I am in IRC with someone from Crytek, but I fear being kickbanned for “YOUR COMPANY’S GAME SUCKS”, seeing how they have ops…

Back to the store with you, Crysis.

(This is a reference to degradation.)

Which is why this.

...what's missing is "ERRYDAY".

I aplogise profusely for the terrible image quality, but the Optimus is on its last legs anyway. And has been for about the last year.

Anyway, I’m currently selling some computer bits on eBay if anyone is interested.

A new year is (hopefully) bringing new opportunities, and I’ve decided to put some of my domains to good use by actually offering my services through them:

• Sourceworx, through which I’m offering computer repair services;
• Code Temple, for website design;
• and CustomBoxen, a Web site developed from scratch for designing custom computer builds.

I’m also getting some business cards made up. I’ve ordered some samples off Moo, if the quality of cards they’ve sent me previously is anything to go by, they should be pretty good. Here’s the initial design proof:

Nice, minimal and to the point. Just the way it should be. (Click to enlarge.)

To cap things off, here’s hoping 2012 won’t be the total failure 2011 turned out to be. I’m endeavouring to do the absolute best of my ability this year, and I’m going to make damn sure it pays off.

Not much really happened, aside from receiving a coconut cake (I’m often called a “strange coconut” at home… heh) with letter candles spelling out “yay hat!”, the thorough breaking of general relativity, and a satellite falling to Earth over what’s looking increasingly likely to be the Pacific Ocean.

I went up to Norwich for an interview on the 22nd, and wow, it’s so much prettier than Chelmsford. It’s a city that insists it’s a rural village; I like that. Not only that but looking for local property turned up some real gems, like a very affordable 1bed flat in Cromer, which, while *on the seafront* is far too far from Norwich itself to be practical. The interview went pretty well though, aside from interview nerves causing a spot of sweatiness and forgetting the basics of SSL momentarily. Oops.

The train ride was a bit pants I must say. The cost wasn’t too bad — £33; Ely, which is closer to Chelmsford by a good county or so, is £48! I went on expecting power points and WiFi like most other train companies — forget it, not a single plug anywhere, and the WiFi was extra for us economy peons. *sigh* It’s National Express though, I’ve kind of come to expect this “image first, customers second” thing from them for a while now. Anyone who’s ever been on First’s X30 Southend-Stansted service will know just how epic the journey is, from the comfy leather seats to the six power points at the tables and *actually free* WiFi.

Anyway… belated happy birthday to myself ^^/.

In the course of this I created a script which sets up the apache vhost and ftp user in one, nothing special but it works.

Requirements:

• Ubuntu (I’m using Natty but it may work on other versions with a bit of tweaking).
• Apache 2.x
• bash 2.x or later
• Sendmail

Here’s the code:
#!/bin/bash
USERNAME=$1;
EMAIL=$2;
read PASSWORD;
mkdir -p /home/$USERNAME/public_html;
useradd $USERNAME;
chown -R $USERNAME /home/$USERNAME;
cat /etc/hosttemplate | sed -e "s/DOMAIN/$USERNAME/g" > /etc/apache2/sites-available/$USERNAME;
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/$USERNAME /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/$USERNAME;
echo "$USERNAME:$PASSWORD" | chpasswd -e;
#
EMF=/tmp/newmail;
echo "Welcome to Sourceworx.rnYour free hosting account is now active. You can upload via FTP by using the following details:" > $EMF;
echo "rnrnHost: $USERNAMErnUsername: $USERNAMErnPassword: $PASSWORDrnrn" >> $EMF;
echo "And of course you can access your page at $USERNAME.rnrnSSH access can be obtained using the same method, although remember any abuse will get your account disabled.rnrnHappy coding! And if you have any questions feel free to email chris@sourceworx.co.uk.rnrnChris" >>$EMF;
#
mail -s "Welcome to Sourceworx Hosting" $EMAIL < $EMF;

service apache2 restart;


I hope someone finds this useful. Save it as “createaccount” and make it executable. The script accepts a crypt()’ed password on standard input, the domain and a recipient email as arguments.

Not only that, I suspect due to non-payment of bills, the whole outfit has dissapeared off the Internet, doing away with my entire posting history since 2007. So I’ve had to start all over again, with Allys as editor and general post-motivator.

I’ve taken this opportunity to update the somewhat dated theme (originally made on an ancient K6 laptop with Paint and Notepad) to a striking (but simple) green/orange noise gradient theme using 960.gs. It really does take a lot of the layout work, and I intend to post a tutorial on using the 960 Grid System at some future point in time. The original CSS for the template was less than 60 lines long, although it has expanded a bit since adding necessary WordPress additions that I didn’t account for.

