OK, so a few weeks ago my old G3 iBook broke down. Yesterday I took delivery of a brand new (well, eBay-sourced, but new for me) G4 iBook and was about to start synching my music collection from my Linux desktop when it struck me that that’s just a dumb idea. I’ve got a 54 … Continued
I get probably about 10 to 20 spam comments left on this blog every day. However, nobody ever sees them because, firstly, the most obvious spams are automatically filtered out using content scanning and IP blacklists, and secondly, the remaining messages are checked by a human moderator (i.e. me) before they appear on the site. … Continued
Oops! The HMG (trading as Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs) has misplaced the personal data of about 40% of the UK’s population, including 15 million children. There is “no evidence that it has fallen into the wrong hands”, but there is no evidence that it has not. This is the same government that plans for … Continued
Today, HRH Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary. Little known fact about Prince Phillip: The Yaohnanen believe Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is a divine being, the pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit and brother of John Frum… When the cult formed is unclear, but sometime in … Continued
The chart above shows the fall of the US dollar against the Euro over the last eight years, with some key events in American politics and economics noted, which may or may not be seen as causes or effects of the falling dollar. Larger version – PNG Larger version – Gimp XCF Source: European Central … Continued
Today marks 700 years since the date traditionally regarded as the day when William Tell shot an apple off the top of his son’s head with a crossbow and kick-started a resolution against the Austrians which led to the founding of Switzerland. The legend goes that the Austrian Hermann Gessler was appointed vogt (sheriff) of … Continued
This release works around errors in capturing screen shots from certain WMV files. It also changes the default geometry from 240Ã180+0+0 to “auto” which is an automatically calculated, hopefully appropriate, geometry. Download dhyana.pl Highlighted source code
A story that seems to have had surprisingly little coverage in the British media is the fact that for almost half a year, Belgium has had no official government. Since the elections of 10 June, no government has been able to form a working majority, despite a lot of effort from the Belgian royal family … Continued
I’m told that the only thing that will bring me more traffic than pirated MP3s and hardcore porn is photos of kitties… The gorgeous models are our 15-month-old cats Chairman Meow and Mr d’Silva. Picture quality is awful as they’re from my phone. We really need to invest in a new digital camera, as the … Continued
Large PNG image Scalable SVG image I drew this map and wrote the skeleton of this article in November, but have only recently gotten around to finishing it… Empires The US is occasionally referred to as “the only remaining global superpower”. By 2050, I believe that it will still be a superpower, but that others … Continued
An update to my PHP encryption class. Despite the name, it's becoming a pretty sophisticated encyption machine. New encryption algorithms added: Vigenerè cypher One-Time Pad Bruce Schneier's Superencyption Various other methods using the MCrypt library The TrivialEncoderManager class has been obsoleted by TE_Machine, an abstract class with several different child classes for encoding, decoding and … Continued
So, I was looking for a way to create sequential video thumbnails (like this one) from a video file on Linux. I found that my options were severely limited. On Windows there are a plethora of tools capable of this fairly simple task, including Media Player Classic, but on Linux all I could find was … Continued
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the day Elvis Presley faked his own death.
Now that fake Steve has been outed, I’m sure everyone is looking for the next fake blog. Well… Fake Bob Keefe (Who is Bob Keefe ?)
PHP lets you define your own error handler, so I decided to get a bit fancy. MegaErrorHandler (MEH) outputs its errors as specially-formatted HTML comments, with the details of the error encoded using JSON. A small client-side script, with an associated stylesheet then pulls this data out of the comments and formats it as a … Continued
I posted a couple of years ago that the command line is the interface of the future. Today I stumbled on a couple of articles that seem to agree with me: Command Line for the Common Man: Command Line Comeback The Power of Command Lines Quicksilver blows away both Apple’s Dock and Microsoft Windows’ Taskbar … Continued
The Open Mobile Alliance, who are responsible for co-ordinating the web-browsing efforts of mobile phones, seem to have misplaced xhtml-mobile12-model-1.mod. This file is a key part of the DTD for the latest version of their XHTML Mobile Profile standard, which defines how authors should construct web pages intended for the consumption of mobile phones. Now … Continued
Here’s a simple PHP library for encoding and decoding text. Examples: TrivialEncoder.class.php (Highlighted source code.)
Here’s a challenge. Decrypt… aWt6eWZlaWEKfWJjeWFvcwppa3p5ZmVpYQpvaWJlCmZjZ2sKZmNnawp5 emtpbwpub2Z+awpleWlreApkZXxvZ2hveApvaWJlCmhrZG0KeXpraW8Ka Wt6eWZlaWEKemt6awppa3p5ZmVpYQpmY2drCm9pYmUKa2Z6YmsKeW NveHhrCm9pYmUKeXpraW8KZmNnawpvaWJlCmtmemJrCnxjaX5leApvaW JlCnl6a2lvCmtmemJrCnl6a2lvCmlia3hmY28KZXlpa3gKZ2NhbwpnY2FvCm9 pYmUKZGV8b2dob3gKfmtkbWUKeXpraW8KZXlpa3gKZGV8b2dob3gKeX praW8KfmtkbWUKZXlpa3gKaHhrfGUKc2tkYW9vCmNkbmNtZQpkZXxvZ2h veAphY2ZlCnljb3h4awp+a2RtZQpvaWJlCnhlZ29lCnl+ZXoKaWJreGZjbwpl eWlreAp5fmV6Cn9kY2xleGcKYWNmZQp5emtpbwppYmt4ZmNvCmZjZ2sK a2Z6YmsKY2RuY21lCmdjYW8KY2RuY21lCmRlfG9naG94Cm1lZmwKeXpra W8KaWJreGZjbwp4ZWdvZQpvaWJlCm5vZn5rCmNkbmNtZQp+a2RtZQp5f mV6
Here’s an example of how to parse an HTML table into an array using the PEAR module XML_HTMLSax3. It supports the , and elements and the rowspan and colspan attributes. It’s worth noting that this code will raise a bunch of notices if you run it displaying all errors. This is pretty difficult to avoid, … Continued
