Blog Archives for 2008

In yet another crazy venture from web 2.0, social networking and music recommendation site last.fm, people in the UK will be able to enjoy the sound of music at their local lido. Kicking things off on the 6th July at London Fields lido in Hackney, London, between 3pm and 5pm members of the public [...]

Over the last 12 months I have found that one single SSL-based host on my CPanel / WHM server occasionally drops back and starts generating “[hostname] has sent incorrect or unexpected message. Error Code: -12263″ alerts when trying to load a secure page in a browser, in this case FireFox.
A quick search of Google and [...]

So, finally, after many a year, I have decided to start a blog. Why now? and just plain why? You might ask.
Well in short it is because the process of writing articles is a long and drawn out one, usually taking a couple of hours at least, whilst, by contrast, blogging takes a shorter time [...]

PangeaSoft are re-releasing the game Cro-Mag Rally for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Ordinarily I wouldn’t care as I am neither a gamer nor have an iPhone or iPod Touch, but for the fact that the vast majority of the artwork in the game was created by a good friend of mine, Marcus Conge over [...]

To promote its new street art walking tour, the Tate Modern is bedecked in 6 works by a range of global graffiti artists: Blu from Bologna; the artist collective Faile from New York; JR from Paris; Nunca and Os Gêmeos, both from São Paulo and Sixeart from Barcelona.
What does this tell us about the [...]

Linked from the home page of the BBC World News online today was an article about how the Romanian village of Voinesti re-elected their mayor of 2 decades despite the fact that he died the night before the election.
Now I am not quite sure this is worthy of front page news, but I think it’s [...]

Given that my job is working with computers, you can imagine that I already spend at least 8-9 hours a day in front of the computer full-time. Imagine I do a job that I love, and therefore spend yet more hours in front of the computer, outside of the working day, not just evenings, [...]

Sooner or later, when you are processing, importing and ingesting data from large suppliers such as Amazon, iTunes Music Store and Virgin Megastore, to name but 3, you are likely to hit a scenario where you are need to handle, process, import and output XML files that are serveral hundred megabytes or even gigabytes in [...]

MacLockPick is a USB flash key based application designed to take advantage of a Mac keychains default open status and other clear text data on a host computer to perform a quick and data collection for further analysis offsite. The primary aim of the device is to operate in as fast a time as [...]

Whilst working in bed recently, enjoying the benefits of wi-fi and early morning productivity, i discovered a nasty downside to my overzealous work attitude.
Given the way I sit in bed and work, my wrist would frequently start hurting when I used the laptop trackpad. This pain would then, rather annoyingly, follow on throughout the day [...]

Yesterday, having posted an article to MacSurfer last weekend, I came across an opinion snippet on a web site. The web site was in fact, injoydesign.com, a site that purportedly puts "joy into design", the problem was, it wasn't giving me much joy, the reason being that the snippet of the site I was looking [...]

Last.fm, rather kindly, provides a plethora of web service and data access formats for developers online. Via the audioscrobbler.net web site you can request data for user profiles, artists, albums, tracks, tags, groups, forums and countries in a variety of formats including, plain text, rss, xml, xpsf and iCal, where relevant.
In this article we take [...]

At the end of the day, if your Apple Mac system hangs at startup, it could be anything, but in my experience there are usually a number of steps to take, starting with looking at the hard drive and the RAM, that act as a clear step-by-step process of deducation.
To start off I would setup [...]

Problems are almost inevitable, though they can for the most part be staved off by sensible action, care and caution. For example, if you persistenly have to force reboot after system hangs, this is symptomatic of a larger problem and needs to be dealt with, don't ignore problems, as they they will go away, especially [...]

When you encounter troubles and you want to try and fix them, your first port of call is to reboot your mac from a device other than your internal hard drive. This alternative device could be anything from your CD-ROM, DVD-ROM drive to an external hard drive or even your iPod. In this article we outline the key combinations, needs and requirements for rebooting your Apple Mac from a secondary device and how to go about troubleshooting your problems.

So maybe you have heard the buzz and seen the goods, and if you are still wondering, i mean Apple's new iTMS related widgets. This article highlights a few of the points as to why I think that the new Apple widgets for iTunes, for embedding on your web site, blog or social networking profile [...]