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...

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...

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 :)

RoundCube Webmail

Hayley asked me to install a web mail client on her domain a while back which might get past her work's web filter (they don't like you checking email at work). I came across RoundCube Webmail and got it installed in 5 minutes.

Haven't had time to really put it through it's paces but the interface uses AJAX to good effect, much like GMail, but less cluttered. read more...

FireFox 2.0a2 Bon Echo

I've just installed FireFox 2.0a2 Bon Echo and I'm mightily impressed. Truth be told I've never got on well with 1.5. It was always extremely sluggish for me and a bit of a resource hog, both in terms of memory usage and CPU cycles. I'd even gone as far as to semi-migrate to Opera 9, which while incredibly fast and efficient, I missed my favourite extensions (Web Developer, CSE HTML Validator, greasemonkey, Gmail Manager, AdBlock).

I could live without some and there were workaround replacements for others but now I can see what is up and coming with FireFox 2 I'm willing to stay put. Writing this post I notice it now has a built in spell checker, which behaves very similar to MS Word's and is worth the upgrade alone! The UI has taken more than a few pointers from Opera (close buttons on tabs, search box) which is certainly no bad thing, although I'm glad they haven't changed the order in which tabs are focused on once one is closed. That drove me mad in Opera!

I've installed the Nightly Tester Tools to get all the 'incompatible' extensions working and only RoboForm has complained which I was considering ditching anyway. I'd recommend giving it a try, especially if like me you found 1.5 really disappointing. Here's a summary of the big changes. read more...

• Links default to opening in new tabs, not new windows
• Close buttons now appear on every tab, and the close behaviour is slightly different
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
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Intel Mobile Pentium 4 M Exploration

This is pretty much the only thing I feel bad about just getting rid of from my old site so thought the least I could do is just copy it across. It's a bit outdated but I hope it's of use to some people. Cheers.

I came across the possibility of using Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processors - M (to give them the official title) in desktops while sourcing components for the company I worked for. My boss wanted these tiny cube systems to sit looking pretty on the desks of our office. However, he also wanted top of the range performance and didn't even think about the noise. As a quiet PC enthusiast I said he would need some impressive cooling system if he didn't want the CPU fan to sound like a jet engine right next to his ear!

So I set about researching and stumbled across a few threads in various forums (huge thanks to the people at Silent PC Review and AnandTech) which explained how I could use these CPU's in desktops. Although the CPU's didn't turn up on eBay often, I got hold of 2, tested them out, got very excited and tried to source more! When the chance came around to buy a large quantity of them I decided to grab them all, put some effort in and resell them. This page is here for the people who want to know more about these great CPU's, although I no longer have any left for sale I'm afraid. read more...

Turion 64 X2 dual-core mobile processors

As many of you know, I have a reputation for doing things with laptop processors which really shouldn't be done; modding them to run in desktops I mean! I'm still running my Mobile P4M 2.0GHz on 1.15v with a fanless Arctic Cooling AC-FRZ-4 Freezer 4 (yes, only the PSU fan quietly shuffling air around) and haven't felt the need to jump to the next generation of processor, not that I could justify the outlay anyway. read more...

Drupal Site Recipe

As promised here's a very rough guide to how this site was made. Check out the Drupal handbook for much better guides to installation and configuration. Think of this as a reference for those wondering how to create this type of site. It's also for my use as I have a terrible memory and will forget exactly what I did in no time at all. read more...