Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Sometimes it is very easy to get confused. For example, this lunchtime I headed off to the local computer shops to try and find a Keyboard and Mouse set to replace the existing Logitech one that I am using on the Mac as the buttons are falling out. From the 10+ products I looked at, only 1 Logitech set was Mac compatible yet all but 1 M$ sets were Mac compatible. Although I am sure you can get the drivers from Logitech, it seems peculiar that 90% of M$ products support Mac right out of the box!! The only one that didn’t was the finger print scanner which I can accept as it is an XP integration… 1 point M$!!

What is Google doing now?? They no longer offer 1GB of storage for their GMail accounts. Sometimes I am amazed by the thinking that must go on there!! No not Infinity+1, its april fools day remember, even though it would be a very good idea! Instead, as they have been running for a year, they are now giving 2GB of storage for every user!! Thanks Google!

They have also integrated Rich Text formatting… at last!!!

I have a number of invitations available if anyone would like one (I am quite sure though that everyone has a Gmail account!)… please leave a comment.

Day 3 proved much easier and quite successful in my quest for Macification. The standard install of PHP in OS X lacks a few of the libraries that I regularly use so rather that figure out how to activate them I did the next best thing; Download an update! Entropy have an excellent ‘one-click update’ for PHP on OS X and it was a painless excercise. Including the download, it took 3 minutes to update to the latest version and activate all of the libraries I need. McDonalds latest advertising cliche ringing in my mind.. ‘Mmm… Lovin’ it!!’

My quest for a code editor was a bit more challenging in that I had found a number of candidates that looked promising. I wanted all of the usual things that people would want in an editor; Syntax highlighting being the most obvious and important. Other features I hoped to find were FTP access to my sites, tabs for each window and support for various filetypes. From the few I tried, the one that immediately had me saying ‘Wow, how much does this cost?’ was jEdit, an open source project!

jEdit supports over 130 filetypes as standard but new ones can be added easily if you need more! Initially it lacked a couple of features I would have liked but I soon discovered the plugin manager where there are hundreds of available upgrades. I installed a tabs plugin, an ftp access plugin, an autocomplete plugin a code beautifier plugin, a plugin that will make a webpage of code from any given selection… all my requirements and more!! At some stage I plan to experiment with the subversion integration it offers. Being a Java application I was initially very skeptical. My past experience tells me that they load and run as fast a fat man in treacle. In this case I was pleasantly surprised. Whether its the Mac platform or just the 7 years of development on jEdit, it ran just like any other application. I would like to test it on my PC (Have to love Java for that!) but I am not allowed to turn it on yet! If it runs ok on there, I will be very happy as that will give some consistency accross my platforms. If you want to see for yourself what jEdit can do, check the Features page on the website. You should probably check the active community site aswell.

The only niggling issue I have at this stage is the highlighting colours… just not what I am used to. Luckily, all I need to do is change the XML file and I can have any colours I want.

I have just about completed my second day of a small task I have set myself that will be in two stages. Part one is to not switch my PC on for a week so that I force myself into using the Mac. This way, I figure, if there are any problems I will have to work through them. Yesterday I managed to get Apache and PHP running properly including a virtual host set up so that I can run different domain names for my sites locally. The second part will be go for a month if all is going well. So far, I couldn’t be happier!!

Yesterdays software search was for an FTP client. I ended up using two that I liked. OneButton FTP and Transmit. OneButton is open source and worked very well, it is lacking recursive operations at this stage so I will keep checking as that feature is on the roadmap. Transmit is $29 so not the end of the world if I decide to buy it… from my initial tests, it is a very well featured application.

Today I downloaded, installed and configured MySQL which was a result. I now have a replica of my blog running locally. Todays great software find was CocoaMySQL. It is quite possibly the best application I have ever used for accessing databases locally and over the net. Open Source aswell so that was sweet!

Tomorrow I am testing out some Editors. I have downloaded a lot to try out and I am really hoping that I can find something similar to Editplus+ I will update about that when I make a choice. All in all, no major problems but a lot of fun!!

A database to search on the counterparts of MD5 encryption. Although not true reverse engineering, this could be a worry as much as it is genius! By entering any word into the search box you are given the MD5 hash, this is also saved into the website database. If you enter an MD5 string into the search box and it knows the original string it will show you, try entering 9ed1ab4a0967b5b0c02502d7b8b2c68a into the search and you will see why it could be worrying if the database gets big enough. This is thinking outside the box!!

Whilst in Jersey, ‘H’ and I completed another Cache. This time it was a webcam cache in which we had to get our picture taken. Thanks to Leigh for sitting there and taking the time to direct us around the square at 1 minute intervals, at least he was able to sit in the dry and warm unlike us! This was our second cache and we have plans to complete some more in the next few weeks. This post is also a test for a new Gallery plugin from geoffhutchison.net. With any luck the image of the cows will link direct to the gallery!

Our first Geocache was a success… this time. ‘H’ and I ventured out into the wilds of Pleinmont again (too cold to stay last time!) to find the cache. After a lot off looking and scrambling through bushes, mainly by ‘H’ as she was the only one that could fit, we finally found the cache in the most obvious place! It was quite exciting to fill out the logbook and read the other entries that people had made. There were groups from as far as Canada in the book and quite a few little treasures that one could take. As it happened, we had nothing to leave and so did not take anything. On our next free weekend, we will try the other local cache. After that, we will have to venture off-island and maybe even make a cache of our own somewhere! My Garmin GPS has been working hard all weekend and is still on the first set of batteries.

