BootBlock.co.uk

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.

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.

When trying to use an ActiveX DLL, DirectX, or other library within Visual Studio, an exception occurs during runtime of either BadImageFormat exception, a Type Initializer exception, or something equally baffling. Why does this happen and how is it fixed? Read on, why don’cha?

When a .NET application that has been compiled to run with the Any CPU configuration and it’s running on an x64 host, the application will try to load 64-BIT versions of any libraries that it requires, even if those libraries are in the 32-BIT format. When this mis-match occurs, it throws the BadImageFormat exception.

How is this fixed?

To fix this, you will need to explicitly set the main project’s (the Windows Application) configuration to target the 32-BIT platform. The project will now attempt to load the 32-BIT versions of all dependant libraries.

This is a less than optimal solution as it breaks processor optimisations, but it is the only way I know of getting around this application breaking problem.

Please note that the above explanation is my interpretion of the problem as opposed to the problem as reported by an official source.

If you have any further information on this problem, then feel free to post a comment and I’ll update this posting.

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.

After leaving the lobster to defrost overnight, it was time to give the little bleeder what for.

The end of the tube-like packaging was cut open, and what seemed like the contents of an entire lake got poured into the sink. Oh. It’s not exactly the biggest lobster in the world, then. This probably turned out to be a good thing in the end.

I’ve seen lobster being prepared on TV lots of times, so I mostly knew what to do. Except for the head - what, exactly, are you supposed to do with the head of the thing? Nevermind! Time to hack this mofo up and see what fishy goodness lies within.

I unravelled its tail and flipped it over. Now, if I were to be honest, I’d have to say that I nearly shat my pants. I have a fairly major case of arachnophobia, so seeing what looked like the underside of a huge fucking spider wasn’t… pleasant. So I pulled the fucker’s legs off. Removing the mandibles was even worse as it had the same layout as a sp… spide.. thing, and they made a squelching sound. Ew.

The legless little tit was now looking like a big red mental sasuage sitting on the counter. Out came the freshly-sharpened knife and it was time for the main show; I was being watched, so I wanted to make it look like I at least knew what I was doing. Tip of the knife was rested just below its “neck”, thrust downwards, and then I shoved the rest of the knife down and split its back in half. Then I moved the knife towards its tailed, and did it again.

Hmm… back to its head again. Now what? Screw it, I’ll split that as I’m sure they do it on TV. Couldn’t remember, but crunch! Oh shit, that was a bad idea. Lobster brains. Wet, wet brains oozing on the marble chopping surface. I don’t feel very well. Why couldn’t I just have hacked the head off like a normal person? Well, it’s too late now. Note to self: need to buy some straws.

Knife gets put down, and I pull the lobster apart. Utterly disgusting. Do people seriously eat this crap? Every thing above where its tail starts does not look edible. It’s a mixture of body juices, red eggs, and fishy poo. I started to pick it apart like an awkward vulture and seperated the pieces. Removing the meat from each half of the tail was nice and easy and resulted in what actually looked like some nice meat. Everything else looked like the result of a baby-in-a-blender accident.

Off to the sink to wash the tail meat, come back, and decide the rest of this crap gets chucked out. Okay, time to take a bite of the tail. Eugh, eugh! Bad! Feeling queazy! No more! That’s enough of that, thankyouverymuch. Everyone else can have this - I ain’t touching it anymore.

So there you have it. Unless it’s pre-prepared somehow, lobster is really, really bad shit, man. The lobster claws were quite good as they just seemed to be a more saltly version of crab claws, but red and spikey.

Edit: Forgot to mention this originally, but with things like this - I will never, ever put sauce over it or use it as a mere ingredient as part of a bigger dish. You eat this kinda stuff (seafood, etc) to taste it, not the jizz that’s been slopped over it. I very often eat stuff on its own. And, frankly, that makes me awesome. 2HOT4U.

Incidentally, I highly recommend reading John’s comment below - it’s probably the best comment I’ve ever had. Read it, now. Right now.

Edit 2: It was actually pre-cooked after all.  Cooking it again probably would’ve turned it into a Goodyear tyre or summat.

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 fowarders set up and routing mail to specified inboxes 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 infront of the main PC anymore - 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 persmissions. 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.