Ok, yeah, I know. Over 7 months without so much as an update.
Well, work is going well. So well at keeping me busy I've not really made time for my own code. But hopefully that should start changing soon.

The status script has had the bulk of the back end code done now, it mainly needs all that nice user interface stuff, some good caching and then a double check for bugs and then it should be done. So give me another year or so and it might be finished :P
See it in it's current horrible state over in the sandbox: http://sandbox.palmnet.me.uk/status/

As for other work, well, I started sorting out palmnet version three. Possible name change. Total design overhaul. New back end. New release system that might encourage me to release things and get on with projects. All juicy stuff.
Nothing to see yet though as it's currently sitting on my PC as a collection of barely filled folders with not much more apart from a logging system.

Other than that, I bought a Chumby, along with Phil from PWnet, and it's excellent.
So far I've only whacked out a quick and dirty widget to display themes from Kuler. It's very rough, so might get re-written in the coming weeks, should I get a chance, although it's currently sat at 4th most popular widget of the week!

I'll post again soon with more information about various things later in the week, honest!

Happy 1,000,000 hits day!

For the first time in Palmnet history I've gotten over 1,000,000 hits per month.
Way back when I think I somehow managed 14k or 15k in uniques, but since I forgot the exact number the new record number of uniques is currently just past 15,000.

At the end of the month I'll have to blog again and see what those numbers have climbed to. But considering we're only 60% through the month I'll cross my fingers and hope for more lovely webernet surfers to come and visit.

In other news

Loughborough University Computing Services are idiots. They blocked ports for remote access to SQL server and FTP for the server we need to access remotely over the Easter break.
&guot;But that won't take long to fix!" I hear you say, but according to inside sources it could be over a week to open two ports, and then over a day for settings to propagate across their various firewalls

Oh, and T-SQL for SQL server 2005 is really, really, inefficient and backwards.
Joys of university projects!

Long time no post!
Seems to fast be becoming my default intro to all my blog posts!

This is actually the first post in 2009, over 2 months since my last post. Since then much has happened to me and my plans and unfortunately not all for the best.

General project plans have been delayed by faffing about with placements, new university semester and year long project deadlines. Some projects, like the shoutboxes are currently on hold while other, like the new version of Palmnet, are still in the pipeline and have jumped the queue.
That isn't to say that shoutboxes will never be finished, just as it stands my future seems fairly busy and I'm not sure where to squeeze them in. But as it's a fairly popular project I dare say I'll squeeze it in soon enough and hopefully get the damned thing done and available for download soon so that the 3 of you, you know who you are, can get off my back and bask in the glory of fresh code.

I've also been tweaking some of the current Palmnet scripts lately, updating things like the raycaster (which still refuses to work) to show a debug view which is pretty handy and should make fixing it properly fairly easy when I have chance to sit down with a pencil and paper and sort it out.
The minipolls also got a bit of an update today with a few new features requested by none other than Rob Manuel, co-founder of the renowned B3ta.com, who then made 2 polls of massive proportions and almost killed my server with the load put on it. Interesting server statistics would be the 309.3% load it was reporting on the intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5130 @ 2.00GHz processor and the 9.4 requests/sec, which though it doesn't sound like much it caused enough lag on that server for database connections to time out and for me to receive 54 emails letting me know about it!

As for Palmnet v3 I'm still researching various options for the back end. The choice between coding it all myself and using a framework is pretty tough, trading enjoyment for time. But I did start some preliminary work on the database so it can cope with the stress and complexity of the many projects linked together. I'm also probably going to develop a sort of micro framework to lace it all up which should be fairly portable for use on top of other frameworks and systems so I can keep the handy functions together for use in future projects.
And the most important new planned feature is a project time line, so I can plan ahead properly and set goals to guilt trip me into working more often on what I should be and keep me away from time sinks like facebook and Google reader.

