Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot

Add a map to your blog

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 24th Oct, 2007

It gives me great pleasure to let everyone know that I’ve managed to get my latest WordPress plugin out of the door. It’s a sidebar widget I’ve called GeoWidget that lets you add a map to your website. You an use the map for anything you like. You can show where you live, where your [...]

Isle of Man Webcams

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 31st May, 2007

There has been a rush of interest in webcams around the Isle of Man because of this TT Centenary, and I was getting bored of rotating through a number of different pages to see what’s going on. So I put together a page with the top 6 cameras around the Island which refreshes on a [...]

LOLCODE

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 30th May, 2007

Here’s an interesting computer language that seems to be emerging. It’s a bit “tricky” to explain the syntax so here’s some examples:
Hello World:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!”
KTHXBYE

 Sample loop:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
UP VAR!!1
VISIBLE VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

What do you think? Interesting huh? Well, if you want [...]

Built a website? Here’s some tools!

Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 26th May, 2007

Building a website gets easier and easier, as more tools make it to the market that make the design process smoother. However, once you have built your website it’s important to make sure it’s accessible to as many people as possible, that it looks good and that it performs well. There are a number of [...]

phpMailer issue on IIS

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 27th Apr, 2007

I’ve just spent some time figuring our an issue I’ve had with PHPLinkDirectory running on IIS. I’m building a new directory site for SearchMann and decided to use an off-the-shelf package for doing this. The biggest problem I’m finding is that the majority of phpLD’s user base run the package on Apache where PHP runs [...]

Putting Comment Email Responder to bed

Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 21st Apr, 2007

I’ve spent the last few days refining on the Comment Email Responder plugin for WordPress and it’s now at a place where it’s clear of immediate flaws and I’ve addressed most people’s requirements. It’s come a long way since Andrew Flusche let me play with it, but the code engine is still mostly his original [...]

Comment Email Responder

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 20th Apr, 2007

Is your blog sticky? Would you like your visitors to keep coming back for more? Well, one way to make sure this happens is to respond to the comments they leave on your blog. The question is, how do you make sure they get the response?
Well, one way is to email them a copy of [...]

Technorati Status Bar Upate

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 4th Apr, 2007

Ok guys, I have a new version (0.3) of the FireFox Extension that lets you check the Technorati ranking of the site you’re currently viewing.
Download here: Technorati Status Bar
This one is better because:
1. It works (API key of 0.1 expired somehow)
2. It works on every page of the website, not just the home page
3. It [...]

Problem with Technorati Plugin for FireFox

Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 3rd Apr, 2007

Well, my Firefox Plugin for Technorati was working nicely, but all of a sudden it seems to have died. After a bit of research I found out that API calls are limited to 500 a day, and I thought I might have overrun this. However, when I tried checking the status of my API key, [...]

Top 10 reasons your software project is doomed!

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 26th Mar, 2007

Came across an interesting post by Dare Obasanjo that lists 10 signs that your project is doomed to fail. Here are his top 10:

Trying to do too much in the first version
Depending on unproven technology
Competing with an existing internal project
Understaffed team
Designing a complex solution for the sake of it
Schedule Chicken (you’ll have to read the [...]

Coding toolboxes

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 23rd Feb, 2007

If you’re a full-time developer, well, even a part-time one, you could get some great benefit by making use ot tool libraries and source code on the web. I came across SharpToolbox with over 1000 tools for .Net and JavaToolBox with over 666 Java tools and snippets. Fabrice has been running these toolboxes for over [...]

Learn .Net v3.0

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 14th Feb, 2007

If you haven’t had a chance to dable with .Net 3.0 here’s your chance. The .Net 3.0 Framework training kit for WF, WCF and CardSpace provides all you need to get started. It’s a set of hands-on labs, demos and presentations designed and used for several 4-day courses. Worth a look if you want to [...]

Six Word Stories - Programming Languages

Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 28th Oct, 2006

I came across this post containing a bunch of six word stories about Programming Languages. Here are my favourite:
C#
I am so better than Java!
Java
How did I become today’s COBOL?
COBOL
Without me there wouldn’t be PCs.

and
Ruby
Rails, Rails, Rails - What about ME???
Rails
Must not .. succumb to .. the hype!
PHP
Rails? Hah. Flash in the pan.
Python
I’m just as [...]

Let BugSentry handle your bug reports

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 25th Oct, 2006

Tired of users complaining about errors and not remembering to note down the problem? Bored of implementing your own error reporting routines over and over again? It might be worth checking out BugSentry. It’s an automatic reporting tool that’s supplied as a DLL you can just drop in your project. When an exception you want [...]

640×480 is still alive .. and kicking

Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 17th Oct, 2006

Interesting post on Raymond’s blog entitled: 640×480 is not dead. In it he discusses why this mode is still necessary and why dev teams shouldn’t forget about this. There’s some interesting comments following the post too.
I must say, The Old New Thing is probably one of the most interesting blogs on my blogroll.