, i imagine that this is also checked to stop spam bots, however i plan to fake the refers in the application, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Therefore in essence to automate the process, all you need to do is create an array of the users that you wish to poke, and loop though them sending your credentials each time to ensure that it is accepted by the server.

While i was poking around i also discovered that FB uses a modified version of Apache 1.3.37 (they suffix it with "fb1"). Whether this is an edit to the string, or actual modification, who knows?

Anyways, when i stop working 7 days a week, or going to bed at 2:15 am, i'll but together a small java app to take advantage of this.

Now if you think this is a lot of work, it isn't really, i got a http request class already built and fully functioning thanks to my work on isolation. So just gotta reverse engineer some more, and apply this concept.

Let the poking war continue!


Quote of the Day

Caption

Because i have time

Remember that facebook widget i spoke of?

Well it's actually in the oven, now and should be ready soon-ish, just have to work out how to communicate with the REST API that facebook uses, and i'm quids in.

Heres a screenshot of it running live in safari, and i built it based on a dashcode generate file, rather than actually using dashcode. Always more fun getting your hands dirty.

2006/ 2007; A year in review.

Alas the academic year is at an end, so i thought i would look over my highlights for the year. Fortunately, for once there weren't too many down-ers, which makes a change. In the last year, i've "grown" as a person, changed a lot socially. One thing i've developed is an extremely are head, the sheer number of compliments i've started getting, is messing with my head, resulting in a chemical reaction, often known as "Big head syndrome".

So what did i like about this year?

• Facebook!!!!
• Jaimini
• Cooking
• Chasing Women * (Not as bad as it sounds, honest)
  
• Strictly Exclusive
• Ocean & Collins
• Nokia E61
• OS X
• Java
• Black Macbook
• My Poster (you know the one ;) )
• Chocolate Bourbons
• Group Dinners
• Tunde (Even if he's a waster)
• Jai & Nick's Co*K Blocking
• Eating Popcorn for dinner
• Plagiarism ( I'm innocent )
• Easter ;)
• Luke, OG
• Stupid Flat Games
• PHP
• Linux
• Comic Life
• Steph B.
• That Monday at OC, well both actually.
• A night in Portsmouth
• Working with Schuster
• Getting my Old Job, back on both counts
• Stupid sleeping habits
• Erykah Badu
• Robin Thicke
• Mos Def
• Dave Chappelle ;)
• My nickname, Lawman
  

What do i want to improve on for next year & beyond?

• Chasing Women (what, they're first years, they need help...)
• My Personal Cleanliness, mainly my room
• Number of publicly available software projects (One is a joke for a software developer)
  
• My relationship with God (not the best at the moment)
• Income (could be better considering my skills)
• Grades (Too much coasting!)
• Language skills, 10 isn't enough, i need more
• Language, ones that other people know, like spanish etc
• general knowledge, i'm getting dumb
• Electronics , don't get it twisted with software
• act my age, yeah i'm 20 not 30 during the day and 14 at night.
• Stop speaking like a LDN kid
• Remove in'it from my vocabulary
• Improve the jokes, (long time coming)
• Start sleeping at normal times
  

Favourite moment of the year

• Coming back to uni after dropping out, or geting my macbook

Biggest Waste of time

• Pro Evo Tournaments at the SU
• A Certain individual(s)

Most Rewarding use of time

• Cooking Dinner for 6 of my friends and watching them devour it with gee

Most constructive use of time

• Building Downtime in my first week back

Biggest waste of cash/p

• That Remote control plane

Most shocking news

• One of my best friends coming out

Favourite Quotes (aka Tunde's section)

• "It's all, real stainless steel" Tunde
• "TASTE!!" Tunde
• "Fail" Anwar/ UMZ!!
• "Mrs. Lawman" Jai, Nick, Lester and whoever else was there
  
• "Lebanon is in africa" Tunde
• "I sleep on my stomach, with both arms under me, with my hands between my legs" Jaimini
• "I'm in the same place(diva) every week" Steph
• "Wasteman"
  

Well i'm pretty tired now, so i'm gonna call it a day. But i must say, sitting here writing this list had be cracking up, and smiling the whole way. It's been a great year and to all my people, thanks for the good times, and God Willing we will have so many more next year.

Jonathan "Lawman" Dalrymple

I know i can count, but i'm not sure about my mac

So in a moment of boredom, i opened up my trusty text viewer, and had a look at some files. Namely a RTF, and a Text File.

First off, i now understand why programmers love plain text files so much. First off, there are no bytes wasted on headers. It's straight into the data, no messing and no playing.

So here is the test stub

#!/bin/bash

## Coursework mass compilation

cd ~/Desktop/OOTM

javac TerminalInput.java

javac Deck.java

javac Player.java

javac Game.java

javac CardGame.java

## Run the application

##java CardGame

This was a little bash script i wrote to help compile my coursework.
Not to remember the basics, each character is equal to a single byte, or 8 bits. FF is therefore equal to 255.

The plain text file is 8KB, with 204 characters. My maths tells me that should be equal to 204 bytes. But for some reason, my mac accounts another 1300 + bytes!!

Mean while the Rtf file is 4KB, with 561 bytes, which is the exact number of characters in the file. But wait you say, there are only 204 characters in the file. Correct, so whats the other junk ....

{\rtf1\mac\ansicpg10000\cocoartf824\cocoasubrtf420
{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset77 Helvetica;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
\paperw11900\paperh16840\margl1440\margr1440\vieww9000\viewh8400\viewkind0
\pard\tx566\tx1133\tx1700\tx2267\tx2834\tx3401\tx3968\tx4535\tx5102\tx5669\tx6236\tx6803\ql\qnatural\pardirnatural

\f0\fs24 \cf0

I only went through it briefly, but it appears to show the font types, and colors for the file.

But my question to the world is, why on earth is the text file twice the size, but yet still halve the number of bytes in the hex editor?

Social Discovery

Call me socially inept, but i just realized something. You can tell when someone likes you or enjoys your company, when they start doing random things, without just cause. Now depending on what they do, you can then determine whether or not they are trying to get close to you, or in fact kill you.

Ie. I do random things for people all the time, however i personally rarely have random things done for me. Which clearly shows i'm dis ... Right let me rethink that.

But you get the point, however the caveat to this, is that you can begin to think that every random act of kindness, has a meaning. If your a pretty young lady, then it generally does. If your me, then most likely not, however every other one might have some significance.



Quote of the Day

"Look, it's my favourite Drunkard, top of the evening too ya"

Can't beat viki, you really can't

Useful Email validation

Got some javascript, for the coders out there. Not my finest work but quite neat.

This validates a email field, combined with a simple input field as shown.

HTML


"<"input id="emailInput" class="halfSize" type="text" value="Place Replay to Email here" name="replyTo" onkeyup="validateEmail( this.value);" />


However it does it in a funky AJAX way, allowing the user to see where exactly they have put a foot wrong.

it checks the following

• Address is longer than 6 characters


• There is a @ symbol present


• and there is a "." within the domain section of the email

The 6 character mimumim was calculated using the following logic,

1 = one character for username
2 = one character for the @ symbol
3 = one character for the domain
4 = one dot/decimal to seperate the domain from the TLD
6 = two characters for TLD and ccTLD.

