Category Archives: General

Who forgot to buy their lottery ticket

I did,

I play the lottery twice a week every week and have done for the last year. I but my ticket for 5 weeks online and I get an email reminder when my ticket has expired.

Yesterday I check the results using my results checker and I was amazed to see that we had won (only three numbers mind you, £10).

We hadn’t won though as I was busy when checking my mail last week and the reminder email passed by without me noticing it. So we didn’t actaully win at all. It’s only £10 but I can only imagine how pissed off I would be if it was 6 numbers.

Sodds law I reckon though, play solidly for a whole year, then when you forget, your numbers come up. I will never let this happen again, after all , how else will I afford my Hummer H1.

Half Viking Gallery Goes Live

HalfViking.com
It’s been a while on the back burner but this weekend I went hell for leather and managed to get the necessary coding done to get Halfviking.com live.

I manage all my photos 6000+ photos in Photoshop Elements and I am very happy with how it copes but it’s web gallery export sucks ass.

What I found was that PSE stores it’s data in an Access database. I wrote (using parts and few sub routines form album2gallery) a perl script to extract the data in the DB and write it to XML.

I then wrote a wad of python to parse the XML and create a static version of the gallery you now see. Using the Python Imaging Library I also managed to resize all the images to thumbnails and larger versions. All my photos are up now…. I have nothing to hide 🙂 .

There is still a couple of hitches (some duplicate albums [now fixed :)] and it’s not browser tested and I want to add some funky javascript) but I couldn’t be arsed waiting any longer… enjoy (or not)

RAD Frameworks

I’ve been looking and Rapid Application Development frameworks alot lately, there’s ruby on rails and now turbogear. They work super on my dev machine and applications come together super quick but how the piss do I get them running on my shared hosting without jumping through hoops.

I know the projects are still in Beta and I love what they are doing but it needs to be easier to deploy on shared hosting. They are great so do give them a try but be aware that deployment is not the easiest.

If you know different or can give me some tips.. please do.

Update: Non-root installations tutorial

Update 2: I’v also found mpcp @ http://jamwt.com/ which is a simple connector to use CherryPy with mod_python for production deployments… Look promising

XP Activation

I now have a completely legit, purchased, version of Windows XP Pro running on my machine. I was running for 30 days without activation and then I activated with the purchased serial. I did not reboot inside the 30 days and now everytime I reboot and try and log in, I have to activate a again (Activation works fine everytime). I have done a repair install but to no avail. I can’t contact Microsoft support as they are only open mon-fri 8-6 (when I’m in work) and I can’t email them either as their system reckons the manufacturer gave me this version of XP…. Not so.

So if anybody has seen this problem…. please let me know how to fix it…………………I will shoot anybody who tells me to re-install. Cheers

Update: Despite my reluctance to re-install, I did and all is now well :).

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Windows Product Activation
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This copy of Windows must be activated with Microsoft before you can log on.
Do you want to activate Windows now?
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Yes No
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Presentation on Content Syndication

Presentation on Content Syndication. My Boss roped me into doing a presentation to the ITWales group I attend on the first tuesday of each month. I foolishly agreed. Today was the day I had been dreading. So in front of about 40 people (probably exagerated), I gave my presentation on content syndication. Mp3s and pdfs downloads below…. and yes I have a nervous disorder which involves clicking my pen incessantly… sorry about that folks. My first public mp3 of voice recording so please refrain from mocking me……… although it can’t be as bad as the time my mates found a cassette of me singing over Bob Dylan (or Nirvana I can’t remember)… very embarrassing.

IT Wales Content Syndication presentation {pdf [1278 Kb]}
On 4th October 2005 I gave a presentation to the ITWales group in Bangor.
Slides for IT Wales Content Syndication presentation {pdf [1437 Kb]}
On 4th October 2005 I gave a presentation to the ITWales group in Bangor. The pdf is the presentation that appeared on the screen.
Podcast for IT Wales Content Syndication presentation {mp3 [32,149Kb]}

On 4th October 2005 I gave a presentation to the ITWales group in Bangor. The mp3 file is the podcast of the presentation. I only rememberrred 7 minutes into the presentation to turn it on…. and the incessant clicking is my pen (nerves I reckon).