BootBlock.co.uk

It’s okay, I’m still alive.

I’ve been caught up in doing some major reworking of the site. The smallest task involves getting the old TNK-BootBlock.co.uk domain redirecting people to whatever they were looking for but on this domain.

The biggest of the tasks requires the Software section getting an overhaul. I’m using an application I created a while back called Software Catalogue (temporary name!) to maintain the listings and associated data, which I’m currently in the process of reworking.  It’s getting there; I’m just about to re-do the screenshot support and give it a proper gallery instead of the textual links it was using before.

There’s still a lot more to do, but once I’ve finished with the program and updating the backend, I’ll be turning to adding services to the website which involve adding update checking to the Software area so all my apps will support version checking (without having to launch an external browser; it’ll all be built-in and incredibly lightweight) and all that stuff.

I don’t think I’ve ever written about a TV show before as they’re generally “meh” and there’s so many of them, but I was pretty surprised by this one.

Peter Serafinowicz has been in a lot of productions, including Star Wars: Episode One, Shaun of the Dead, Look Around You, Black Books, and others. He’s a part of the current generation of UK comedians and actors (Simon Pegg, Mark Heap, Kevin Eldon, and so on), so I was looking forward to see how he’d do in his very own sketch show after being the main force behind the Look Around You series.

After watching the first episode, I’m honestly surprised to say that it wasn’t crap! Hell, it was great. I say “surprised” because I’ve seen Peter in panel shows and he doesn’t seem too hot at impromptu comedy; granted, a sketch show is obviously written, but it still somehow marred my initial thoughts on how he’d do in something that isn’t driven by plot or direction.

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After moving over to the 64-BIT edition of Windows Vista, I encountered problems with Visual Studio 2005.

The first problem was to do with the Visual Studio window not redrawing itself when an executed application had finished running and VS did not have focus.

The second, and most annoying problem was with external libraries, as I couldn’t continue development of some projects because of it. Thankfully, I was able to work out how to fix all of the problems except for one. It’s just a shame that it took me months to re-visit the problem as development suffered for it.

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Bit of a surprise, this one. Lidl have a huge freezer full of lobsters for sale, at £5 each. Sounded good, so we grabbed one.

Having previously lived in Grimsby, a fairly major fishing town famed for starring in adverts featuring singers with stupid accents, I was a fan of seafood and had tried most things. Most things except lobster; although I’ve had these weird lobster tail things that are textured white fish with lobster flavouring. Bit of a rip-off at £1 each, but they are pretty nice. As are cray fish tails, for that matter.

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Okay, I’ve now pointed the TNK-BootBlock.co.uk domain so it points at this one in an effort to get this site established as my main.

Rather than using standard MetaRefresh redirects, I did it all using .htaccess located in the root of the domain. I’ve never used the RewriteEngine before, so it was all new to me – I robbed most of the directives from sites giving examples of how to use them. It seems it makes use of Regular Expressions, which is a pig at the best of times.

There are a couple more things that need sorting and then I can start dismantling the old site. Then I’ll need to take the biggy …

Email.

This is going to suck. I’ve got 68 email forwarders set up and routing mail to specified in-boxes to help with working out which crappy company decided to sell a list of their customers email addresses off to spammers so I can easily block that respective forward. I can’t really utilise the mail forwarding method for various tedious reasons with this domain, so I’m going to have to get creative.

Once that’s done - it’s going to take a while, maybe even a few weeks - it’s time for me to update any of my apps that make use of services from the previous site – mainly update checking and the like. Speaking of which, I’m going to do a proper update checking service that doesn’t end up launching a browser from the app to perform a simple version check via PHP. I only really did that to send a little more traffic to the site, but either way it wasn’t very good. Only a few apps utilised a proper version checking mechanism, which I’m going to fully expand to all of my progs.

After that, I’d like to continue working on BlockBox (previously called WhiteBox) while also sorting its site out. I’ve got a domain for it (which is in fact the parent domain for this and all of my future sites) which is ready to roll with a fresh Joomla! installation.

Anyway, I’m hoping this is the last of the boring site updates and things’ll start getting more interesting around here. Possibly.

Here’s the new site, just like I said. I like being right as it makes a change.

So, what can you expect in this new place? Hopefully more posts. My posting frequency went to shit on the other site due to just not being arsed. Now I can post in a browser without having to be sat in-front of the main PC any-more – that, I like. I could have just added browser posting support to Planarchy, but eh.

I originally went with Joomla! instead of Wordpress (which is what you’re looking at right now, but it really started to piss me off when I couldn’t make use of the new FTP layer feature and spouted a load of crap about file permissions. So I moved over to WordPress.

Joomla! was a true content management system, as opposed to Wordpress’ blogging… thing. It’s probably a good thing in the end as WordPress uses a vastly smaller amount of resources to run.

To see how this site looked when I was running it with Joomla!, take a look at the current BlockBox test site. BlockBox being the new name of the WhiteBox HTPC software I’m working on. WhiteBox, as a name, was a bit too prolific for my taste. Shame as I really liked the name and it’s actually the name of my PC media player that sits under the telly.

But anyway, this site isn’t entirely complete, but I thought I’d unveil it at this point. There are numerous reasons why I went and trashed the old domain (it’s just a pointer to this one, now). Which I can’t be bothered going in to. One reason, at least, is to use a blogging system that isn’t tied to my desktop PC and I’d feel more comfortable making more regular posts with. I didn’t finish the editor in Planarchy and it had a weird sort of clinical feel to it that I didn’t much care for.

So, yeah. Expect more posts from me if I don’t get stupidly lazy again.