First improvement, that one should make, is enable both the input field, and result field to be supplied as function arguements, however in my case (internet computing assignments), this is only getting used once.

Javascript


function validateEmail( pEmailObj ){

var pEmailString;
var retVal;
var returnObj = "emailValidStatus";
var whereIsSymbol;

//Setup
pEmailString = pEmailObj;
document.getElementById(returnObj).style.background = "#bf3a3a";
document.getElementById(returnObj).style.color = "#fff";
document.getElementById(returnObj).style.padding = "2px";

//Go Down a level after each check
if(pEmailString.length > 6){ //Check length

if( (whereIsSymbol =pEmailString.search(/@/)) > -1){ //Check for @ symbol

//Find the dot after the @ Symbol
var lastDot = pEmailString.indexOf( ".", whereIsSymbol)

if(lastDot != -1){ //Check for . after @ symbol
document.getElementById( returnObj ).style.background = "#71ba43";
retVal = "Valid!";
}
else{
retVal = "Invalid: Bad Domain";
}
}
else{
retVal = "Invalid: Missing @ symbol";
}
}
else{
retVal = "Invalid: Too short";
}

document.getElementById( returnObj ).innerHTML = retVal;
}


Last but not least it's Released under the GPL, so use it and abuse it.

Latest Project: Facebook Widget

To help me with my face book addiction, i've decided to make a dashboard widget, strangely enough it's for the said website, facebook. A bit more useful than the search widget that currently resides on the internet, and a lot more simple than the famed Isolation project.

After 20 minutes in photoshop here it is


ETA, is about a week i hope, besides how hard can it be ...

As i see it have to translate part of the current offical Java API to Javascript, and parse some xml. Thats the hardest part, the actual widget design should be simple. Development starts in about week, after the java work is done. ^_^

But i think i've announced too much vapourware so i need to start delivering

I'm off to bed, some of us have to work you know.

I love to function

While working on my piece of piss Java assignment, i came up with a neat little random number generating function. It's a mirror of a function that is commonly used by Objective-C developers, and allows you to have random numbers but within a range. I've casted the result before i return to the calling routine, so you simply change or remove the cast to get the primitive of your choice, as it's all Floating point arithmetic.

Java


private int randomIntWithinRange(int pLow, int pHighest, boolean pDebug){
boolean acceptableValue = false;
double possibleValue;
double finalValue = - 0.1;
int attemptsTillSuccess = 0;

//If the value is not acceptable continue
while(!acceptableValue){
possibleValue = Math.random() * (pHighest * 10);

if(possibleValue >= pLow && possibleValue <= pHighest){
finalValue = possibleValue;
acceptableValue = true;
}
else{
attemptsTillSuccess++; //How many times
}

}

if(pDebug){
System.out.println("" + attemptsTillSuccess + " attempt(s) till success"); //debuging
}

return (int)finalValue;
}

It's even does a little debugging line, so you can see the number of attempts till it succeeds. Released under the GPL 2.0, For use in non-commercial products yada yada. When i can be asked i'll write a Javascript, and C version, and if i feel really nice a VB version.

Update: With me having banned myself from facebook for a while, i thought i would make myself more useful and covert the java to ECMA script, of Javascript for lesser clued up, wasn't hard just replaced primitive declarations with var ^_^.

Javascript


function randomIntWithinRange( pLowest, pHighest, pDebug ){
var acceptableValue = false;
var possibleValue;
var finalValue;
var attemptsTillSuccess;

while(!acceptableValue){
possibleValue = Math.random() * (pHighest * 10 );

if(possibleValue >= pLow && possibleValue <= pHighest){
finalValue = possibleValue;
acceptableValue = true;
}
else{
attemptsTillSuccess++; //How many times
}
}

if(pDebug){
Document.write(attemptsTillSuccess + " attempts till success"); //debuging
}

//Damn loosely typed language!!
return Math.round(finalValue);



PS. I didn't test the javascript version, so don't count on it to work straight off the bat.

Facebook is the nuts!

Get one, i love it.

I've got in contact with people from my primary school
One of my cousins
Couple people from secondary school

Basically for someone enjoys "trying" to be social, it's amazing.

Quote of the Day

"I'm sorry charile murphy, it was an accident i'm having too much fun."

Dave Chappelle

A Guy, A Mac, and a Linux Distro

So, it's that time of year again. Everyone's disappeared to their various corners of the uk, and i'm left here to contemplate life on earth.
So many people have asked, why have i decided to stay here on my own, simple i got a lot of work to do, plus i wanna take advantage of the gym.

Heres what i got to do in the next three weeks

• Database fundamentals Coursework


• Internet Computing Assignment


• Computer Architecture Coursework


• OOTM Assignment Assignment


• Learn x86 assembly


• Finish the Fat Cheetah website


• Write & Design a reusable PHP CMS


• Write & Design a reusable PHP forum


• Apply for loads of Jobs


• Do someone else's assignment


• Cook various people dinner


• Revise for networking


• Buy and play with a Treo 680

Quite a lot of stuff if you ask me. I'm only working at maplin on the weekends, so i'm gonna try and give this thing my full attention. In my eyes these three weeks will make or break my course, prehaps in yours too ...


Now if you excuse i have to contemplate whether or not to get a facebook or not.

Quote of the Day

PS3 buyer"I need an optical cable for my PS3"
Me "Cool, how is it?"
Customer"Don't know didn't get any games."

Nice going sony, you get a grown man to fork over £425 quid, and then shaft him and give him no games.

Mastertund

This photo needs no annotation.

Ones to Watch

Now that i'm back at home, if only for a couple of days, i have the opportunity to try out the finest TV shows from our brothers across the pond.

Firstly 30 Rock,

Number 1, it's got a Baldwin in it, so that caught me. Second it's got the head writer of Saturday night live, writing and staring, Tina Fey.

This two things mean that it can only be good. Thus far I've only seen four episodes, but it is very funny, clean and stupid.

I would highly recommend this if you like family guy or american dad, and no it's not a animated series.

---

Next up, The Apprentice Season 6 : LA

No it's not the uk version, it's Donald Trump doing what can only be described as good tv. Watching the first episode now.

Nothing like watching wasters try to shoot each other down

20 in 8

Nothing much to say, except that in 8 days i'll reach that milestone age of 20 years old. How about that. Jonathan at 20, i should really do the whole dave chappelle thing, and make comparisons between me at 20, 14 & 8. Would be quite funny i think, i think i'll make that bus post.

Plus i'm going back to hemel this weekend to link up with the old crew, till another time ...

Too Badu for you

In the last couple of days i've been listening to a lot of Erykah Badu, and man is she good. In my book shes, like the musical sister Jill Scott never knew about.

Sadly not all is well. I discovered that Ashley, from such famed posts as "meet my friends", lost his mother to Cancer, plus the ex-partner of one of my work colleagues has been in hospital for a while. To them i wish them all the best, and hope for a speedly recovery, as for Ashley my heart goes out to him, and i pray that his mum made it to heaven.