After my GPS arrived on Saturday, I wondered what I could do to test it out as a new toy, after all, needs some attention. The answer came in the form of Geocaching. This is essentially a high tech treasure hunt where you travel to a precise set of co-ordinates using your GPS to find the cache. As I understand it, a traditionally cache consists of a sealed container with a logbook and some small gifts inside. When you find the cache, you log your visit, take something out, put something back in then head home to register your find on the website! Amazingly, there are 2 caches listed in Guernsey and 3 in Jersey.

On Sunday morning, we headed out to find a cache at Pleinmont and found the exact spot successfully. Unfortunately, in our eagerness, we did not think to find out what it was we were supposed to find here and so after a very brief look in some bushes we went back to the car to warm up! I think another attempt will be made next weekend to try to cache this one! Also, as there is a plan to go to Jersey in a couple of weeks if the weather is nice enough… I think trying to find one or two of the Jersey caches is a must. I know the location of one in St Helier and it is walking distance from the marina. The other two could be more challenging… hopefully there will be one at the Yacht Club!

I am truly astounded… no, I am in awe and cannot help but be absolutely amazed and grateful for the service that I have just received from GPS4Less.co.uk. Yesterday afternoon at about 4 o’clock, I ordered a Garmin handheld GPS unit. It arrived this morning (Next Day) at 10.30!! How did this happen? If I had been partying at some stage in the week, I would seriously question if I had ordered it much earlier… babbling and speechless so off to play…. thanks GPS4Less.co.uk.

Just because it sounds funny and I would like to confuse anyone that has the slightest interest in my Blog, I have decided to call my Mini, Mac after my Mac mini!! Having clarified that point to save any confusion, it would now be appropriate for me to complain again about Mac, he is leaking oil in very small quantities. After all of the problems I have had with him (mainly due to very shoddy work from St Martins Garage), I really feel that soon enough, he will be running great!! It’s not all bad though as I have discovered that he can do about 10 miles on just the smell of petrol… good work Mac, saved me having to push!! As it is related, I should mention that I am also getting on very well with my Mac mini, less problems than the Mini, Mac so far… not hard as I would already have had to give it to the computer garage for 6 weeks so they break the DVD-ROM drive for me.

I am sitting in silence and typing this post. I can hear the wind outside my window which is a novelty for me as I usually only hear the wind blowing from my Coolermaster PC case!! I have spent a day with my new Mac mini and so far I am absolutely stunned with it. The performance out of the box is not too bad at all, it runs silently, the graphics system is surprisingly powerful, it has not crashed once and it looks cool as heck!! I am so very pleased that I spent this small amount of money as I can honestly say I love this computer already… it really is paving the way for a Power Mac. I bought the 1.42Ghz version that has the standard 256MB RAM which I plan to upgrade to 1GB soon!!! So far it has done everything I have asked, playing DVD’s is excellent, the quality of the movies is great but the lack of any discernible noise really makes a lot of difference. I am not even going to start with my comments of the operating system as I am far too pleased with it at the moment and I do not want to be too biased towards the computing platform that I mocked for most of my computing life!! It would seem that I have joined the elitist ranks of Apple ownership and it looks like my theory was correct… Mac’s are cool !!!

I have written a small article about NMEA and our plans for installing a Multiplexer on Mystere. If you are interested in these… head over to thesailingbug.com and have a look. This is a subject which I am learning about and so I put this together to try and clarify a few things to myself. If anyone else finds it interesting or useful then great!!

About a year ago, I purchased the iMatch Image database to catalogue my collection of photos and hopefully allow me to find a particular image quicker. The application is very powerful and completely exceeds my requirements as I dont have enough time to learn about the advanced features. I am sure I have a number of uses for the scripting language it supports, but I have no idea how to use it. The biggest feature that I have wanted to use is the categories view. An image can be assigned to multiple categories that you will have decided upon. I have opted for location, type of image, what and who is in the image.

Yesterday I completed the categorisation of every single photo. I can now click on ‘Mystere’ and see all of the pictures of the boat. I can click on ‘Shane’ and see all photos that have me in them. To further this, I can combine these and select ‘Mystere’ and ‘Shane’ to see all pictures of me on the boat.

I have calculated that the images have an average of 4 categories assigned to them, as I have 4200+ photos, that equates to more than 16,000 checkboxes ticked!! I am off out now to buy a new mouse as my left button has melted!!

With the 3 new projects I am about to embark on in one sweep, I thought I should get my affairs into order first. As my time developing this site will be restricted for a number of weeks, I decided to fix a couple of CSS and design issues I had. The most challenging thing I finally got fixed was a problem with overlapping floats. If I posted a picture into a small amount of text, it would overlap into the next post and shift the text fouling my layout. I was prompted to take action on this as it was an instant issue on my Videos page! This is now fixed as you can see in the post about the Curta below… the box is the height of the image. I believe that my fix will work in all known browsers which is a plus although I have only tested in Firefox and IE. The step back was when I had made my changes and I cut all the text from the Curta post to try the solution… problem was that I then went and cut & pasted some more code and lost all of the original text… nightmare ! Luckily I was able to write a more concise posting without fear of the image ending up half inside the Tickle-me-Laserjet post!

The other thing I have got around to is the style of the comments which was standard before. As I have just implemented Gravatars into the site… I thought I should sort out the formatting. I am now pleased with the style of this area… leave some comments to try it out!!

This is my MkI Curta calculator. It was developed by Curt Herzstark in the 1940’s. It is made up from 605 finely machined parts and is capable of some advanced mathematics. By using this resource, I am able to calculate that my Curta calculator, with serial number 59065 was manufactured in November 1963, making it 42 years old. It is in fine condition and I intend to learn more about it and what it can do. I have multplication, addition and subtraction sorted… now I need to work on division, squares, roots and remainders! If you want to have a go at using a Curta calculator, you can try it out using this well made simulator.