Category: Uncategorized

The observant among you may notice that my site now has a new design (well, you will have if you’re not looking at this site through some kind of blog feed reader).

I don’t really know whether it’s an improvement on the old one, I just did it for two reasons: (1) fixed-width layouts are really annoying when you’re looking at the site on a widescreen monitor (all that wasted screen real estate), and (2) I just got bored of the old one.

One thing you might notice is that I now have an advertising link at the bottom of the menu bar on the right. It’s probably so unobtrusive as to have no effect, but I might experiment a bit with positioning. The reason I stuck it there was because this site ain’t paying for itself, and it would be nice to recoup some of the money if possible. It probably isn’t, but still. The adverts are supposed to be context sensitive… the one there when I last looked was for UK Demolition Contractors. I thought perhaps that was picking up on my previous references to Torchwood (Torchwood Scripts, remember?) – all they do is pretty much destroy things, right? Relationships, property, Chris Chibnall’s writing…

Aaaaanyway. That’s all for now folks. Except the usual “The Weekend” update sometime tomorrow. Or whenever I feel like it…

I’ve noticed recently quite a few screenshots of web pages which seem to be very long, i.e. they are of the web page in its entirety, not just the viewable area (I’m very bad at explaining things: basically, what I mean is, if you have to scroll down a web page to see it, then the screenshot would include those bits that you need to scroll down to see).

I wondered how people did this at first – I assumed people were just using an image manipulation program and capturing multiple screenshots of the browser window at various points down the page and then pasting them together. Very naive of me, I know, but still.

I’ve just found an extension for Firefox named “ScreenGrab” which will take care of all that – you just hit a button and immediately the whole page is saved as a PNG or JPG, to wherever you want it. Is that cool or what?

Very useful if, like me, you have to get web page screenshots occasionally…

Host: “The first rule of robot club is: you do not talk about robot club! The second rule of robot club is, you DO NOT talk ab– wait, I got that wrong. The second rule of robot club is, no smoking.
Tim (to Mike): Why aren’t we allowed to smoke?
Mike: shhhh! We’re not supposed to talk about it!

*ahem*. Apologies for that – I can’t resist dropping in the odd Spaced quote now and then. Anyway, the anti-smoking bill is coming into effect on Sunday. This includes Churches. Dave Walker has posted up some no smoking signs for Churches. The last one is definitely my favourite, but as he doesn’t want people hotlinking you will have to go to the page and look at it yourself!

Just a quick update about the house situation I mentioned a little while back. We have finally exchanged contracts (yay!), and the completion date is set for next Friday (6th July). We’re aiming to move the weekend after that (14th July).

So, watch this space!

I just wanted to update, I’m rather excited…

I’ve noticed a few random links popping up on my referalls list recently. Some of them come from forums on .edu websites. What gives? What’s going on all of a sudden on .edu websites which makes people want to link here? Particularly strange is the fact that most of them aren’t accessible from the outside world (i.e., they’re probably on intranets) meaning it’s impossible for me to see what’s going on.

I think most of the referall links are probably just spammers, clogging up the web with their junk (again). Still, it’s a little bizarre.

Oh yes, I noticed that a lot of people seem to be reaching this website after searching for torchwood scripts. I just want to say to those people, there are no torchwood scripts on this website. If you are looking for torchwood scripts, you have come to the wrong place. For torchwood scripts, you should go elsewhere!

Besides, why would you want to look at torchwood scripts anyway… they’re rubbish! Besides, I bet Captain Jack would be rubbish at Python. Toshiko might be OK though… um, whatever!

So… it’s time for another “The Weekend” post! On Friday evening, I went round to Wivenhoe to help Alex clear up the house before moving out, and also to have some fish & chips. We got them from Henleys because we didn’t have time to go down to Papa’s… I have to say, despite Henley’s winning all those awards, Papa’s is still my favourite for both taste and the service 🙂

On Saturday, Phil’s parents came up for lunch. Just before lunch, though, we were able to go up to the house we are buying and talk to the sellers about a couple of things (i.e., exactly what’s staying in the house) and also measure up some of the windows for curtains. We’re going to see the solicitors tomorrow, so all things being well it won’t be too long before we move in!