In business news, Isolation is on hold while i do some contract web design work, Ajax and the usual lark. But in even bigger news, i;ve join the "Fat Cheetah" Revolution. Fat Cheetah is a three man company destined to take over the world. It comprises a quality graphic designer; Paul, a classy Web Developer/Application Programmer; me and a Shark Tunde. The perfect blend.

If you live or work in the southampton city area, you'll be hearing from us!

Oh, while i'm here

March 13th, @ Bambuu Bar Come down and see Heartless Crew in action
A One Promotions & Fat Cheetah event

Thats about it for a round up, i'm try to save money to pop another Gig of Ram in that black plastic thing over there (writing on my nix box), Was ill for the last week, and had apple juice and popcorn for dinner, plus Jai quit smoking.
Quote of the Day

Lights dim
Anwar "Where did nikya go?"
Somone else "Don't worry i can see his teeth"

We love him really

Looking for work

Super amazingprogrammer looking for work!
i code in the loads of langauges, and i do contract work for cheap. If your interested conact me, and don't try the line that you couldn't find my email address, half the population of nigeria knows it, so for you it should be a peice of cake.

Websites
Bespoke Developement
Debugging
Scripting

what ever, call me

ps. I haven't lost my job, just looking to move up.
Quote of the Day

Yeah, because we come across 18 + digit binary numbers in our day to day lives

Computer architecture can be fun, honest.

Whats new....

Well since the data disaster, i've managed to rewrite a sizible chunk of code for isolation. However, it's hard work, considering i had done it all before. I've also gone backup nuts, and wrote a back script that i keep in the dock.

In other news, i've started on a light Cocoa project. A Cocoa version of one of my favourite games, Dope Wars. As you've come to expect here's the teaser...




Loads of work as you can see Started yesterday, while watching lost. Now although i love Xcode, i hate this whole idea of connecting the program to the UI. I can see the benefits, but i dislike the way it's done. Sure it's kind of similar to the way things are done in visual studio, but still.

Plus i've started learning about assembly on a serious level, so i'm now learning 3 languages at the same time, as well as brushing up on my C skills, to help improve my ideas on all these new fangled languages. Coupled with this i want to do some proper ruby on rails development, and see what all this crap is about in a production like environment.

Lastly, i've discovered that for all my love of computers macs, that i really don't know what i want to do after i leave university. Web development, is exciting, fairly easy and pays ok, but it's not a challenge. I write CSS in my sleep.... Writing kernel/device drivers looks cool, but how often does one need a new camera driver? Software development looks cool, but things take too damn long. And i'm not keen on all this paper designing either, wheres Visio for OS X? Although i plan to work for no one, and do my own thing, i'm not quite sure what yet.

To sumerize in Objective-C ...
Future = [Me whereIsCareerGoing:currentStatus];


Quote of the Day

Am i too nice, or do i just like thinking that?

Lets put the vote to the people

I'm a Retard

Why, i wiped my Mac's harddrive, every last kb. Yes i could of recovered it, but i can't be bothered to build up any hope of getting my data back.

So what happened,

I was trying to install the New Microsoft Vista(Which i'm using as we speak). I used the disk utility on the mac osx install dvd to remove my old boot camp partition. i had split it as follows 103 GB for osx, and 8 gb for linux. It had been that way since the week after i got my mac. I was using rEFIt to manage the boot partitions.

I selected the 8 GB parition plus the nix swap space, and erased them. Before i did so, i clicked the little lock, to prevent editing to the osx partition. after wiping the two, i then reformated them as fat32, and thought nothing more of it, one restart latter osx wouldn't boot. thought it must be a partition table issue. So i reboot the install dvd, and went to repair the drive/partition.

Thats when i saw it. Macintosh HD had 55Mb used, instead of 90 Gb!

So what have i lost

Isolation, and Syndication, The new company website. plus all the recent changes to the HTTP library and Diggr for the last couple months. All of my uni work for the last 3 months, plus about 2000+ tracks. And my cracked cs3.

So .... backups are a good thing.

What i can say, is that Vista isn't too bad. They fixed the performance issues that they had with the last version i tried, 5270. It's nice and shiny, and although i haven't got all the drivers, it's still not too bad. After i've reinstalled osx, i'll set up a proper boot camp partition.

Isolation will be rewritten this month (February), Syndication who knows, Diggr is on hold until i can master palm's C api.

HB HTTP lib, i'll release what i have, but it won't work until the nice folks at HB update the runtime environment or the compiler, to fix the stream writing methods.

So if you'll excuse me, i've got a hard days worth of installing and downloading ahead of me.

Finally!!

So Januarys kinda like done, and i still haven't finished my first app. But the good news, is the weirdest part is done, which was handling data/ captured requests between two servers is practically done.

hence rejoice, for i have screen shots, but no code (i kinda like trying to make money thanks)




Now if you excuse i got loads more work todo, plus i need to stare at this powerbook(not mine) in front of me...


Quote of the Day

"So he came up behind you and began kissing you on the neck, ok"

As i said on numerous occasions, teen drinking is very bad

The Bookshelf gets better

The bookshelf is getting better. Finally after a week of waiting the precious Objective C book is finally here. Time to write some real code, i'm java's slave no more.

The book i got in the end was from my favourite publishers, O'Reilly, but Addison Wesley???? It's called "Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX" by Aridian Hillegass an ex apple and NeXtstep engineer. Only up to page 13, but it's looking good.

Now if only i can get enough to a have a proper reference library...

Plus i sorted out my house for next year, 6 beds, 3 boys 3 girls. Moving in July 1st.

Quote of the Day

Steph "I need you out of the house for a week after we move in"
MeWhy should i, i pay rent too?
Steph "Fine, stay you just won't like what your'll be hearing"

This is what i'm living with... Just kidding it's not all bad

Deadlines; What are they & how i misuse them

For what must be the first time in while, (think 6/7) i'm performing academically the way i should be. I'm doubting myself and still getting 95% in tests, never mind completely acing others. It's a nice feeling, the torment that was A-level results left my head in a bad place, so it's great to be heading over the ridge.

I like love what i do. Writing code for me is better than ... making money. So it's great that i can use one do achieve the other. However, and employees of DSGi will know what i mean, i like setting ridculous deadlines. Heres one famed example.

A completely automated website to manage a entire retail chains intranet. A normal developer would quote a couple of months. I said 2 weeks!

So how do i make these estimates up?
Easy my calculations don't account for sleep, eating transport times etc. Why, cause i don't plan to do any of it. I'll work my arse off till, i collapse or do other injury to myself.

So where is this going?
Isolation, Diggr and the HTTP lib are gonna be late. Reasons are as follows

Isolation: - No real bottle necks just so much damn code to write; hashing controls, cache algor., multithreaded servers etc.

Diggr:- VB is like AIDS to me right now, and hint that i'm in proximity and i'm running, plus i gotta boot up windows. I'm on the verge of dumping the whole win32 thing for good, i just know its stupid to do so.

HTTP lib:- Palm OS is doing some weird stuff, and things aren't working exactly as they should be, debugging on device is like so yesterday, plus i wanna dump this whole two device thing and get me a Treo 680.

