Wow, almost half a year’s passed since my last post.

You may have noticed my blog’s theme has changed, very observant! I’m using WordPress.com’s “Custom CSS” tool to rip apart the Benevolence theme so that it looks and feels identical to my new website. When will the rest of my new site be ready? Come on, not even I know that

Sport Relief

We ran the Sport Relief mile in Plymouth, raising £80 in total. Big thanks to everyone who sponsored us. We didn’t raise our £100 target but every little helps and all that… We had great fun, that’s what’s important.

Why in Plymouth? We were caravan holidaying in Devon and it was the nearest “flagship” run.

University

I’ve finished the first year of university; I’ve got the results too. I’ve passed everything, just scraped the maths module mind you. But it’s still a pass!

Got to say, the second semester was a little dull, for a web development course, it seriously lacked in web modules. Not to worry though, next year I’m making up for it with a number of web programming modules.

I’ve moved in with my girlfriend, we have a nice flat in Stafford, excellent location… there’s a 24 hour ASDA just a quick walk away and Staffordshire University’s only a short walk in the opposite direction!

Belated birthday celebrations to me!

It was my 19th birthday in May, Tasha and I travelled to Shrewsbury to spend a few days with the family; we all went out to The Riverside Inn for a meal, nice place… the steak and kidney pie even came with my name written in pastry. Awesome I’m sure you’ll agree.

Thanks for checking out my blog, I’m going to make an effort to keep it a little more up to date, so please subscribe to my feed if you’re interested in my dull ramblings!

Two years ago Nick and I ran Sport Relief in Birmingham, raising just over £80 in the process. The event has come around again, and I will be running another sponsored mile, however this time I’ll be in Plymouth and running with Tasha.

We need your support! Together we aim to raise more sponsorship than before; we’ve set our team target at £100.

Unlike last time, the Sport Relief website is fully operational; you can sponsor me at www.mysportrelief.com/pwnet

Everyone and their brothers talking about it, and I’ve seen a few around the uni, I even hear my old mate Adam has one too! I’m talking about the Asus EeePC, I thought I’d document my recent purchase as taking photos of it gives me an excuse to clean up my desk!

It’s a small, inexpensive laptop which I thought might be useful while at university. It’s in no way intended to replace a desktop computer, but it’s very handy at getting on the internet while out and about. No messing around with mobile phone browsers when I can get free WiFi around the university campus, at home and at my girlfriend’s house.

Still not decided what operating system to run on it though, the default install was too limited, so I replaced it with XP, since then I’ve installed Mint Linux, and now I’m considering going back to XP.

My main concern is related to its screen size; some windows become inaccessible as their height is fixed meaning some of the content is out of sight, and without scrollbars it becomes impossible to use. Most frustrating The solution? In Linux, Alt + left-click to drag the window up to reveal the out of sight content. In Windows, you can use the bundled utility to up the resolution, allowing you to “pan” up and down.

There isn’t much more I can say, so until next time, I wish you all the very best.

Asus EeePC Photos

I’m currently in the process of moving accounts to the new PWnet Central system. During this time you may receive an email containing your username and password.

PWnet Central functionality such as ordering/billing and ticket support are offline until the transition is complete. Check the status page for updates.

It’s been a while since I updated my blog, I’ve been busy with university - coming to the end of the first semester. I’m studying Computing Science: Web Development, a four year course (including a years work placement in the third year). I’m living in halls at Staffordshire University, the Stafford campus. I have a small room, restricted internet usage, but apart from that its a nice place!

I’ve been keeping busy, during freshers week I met the most amazing girl in the world, Tasha. We met at one of the union organised events, Tony Lee’s XXX hypnotist comedy night.

We’ve been ice-skating, the first time since going with my secondary school!

Spent a weekend in Portsmouth with Tasha’s best friend, Shona. Went out on the Saturday night to a comedy night/club. The next morning we took a day trip to London, traveling on the train.

A few weeks back we went to see Pendulum performing live in Birmingham, a totally different experience to when I saw them with Nick in May. Definitely worth it.

I checked the UCAS Track site after being tipped off by Nick, so I knew before collecting my results that Staffordshire University had accepted me. Wolverhampton, my insurance university also gave me an unconditional offer.

Collected the results from SSFC just before midday, in no particular order:

• Business Studies: C
• ICT: C
• Sociology: C

I’m pretty happy with my results!

I spent four days at Staffordshire University on their Step Ahead summer school pilot, it laid to rest some of my fears about going off to university, but it also made me realise how much I really do want to go, getting the results today has taken a weight off my mind!

Finished my last exam this morning, we get the results on Thursday 16th of August I need two Ds and a C (or the equivalent combinations) to get into Staffordshire Universities Internet Technology course I’ve applied for. Hopefully, regardless of my total lack of revision in some subjects I will be able to achieve this!

On another note, It didn’t really deserve a post of its own, I bought an MP3 player a couple of weeks ago, originally I chose a Philips, but Amazon’s estimated delivery time put me off, so I cancelled and ordered the SanDisk Sansa instead.

It’s only the 2 GB model but I’ve bumped it up to 3 using the microSD slot and the card I bought for my phone a while back… but never used as it only worked intermittently. The Sansa is much smaller than my PDA so hopefully I’ll use it more often.

This is the second time Microsoft’s advertising has impressed me recently, a few weeks ago I had fun with their “Certified for Windows Vista” campaign site. In particular the staring competition against “the coach” which uses your webcam to detect when you blink (or basically any movement!). Nick dugg the site, it’s well worth a look if you’ve got a webcam.

I wouldn’t have ordinarily noticed this, but earlier today I opened Internet Explorer (*shudders*) and waited for the MSN homepage to load, I thought they’d done a fancy redesign at first; however it’s just an interactive (in a way) advertisement for Office 2007 – for today only.