The job offer I mentioned back in my Christmas post was accepted by me and I shall start working for a company called Fivium down in London starting in July. If anyone has any advice on living in London it would be much appreciated as I'm a mere small country town boy and have only been to London twice before, one of those was for the interview.
The job should be awesome, pay sounds good, company seem great and the work seems to be interesting. However, it will probably mean less blogging than usual because of working 9:00-5:30 and I also had to sign official secrets act, so I can't even blog about some of the work I'll be doing which is a shame. But it's all for the good of the government and such, so it's for a good reason.

Also, congrats to Ben on passing his theory

It's Christmas! (Almost)

Anyway, as the season is upon us I get a nice break from university, from the 12^th of December to the 12^th of January. This gives me a bit of time to actually do something instead of talking about things I'd like to do.

Jobs / Site plans
At university these past few months I've been hunting for a placement job.
For those not in the know, an industrial placement is basically just a year out working in the industry you hope to end up in. My university is extra nice and gives us a whole extra diploma for taking a placement, which is always handy.
So I updated my CV, customised it for each employer, put it in multiple formats and so on. Sent it off to 4 companies, had 3 replies so far, 2 interviews and one job offer so far. The one thing I noticed was that most applications wanted a link to a personal website, if you had one. Or it would at least be brought up in interviews because of the work I've done and the places I applied to.
So I've actually started to have important people looking at my site and judging me based on it...not a good thing when the site is as poor as this one currently is.

My solution is to start working on Palmnet version 3 (Pv3), and to actually start working on it this time because I have a good reason to re-code it all.
Plans are as have been mentioned a few times before, but hopefully with more finesse that would make potential employers swoon at the simplicities of the design and intricacies of the code. As I have two weeks after Christmas that were planned for revision time (5 exams coming up at the end of Jan/start of Feb) I shall no doubt start coding then to help me relax while revising.

Kevin, the skilled photoshop ninja he is, has been cranking out some rather fancy pants designs and an awesome logo too. So expect the site to actually look good when compared to the past four years of my creative design skills.

Christmas
I'm a bit of a Grinch as of the past couple of years.
After working in a pub once over Christmas I now utterly detest all Christmas songs. Except Fairytale of New York which is just plain awesomeness all year round.
I'm also too old now, according to my parents, for those cool presents I used to get (19 is not too old). So now I'm dreading crappy gifts and just wanting the money instead so I can pay bills and eat!
Not much to say other than that really.
Bah Humbug! But yay for the time off uni

Projects
As is fairly traditional, whenever there's a holiday I tend to come up with a few little projects.
This year I might not start anything new and instead work on re-designing and re-coding all my old projects to bring them up to date. Everything currently is so inconsistent and just needs an overhaul to keep them in shape.
A few old projects that never got finished in the first place might have to make their way to completion too if I can get time. (Shoutboxes being top on my priority there)
I do have one project up my sleeve, but it is a rather big one so not sure whether I'll start it now or wait until the other work is finished, have to wait and see.

Usual long time no blog and larger catching up post however this time I have a genuine reason why I might appear to have been dead for a while.

I started my second year of university here at Loughborough (Sunday Times University of the Year ) recently and moved out of halls and got a house. Which though awesome it did mean I had to set certain things up. Gas, water, electric and all the less important things were easy. But the most important thing of all, the internet, took about 2 weeks just to get installed!
So it’s not out of choice that I haven’t been replying to emails, checking forums and being on MSN.
However, in my time offline I have done a little work on the much anticipated (ha shoutboxes.
So much work that it's almost in a stable and usable state, see here for a demo:

As you can see, it's still nowhere near feature complete, let alone finalised. But it is at least working based on the underlying code I've done. So hopefully things left to do on my 100+ item ToDo list will be easier to code and everything should go a bit smoother now.

Other than shoutboxes I haven’t got much to report, general first week of university activities kept me busy.
I do plan on doing either some fancier image things or perhaps update the CPU emulator if I get chance soon. And I’ll hopefully be starting the new Palmnet soon because the current version with it's masses of non-centralised and segregated projects is starting to get in the way of progression. So updates are badly needed.

But uni work this year is far more than before, with two group projects, one lasting all year, and I have to find a job too as I'll hopefully be on a placement year. That coupled with normal work and day to day house/uni/society things I never seem to have much time to myself to sit down and code. But I'll try and make time. Mostly because Kevin will tell me off otherwise!