In the evening, we went round to Anne-Marie’s to watch Doctor Who, which I thought was fantastic! Ok, so perhaps it’s not going to be a classic. But at least it hasn’t got Daleks in it this time… there were also one or two things which were rather “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” For example, the thing young timelords have to look into which contains all of space and time really reminded me of the “total perspective vortex”. Of course, it probably wasn’t powered by a small piece of fairy cake, but still – you can’t have everything! [Oh, and ‘Apocalypse Please’ by Muse would have made a fantastic backing song for this episode. Perhaps they’ll use it in the next one!]

Back to the weekend. On Sunday, we went to church in the morning, didn’t do much in the afternoon, and then went to church again in the evening. The evening service wasn’t really a service – it was a musical evening (or “Soiree”), and it was very good! All the musicians played very well and a good time was had by all. It was just over too quickly! But you can’t have everything. Nevermind.

Oh, by the way, I’ve just released a new beta of my Facebook Photo Uploader, which includes the ability to tag photos before you upload them 🙂

There’s been an exploit going round recently (well, actually, for quite a while) which involves websites running cPanel (I think). A couple of weeks ago, someone managed to hack into this site and append some <SCRIPT> tags to the bottom of each index.php, the purpose of which was to download a virus to the unsuspecting victim’s computer.

In other words, if you’ve visited this site using an unpatched version of Internet Explorer during the past couple of weeks you may be infected with a virus. I recommend obtaining a good anti-virus scanner and doing a full scan.

The reason I haven’t noticed is because I don’t use Internet Explorer – I think most other browsers / operating systems are not vulnerable to this exploit.

Apologies to the inconvenience this may have caused you… it’s not my fault, but still. If you notice anything like this happening again please let me know straight away!

Ok, I know I’ve been going on about this a lot recently, but I’ve finally released version 1.0 of the Facebook Uploader. You can download it from the project page on Google Code.

The features are:

• Browse photos on your computer and upload them to one of your Facebook albums
• Create albums on Facebook
• Rotate photos on your computer before uploading them

In the next release, I plan to add Photo Tagging. I am currently working on this, but it is actually surprisingly difficult…

Just a quick update about what happened over the weekend… on Friday evening, Foz came up to stay! 🙂 We didn’t do much, apart from watch the first DVD of “An Evening with Kevin Smith”. It was absolutely hilarious, Kevin Smith is a very funny guy!

On Saturday, Philippa and I went over to my parents as my sister was up with my niece and nephews. We all had lunch and then went to Framlingham Castle. It was a very good day out, we haven’t seen my sister et al in a while, so it was good to see them at the weekend. Framlingham Castle is also a good place to look around, they provide you with “Mobile Phone” style audio guides, which were very informative!

In the evening Foz, Philippa and I met up with Karen at the Twister on North Hill. It was the first time I’d been in there, and it was nice. We had to turn the heating on (we were sitting outside), but it was a nice evening!

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then in the afternoon Philippa and I went to a piano recital by someone named Trevor Cordwell. He does piano recitals every year at Colchester Arts Centre. This year he was playing a selection of Beethoven – the Eroica Variations, Sonata no. 23 “Appassionata”, and Sonata no. 21 “Waldstein”. I think my favourite was actually the Eroica Variations, although the Waldstein was lovely too (the Appassionata is beautiful but a little intense for me!).

In the evening Phil B came round for a bit, and then Foz and Philippa went out to the service at Kesed, a church at the Charles Lucas school in Colchester. It was apparently good, although I didn’t go because I was working on the Fordham website!

Anyway… from Beethoven to Pendulum: Foz is a big fan of them, and I hadn’t really heard much of their stuff before. So, on Foz’s recommendation, I decided to download their Essential Mix from 2005. He was right – it’s an awesome mix! I really like their style of dnb, it’s quite varied, sometimes quite melodic, sometimes quite dark, sometimes heavy – always energetic! I listened to it at work today, and I think I’m going to listen to it again tomorrow (and I’m listening to it as a sit here writing this).

Well, I think that’s about all from me. All for now…

Matthew made a blog post the other day about search engines: in an article, Google came out with one of the worst privacy policies of any internet company. Matthew wanted to try out some various different search engines… read the blog post for more info!

Anyway, I’m a fan of the Google search engine in terms of its results. It’s fast, usually relevant, and uncluttered. I don’t really like their privacy policies either, though. One thing you could do is use Scroogle. It basically grabs the results from Google but doesn’t store your information, i.e. Google won’t be able to trace your search terms back to you and in general won’t know any info about you.