Plus i just kinda sold my beloved TX to a classmate, which technically means i can't finish the HTTP lib has it has to be tested on a device, no ifs no buts. That great treo 680 only has bluetooth (+GPRS but how the hell to i capture packets with that?) which i have no idea how to even begin to use fully. I think i would have to monitor a faux serial port!

So yeah, lifes great

If you excuse i must go food shopping instead of working to assignment deadlines.

Quote of the Day

Jai "You were doing the Carlton Dance!"

Me "Sadly, i just about remember that!"

Teen Drinking is very bad, even if you got a fake id

TIOTI: Tape it off the internet Beta

For once i can talk about someone else's work. TIOTI, has been around for about a year. I first heard of it on Digg. As usual they was a big fuss, but as the months went by that died. Fortunately for me i have a good memory and was able to sign up for the beta program.

So for the people that haven't seen it here it is.



Thus far, it seems like a cooler version of TV.com. There are user discussion groups on various shows. You can add them to your favourites. You can get RSS feeds for various things, like group discussions etc. It's got a nice balance between web 2.0 goodness, and plain old skool web design



In fact its cross between digg and TV.com. Users swarm over tv shows, rather than stories. After that you can then paticpate in various activities related to your show and get badges and such.
Apparently was i was using was build 14


However there is one sweet addition, this thing schedules torrents, based on your favourites! But it's not only for us Fearless DMCA folks, it also checks for itunes downloads, which it lists a premium content. Please excuse my poor screen grabs, am still getting used to this sexy mac. Oh yeah, this shots are from a mac. They recommend using firefox on osx, so thats what i used. But most of it seems to javascript, css and html so safari performance shouldn't be too far away.]


This is the user account page, i just joined like 5 mins ago, so excuse the lack of friends.

Speaking of code, it's quite clean, all the javascript is placed in external files, so the actual html is very clean, (perfect for greasemonkeying ...)

The future looks bright for this service. I'm glad to say that TIOTI is not vapourware and should become a useful tool in filling the downtime of life, not that i would know anything about that kinda of thing.

Killing my own Ideas

Great idea, a External display via the firewire 400 port on my computer!

Lets do the math
(bare in mind that this done assuming we want 24 bit displays at 60hz)

Firewire = 400 Mbits
SXGA = 1 310 720 pixels
Each pixel is 24 bits / 3 bytes
therefore 3 932 160bytes (3.75 Mb) required to refresh the display each cycle.
average display is refreshed 60 times (60Hz) therefore 60 * 3.75
Total required thoughput of 225 Mb/s
Firewire total thoughout = 50 Mb/s

Thats why it's a express card job

Another reason why Having no express card port on this macbook is starting to suck. a 13" macbook pro would have been really nice right about now.

Another bright idea, external display via gigabit ethernet, nope only 125 MBit/s. Looks like my dream of a dual headed macbook is kinda dead. It's a mathmatical impossiblity :(

Since i was in this frame of mind i wondered, what the thoughput of a DVI connector might be

Single link
1920*1200
6.5 Mb per cycle
395 Mb/s


Dual link
2560 * 1600
11.7 Mb per cycle
703 Mb/s

A nice indication there of how much pixel pushing a graphics card really does in order to devliever a rich high resolution experience. Still no reason for crappy open source support, but it at least makes it clear why graphics cards have to be so damn powerful.

OSS HTTP Lib is in semi-effect

After months of promises to the users of 1src, the HTTP OSS lib is operating. Most of the code has been written without ever testing it all, which is stupid, but i was too busy reading HTTP docs, to take the time to set up a testing server and go through logs looking to see it i had a hit or not.

In the end i didn't actually do that, i used ethereal, and MAMP on my mac ^_^. The point is, the OSS lib for HB++ developers is practically done. I've started the documentation ....


You might have also noticed, that that is windows. Although i've grown to dislike it, i need it. I had hoped that once i got my mac i could kiss this windows workstation good bye, but sadly not about of wine and vmware can make up for nativity. So until then, Linux on my desktop is dead, less glitz more work.

Now if you excuse me i'm off to tell the nice folks at 1src about this.


Quote of the Day

Me "Dont hit me with that"
Aimee "Why, are you gonna hit me?"
Me "No, but i'm gonna leave busies, and they won't be on your face!"

I think i'm in some sort of widthdrawl, can never get your hands on people when you want to...

It snows in 2007

I've returned to my little hive in southampton. First thing i did when i got back, was upgrade my linux distro. I'm now running Ubuntu 6.10 with beryl, and this is what my desktop looks like.



I believe myself to be alone for the moment, but everyone should be returning in short order.

Happy new year

First post of 2007, Happy new year to all random vistiors.

Main reason for posting, is progress on Isolation. It's now got its icon, and is almost at a alpha stage.
The Proxy server is working, in one direction at least. The client is coming along. I've written a HTTP interface class, that allows me to do things like

makeGetRequest("/filename.html");

which would return a complete HTTP request string with line feeds and carriage returns. It also has constants of all the HTTP error codes, or at least the 4 most popular.

Sadly this is the last work i'll do for a while, as slightly more pressing issues beckon (Uni work). But all things look to be on course for my first product launch to come by the end of month, if not mid february.

Oh incase you were wondering, heres the icon


In the event that you have forgotten, what this thing is... Isolation Personal Proxy: is a multi-platform proxy server. It runs in the background and caches your content plain/text or binary files, allowing any application that supports a proxy server to get content from the cache without even knowing it's doing so, and enabling almost complete offline browsing.

Finally i've started using the tag feature that they have added to the blogger beta, i'll make a tag cloud one of these days

2006; A year in Review

So 2007 is almost here, and i thought, what is the best way possible to look over the past 364 days. My only conclusion was a good ol' fashioned blog post. So here it is, 2006 in my humble opinion.

Highlights

• Getting my first Programming Job


• Paying off my university debt


• Becoming truly independent for the first time


• Buying my first Mac (aka the Blackbook)


• Remembering all the poetic crap that i wrote (Trust me theres a lot!)


• Meeting my current batch of uni friends, especially one...


• Going home at Christmas knowing i'm going back to uni


• Meeting David Isaacs in a club in southampton


• Writing my first real program, Hold On


• Becoming a real programmer ^_^


• Watching the entire Godfather trilogy


• Being the best man at my Brothers wedding


• Giving away an entire computer

Low points

• Being asked to redesign Myspace sites That stuff is below me!


• Not taking certain people out on dates


• Leaving Uni to come home


• Being unemployed for a month


• Getting C&%$ blocked, when i had a hot Swedish girl in the bag (not that i'm bitter)


• Staying in Southampton for a week after everyone had left for home


• Going back into my old Sixth form (the weirdest thing i've ever done!)

Overall, as an outside observer can see, this year as been fairly average. But i must say that getting my Job at DSGI was most definitely the highlight of the entire year for me. All i can do is thank God and the nice folks at Kelly's Hemel Hempstead, for getting me that.

