Designer Blog

Date: 2007-11-26

hhmmmm it;s been a bit too long since I posted anything on here...

for what it's worth I've started a new design blog at design.a-holics.com - check it out and let me know your thoughts :)

Web 2.0 Relief Fund

Date: 2007-09-18

After months of paying 70c for those tiny little chocolate bars in the charity box at work we decided it was time to do things at a sensible price!... so we made our own Web 2.0 Relief Fund chocolate box :)

Check out the photo and more here

Font creation tool for iMonLCDg from MediaPortal

Date: 2007-09-12

This little javascript "applet" is used to create the hex codes used to define fonts within MediaPortal's iMonLCDg.cs - this is designed for use with the basic 7 x 5 pixel font (although it's really an 8 x 6 pixel font with inbuilt spacing) read more

The blog goes web 2.0(ish)

Date: 2007-07-24

It was about time for a bit of a revamp - so what better way to test out my modular codebase than by implementing it (or at least some of it) with a new "web 2.0" version of my blog. Yeah ok so web 2.0 is much more than just a design philosophy, but there's many interpretations read more

Create a shortcut to explore my computer

Date: 2007-06-10

Sick of right-clicking on my computer to select "explore"?... here's how to make it a single-click process

Change the search service URL in Nokia Podcasting Application

Date: 2007-04-09

By default the nokia podcasting application uses a search powered by digitalpodcast.com - personally I prefer to use The PodLounge (strangely enough) - and this is easy to do.

Neiman-Marcus Cookie recipe

Date: 2007-04-07

I can't vouch for the accuracy of the story (or the recipe for that matter) - but apparently this is the recipe for the Neiman-Marcus cookies!

Update: I now have the real Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe available - see the bottom of the page.

PHP Password Functions

Date: 2007-04-01

Here's a couple of basic password generating functions I've created which have come in quite handy.

PHP function for displaying relative dates in a human readable format

Date: 2007-03-29

here's a handy PHP function I use for comparing times and displaying the difference in a human-readable format.

The function itself returns the nearest approximate time based on the largest value from: decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes or seconds

Updating to Dark Alexs 3.03 OE-C firmware for the PSP

Date: 2007-03-24

Updating to Dark Alex's 3.03 OE-C firmware for the PSP

for those not familiar with Dark Alex's work - firmware updates such as this allow you to run both older (1.50) firmare alongside newer (3.03) firmware on your PSP. Why would you want to do this? Many of the newer games require a recent firmware such as 3.03, whilst homebrew software requires firmware 1.50 to run.

Ubuntu tips and tricks

Date: 2007-03-09

This post will continually grow and is setup to contain various ubuntu related tips & tricks

1 - Setting a static IP address

Colour Theming Tool

Date: 2007-03-04

I've been playing around with some colour algorithms in PHP and as a "proof of concept" I have created a basic colour theme tool.

Currently it generates tetrad, monochromatic, triad, analogous, complementary and compound colour combinations and also returns muted and pastel versions of the same.

Hopefully I can use this to create some more useful tools along the way - I've already got some great ideas for it :)

DHTML Effects using Javascript

Date: 2007-02-06

With user-interaction becoming even more of a key focus in web development everyday (especially since the phrase Web 2.0 was coined), animating "objects" within a page has become much more common place.

Rather than rely on technologies such as Flash to animate items, DHTML can provide some impressive effects.

This is the start of a library of DHTML (Javascript based) effects that I am building - an early work in progress. Currently containing Switching on/off, fading in/out, vertically shrinking/growing.

Borat advertising on realestate.com.au

Date: 2007-02-05

Not sure if this will still be around by the time you read this post - but somebody has posted an advertisement on realestate.com.au from the one and only Borat Sagdiyev.

SEO - Google 1st page without even trying

Date: 2007-01-31

I'm not really sure why it is ranking so well, but a recent topic I googled brought up my bookmarks on del.icio.us on the first page of google! - try a google search for gammu smsd documentation.

Does this make me some kind of SEO Jedi? - I don't think so.... but made me smirk :)

DIY SMS Gateway - Part 1

Date: 2007-01-29

A little while back I had setup an old pc with a copy of fedora and gnokii in an attempt to build a basic sms gateway - while I got things working it was far from a truly functional machine as I couldn't get the sms daemon (smsd) that shipped with gnokii to work correctly with MySQL. As a result both incoming and outgoing messages were stored as basic text files rather than in a database - yuck!

SEO Melbourne - the next Search Engine Challenge

Date: 2007-01-28

I noticed that recently, Jim Stewart from Stewart Media had replaced his blog with a challenge of re-ranking well again with the term "SEO Melbourne"

After the fun I had trying to match his "cheap microsoft office software" phrase (successfully) - I thought it was about time to try and gain with the new phrase: SEO Melbourne

Enable remote access to MySQL

Date: 2007-01-19

It seems that everytime I need to set this up I have a terrible time trying to remember how it is done (esp. what the correct syuntax is) so I figure posting it here will help me remember (and possibly be of use to somebody else).

Enabling remote (non localhost) access to MySQL is often required to use tools such as NaviCat to manage a MySQL database. Simply follow the steps in here and all should be good :)

Contact Juggling

Date: 2007-01-09

Remember the funky "Crystal Ball" handling, supposedly done by David Bowie in the film the Labyrinth? (It was in fact done by Michael Moschen) - well I came across this great little demonstration of it on YouTube (yep - there's pretty much everything on there now) - check it out!

PSP firmware downgrade from 2.71 to 1.50

Date: 2006-12-19

I remember being disappointed when I first purchased my PSP that I didn't get a v1.50 firmware version - the result of getting in a bit later has meant that running homebrew applications has been impossible. However - a bit of research tonight and I found a great set of tools from a guy called Dark_Alex (see his site at: http://dax.st/) which has enabled me to downgrade (all the way from 2.71) to 1.50 :)

The basic procedure is as follows:

The Blog is Back

Date: 2006-12-17

After moving the igeek domain to another host I had two choices... 1 - restore my old (WordPress) blog or 2 - create a fresh new one. Never being one to be happy with old/existing answers I have started to develop my new blog - and here's the first entry! The plan is to keep all the code behind it fully modular, so as to make reuse/redistribution of it nice and simple :) At the same time most styling is done using CSS (there's only a couple of images used on this entire page - including the advertising) keeping things simple, search engine friendly and easy to modify. So until next time - have a great christmas and may my old blog content make it back online over the holiday season.