Work
I finished work the other week after working there for quite some time. It was, all in all, awesome.
I got paid to do what I'd sit at home doing anyway: Programming. What could be better than that!
All the people in the office were great, I learned loads about CakePHP/Design/CSS/Managing large projects/How crap Amazon are/... And to top it off, I have lots of things for my CV and a good reference too.
A good summer was had, even if it did entail waking up at 9am.

Flash
At work I got given two projects that required flash. I thought they'd give the flash jobs to other people who knew more about it but I ended up being the one lumbered with the task. No small feat for someone who's probably only written about 100 lines of Actionscript before in their entire life!
However, it's not that bad really. I think before when I used it I wasn't as good at programming in general as I am now and therefore found it pretty hard to get some of the things to work. Now I know a fair amount of stuff when it comes to programming, and lots more when it comes to trying to find help. So within an hour I'd learned enough to use a matrix to change the colour of things at random intervals to the colours I wanted, and to make a mini gallery-like script that interfaced with PHP to load all the images from a folder and alpha-tween between them.
So now I'm thinking I might try learning some more and perhaps do some flash based things, especially where I've used PHP/GD in the past, flash would offer faster speeds, less server load and, of course, interactivity.
Watch this space...(Don't watch too long though, you know what I'm like

New PC
As mentioned last time, though now I actually have it.
Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing as far as Palmnet is concerned because on one hand, I have a swanky new PC that can handle all I throw at it and means I can run things double quick which is handy for dev work, and on the other hand, I have a sweet gaming rig which I can waste days on playing all the new games I haven't been able to play yet.
So far results are inconclusive as to what hand will win out, but the gaming is very nice...
Will probably start work on a few other dev projects in mid September though, notably the new version of Palmnet and the updating and inclusion of all existing tools and scripts.

Shoutbox
The shoutbox is pretty much stalled at the moment. Mostly through lack of effort on my part and partly due to Phil, AKA PWnet, who's slow and lame when it comes to modifying the shoutbox theme.
On the up side though, Kevin, who rarely gets a mention on the blog, spent mere minutes and came up with a well laid out, clean, simple and teeny theme for the admin panel. I've just been setting up my new pc the past few days so haven't implemented it yet, but I will do soon. Once that's done I can do the whole of the admin panel without any more stops. Only thing holding me back would be my laziness and lack of drive!
If anyone wants to know about the work I have done though, it's all good so far. I think anyway. The image renderer is pretty much done now. Needs a few tweaks but nothing major.
The back end code is pretty much sound now too. I had some major, and I mean major, issues with my wonderful data layer but that was all fixed with one function to handle my forgetfulness in my design.

So all I need to do now is fix up the theme, finalise the image renderer and finish the admin panel. So close but yet so far.

And finally:

Router hacking update
Anyone remember the articles I posted about a little exploring I did on my router, a Belkin F5D7633-4, well over a year ago now? Well I still get hundreds of hits a month just to those posts and even emails from a few people from time to time. So I thought I should probably do a little section to catch up.
Firstly, no, I will not be making custom firmware for it anywhere in the near future.
I would love to, but I think that's slightly out of my league as far as the skills needed go. I would like to make a few tweaks perhaps at some point, but nothing major and definitely not in the next year or two!
Secondly, no, I don't know of any custom firmware you could run on it. It's not the most widely used router and they certainly kept their source obscured from direct view. So I don't think anyone else has bothered to make their own custom firmware either.
Thirdly and finally, no, I do not accept money to do anything above. Not unless it's vast amounts, and by vast I mean VAST. I unfortunately do have a life outside of my website and the internet and I don't think anything would justify me stopping that to mess about with routers all day instead!

However, I do want to know if anyone else does anything similar and interesting, so feel free to let me know if you or anyone you know has done something cool.

Long time no post!
I should probably code it so all my blog posts start with that thinking about it. But I have good reason not to have posted in over a month.