On the regrets side of things, nothing serious i liked a couple of girls, who in traditional fashion, i said nothing too, and allowed them to travel down their own merry road, into jonathan-less bliss. On second thought, that was the right thing to do. Besides, i'm some sort of player apparently.

For me 2006 was a year of maturity, become more of a man, and less of child. I still openly refer to myself as a child, rather than adult, or even young adult. I believe this to be i don't want to get ahead of myself. In my eyes a man is seen for what he is in another persons eyes, not his own.


Quotes of the Year

Dave Chappelle "They should have never given you niggers money"

Jumoke "I think i my laptop screen is broke"
Me "Whats up with it"
Jumoke "The screen stays dark"
presses the brightness button "Nah, it's fine"

Tunde "Hows the wife?"

Me "How old do you think i am?"
Numerous sources "24","28","22"
Me "Actually i'm 19, thats ok"

Jaimini "I spend more time with you than anyone else"
Me "Really, never noticed"

Teacher "Have any of you done any programming before?"
puts hand up
Teacher "Have any of worked with arrays"
puts hand up
Teacher "I'll just assume for the rest of the year, that you've done all of this before"

Me "Dalrymple is just my slave name"
Elle "Slave name? i don't get it"
Me "Well about 300 years ago ..."

Japhet "I don't appreciated being called monkey"
Me "You mean, just after you finished labelling me one?"

Lester "I went to get something out of my wallet, and there was this random girls driving license, i have no idea how it got there!"
Me "I need to go out with you guys!"

Nik/Nic "New rule, when we are out we don't talk about our course!"

Nik/Nic "All the people on are course are freaks"

Luke "He said he hates me, thats a strong word. Who hates someone?"

It's been a fun year


Happy 2007 everyone

Programming Syndicate

As my journey to become an elite software developer continues, i've reached another milestone, and it's come a bit late, but its better late then never. I've starting using CVS, or Controlled versioning system. which automatically stores copies of my code, allowing better control over it.

Syndication, one of my new programming projects, has got to the stage where it can open and display a text file. Not a super feat in the grand scheme of things, but from idea to implementation in less than a week, thats not bad.

Next up on the coding hit list is Diggr, a lot of the stuff i'm learning on these other projects is moving my knowledge of OOP on by miles. However the whole VB thing is killing me, seriously it's a horrible language when you go back to it from C like syntax.

The work goes on, i can't sell what doesn't exist, this is tiger telmatics you know!

I heart Xcode

2007 will be a year of milestones for me, As i speak/type i've got three projects, planned for release next year.

Two Desktop apps, and one palm app.

They are as follows

Isolation :- Background Local HTML page Proxy (Multi-Platform)
Diggr :- Handheld Digg Client (Palm OS)
Syndication New!:- RSS Template Builder. (Multi-Platform)

Isolation and Syndication, should form the backbone of my commercial apps. Diggr will be my last big Palm OS project. Hate to say it, but it looks to me as if the platform is dead. Plus i'm starting to really hate Visual Basic. This Java + Swing stuff is just in a class of it's own.

As for release dates, well thats another thing. Diggr is at the most advanced stage of development, however it's held back by a couple of Libraries that i still need to complete and test (HTTP Client & XML Parser).

Isolation, has come a very long way, in a very short time, i started it last week, it's got a gui and a working server, and client.

Syndication, i "invented", and started in the last 3 hours.

But the real story here, is My Blackbook it's amazing. Incase you didn't know it apparently has auto sensing Ethernet ports, so need for patch cables here! Not that the last fact is important, just very cool. But seriously Xcode, best programming IDE i've used. I can see where Aptana gets some of it's zest from, heritage is quite clear in this case. The Battery life is pretty good, 5 hours with all the radios off. Speaking of radios, i'm starting to scare myself, i carry 6 radio transceivers on a regular basis! Two in each device 5 2.4 GHz(Wifi x2 Bluetooth x3) and 1 1.8/1.9 GHz(Cellular). I should really start wearing a tin foil hat.

Finally I'll be heading home to nice old Hemel on sunday, I'll be very busy over Christmas, mainly because i got to try and ship product. Companies with vapourware don't do very well in this modern economy. Plus if anyone remembers all those random people women i often blog about, scrap them i've replaced them all with a single person hot young lady, No hints She's all over flickr!. 2007 should be a good year, professionally and personally. Oh and before i forget, i've lost the password and login to my flickr account, so no new pictures for a while At least till i recover my windows partition ^_^.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year - Jonathan

Mr. Moon

Merry Christmas, nothing heavy this morning. Just to put this in context, it's 20 to 6 in the morning, I've been out at Diva, since 10-ish. Yesterday was my staff Christmas party, from which i dont actually remember some bits. Currently i'm in my bed listening to Jamiroquai.

What is this post all about? Nothing i guess it just one of the random things to do. That and think about pretty girls who aren't here, apart from that nothing else.

Plus Black Macbooks although infinitely cool, suck when it comes to finger prints, this thing looks like it's owned by someone who exclusively eats crisps!

Quote of the Day

Luke "My dad knows this guy who helps him get his money back when people don't want to pay up"
Tunde "Yeah, thats called a heavy"
Me "And that thing where he goes to ask for the money is called a shakedown"

Luke doesn't want to admit it, but we believe his family to be part of Bournemouth's organized crime circuit

New Project: offline proxy

So my new Macbook is the best thing ever created. However it lacks something, offline web browsing. Now before you go off on one, i'm not going crazy. With the benefit of highspeed internet connections + larger hard drives, what is there to say that we couldn't have a system that stores several hundred pages of the web, for you to explore at a latter date. Plus it also has the benefit of possibly increasing your download speeds on (non-binary data at least).

So far in my head here is the plan.

a proxy server written in java. your os would point to the server, the server would get the requested data, keep a copy for itself, and return a copy to the requesting service/application.

So far that is very similar to current web browser caches, where it differs a little, is in the use of pre-fetching, lets call it dynamic pre-fetching. The server, downloads additional pages which it thinks might be used by the user, taking a maximium number of additional downloads into account to insure that it isn't killing the poor remote servers bandwidth for no real reason.

Now, on top the above, we use scheduled content refreshing, so every hour or so, we do a checksum on the remote, and local files to ensure that we have the most upto date files in our local repository. Plus have gui where the user can specify that they wish to update the content.

Now in what is a departure for me, this isn't a palm os application. But rather a platform independent java app, with next to no, gui component. I want it mainly to run on my mac BlackBook. But it has other uses, like when the nice old fog in southampton screws with my laser based broadband!

The only thing left is a name for this pretty little thing...

"disconnected", perhaps or "isolate", the later sounds like a good name. Anyways thanks to my wealth of experience with the http protocal, most of the research for this project, is already done.

The language of choice is java in this case, for a couple of reasons.
a} memory leaks would be a constant problem in application like this where i'm dealing with large amounts of data in the background, using managed code instead of a standalone deal like, C++ makes debuging a little less painful.
b) java is the courses language of choice, plus this is basically disertation material, which is always good.
c) I can run it on my nix box, and on my osx sexy book, i mean mac, plus all you windows people can enjoy it too.