They’ve placed the standard MSN page inside a Word document, and by using the Ribbon and Office’s live preview feature you can make a few changes to the styling of the page.

cPanel was updated to version 11 last night, there are a number of new features, so go check it out!

I used to run RvSkin on top of cPanel as I believed it improved the user experience, however I’m impressed with the new x3 interface, so for the foreseeable future I’ve set all PWnet hosting accounts to the default cPanel theme.

I recently had the chance to catch up with my friend Nick Palmer, the guy responsible for Palmnet. He’s recently launched Palmnet CodeBox, an online service allowing users all over the world to collaborate on code snippets. I’ve been given the opportunity to take a look behind the scenes and find out about CodeBox and other web 2.0 developments.

Phil: Hey Nick, how are you?

Nick: I’m great thanks, yourself?

Phil: I’m pretty good too. Lets get stuck in with some questions… what inspired you to develop Palmnet Codebox?

Nick: There is already a script called pastebin, but it has a few flaws. CodeBox was developed to iron out some of those flaws and create a better system for sharing snippets of code.

Phil: So you saw room for improvements?

Nick: Yes, I saw the original pastebin didn’t really give users ownership over their own scripts, and it didn’t even offer syntax highlighting while editing. I added these features in and a couple more, but you’ll have to go to the CodeBox to check those out.

Phil: How was it created?

Nick: Well I started late on a Saturday evening, probably more like Sunday morning! I just opened Adobe Dreamweaver and a few hours passed. I ended up with a simple database and about four PHP files, and thus it was created

Phil: What security implications did you identify and how have you overcome them?

Nick: Well there are rather a lot of XSS flaws that could have been potentially exploited. However, PHP has a really cool command: htmlentities(); that turns any normal code used in XSS exploits into standard and harmless HTML.

There were also a few database issues I had to patch up as you can submit SQL snippets, and obviously I didn’t want those running instead of being submitted to the database! But there are a few great articles on PHP and MySQL security I found through Google that helped me lock the system down.

Phil: What’s planned for the next revision?

Nick: In future CodeBox releases I plan to add more languages to the system. It runs using the Codepress syntax highlighter but I’ve already started to tweak it out.

I also plan to hone the system down some more, and add a search system in too, this way people can find snippets that might be related to their own.

Phil: So apart from the CodeBox system, what other web projects and tools do you make or help create?

Nick: Well I also run a questbar system, where people can show off their questing status for certain items. These need updating badly, but we’ll have to see.

There is a small group project of teenagers I’m a part of too. They basically all get together to learn about programming concepts and languages. Even though I don’t take an active part in the learning I help them along with the concepts of various languages and help some people out with their PHP.

There is also the great shoutbox system too. This is a cool little, well it used to be little, open source project which I took over from another person about a year ago now.

There is a new version in the works so I’ll tell you more about that nearer release date.

Phil: Can we expect more Palmnet tools soon?

Nick: I sure hope so! I plan to possibly open up the source to a few projects that are web based, like the CodeBox system, and perhaps start developing more offline applications too.

I’ve recently started getting back into Ruby development, so you might see some Ruby scripts rolling out soon.

Phil: You spend time developing these free, open services, what do you do to earn some money?

Nick: Well I have a fair amount of savings from my old job. Those seem to get me by in life and buy me my Subways daily.

Apart from that I work with you on commercial projects for PWnet, helping out with some of the more intensive backend systems. I recently designed a little events system for the BNTA, where they could post up events and do some quite neat stuff with the data, like use Google maps to plan journeys for people.

Phil: I see one of the greatest advantages over desktop applications is the ability to roll out software updates instantly for all users, do you see services such as Palmet Codebox replacing traditional desktop applications in the future?

Nick: Well, my CodeBox system won’t ever be as powerful as a full desktop IDE. But I do think that as online services progress, and alongside projects like Adobe Apollo, we will start to see more and more systems that are web based, only now with client side features too. However I don’t think they will ever be capable of the complexities of a modern desktop application, or at least not for a very long time.

Phil: In the world of web 2.0, what are you especially excited about at the moment?

Nick: I found a really cool search engine designed specifically round open source projects a while back called Krugle. It’s great. It has all this AJAX on it so it looks and runs really slick, and the search system is great.

You can look up source code from free open source projects, then if you find something good you can tag and comment it to help future Krugle users who might be after the same code, so it’s really innovative stuff.

Also I’ve been loving the Adobe Apollo system. It’s not out for the public yet as it’s still in the alpha stages of development, but it’s really nifty. It brings the web services aspect right to the desktop, which is neat. And anyone can develop for it too using a variety of languages.

I tried out some of the Digg API demo’s that use it and it was really neat, but there needs to be a bit more work done on it yet before I’d use it all the time. So I’m hopeful for the future of Apollo systems.

Oh, and Trillian Astra, some amazing features, too much to talk about! Go check out their preview site.

Phil: At one point many saw the web 2.0 revolution only in terms of its aesthetics, gradients and diagonal line fills! Nowadays the terms meaning is much more defined and we’re seeing a lot of sites centered around user created content and collaboration. What are your feelings on web 2.0?

Nick: Web 2.0 to me is pretty much summed up by cool websites with a minimalistic feel and a fair bit of AJAX. However, that’s not all. Web 2.0 for me is this new shift in the web, rather than static pages with static content about static things we’ve made it evolve into a much more dynamic place.

Blogs, for example. They get updated, tagged, searched, voted upon, commented… Much more than we ever would have thought about before. Thats web 2.0 for me.

Phil: Thanks for your time, Subway tomorrow?

Nick: Damn right