My main reason is work. It's so much fun and an awesome job, but it really tires me out. So when I get home around 6pm I'm not in the mood for coding like I used to be because I've been doing it all day.
However some stuff has been done. Namely shoutboxes, as usual.

The shoutboxes have come on in leaps and bounds. The image rendering times are so good and the code is so slick that even when it has to render in a totally different way to last time, rendering coloured text multiple times on multiple lines, 11 emotes and underlining some text it's actually faster on average than the old script was!

The admin area has been expanded a little but there is a major snag I've hit with the site theme which kinda screws me over. Hopefully Phil will come up with something soon but he's rather elusive lately so I never know quite what's going on :S I might even have to delve into the dark world of design myself until I can find a better replacement.
If you think you can crank out a design for me do drop me a comment

I've also started work on a little API for it too, so that people can code random stuff to integrate with the shoutbox backend without having to touch my code at all. The idea comes from Sonic Offline, an online friend from the US, who mainly does flash based things. He wanted a way to mix his ActionScript seamlessly with my PHP.
I wrote the whole API in about 30 minutes and it outputs data in XML, JSON and even a raw PHP array but with future plans for CSV and perhaps some other formats that people suggest.
I also need to find a neat and secure way to let the API accept input data securely but it's not a major feature on the top of my mind at the moment.
Still, something nifty to look out for in the future :3

Also worked a bit on the new version of my site. Still not off the drawing board yet but the plans are starting to straighten up and it looks like I might have started to come up with some nifty things using loads of ideas I've had over the past few months.
My main goal is still to somehow come up with a central palmnet hub which will have all my other things integrated into it nicely. So my sandbox scripts would be easily accessible and my blog would merge with the portfolio. But there's still much to do and little time.

And if that wasn't enough I could tell you about some of the offline apps I've done to help me at work, but I plan on making a little coders/hackers toolkit at some point with all sorts of nifty things for windows people that will make coding and hacking oh so much easier.
I've also done some rather interesting web work at work, but I can't show one thing publicly and the other isn't fully live yet.
Oh, and I should have a new PC soon, which I guess might make me more productive...or it may mean I'm less productive and I'm playing games instead :P

Sorry for the long ramblyness of this post, I'm too tired and lazy to structure sentences and paragraphs properly. Will blog more soon when I progress on things like the shoutbox and my little toolkit.

Should there be any potential Palmnet-employers about then have I got some wonderful news for you all.

I just spent a little while updating my portfolio. First update to it for quite a while too! So go and check it out, play spot the typo's and all that fun stuff that can be gained by reading my little portfolio.

My portfolio can be found here: http://www.palmnet.me.uk/module/portfolio

Ok, so little/no Palmnet activity lately.

This is mainly because Uni is getting a bit more busy with projects being set, coursework to do and tests to start revising for, let alone the massive backlog of personal Palmnet stuff!
So I haven't really been all that busy with Palmnet lately. However there have been a few undocumented things going on:

Shoutboxes have had some more work done on them. RSS feeds now all snazzy and working and some of the user login stuff is done and tested. Next going to work on the customisation, image generation and the admin panel before doing a thorough review of it all and working on posting, history, fancy extras like emotes and security last but not least!

PIntEd also got some work done on it!
It was that VB.Net syntax highlighted editor for interpreted languages. Really rather nifty if a little useless and buggy at the moment with it's lack of features, but hopefully with a bit more work it'll be fairly honed.
The main problem was with the syntax highlighter script. It worked but was very slow when it had to re-highlight the whole document after every key press or size change. So I changed it to only highlight the currently visible text and to only highlight the full document when loading or when told to. That gives the illusion of non-stop highlighting action when it's only doing the minimum amount of work, which is some great optimisation on my part!
I'll just tidy up the code when I egt a chance and shove it online as there's heaps of people it seems who want a good, free and working .Net syntax highlighter script.

