The server move is complete! The forum is back (and now advertised above), along with the addition of a wiki for my software. Waah, a wiki?! Yeah, click on the link above but do note that at the time of writing there’s only Comical in there.
Email is also back up and running, so, yeah, whatever. What, you don’t actually expect me to reply to you, do you?
Twitter is a stupid fad of little worth used by people who think they’re intellectually above everybody else but have an overwhelming urge to let those loser everybodies know how much their morning dump weighs mere moments after it came dribbling out of their flap. They’re fad-driven arseholes and I hate them.
I signed up for a Twitter account about ten minutes ago.
What a bunch of scummy bastards.
I decided to move away from 1and1 Internet a while ago because the features they offer are still stuck in the 90s with their tiny monthly transfer and instead went with UK2.net as they’re not so freakin’ archaic (although they have a terrible-looking control panel). I’m still with 1and1 because I want to make sure no more mail is incoming via my tnk-bootblock.co.uk domain and their domain transfer procedure is a massive pain in the arse.
What prompted me to write this post is the fact that this morning I received a fucking debt collection notice! I make it a policy never to never owe anyone anything, seemingly unlike the current UK culture these days. Then out of the blue I get this. Lovely.
I recieved a replacement credit card but kinda forgot to update my details with 1and1. I get an email saying that payment couldn’t be taken, so I login to my admin panel ASAP and whack in the new details. Done. The site’s “We couldn’t take payment” notice disappeared and the account was all working fine. That was a month ago.
Today I get the debt notice from some company called Arvato Finance Services. I immediately phoned up and paid the charge (which included a £15 “late fee”) as I’m not in the mood for this shit.
This is actually the second time 1and1 have done this, minus the debt crap.
Fuck you, 1and1. And your mothers.
My main email account has spacked out; I can recieve mails fine, but I just cannot reply to them. I thought this would have been solved quickly, but it hasn’t - so I’m making this posting. If you’ve mailed me and haven’t gotten a reply back yet… this is why.
Woah, wait! I’m not going to blather on about Chrome like a lot of people are currently doing. Okay, I’m not going to slag it off like a lot are doing, and I’m not going to praise it as the best browser in the world. Like a lot of people are also doing.
What I am going to say is in regards to the WebKit engine contained within.
WebKit is supposedly the most standards compliant browser code-base out right now, but I, like a lot of people, have only ever seen it used within the Safari browser. Chrome may be a featureless skeleton of a shell (the screenshots look terrible, but actually look okay with Vista’s Glass replacing the blue background), but the WebKit devs must be ecstatic that people will actually be seeing their engine used in a browser that isn’t a rancid mess of an abortion. For that, Chrome is good.
While I’m here: Having the address bar contained in the tab pages is actually a good idea which doesn’t work too well in practice. Opera has this enabled by default and it’s, well, crap. I even had the same design in one of my apps back in 1999 - it made sense from a coupling point of view, but I removed it. One reason why is code duplication; having the same controls duped across tabs was just needless redundency. With browsers, it just seems to also “feel” wrong.
Anyway, that’s it. I basically wanted to say what a heap of shit Safari is and that WebKit is not Safari.
It seems like I lied about the blathering part.
Update: Lots of people are calling certain parts of Chrome invovative. For their information, the each-tab-as-a-process thing is from IE8. The “Incognito” mode is also from IE8 (which it calls InPrivate). The page with thumbnails of websites is from Opera, but Opera only shows pages you’ve specifically placed on the “Speed Dial” page. Chrome automatically showing it as a list of most-recently-viewed sites sounds like a problem, to me.
I’m impressed with Chrome’s start-up speed, that’s for sure. Hopefully it’ll get plugins and will become much more. I hate the current available web browsers and so I’m hoping Chrome may be The One.
I’m not entirely sure how I found this site, but randomally hopping between sites while clicking on links that seemed mildly interesting seemed to be somewhat responsible. OCR is a site dedicated to providing high-quality remixes to existing video games.
Not much more to say than that, really. I’m particularlly fond of the Da Bomb Lemmings remix. The built-in Last.FM player doesn’t work for me, so click on the Download MP3 link underneath it if you’re also experiencing the same.
View: OverClocked Remix
I really hated the look of the old Software area of the site, so I went ahead and redesigned it. While I was at it, I did a ton of work which resulted in the listed below. This took longer to do as it required some major code changes within the application I use to actually maintain the listings data as well as of course the server side of things.
Here are the bigger changes …
Awards. I’m sure a lot of you have seen software sites that give awards to the programs they feature. These days, awards mean absolutely nothing. They just exist as a means for software archive sites to get more links back to them. They’re crap, and I hate them. So, why did I add support for them? Because I want to release the application and associated PHP files for the software section so others may use them, so it’s up to the individual user if they want to make use of this feature or not.
I mentioned a Support section in the above list; at the moment is just provides a means of contacting me about a particular software title. I want to expand this so it also provides frequently asked questions and general trouble-shooting information.
There is also a facility to purchase the full versions of any shareware, but that isn’t currently used as pretty much all of my stuff is free. Oh, yeah - the page is also fixed-width. This was accidental and will be fixed some time in the future.
Finally, I have integrated a part of this blog system with the Software section backend which results in the latest releases being displayed on the right-hand menu that you can see. Click on link to be taken to its relevant area of the Software section.
Edit: Erm, I think I may have made the link badges on the right a bit too glossy. Oops.
Flash games, hmm? They’re generally completely rubbish, but this one is a bit… weird.
In your role as Reiko, you must restore your position as top lady of the house by opening your right hand and slapping some bitches in the face. That’s the entire game, right there. You open-hand slap people in the face. Slaps can even crit for extra damage.
The first four fights were easy enough, but the five? Wow. I’m surprised my character didn’t instagib all over the screen. I was doing ‘er a good ‘un, and then got hit in the face with her sasuage fingers. Ouch. Edit: Yay, got her on the third go without being touched.
The game itself is all very well done, with anime-style graphics (I’m not a particular fan of the non-anti-alised lines, personally), proper music and sound effects. I particularly like the Street Fighter-style visual effect of out-slapping a wench. Maybe the sequel will feature big hairy geezers towel-flicking each other in the pods - watch out for that one.
Takes a little while to load, but here you go: Rose & Camellia.
The Software section of the site has been offline for a week or so and was resurrected only this morning.
The reason for this is that I have rewritten the back-end and entirely overhauled the application that generates the data. This took a while, but now I don’t want to rip my own eyes out when I update the catalogue.
What this means to you, fair reader, is… not much, really. There are thumbnails of screenshots available as opposed to the text links originally. In fact, I have added a lot more screenshots - especially for applications that didn’t have any at all. Three new apps have been added to the listing (including Timeline, my latest project).
If you were linking to any of the software in the Software section, you might want to update your links. The old method was extremely optimised in its PHP code, but the linking method (from other sites) was far too verbose for its own good. So I chucked the old code out and reworked things to how they should have originally been.
There’s other stuff in there like an integrated version checking service for my applications to make use of and other such stuff.
Last thing I need to do is completely redesign the appearance of it all as it looks a bit too simplistic for my liking. And a bit poo.
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.
Recent Comments