Cluedo Detective Notes
I made a pdf of Cluedo Detective Notes which you can download from here. Although it has 16 pages, you don’t need to print all of them. Just print out the...
2021
The Enigma Of Slaiman And Kate
I found the Whealth by Slaiman youtube channel in late November 2020 and was immediately hooked on the Pranks being played by Slaiman on his (then) girlfrien...
2020
Time For A New Pc
I have been on the lookout for a small computer case to replace my aging cube case. The front panel had stopped working, so using it was somewhat awkward wh...
Helping The Search For Covid 19 Vaccines
How I found a way to help
The Making of a Remote Audio Recorder
Pi Record is an application to record audio files from microphones. I am developing it primarily to record from a Blue Yeti USB microphone and from a Focusri...
My New Piano Arrived
I have recently taken delivery of my new Baby Grand Piano, a lovely Feurich 162. This is the story about how it came about.
2011
Displaying My Rss Feed On Hartley Consultants Front Page
I had always planned to replace the feed on the front page of Hartley Consultants web site with a summary of recent posts from this blog. I had previously s...
Allowing Syntax Higlighting In Comments
I have installed the SyntaxHighlighter Evolved plugin to allow me to post snippets of code to my blog. However (as far as I can tell) it does not natively s...
Site Cutover Completed
As you can see, I have now managed to make this site go live. Copying from the system running on my desktop, to the production version couldn’t have been eas...
Integrating Gitweb Output Into A Wordpress Page
One of my known stumbling blocks to converting my site to WordPress was how was I going to manage to incorporate gitweb so that its output appears within the...
Wordpress - Creating my own Menu
Introduction
Switching To Wordpress
As will shortly become apparent as this blog goes live (I am currently editing posts on my test system, but intend to include the posts I am making whilst I ...
Typing a © Symbol
I was trying to type a copyright symbol (©) in Gimp in order to add a watermark to a photograph. I found this quick tip which I would like to share.
Keeping My Personal Data Backup Up
I just read a post on Slashdot asking the question of how to keep personal data safe. The questioner had just returned from Mexico with lots (he said 16GB w...
2010
Webkit Developers Know Best?
In a web application that I am building I need to use a multiple selection <select> list. Because screen space is limited I decided I would set the si...
Internet Explorer 8 bugs - why aren’t the fixed?
Not being much of a user of Windows – my desktop is running Gnome under Linux – I came across a strange Internet Explorer 8 bug last Friday. I was setting up...
Why I Think Michael Schumacher Was Dangerous In Hungary
It was a controversial move that Michael Schumacher pulled on Rubens Barachello at the Hungarian Grand Prix 2010. I looked at the video quite carefully and ...
The Ways In Which Melinda Doolittle Has Ruined My Life
It was on the 26th of June 2007 that Tiernan started a thread on the message boards of melindafan.net that started one of the most important threads in the h...
The making of MBChat v3 - part 2 coordinating multiple activities
In the previous blog article I discuss a process which would take several seconds to run. Obviously it is started as soon in the load process for the initial...
The Squeeze between a Rock and a Hard Place (installing a Debian Squeeze system)
I have just re-installed my Debian MythTV server now that I have bought it bigger disks. In fact, with two new 1TB (ie approx 1000 Gigs) disks, I have put th...
The making of MBChat v3 - part 1 introducing Nested Closure Programming
MB chat is an Ajax chat application that I built for Melinda’s Backups. It was originally so that the leadership team could hold meetings without resorting t...
Its Been A While
It has been a while since I last made a blog entry. Over the past couple of weeks I have been re-instating my web site and collecting the old blog entries an...
Melinda Sings Happy Birthday To Me personally (March 2009 - my 58th Birthday)
I was on cloud nine when I received the following video
Akc Money Revisited
AKC Money is a personal finance management application. It allows users to create accounts, and transactions to and from these accounts, maintaining a balanc...
2009
Providing A High Speed Connection Between Two Web Clients
I have been considering the architecture for a web based real time game between two players. It doesn’t matter what the game is, any game in which there are...
Melinda Doolittle’s first CD, Coming Back To You released today
It has been nearly two years since I first mentioned Melinda Doolittle in this blog. During that period I have moved from being someone who just caught some...
2008
Playing With Google Analytics
I have been playing with Google Analytics over the past few days to try and understand better who actual access to my web sites are happening.
2007
An Internet Clan Became Friends On The Internet
It was in the summer that we at Melinda’s Backups first came up with the idea of a party for the backups to attend and get to meet each other for the first t...
Melinda’s Backups Goes Live
At 4:45 yesterday afternoon (UK time) a supportive association to support Melinda Doolittle opened its web site for membership. I have had the privilege of w...
Being A Proud Father
My daughter called me yesterday to say that she had been offered a job at Red Bull Formula 1 team. This is a follow on from the previous post about being a p...
An Update On Asterisk
This is just a quick blog entry to note that I now have a working environment of a local telephone system, including three telephones inside the house and tw...
