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Private Stock
Date: 10/9/2007
I write all sorts of software that I just use myself with no intention of releasing. This latest one is because I hate WinAmp:



It just reads a whole folder tree of music and displays it, reading the tags on the fly in a thread and lets you play back the music, mp3 and ogg mostly. Ultra lightweight of course. Probably too lightweight. Oh well.

Some of the other ones are:
  • Car search app: aggregates search results from various car for sale sites with more advanced filtering, sorting than the source sites... with thumbnails. Don't need it much now that I've bought a car.
  • Videnc: video pipeline manager for HDTV -> avi via a number of other apps. It's manages to avoid a/v desync by using a very error tolerate demuxer app, which it scripts even though it's GUI only. All other tools I've tried including everything on the Mac and PC are hopeless on HDTV streams because of the number of stream errors present.
  • Html2Xmltv: My private stock EPG app. Schedule and go.
  • i.Archive: front end for some stupid little archiving tools, e.g. "rar".
  • HttpLoggingProxy: a visual proxy, lets you inspect every HTTP request and response with some decoding tools. Pretty freakin neat. I don't know of any free ones so I wrote my own... cut down version of Charles.
  • TranscodeDrop: little pad to drop audio and playlists onto to convert them via BeSweet.
  • VideoSaver: My video screensaver. Lil DirectShow screensaver that plays random parts of video's from a folder. This gets lots of comments when people see it :)
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Phase 2 In The Grand Green Earth Plan
Date: 4/9/2007
After a successful Phase 1 of the Grand Green Earth Plan for my house hold. Phase 2 went into effect last week with the purchase of green(er) family transport:



We are with you.

For those who care about numbers, and it does all come down to numbers, here they are: It's not as good as I was hoping but when budget, size, drivability, features and safety collide it's always going to get messy. I really like that we have 4 air bags now as well as the improved economy. I've seen a few trucks run reds and the messy aftermath... and I for one want a little bit more between me, my family and the truck's bull bar.

Phase 3 perhaps...?
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Scribe v1.89 Stable
Date: 23/8/2007
I've made a branch in svn for v1.89 stable based on test20. Apart from one user I've had no reports of major issues. I'll update the translations one last time and release v1.89 stable.

So in the trunk code I'm trying to move towards a cleaner storage architecture so that I can incorporate a new file system based mail/contacts storage. At the moment my idea is that email gets downloaded to a single file (.eml) and then at some point later gets "compacted" into a blob of mails. Which is typically maybe a MB of email in one file. This means you can delete an email and reclaim the disk space used without having to copy more than a MB of data. The mail store directory would mostly be 10's or 100's of "blob" files where all the email reside, some .eml files that havn't been packed into a blob yet and some indexes into the whole thing for fast searching and so on. It's kind of a mix of the MBOX and MDIR ideas, with I think the benefits of both.

The current storage API is not going to map onto that easily so I'm trying to work out the route of least resistance to get that working. I still havn't figured out how the indexing will work. I'd love to get rid of the flaky mime parser the current system uses and start using the new parser for both reading and writing email. But I might leave that so that I don't have too much going on in the code.

That said, I still have trouble with my RSI these days and can't type much. It's not that I don't want to work on the code, but more of a case that I can't do much without endangering my health. I wish I could move faster on these issues but I can't. Sorry.
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Wanted To Buy
Date: 15/8/2007
This is more so that Google indexes it than anything else so here goes. One day I'd like to get my hands on the following guitar amplifiers:

Marshall JMP800 2204 Head
Early 80's model, in good condition, 50w head, unmodified a bonus.

Mesa Boogie Single Rectifier
'90s model series 1, 50w head.


I'd prefer a local sale (Sydney, Australia) but shipping from somewhere in Australia is a possibility. The amps must be local voltage units (240v) not US voltage (110v). They don't need to have new tubes but must be in working order. Please let me know if you are interested in selling such an amp.
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Teh new Apple gear.
Date: 8/8/2007
802.11n AND gigabit!
After ranting about the lack of gigabit wired access on the Apple Airport Extreme, they have finally updated the device to include gigabit ethernet. Oh sweet joy :D

iLife08/iWork08
Oh what have we here, the next rev of iLife and iWork! We've only been waiting for what 8 months now? Finally.

Must... resist... clicking... buy now... ;)
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Don't Lose Data
Date: 7/8/2007
I read Jeff Atwood's post about What's Worse Than Crashing? this morning and I whole heartedly agree on his assessment. However I have not been as diligent as him, in that my software has caused user's to lose data (and I'm very sorry about that if it was you!), however it's getting better, in fact I released Scribe v1.89-test20 this morning to try and prevent users from corrupting their settings file (yay... go me *cringe*).

Anyway I opened up my phone to look for some info I had stored in the calendar. And recent events were in there but as I scrolled back through the months there was no old events at all. It seems all the events from Jun 2007 back were gone. Typical I thought. It's crashed or something and lost some of my data. (The phone has well and truly lost any credibility with me). Anyway so I start googling around for info on the problem hoping to bump into some other frustrated users and maybe get a solution... and got pretty much nothing. So I noodled around for a firmware update. And idly ran through the settings on the phone looking for anything that might shed some light on it. Then I saw it... in the Calendar setup there is an option called "Delete After:" and the value was "4 weeks".

A moment of stunned silence followed. Crickets chirped. Huh? The default mode of the phone is to f*** with the users data? Niiiiice. Good one Motorola... thats just sweet, you really nailed that setting. Oh of course there is a "Never" option, which perchance is what the user would expect to be the default, but thats not the default is it? Nooooo. Unbelievable.... unbelievable.

The default setting!

Unbelievable... *sigh*
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