Other than that the only interesting work to date is a little bit of Palmnet v3 planning and research. So far I'm looking into all sorts of interesting frameworks and plugins but may end up just stealing the ideas and writing my own Palmnet-optimised versions, though I must say that Ext-JS is very enticing!
The new layout is planned in my head but not fully down. A new logo is kinda in the works and a new general theme is half done.
The main palmnet core will be fully re-done and will totally outclass the current system I have in place, which is fine but really not so good for some of the things I want to do, like keep consistency in parts and yet differences in others.

Any ideas/suggestions will be taken into account as they'll probably be better than mine! But expect great things...whenever I get a chance to do them.

Oh, and earlier when I mentioned uni work? You can mostly replace that with Beautiful Katamari >.<

You can all thank Kevin for this wonderful blog post, and my melting mind for the title.
Whenever I forget to post for a while Kevin is usually the guy to remind me and force me to write up a new post, so here it is this time.

Projects
I have a few old projects that are stagnating, namely Spunge and the shoutboxes. However, I also have all new projects too!

But first, the stagnating ones.
Spunge is at the exact same point it was at last time I posted, and the time before that too. Still the file manager to go and then just polish.
But it's always that last little push that's the hardest.
I also noticed a slight bug with the WYSIWYG editor I was using which I'll need to patch up too, and yet still no drive to complete it. Mostly due to the lack of co-developers on the project to poke me online and give me the enthusiasm to complete it.
The shoutboxes are also getting into a state of disrepair with no work being done on them for about a month now!
However, there is still a lot to do and the final spec isn't even finished yet, so the code is evolving each and every time I touch it. So far the JSON is gone as PHP5 still isn't all that common and the RSS feed is back and will be boasting more features...or at least it will when I get round to coding them!

Now then, new projects!
PIntEd
I did make a little interpreted languages editor about a year ago in VB6 so I could easily play with PHP on the fly at college.
That program sucked. Majorly! It had no real features, so to speak. It was just a split panel layout with one text box for code and one for output.
I recently started toying with .Net, a thing that's always made me shudder in the past, but I think I actually rather like it now I know how to program properly! OOP is no longer a problem and all the various other bastardisations available in .Net seem to somehow make, dare I say it, sense.
So thank you Microsoft! I like Visual Studio 2005, its nifty.
Anyway back to PIntEd, Palmers Interpreted languages Editor. It's made in VB.Net, my love for VB is still strong, and has all sorts of new stuff like syntax highlighting, line numbers, multi-document support...
Still not finished yet, but coming along well. Just tweaking the syntax highlighter now for faster highlighting. If anyone knows any good tips for syntax highlighting text boxes in .Net shoot me a comment

FlashHacker
Nothing overly special. I just needed to grab some variables values from a flash file at runtime so wrote a little VB6 app in about 10 minutes to do it for me. Then expanded it to writing variables and such and may add some extra features to make cracking flash games easier.
Also might be nice if I add in some scripting so you can get little botting programs on the go for flash MMO type games. Depends on how evil I feel.

Icey
Should be a nice little add-on script for Spunge or a standalone system when done for podcast owners.
The amount of podcasts I see with crap sites consisting of nothing much apart from a list of show links annoys me. So I set out some plans, not much code yet, to make an easy to manage podcast system that supports shows, tags, descriptions, track lists and all sorts of podcasty treats!
Palmnet v3
Recently PWnet.org.uk has had an update to make it look even flashier than it was before.
Never to be outdone I set up some basic plans for the next iteration of Palmnet. Nothing much to say yet as all I have so far is a text file with some generic buzz words and a few paragraphs about re-organising the stuff that's currently there. I also made a start at looking at new design ideas, but hey, I suck when it comes to anything that has to look nice!
Expect to see nothing for a good few months, but hopefully by this summer I might have come up with something cool for you lot to see.

In other news:
Uni, exams, gah. Need I say more!
Also, future projects seem to be oozing out of me right now, so expect another project soon to be a project management system!

Write again when I finish PIntEd I dare say, as that has very little work left to do on it. FlashHacker needs some tweaking and such but should also be out soon.
Oh, and I have a few fancy easter eggs in the planning stages for them too, but if you can think of something you'd like to see randomly included then don't forget to comment with a suggestion. LOLCATZ are forbidden. Stoats on the other hand...