Lastly, this one isn't going opensource, at least not the whole thing. I'm looking at going commercial here i need to earn back my £860 for this sexy black thing sitting next to me. So hopefully this should be a launch product for the firm, when it starts.

Anyways that was a long enough peice, time to do some ground research for this thing, catch ya later.

Quote of the Day

"Where Mrs. Lawman"

You ever get the feeling that your mates enjoy taking the piss?

Blackbook software list

I complete list of mac software thanks to "ls", bare in mind that some apps, like rapidweaver, i'm just trying.
--------------------------------------------------

7zX.app
AMSVisualizer.app
ASCII Viewer.app
Address Book.app
Adium.app
Alarm Clock.app
AppleScript
Aptana
Aquamacs Emacs.app
Audacity.app
Audio Hijack Pro.app
Aurora.app
Automator.app
Azureus.app
BSNES.app
Big Bang Board Games
BonEcho.app
Boycott Advance.app
CSSEdit.app
Calculator.app
Camino.app
Chess.app
Chicken of the VNC.app
Comic Life.app
CoreDuoTemp.app
CrossOver.app
DVD Player.app
Dashboard.app
Democracy.app
Dictionary.app
DiggUpdate.app
FinkCommander.app
Firefox.app
FlightGear.app
Flip4Mac
Flock.app
Font Book.app
GarageBand.app
Generator.app
Genesis Plus.app
Gimpshop.app
Google Earth.app
Google Notifier.app
HTTPScoop.app
HamachiX.app
HexEdit Fat
HexEdit.app
ID3 Editor.app
Image Capture.app
ImageWell.app
Inkscape.app
Internet Connect.app
Locomotive2
MAMP
MD5.app
Mac Pilot.app
MacLibre.app
Mail.app
Microsoft Messenger.app
NeoOffice.app
Net Monitor.app
Netfixer.app
OmniOutliner.app
OnyX.app
OpenBase
OpenOffice.org 2.0.app
Opera.app
Pacifist
Parallels
PhoneAgent 1.3.1
Photo Booth.app
Ping.app
Pixen.app
Plucker.app
Preview.app
QuickTime Player.app
RSSOwl.app
RapidWeaver.app
SMSRotateD.app
SQLEditor.app
Safari.app
Seashore.app
ShakesPeer.app
Sherlock.app
Shiira.app
Skype.app
Smultron.app
Songbird.app
StableWindow.app
Stellarium.app
Stickies.app
StuffIt 11
Switch.app
System Preferences.app
Taco HTML Edit.app
TextEdit.app
TextMate.app
Themes Creator.app
Thunderbird.app
Tomato Torrent.app
Translation Service.app
Transmission.app
UnRarX.app
Utilities
VLC.app
VM2Go.app
Vine Server.app
VirtueDesktops.app
WMV Player.app
Wcode.app
WhatSize.app
You Control Tunes.app
aMSN.app
eclipse
ecto.app
gDisk.app
iAlertU.app
iCal.app
iChat.app
iCyclone.app
iDVD.app
iMovie HD.app
iPhoto.app
iRooster.app
iStat.app
iStumbler.app
iSync.app
iTheater
iTunes.app
iWeb.app
iWork '06
img2icns.app
jEdit 4.2
sixtyforce.app
smcFanControl.app
synergy-1.3.1

-----------------------------------------------------

Also note, that i've tried really hard to stay away from power pc apps, and i use mostly open source stuff, actually this is my Dock

Damn this thing is sweet

When the core 2 duo Macbooks first hit the scene, never did i think that it would be as sweet as this.

This thing(i'm using it now) is so amazing, that i've fallen in love with it. Plus you know how all those people rave about mac OSX, and apple products in general. Well they have good reason too. This stuff is the very height of modern computing. Anyone who thought about buying a mac, don't wait, just buy the damn thing. But what ever you gotta do, don't get a black one, those are for me only.

Anyways, thanks to a "bit" hardcore configuration think days, i finally got mine to a state, where i'm proud to call it mine.

It's completely loaded with open source software and freeware. The only commerical program on here is parallels, with enables me to run windows xp in a window.

I use synergy to enable to use my main keyboard and mouse, with it.

Heres the convoluted setup.



Well until another day or time when i feel like being a loser by writing a blog that no one reads ^_^ , Blackbook, i mean jonathan signing off.

.
Quote of the Day

Random Guy "Can you get me MS office 2003?"
Me "What makes you think i can get that?"
Random Guy "You just look like the kinda of guy that does that kinda thing."

Now bear in mind that we are in the same class (internet Computing), and i was working on my Blackbook at the time, still interesting that i look like the kinda guy to get pirate software from, didn't he ever hear of Open Office, or better yet Neo Office!

It's Here and its the best thing since sliced bread

The Blackbook, is finally here. And i must say that its the best thing since sliced bread.

My mate, Tunde, says it's "Sexy", personally i completely agree.

I can't believe that i waited so long to actually buy it, and i did several very sad things, which i won't admit to the video is coming soon

but enough talk heres a couple shots of it.

No Blackbook, but loads of code

Despite apple screwing with me, i have managed to make progress in other areas. Diggr, an application that i started many moons ago, is moving ahead nicely.

The Database hookups, have gone in, and appear to be working nicely. The HTTP Lib that will enable the application to be independent of the hotsync, is almost at alpha/beta test stage. All that is left is the XML parsing engine, which will be the heart of this beast, and will be the make or break of the application. The quicker it converts, the quicker the user can start digging.

Here's a few screen shots from it running live in the emulator/simulator,

The nice n' shiny Diggr Icon, the red ring is actually a mistake. I'll remove it in later builds.

The main screen, from here you can digg stories, and enter the viewer screen as seen below.

The main viewer screen, there a few bugs in it, but it should soon look similar to my lovely mock up as can be seen in my flickr account.

Quote of the Day

"Hi my supposed senior member of stuff, thanks very much for the pay rise mark, 5 to nine and F*%* off!"

With great Incresed grits comes great responsibilty

China is a long way away

Right, i getting somewhat sick of hitting Refresh on this TNT tracking page. How long does it really take to unite a boy who has waiting 7 months for laptop with the apple of his eye? Coupled with this is the distinct lack of certain people, who happened to have disappeared off to sweden/bora bora.

Meanwhile i've downloaded every single mac application that catches my eye, All 51 of them. I've cleared a space on my desk, set a back aside to carry the Blackbook as it will be known. I almost wanna call them up, and explain to these folks who i am. Programmer extreme

Well it you see a plane with a black Macbook in the window, call me i'm expecting one.


Quote of the Day

Nick "They where drinking fish and milk on the stage"
me "And you wonder why i haven't been to jumpin jaks in two years..."

No matter where it is Hemel or Solent, jumpin jaks is always crap, and a exclusively crunked venue.

Blackbook cometh

I can almost taste it, and i'm not talking about chinese niether. Expected delivery, the end of this week! Can i survive till then, i'm really not sure. But it's very cool that it comes straight from the source, and halfway across the world. I think this is a fairly good reason to take a trip to the far east...

In case your interested it is configured as such...