Melinda Doolittle - a breath of fresh air
I starting watching American Idol this year after I heard that Leona Lewis – see Will Leona Lewis last? was due to sing there. Watching the auditions was qu...
Playing With Asterisk
Asterisk is the Open Source PBX software that can manage telephone lines. As well as the classical hardware phones, more importantly for me, it also manages ...
Update to Tomcat 5.5
Last night I updated the underlying server for this web site from Tomcat5 to Tomcat5.5
Will Leona Lewis Last?
I feel emotionally drained. I have spent the weekend reviewing the various recordings on the net of Leona Lewis’s performance on the X-Factor, and trying to ...
Next Steps with UserMgr
As the last article hinted, I had hoped to move forward with the web site. The next stage is an update to my UserMgr application.
Happy New 2007 To Everyone
A Happy New Year to everybody out there.
2006
Lewis Hamilton driving for McLaren
On Friday, McLaren announced that Lewis Hamilton would be driving in Formula 1 next year, driving alongside Fernando Alonso. Having seen Lewis Hamilton drive...
Recording My Day In History
Yesterday I recorded my day for history at history matters. It was the day the parts for my new computer arrived, but as a reflection of todays times, it was...
Disaster Strikes
I ought to know better, there are loads of sayings that I should take heed of.
Free as in Freedom as well as Free as in Beer
I just came across Aaron J Siego’s post in his blog about the difference between free as in beer versus free as in freedom, and how the open source community...
CSS Holy Grail
I just saw the article In Search of the Holy Grail about how to get a three column site to work reliably in CSS.
Having fun with GIT
It was just yesterday morning that a light came on in my head and I understood just what the index file was for in git. It seemed to strip away the fear that...
My New Blog - with Lucene
Today is the day – my new blog has been made live
AKC Money is Born
At work I got my new laptop last October. But I couldn’t get my Palm Pilot to Sync with it, so was getting increasingly worried that my data, particularly my...
2005
A Little Test Java V Php
I was curious as to the relative speeds on Java versus PHP. So I created a couple of simple applications (see below).
Ibatis V Hibernate
For those that have been following the “Taking the Java plunge” series, you will note that I have chosen iBatis as the framework to use with the database. By...
Taking the Java Plunge - release 1.0 reached
Well I made it. It was early in the weekend that the code was working, but its taken a couple more days of struggle to get it so I could put it into producti...
Taking the Java Plunge - into the last mile
After some hard work at getting my ideas together and then some marathon debugging sessions, my application is almost working. It has taken me a lot longer t...
Taking the Java Plunge - some weeks later
It has been a while since my last entry, but here I am sitting in a hotel room in Instanbul, and discovered that it has a wireless lan capability.
Taking the Java Plunge - Selecting and Using an IDE
It has taken a my about 3 weeks of exploring to know what my next step in taking the Java Plunge should be.
Taking the Java Plunge - Finding Out What to Do
Thats it – I just have to start it. 5 years after adding it to my TODO list for my home computer network I have started my first java web application. I want...
Trip To Perth
In May 2005, at a days notice, I had to go an work in Perth, Australia for 6 weeks. This is the story of how I got there.
A Proud Dad
It was just last week that my youngest daughter got offered a job at Bar Honda Formula 1 team and which she will start in only a few weeks
A Comment On Politics
With the UK general election upon us, I decided to reflect on my feelings about politics in general, and the problem I have about how to vote. Although I am ...
Open File Formats
The state of Massachusetts is defining that all government documents should be in an open format. Quite right too. Any government department should ensure th...
Backup And Archiving At Home
I have several computers at home, and it is important that they are properly backed up in order to not lose data. I want to show an example of how this is do...
A New Vision For The Desktop
As I start to write this article at the end of March 2005 I have in my head a partially formed vision for how to improve the usability of the Personal Comput...
Software Patients Are Bad For Europe
Since man first invented the wheel, society moves forward technologically by inventors standing on the shoulders of those who came before. This advance in ou...
Be Wary of Digital Righte Management (DRM)
I have just been reading an article in which Bill Gates is justifying the introduction of digital rights management into Windows Media Centre. In essence he ...
2004
Debuging Is My Pleasure
About a month ago I decided the time had come to find out why, when I attempted to blank a cd in my cd rewriter, cdrecord (the program I was using to do this...
Wysiwyg v wysiwym
I was thinking the other day about the way we produced documents in the mid 1980’s. It was kicked off by hp setting up a competition to find the oldest laser...
A Nice Little Earner (for my Energy Supplier that is)
Now I know energy prices are rising, but 25% increases each. That is ridiculous.
My Open Source Philosophy
It may seem strange that someone who has made his living for over 35 years in the software business, with at least 15 of those years in charge of a product f...
2003
Grand Prix Legends
Grand Prix Legends has been the game that has kept me glued to the computer for hours at a time. I started out just driving solo, but once I had discovered o...