OpenId support
2008-01-12 Update: I've upgraded the whole site to drupal 5.x, and am now using a newer OpenId module. It works a bit differently, so you now create an account on this site, and associate an openid with it. This means that any existing accounts you had must be recreated (sorry) but OpenId support should work better.
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Media PC Software
Read on for a detailed description of how I configured my MediaPC to be a Media PC, using Kubuntu Dapper (6.06) and MythTV 0.19.
A simple libglademm application
This article is a walk through for creating a simple application using gtkmm and libglademm. I've chosen a simple calculator as the application, since it is easy to write the logic behind it, and I can concentrate on explaining the user interface parts.
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Downloads
When I was setting up my new website, using Drupal, I wanted to have a page per project, like the one you're reading now. I wanted to attach the programs to the page, and have it show the MD5Sums and download count. The builtin upload.module didn't do that. Other modules did, but added more complexity, such as making each download its own node, so I wrote downloads.module.
Birthdays
checkbdays.sh is a small piece of bash shell script designed to be run from cron every morning to check for upcoming birthdays and remind you of them by email. Each birthday can be warned a configurable amount of time in advance. For example, if your sister lives on the other side of the planet to you, you might need a month's notice to get something organised, but for other people it's just nice to know on the day if you see them.
Robopebble
In my professional life as a programmer, I found myself often asking the same questions of people seeking support. Since we have a support department, I thought these questions should already have been asked, and when they do need to escalate the problem to me, they should include all the info I'm going to ask them for. It struck me that if I could encode my technique for narrowing down the problem and locating relevant information, it could save me time.
Robopebble was written to do just that. It is a general purpose, web-editable "Expert system". An expert system is an AI technique which asks questions designed to diagnose a fault or condition. With Robopebble, you can teach it new questions to ask at any point, or add new options.
PHP Quiz
This is a very simple quiz script in PHP. Originally it was written as a replacement for a site called friendstest (which doesn't appear to exist anymore) - a quiz site that got quite overloaded. Later it was expanded to make it a little more flexible, with ideas from Darkmoon.
How-To: Make performance monitor variables work
From the rest of this site you'll probably realise that Linux is my preferred operating system. I'm paid to write software for Windows, however. When writing applications for Windows - especially those without any user interface as many of mine are - the Performance monitor application is quite useful. This can be found under Administrative Tools/Performance in the Control Panel.
Jeffrey Richter has a useful article on adding your own variables, but sadly there's a few drawbacks with his sample code. Since I spent ages trying to fix one of them, and couldn't find anything else on the web about it, I'll document that one here.
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My Media PC
I decided I wanted a living room PC. I wanted this to play DVDs, record TV, etc like a normal Media Centre PC, but also to be able to proxy my PS2 console onto the wireless network so I can play online, and also be able to chat online/browse the web/check email while watching TV.
Bash Browser
Unannotated and unformatted, this is a one-liner that can fetch a file via HTTP (assuming no authentication or proxying is needed). It was written to show that a basic Linux From Scratch system does include all you need to do this, since all you need is bash.
It is presented here as an example of how bash's tcp socket handling can be used. As written, it'll download links-2.1pre1 for you, then you'll have a real browser to go download new things with.