2.0 GHz core 2 duo
1 GB DDR2 5300 Ram
120 GB HDD
6x Dual layer DVD burner aka "superdrive",

for the pretty price of £850 after student discount.

Not bad to be the envy of most mac users out there, now if you excuse me, i need to see if i can find the plane on google maps...

Quote of the Day

"You guys need to either drop the roses, or stop walking together before someone starts getting ideas."

Couple of my mates worked over the weekend, and came home with roses, they happened to be straight homophobes, so i thought i ought to lay down the law.

Why people go out with people of the same race.

Because it's too damn hard to do it any other way!
Black and White, and vice versa works "fine", but Asian/Oriental inter-racial relationships with either whites or blacks are next to impossible.
Why? I have not the slightest idea. If you don't believe me, just look around. I've heard people say that it's often because the parents want to keep the family relatively poor, besides who wants a black person in their family, they'll just get shot.
From personal observation, i find that the racial division is no longer between each individual race, but rather blacks and whites seperated from asians(indian sub-continent) and Orientals. Personally i don't care, but it's just so damn weird.

If your wondering why the hell this is bothering me, yet me explain. Theres this girl called j, nice and all. I go to her flat from time to time, and almost when ever i go, there is someone else there, and thus far they have all been asian, and looking to "get a peice". My black flat mates find it strange that i like her, mind you i do have weird taste in women, viki, clare, ....

Maybe it has something with my drive to experiment and try out new things, who knows. I think the barrier may be home life, and social environments. How do you explain fried plantain to an asian? Scratch that, how do you explain it to anyone outside of the caribbean lot.

I don't like to think of myself as ignorant, or nieve, but the world is so badly split into factions, it surprises me that we are still here today. I guess it's a good thing that money doesn't have a race, otherwise we would really be screwed.

Thats my racial rant for the day

if you wanna see pictures of the ever so cute j, and or anyone else that i've met thus far, check the flickr account. Till another time later

Quote of the Day

Teacher, pointing to T|X "You can get a version of Maple for that?"
Me "I'm fine with excel, really"

This damn weird set logic and generally weird maths is getting on my nerves.

Date Sickness

This epidemic is taking over the world, people left right and center are finding that they are no longer to entertain, their dates due to a mysterious sickness, some say it has links to freshers flu, others are doubtful saying that it may "pre-loseritist".

We spoke to one victim, Jonathan, from Southampton. "I asked this girl that i like round to dinner, but after cooking for her and one of my mates, i found that i could not summon the strength, to even talk to her let alone eat my own cooking."

We'll have more on this series of events in the near future...

----------------------------------------------------
Check out the new flickr pics, that i put up, most of them are of southampton, taken on my precious phone. Speaking of precious, it's taken me a week to work my way through lord of the Rings return of the King. 3 hours just isn't something i have.
This post is coming at ya form my Super T|X with it's amazing keyboard, and the GPRS hook up via BT (aka i love beening a geek).

Take care till another time.

If only i had the magik stick...

Howdy, one and all. I do still blog once in a while. Where can i start ... well i give you a break down of the last couple of weeks

• I started a weekly pro evo gathering - www.solent-proevo.blogspot.com
• I'm obessed with someone (no it's not chloe, think fitter than)
• My macbook purchase will be taking place soon
• i spent £400 in my first month in town
• I got so drunk i was still drunk the morning after
• I'm Aparently cool in some sort of capacity.
• and funny too, like when did that happened
• I've geeked out way too much

Thats about it, keep your eyes on the flickr account as the pictures, will keep rolling in, maybe even a few of J (that isn't actally a code name), it's a actual person, seriously.

Right i'll catch u all later

Quote of the Day

Schuester "My friend at the apple store can get 40% discounts"
me "Does your friend mind doing me a favour... "

The macbook is coming!!!!!!

I Believe i can fly

Well i finally got my student loan, which is nice to have after 12 months. Works great, i have yet to visit the "house of g*sh", (their words not mine). My macbook purchase is now so close i can almost taste the black apple.

But the really big thing, is that i brought a RC plane, turns out i'm a pretty crap pilot, but i'm sure the kills on Ace Combat 5 knew that already.

Anyways i'm back in the big bad city, this weekend so i might try and do some catch up with work with all of you.

Till then, later

Quote of the Day

Chris"You ever thought about doing stand-up?"
Me "Not really, i cant be funny on demand, if i try it's not pretty."
Chris"What do you mean?"
Me"Why did the chicken cross the road?"

I leave the stand-up to keith, i'm a situation man give me an in, watch me work...

I want a Black MacBook Bad, i mean like, crazy bad!

Afternoon, As usual i've found some gadget that i want really bad. In this case, it's a girl, who i fancied last year, who i met again today, and haven't stopped thinking about her since a Black Macbook...
This think is wheel kicking good, i went to john lewis just so i could stare at it, and wish i could hug her it.



In other news i'm making friends, my whole flat gets on pretty well, their are a few quiet people. We go to the movies, play pro, did i mention that they are all boys, yeah, i got screwed again.

Otherwise all is good at the moment, i got my Job back, and got to do a stock take, yip pee. I built a entire site called DownTime, which is getting a nice reception thus far, it's kinda like a community portal, where people can share and rate media, and chat in the community forums.



Enough plug'n, i'm off to chill to cool "soundz" before i head to bambuu bar, check for me on dontstayin.com

Later
Quote of the Day x1

Lester "I was looking in my wallet, and i found this girls driving license, i looked for her name in my phone, and it was there, but i don't remember ever meeting her!"

And everyone wondered why i loved it so much, classic stories like that of course.
Quote of the Day x2

Tunde "Do you believe in sex before marriage?"
Jay "Yeah, but that was different, before they had condoms and S*&%"
Me "But you know that church doesn't believe in contrapception, right, which sorta destroys your whole loophole"
Jay "Yeah, but it's still different"

Jay will try and have sex with pretty much anything that moves, nice guy thou.

Second Time Southampton

Nothing too long winded too say, except, that southampton rocks as we are all well aware of. I made some stuff with PHP, which has some promise. But we'll have to see how that goes.

Missy Elliot is coming to town. this saturday, apart from that south is south, and west is east.

Quote of the Day

"Could you hack into the FBI?"
After a brief pause "Anything is possible"

My skills natural talent are starting to be noticed

сотый столб 2

Turns out my blog is called russian space station for a reason. What is this reason, i'm not quite sure myself, but what i do know is that Hold On is used in the mother land. Yes folks, my lowly first hash at development, is semi-popular in russia!

So here is the proof!

It's a Russian Palm Handheld, site that lists my application, my name, and my email. In fact thats how i found it, by googling my email address (don't ask).

Incase your worried that it's some sort of big russian mail order brides site heres a picture


In other news, i off to uni in two weeks, and i can't wait. Although i could swear that last time i filled out this part correctly, one can never be too sure...


Plus cause i'm open like that, i'll be living on the ground floor of the Camilla Block in Lucia Foster Welch, room 004. So if you randomly googling peoples rooms, welcome and i'm the guy next door, Index this! Hell, what have i got to lose, i'm know in a russia for petes sake.

