Once and Only Once

Apple pushes anti-virus for Macs

Daz — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:17:48 +0000

Mac OSX - really different from windows?

Daz — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:25:26 +0000

The latest update for my mac includes Safari - a web browser, which requires me to restart my Operating System to install it. Presumably this also means whatever holes it's being patched for go through to the core of the OS.
This was the same thing people used to criticize windows for. ...

Some really interesting buildings here

Daz — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:00:00 +0000

http://villageofjoy.com/50-strange-buildings-of-the-world/

My Opinion of Broadvision

Daz — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:02:00 +0100

A while ago I had the misfortune of working with a product called BroadVision that was sold to the IT Director. Information on the internet about it was pretty sparse so we knew nothing about how it actually worked until we recieved the discs, I vowed to contribute back to the internet to give my own personal opinion of it sometime, I forgot until I was reminded today by looking at some BPM diagrams.You should do your own research if you are likely to be interested in buying any of it, but beware a company that doesn't want your developers to see their framework until you've signed a contract.

It was a sign of things to come that they had sent us discs for the wrong OS so we had to wait even longer for the correct ones to arrive. It was a stack of open source products together (The editor was based on Eclipse, but an oldish version!) with the work they had done in a kind of BPM type of way. From what I could tell from the internet and one of their consultants Broadvision started out as some kind of TV/internet concept but it didn't do that well so they reused code for the new model of selling self service e-commerce apps. If you use it and you wonder why some of the naming is a bit odd ("channels" for example) that's why!

We had no end of problems, it was buggy and i'm not even sure it was finished (you had to write a custom java class to be able to persist a checkbox as a boolean!). It was sold to the IT Director with tales of how you can just draw these flow charts connect up the boxes, click a button and your application is done. From the start we needed the consultants for practically everything even during our supposed training course - at one point something wasn't working and we couldn't figure out why. He couldn't figure out why either. Eventually he decompiled a class (which we weren't allowed to do) and discovered a catch block swallowing the Exception.... I asked the consultant (his desktop wallpaper was his red sports car in front of his nice house) how often he expected we'd need to have a consultant come visit and he said something like "2 days every fortnight", a cost my company had never expected - this was supposed to be a system that almost didn't need developers! We also found that we would have to buy more modules than we expected to just be able to do a fairly simple shopping cart.

I will spare you the rest of the messy tale but lets just say it got much worse and dragged out for a few months. They never did fix the checkbox bug I raised a ticket for, and then we were back to normal java - ahhhh.

They may have totally changed, their website looks different now - but despite it saying "View demos and download free software" under the "Attention Developers!" banner I couldn't find anything to download except marketing media that seems to still be claiming that you much less developer resource.

Would be a cool game :-)

Daz — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:33:05 +0100

Am I the only one who thought this would be even cooler if the dots were sheilds/bullets and the developer was a ship - like a 2D shoot em up :-)

Exposing MythTVs telnet control over HTTP

Daz — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:52:00 +0100

I've been setting up remote controls on mythtv recently but one of them is a bit old and clunky. It occurred to me that it would be nice to use my smartphone to control mythtv instead. I found an existing app for smartphones but installing the .net libraries onto my phone and compiling a C program for the server too seemed a little too much when I don't even have activesync installed. What I do have on my phone already though is a web browser.

I wrote this ruby script to create a web interface, it generates a page and translates the links into telnet commands that are passed to mythtv.

Because it simply translates the urls you can use pretty much any of the mythtv telnet commands by just inserting a slash where there would normally be a space. It's been a nice application of Ruby, it was quick to write (in fact an attempt at KISS) and is self contained apart from needing Ruby of course.

mythcontrol.rb

Change 192.168.1.6 to the ip address of the frontend you want to control

run by typing mythcontrol.rb

point your browser at :

http://127.0.0.1/

You can do everything you need with the buttons i've exposed but all you need to do to add/change them is change the URLs in the code - check out mythtvs docs for a list of possible commands

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Telnet_socket

Buggy scribblish theme

Daz — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:50:15 +0000

The blog theme was causing people to post multiple times as there was no feedback that the post had been successful.

I've switched to another theme now which, while it has crappy cosmetic bugs of it's own, works better.

I have been less than impressed with the stability of Typo and it performs like a dog to boot.

Bloody OSX

Daz — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:52:00 +0000

Tired of windows updates? Tired of having to reboot for security updates? Thinking of switching to a Mac? Think again!

This aspect of Macs has really disappointed me - seemingly every couple of weeks a new massive update is required - the usual culprits are are Quicktime and iTunes - both things I deliberately avoid using and they both require a restart!

TF2 changes

Daz — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 12:38:08 +0000

this this article caught my eye today.
"It's a large scale modification to the core of the game," Walker hinted. "It'll debut in a limited fashion through the Medic first

I wonder if this will be the return of grenades in the form concussion grenades for medic.

Ouch

Daz — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:48:00 +0000

Hmm so that's why the server seemed slow...