I have also moved the hosting over to Amazon EC2. Whilst there’s a moral question mark hanging over moving my hosting on Wikileaks’ old home, it doesn’t bother me that much, and I suppose they really should have been hosting on their own dedicated server anyway with a provider like prq.to, who hosts The Pirate Bay among others.. It is just like having a full featured free VPS (as long as you stick to the t1.micro tier) with infinite expandability as your site gets bigger, and it comes complete with a CDN. The only thing I do lament is that S3 should have an FTP interface, or the WordPress Total Cache plugin should have S3 support. Either of the two would do me just fine.

Not planning on doing something like large-scale hosting on it, though.

In other news, we’re currently in the process of getting home broadband with Telefonica O2, bagging one hell of a deal.  Initially, we were going to have to pay for a £43 line connection charge, on top of £12.50 line rental and an additional £12.50 a month for broadband. Being an existing O2 customer, we got the first 3 months broadband free of charge. Buying the router up-front (normally £50 but half-price on a promotion) got the whole price for the router deducted off the first bill. So a bill that was initially going to be £65.50 is now £15.50, essentially waiving most of the reconnection charge.

And being on Be’s network, we get their expertise, decent support and network reliability thrown into the deal. The only issue is the notoriously unreliable stock router, which will be replaced at a later date.

I’m waiting until all my other sites are back up and running before putting my portfolio on here, otherwise there’s quite a few gaps which is less than ideal. This might take a week or two.

This is a concept which you need to be familiar with! Did nobody tell you this in your 5-day Web development course?

Obviously not, because so many sites I see nowadays whore jQuery/Prototype/MooTools to the point where a page is unusable on low-memory systems.

The Web isn’t meant to have “minimum system requirements”, yet to reasonably browse the Web nowadays you need a system capable of playing at least Crysis before you can even THINK about browsing many modern Web pages.

Emma is often forwarding me cool StumbleUpon finds via e-mail and Twitter and while Google Apps and Twitter work fine with low-RAM systems;

• WordPress
• Facebook
• Slashdot (you’d think Geeknet would know better)
• 80% of the rest of the Web

take multiple minutes to load with any less than 1GB RAM. This is unacceptable! All your corner cutting to save a few hours of effort is going to cost your client many times that in customers lost to 150sec+ loading times, is going to piss your users off no end, and uses unnecessary bandwidth.

I for one eschew “cool features” in lieu of speed, performance and reliablity. Cool features are pointless if they’re non-functional due to the rest of the page jarring the experience.

I know from experience many Web developers use either Core 2 or faster machines, or top-of-the-line Intel Macs, making Conroe multicore CPUs with lots of memory the norm in the Web development industry.

What you have to bear in mind is your machine is probably far faster than probably 90% of your users. So if a page is slow on your box it’s going to be torturously slow on a slower machine.

The next dev I see using jQuery + plugins with no fallback is going to get the entire source code of Linux 3.1 (666MB) through their letterbox.

/rant

What a load of toss. I LOVE film. I HATE digital photography, with a passion. Call me old school, but I’m only 23 and I’ve seen the rise of solid-state digital cameras and they’re still nowhere near comparable to film in my opinion.

Dynamic range. Remember GCSE maths, and the differentiation between discrete and continuous values? Colour values in digital are discrete *and* limited to a certain range. Got a scene with REALLY high contrast? Well tough — if metering for light the dark bits are going to be extremely dark and vice versa. This is changing in the higher-end dSLRs but is still a problem I see ruining otherwise good photos all too often.

Resolution. To recreate all the detail on a 35mm print neg would require approximately 10Mpx of data; a 35mm slide negative, like the 150lp/mm Fujichrome Velvia 50 RVP, requires almost 90 megapixels to obtain the same amount of detail. Things go even more detailed when you factor in MF and LF films; a single LF exposure would require a scanner with effective resolution of approximately 450Mpx — that’s almost half a Gpx!

Archival. Yes, if not stored properly, gelatin, and therefore film, degrades. But it takes decades! The FeO2 on a hard disk platter will probably start to degrade after 8-10 years, and silicon (SSD) storage is so unreliable for long-term archival storage I’m not even going to go there. By all means, store your negs digitally — but I’ve seen properly stored negatives from the 60s and 70s that are still printable and just as usable as the day they were developed. You can just put them away and forget about them. But if you store your photos online, companies go bust. Data gets lost. Hardware fails. You actually have to check on your backups, which is something you don’t need to do with film.