BTW the title means 200th post in the language of the motherland And no, the motherland isn't south london.

Quote of the Day

Tim "It would be helpful, if you didn't mention how awful the press ads are, as we would like them to stay around beyond the first day"

I can't help it if i'm too real It was a joke first time, Ele liked it Not that her opinions carry any weight in my head what so ever...

Code Snippets

Having learnt PHP like yesterday, i decided that i might most some of my code. This function converts file sizes to user friendly Gigabytes, Megabytes, or Kilobytes.


//Convert bytes to higer values
function byteConvert($INPUT)
{
$temp = $INPUT;

//If it's over a Gigabyte
if ($temp >= 1024000000){
$temp = $temp / 1024000000;
$temp = round($temp,2);
$temp = $temp . " " . "Gb";
return $temp;
}
//If it's over a Megabyte
elseif ($temp >=1024000){
$temp = $temp / 1024000;
$temp = round($temp,2);
$temp = $temp . " " . "Mb";
return $temp;
}
//If' it's over a kilobyte
elseif ($temp >=1024){
$temp = $temp / 1024;
$temp = round($temp,2);
$temp = $temp . " " . "Kb";
return $temp;
}
//If' it's under a kilobyte
else
$temp = round($temp,2);
$temp = $temp . " " . "b";
return $temp;
}
?>
Enjoy

Wine isn't that bad

No, this isn't about some alcholic adventure that i had over the weekend however i hear those maybe back in fashion with me heading back to uni. In fact this one is about my continuing journeys with Ubuntu Linux. Now first off i have the coolest desktop around, it spins, ripples, rotates, tints.



What we have here is Handhand basic, with the palm os Emulator for the Palm TX running natively in linux, with zero hacking. The only problem, is that the api call made by Handhand basic, for the fonts in the app preview pane, is unsupported by wine, so the fonts are screwed up some what. Otherwise it's kinda sweet. It compiles, and does all the things you expect, as for the emulator just works, rotates and does all the shiny stuff.

In non 1337 news, i return to university on the 23rd of september, i will have a little get together, hopefully even get Ele to come along,(how exactly that will work is another issue). Till then i'll send out E-invites :)


Quote of the Day

Caption

Return of the MAC

This isn't so much for you guys as it is for the people/devs in the 1 src forums, but this is how i roll develop my apps.



What your looking at is my Sweet XGL Ubuntu Linux twinview Desktop (I like adjectives). On the left side is VMware running Windows XP Pro, inside VMware is HB++, my palm dev IDE of choice. On the right side is the documentation running in swiftfox, an AMD athlon xp optimized version of firefox for nix.

The Real purpose, of this is to show my new application "MAC" which stands for Musical Alarm Clock. It's very early beta, but i wanted a name, so name away.

Quote of the Day

"It was like they just lifted the 13 quid off me the minute i walked through the door, it's the perfect crime, i had no recourse!"

Don't see Miami Vice, no matter how cheap you are the cost!

College Dropout...

And they said idolizing musical artists is bad for young people, didn't hurt me...

Quote of the Day

Looks at dual 19" monitors, Two PDA's, Two SE Phones, 5.1 Speakers, stacks of CD's...
"I got too much stuff"

Ebay anyone...

One of those days

This one of those few times, when i can sit down and say, i had a good day. Mainly because the blane of my existance for the last couple months, the DTF redesign got the nod from the general managers. By the way, never leave for a meeting without making sure the site actually loads first. Anyways that was great.

In another news i've fallen in love with a Comedy/Drama Called "Weeds" which comes on skyone, check it out, i'm burning a copy of season one for a friend.

I've also finished learning C, now and i'm moving onto Java, which i've done a little of, already this week. The Gung Ho learning starts next week.

Plus I've got photos from my Brothers wedding, i did create a site just for them, however these aren't exact professional shots, just some nice ones taken on the 750.
Nothing Like a Sun Flower
In the Limo on the way to the Reception
From the otherside of the ribon
My Mum worked for two days to get all the flowers done, but compared to what other members of the family did it pales into nothing-ness.
Blue Roses?
The Church where they got married, thats my cousin Helen, who was the offical photographer
My Brother, and my new Sister in-law, Tamara, the Brides step mother's head, and the cheif brides maid's head, Elair(E-lie-la)

Quote of the Day

Ele "I didn't have a boyfriend for like a year, and then my mum just asked me if i was a Lesbian, because if i was she was ok with that."

It's always nice to have the support of your parents no matter the issue or circumstance.

Alternative Quote

Dave "Stacy doesn't mind if i play games, she just goes and plays Need for speed"
Me "Where do you find these girls?"
Dave "I don't know they just flock to me"

Uncool cats need not apply in daves world, party on, excellent...

All nighter

At the moment it's something to4 in the morning. I've been up for about 21 hours. Currently we're in the flower market in vauxhall. I got some pics to boot.

So far i've eaten some great BBQ chicken. Had a arguement with my brother about crap,
Not slept.
Tried and failed to loop through putting values in a grid object.
And now we get to buy flowers.

fun fun fun

Wedding Photos, 1st set

For those of you who are big on wedding photos, here are a couple (Three actually). All taken on my "new" SE k750i.


The Freshly married couple posing for pictures with friends. The Bride is my Cousin CollettMy grandfathers, sisters, daughters, daughter, they took the pics at a place called Coombe wood. The Groom is steven.


This is at the reception, As you can see the "top table"; featuring my cousins sister, Colleen; My Uncle Cleveland and Aunt Norma. Plus the best man and the grooms mother.


Lastly, Cake cutting time. Not bad pics for a phone.

Expect more on this theme, as my brothers wedding comes next week. Plus i'll throw up the rest of this photos on Flickr, for any of you crazy wedding=clock ticking people.

Quote of the Day

My Dad "How old are you now?"
Me "19"
My Dad "Oh, i thought you were 17"

An example of perfect parenting

I found what i want for christmas

Now where to get $300k from ...

Donate va Paypal

Treating my friends better

As an introverted person i tend to treat those around like crap, at least in my opinion. I spend a little to much time with my beloved PC Blu-ray or Blu-buntu, Depends who ur asking, trying to work out how exactly a stream socket connection works, rather than getting pissed down at the pub, not that i associate drunkness with friendship.

My point is, that i kind of hide myself away, buried beneath my work (self-imposed or not). I would like to apologise to all of my friends if they ever thought i wasn't very "friend" like. I imagine that most of everybody will wonder what i'm on Poppers and LSD, but this sort of just came in to my mind.

Plus this wouldn't be a sterotypical blog without me whining about some sort mental, and personal issue...

So that is basically a "in" to say invite me to every party going, cause i'm a crazy nergo, who's wild and exciting, thanks to those of you who have pretty much always been there for me , with or without knowing it.

^_^

Also i found this post in my archives, i thought i ought to update it...


Taken on my ebayed k750i

Now if you excuse me, i must dash to bed, i have my cousins wedding to goto tomorrow.
This post has been rated R; Raving nutter of a programmer

Quote of the Day

"We better stop talking about bombs, before someone gets the wrong idea"

Tim and i often drift a little off topic...