Corrupt File Trimmer
Way back in the day™, before BitTorrent and eMule/eDonkey, the file sharing platform of choice was WinMX. It seems like a lifetime ago and in technology terms, it was. It required a lot more manual intervention in order to exchange files compared to modern software. It was very inefficient, slow and quite frankly a little ugly. However, one thing I did love about WinMX was the built in chat room facility which nurtured many a community, usually centred around whatever files were being shared. I got quite friendly with the bloke who ran one of the chat rooms and completely out of the blue he emailed me recently. It was great to hear from him and it took me right back to my days at University, he says as if I'm sat here in my easy chair with slippers and a pipe, offering Werther's Originals around to small children!
My friend did have good reason for making contact, aside from to say "Hi". You see, WinMX had an annoying bug where large files would occasionally become corrupt if the transfer was terminated before competition. Attempting to resume the file would sometimes give you a warning message and many people simply restarted the file from the very beginning. My connection at the time was 128kbps down and 64kbps up and the files I shared were mostly around the 700mb mark, so you can see that when corruption occurred, it was not pleasant. However, some smart people discovered that if you stripped back the corrupt "dead wood" from the end of the file then resumed transfer of the file, more often than not it worked. The easiest way to do this at the time was to use file splitting software, which was designed to split large files so they could fit on multiple floppy discs or CDs. It was an awkward process and often you would trim a file only to find it needed more trimming off. At the time I had just completed a course in MFC programming for my degree so I decided to write a program to tackle this task better. read more...
250 new public charging stations, some in Sheffield!
I can't find much in the way of details but AutoblogGreen reports that we're getting 250 new charging stations for electric vehicles next year, including some in Sheffield! Fantastic news which can only encourage the adoption of EV's over here. I used to commute from Catcliffe to Sheffield city centre and most of that was crawling at walking pace. With used G-Wiz EV's for under £4000 I can see a lot more people being tempted to switch for the daily commute.
Cheese and Broccoli Bake Recipe
I know it's lame to return to blogging with such a pathetic post, particularly as so much has happened since my last entry on here but be grateful faithful readers...or more likely spam bots!
Here's my quick and easy Cheese and Broccoli Bake Recipe which will probably feed two people, or one chunky monkey like myself.
Update:After cooking this many times I've revised this recipe somewhat. Gone are the potatoes and the quantities are a little revised. It now easily caters for 2 hungry people and probably more like 3 with normal appetites!
Ingredients
- Approximately 200g of fresh broccoli
- 2 mushrooms
- 120g of butter
- 80g of plain flour
- 350ml of milk
- 4 eggs
- 300g of cheese
Directions
- Prepare and steam the broccoli.
- Melt the butter on medium heat in a saucepan large enough to fit all the broccoli in there later.
- Add the flour, mix well and keep stirring until bubbly.
- Gradually add the milk stir until well mixed.
- Bring to a boil and season with a bit of salt and pepper if you fancy. I never add salt when cooking but that's just me.
- Turn off heat and get to work beating those eggs.
- Mix in the eggs.
- Now gradually add the cheese. I usually save some back to put on last for a nice cheese top layer.
- Finally combine it together with the broccoli and whatever other veg you decided to sneak in there and mix it up good and proper.
- Slop it in a casserole dish, adding the cheese you saved back on top if you want, and bung in the oven at 325°F/165°C/gas mark 3 for about 30 to 40 minutes.
Leave it to cool and dish it out. Sorted!
Imgjax, quick and dirty image hosting
Of course I'm far from short of hosting accounts to store images on but there's something to be said for quickly uploading a pic for temporary storage via a website, especially when it's as easy as imgjax makes it. I've used allyoucanupload.com a fair bit but I hate the fact it changes the file format to jpeg no matter what the original format was. Very strange and unnecessary.
Via Ajaxian.
Update: imagax seems to have bit the dust. I'm now using BoostUpload and Image Bin for dumping images quickly and jagbox for any file type.
BBC Delivery On-Demand Open Consultation
Well worth spending a few minutes filling in this open consultation if you care about how the BBC should develop it's on-demand content services. I made a point of emphasising my opinion that open standards should be embraced for content delivery and that third-party suppliers of the service (e.g. ISPs) should not be subsidised to allow/encourage the use of such on-demand features. I think the first point is one which everyone would instantly agree on, after all there is no technical reason to lock ourselves in to a proprietary system when there are so many alternatives. However, some people might query my second point so here's my logic. read more...
Banana Cake/Bread Recipe
Banana cake is very popular around these parts. Maybe it's because it sounds healthy when actually it's not. But anyway, here's the recipe the little one uses.
Ingredients
- 4oz of butter or margarine
- 6oz sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2 big bananas
- 8oz wholemeal self-raising flour
Instructions
- Mash the bananas with a sturdy fork
- Cream the butter and sugar together, and mix in the eggs
- Mix together the two yellow sludges you now have, and mix in the flour
- Scrape into a cake tin and bake for about 40 minutes at Gas Mark 4/180°C/350°F
- Turn the oven down to Gas Mark 2/150°C/300°F and leave in for another 30 minutes
Sourced from Peter Hartley's Home
A long overdue site and blog update
After so much playing around with this site last year I think I killed and wasn't able to log in for a while. Does that sound like a feasible excuse for not posting anything since the end of the summer? Well it sounds believable to me! Not to far removed from "dog ate my homework".
So I finally got a few hours spare to upgrade the site to Drupal 5 which is truly deserving of the major increment in version numbering. There was some debate for a while if it should be labelled 4.8, such is the concern of the Drupal community to do things by the book! I've recently finished off a few sites on the 4.7 platform and it feels so antiquated now I've had chance to develop in 5. Absolutely every aspect of the CMS has been updated for the better though there are still a few little features I'd like to see in 5.1; time to get contributing!
As you may notice I've also changed the theme on here with help from Marek and I'll be making a few more changes as time allows. Bye for now :)
Center Parcs
Just got back from our little holiday and centre parcs and thought it's a perfect time to try out Picasa2 and it's new web albums. Click here or below for the gallery.
Subtle, real subtle
NSFW: I think it's probably safe to assume this video ranks quite highly on my list of favourite online viral advertisements.
P.S. Anyone hungry?