“Think before you shoot”. Each exposure costs money. On Velvia bought in the UK this can be as high as 20p per exposure, or 3p/exp on the cheap stuff. But the fact this resource is finite, and expensive, makes you think much, much more before randomly snapping. Thinking about composition and similar factors to make sure you make best use of film is the best way to make sure you get good images every time.

Character. If you’re doing commercial photography that requires crystal clear, sharp-as-a-tack, clinically clean images with no noise whatsoever then yes. By all means go digital. But that clinical characteristic robs the final product of character and warmth. A trained eye can tell a digital image from a film one by just this lack of character.

So my rebuttal to this? Digital is kind of like the Polaroid of the 21st century. Yes, you get clean, tack-sharp images, but they have about as much soul, depth and character as a brick wall. Call me silly if you want but part of the art of photography is catching the mood/soul/character of a scene, which digital misses a lot of the time, even after the photographer has expended significant effort in trying to capture it.

I’m kind of sick of this, so I came up with a mnemonic to remember it. I’ve seen one but it involved boobies so it’s not really suitable for a work environment. Well, most, anyway.

You have to remember 2 things though:

1. Each pair consists of a Colour/White strand and a White/Colour strand. The Colour/White strands (pins 2,4,6,8) are in UPPERCASE, and the White/Colour strands (1,3,5,7) are in lowercase.
2. Both Blue and Brown start with the letter B, so for Brown I use the letter ‘R/r’, being the second letter. Blue has no letter R so this avoids ambiguity.

If we take o=Orange, g=Green, b=Blue, r=bRown, this gives us:

o O g B g G r R
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8


If we split this into even/odd pins, we get

o g b r for the odd pins
O B G R for the even pins

The mnemonic is:

our good boys run Over Bloody Great Rails

So next time you have to hand crimp some Cat5e just say this to yourself, and remember the first 4 are the odd pins and the last 4 are the even ones.

Bear in mind this is only valid for TIA/EIA586B. For non-PoE A/B crossover cable, just swap the Green and Orange pairs round at one end. I haven’t thought of a mnemonic for this one yet, though, so you’re on your own. A word of warning though! This will only work for data-only Cat5e — you risk seriously damaging your kit if you run Power over Ethernet or phone signals through this kind of crossover cable. Something tells me that your average onboard Ethernet chipset will not appreciate having 48V DC shoved up its backside.

Remember, with the advent of widespread support for Auto-MDIX there is often no need to run x-over cabling at all and just using straight B-B cabling is the best idea unless neither of the PHYs on either end support auto-MDIX.

The popular press has done nothing to help this, every other week in some red-topped tabloid there’s a story claiming “Hackers break into x”, but the thing is –

We aren’t the ones breaking into your bank account and siphoning off money for their own personal gain. The names for the people who do that kind of stuff are “computer criminals”, “Nigerian 419ers” and many other terms, but not hackers. For this we have only mass media to blame, people believe what they see on TV and, unfortunately, take it as gospel.

A hacker is someone who hacks things. Hackers wrote Apache, the software this blog is running on, because many people added “hacks” to make Apache better. Hackers wrote ModSSL/OpenSSL as a “hack” to Apache, without which you wouldn’t be able to conduct secure purchases online.

So for those of you still unconvinced, I urge you to watch a documentary called “Hackers are People Too”, by Ashley Schwartau, a Def/Toorcon regular and somewhat talented film-maker. It portrays us in a light that the general public usually don’t see us in, which is a welcome change.

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=x3lrhCuofqw]

Remember guys: Hug a hacker today! =3

Of course you have.

If you’ve ever come across DAA images, you’ll have run into the same brick wall I have many a time. The only program that’ll easily mount these is PowerISO. I had the displeasure of having to install this suckware a couple of days ago. BAM! Instant problems.

Where do I start?

• It’s slow. Like, REALLY SLOW. Every right-click is now accompanied by a ~10sec delay as PowerISO’s context menu integration kicks into life. Even on the system tray icon.
• Constant bluescreens. I’m under the impression that it’s because PISO is chewing through kernel memory like it’s going out of fashion.

So, I have these precious few nuggets of advice to share with the world.

1. DON’T buy it! You’re throwing your money away.
2. If you download .daa images via BitTorrent, don’t seed them.
3. Finally, if you do end up with a .daa image, use daa2iso to convert it to an ISO, which you can then mount using something far superior like WinCDEmu. daa2iso is an open source utility that will convert .daa images (which are really just renamed .iso.Z files, compressed using zlib, no more) to ISO’s. Windows version here, unix users can simply (iirc) zcat whatever.daa > whatever.iso for the same effect.

Remember folks, open standards are the future! Badly written crapware most definitely isn’t.