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.