tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-112493852011-12-15T03:19:43.759ZAlex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.comBlogger701100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-65129742430586544542011-12-07T10:32:00.002Z2011-12-07T11:09:14.713Z

This is a little rant to people that think managed languages and sandboxes are the way to go. We've been doing lots of development on Mobile platforms. We started on iPhone with Objective C. This was fine, but we knew we must go to Android in the future - and there lies Pain. So when the day came, we rewrote the entire app in C. This wasn't that hard, but took a couple of months - and longer if

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-63594380276273018252008-12-14T15:32:00.002Z2008-12-14T15:56:20.762Z

We've been live for 4 weeks, so its time to review how it has gone. We have sold about 80. On Friday we had our first 1 sale day, so obviously we've fallen about as low as we can (still I guess we haven't had a *no* sales day :S).We've now released a free version - Clubkit-Lite. Unfortunately we seem to have fallen on another mass release day - I never saw us on the front page. This one is back

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-85021900780501544252008-12-01T17:40:00.006Z2008-12-01T18:20:57.639Z

For those interested we have now been going since the 21st with our first app, Clubkit. The aim was to release an app to the Appstore to learn as much as possible about the market, and see what can be done to market. For this first phase we're not using any professional advertising, just word of mouth. Assuming it doesn't go mental, we'll probably do a second phase with paid advertising, as I'd

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-79063031311547612302008-11-22T19:14:00.002Z2008-11-22T19:20:41.222Z

Just completed our first iPhone app - ClubKit. Its now on sale in the Apple AppStore, so lets see what happens over the next few weeks. So far its earnt a stunning 5 pounds (mostly from friends and family!)Now its out I can focus on all the other things we need to add to it to make it better, but the simple act of getting it on the store has been an interesting and time consuming process!

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1166810863051989232006-12-22T18:06:00.000Z2006-12-22T18:07:43.073Z

How ironic that it leaves beta just as the craze for blogging starts to waine.Fadtastic!

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1150625864762688032006-06-18T11:07:00.000+01:002006-06-18T11:17:44.776+01:00

I have a problem:I have a table with name value pairs:Key1 Data11 id1Key2 Data12 id1 Key1 Data21 id2 Key2 Data22 id2 I also have a master id table:id1 name1id2 name2I wanted to create a sortable table reading from this mysql database that looked like:ID KEY1 KEY2--- ---- ----id1 Data11 Data12id2 Data21 Data22Importantly I want to be able to sort by multiple fields.My SQL looked something

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1147533650601129532006-05-13T16:08:00.000+01:002006-05-13T16:20:50.620+01:00

Variants sound cool don't they? MS certainly thought they did, so they implemented them all over the system. Over time the type checking code grew and grew. People said variant types were bad and must be avoided at all costs. Around that time I switched to Javascript. Variant problems were still evident, but I never seemed to have the same amount of difficulty as in C++. Today I remembered why:/*

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1147523038660884472006-05-13T13:21:00.000+01:002006-05-13T13:24:06.493+01:00

Just found out (3 years too late) Oracle supports functional keys. No other DB seems to do this (certainly not SQLServer or MySQL), but its quite handy. If you do oracle stuff and you have say a Select * from tab where Upper(key) = 'HELLO'You can speed this up *a lot* with:create index IX_Index on tab (Upper(key));Especially if the table gets big. You can then get ORACLE to perform more like SQL

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1142945505202693512006-03-21T12:22:00.000Z2006-03-21T13:00:56.316Z

nVidia have just announced using SLI to do physics processing, and Charlie Demerjian at the Inquirer has a few words to say about it. I understand his frustrations that little seems to have happened in this area, but I am not sure about his conclusions.Ageia have spent an age developing their card, and its still not here. Moreover most of the games floating around (the big ones at any rate) have

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1140968367699790332006-02-26T15:28:00.000Z2006-02-26T17:27:39.526Z

I have been recently writing lots of PHP using the MediaWiki libraries. The performance was somewhat shocking for multiple article inserts, so I set about writing a new optimized import routine. I didn't need the huge amounts of validation. Whilst I was doing that I realized I really had no clue about what is the fastest way to achieve a certain task in PHP, and what performance penalties you

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1138735437898676562006-01-31T19:07:00.000Z2006-01-31T19:23:57.916Z

I have been trying to figure out for a while how you can get image based sidebars to go to the bottom of the page cleanly. Hunting around the net I kept on almost finding the answer. However there seemed to be two camps: those that used no images, and are fully resizable, and those that have images, but cannot resize the central bit of text.I had a skin for media wiki that I quite like. However

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1136893470745985802006-01-10T11:32:00.000Z2006-01-10T11:44:30.763Z

First post of the new year, and might as well make it a rant. I have been fiddling around with MS Project 2003, and wanted to get the data created in it out. Grudgingly MS have now added an XML export function to it. I say grudgingly - before service pack 1 it couldn't even read the file it had created back it without GPF'ing. SP1 seems to have cured that, but if you give it an invalid file -

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1135247701145335662005-12-22T10:25:00.000Z2005-12-22T10:35:01.160Z

I still am using Visual C++ 6 to develop a few things. Mostly this is because I had a laptop with "only" 384 Meg, that was being brought to its knees running IIS and SQLServer - let alone .Net studio.C++ 6 has been fine for me. I actually prefer the way the debugger isn't tied to the script debugger, so you can debug both assembler and script in a process at the same time - something lacking from

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1134423565087779712005-12-12T21:21:00.000Z2005-12-12T21:39:25.106Z

This just got slashdotted:http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-fpfxbox/?ca=dgr-lnxw06XBoxStoryLooks like it was seriously designed to complement the GPU - rather than the Cell "Media streaming" model Sony ar fond of. They have added lots of instructions for doing things they do lots of (like dot products) and the cores have been designed for procedural geometry - expect lots of

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1133726129761993412005-12-04T19:49:00.000Z2005-12-04T20:00:39.920Z

I have decided to put down a list of what I reckon's hot. Everyone else is doing it, so why not me?* Soccer is being sold to the Americans. This has been happening all last year (and possibly a little the year before, but I reckon this year it might just reach the far flung masses. There is yet more American Soccer comedies out, and its popping up all over the place. I presume this is why Glazier

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1133356563474321422005-11-30T12:53:00.000Z2005-11-30T13:16:03.493Z

Once upon a time there was a computer from IBM. It had 128K. Its process had to page it into 64K chunks. Everyone had to write complicated algorythms, because few things could fit in 64K chunks.After a while the computer grew and grew until eventually it had gigabytes of ram. People writing programs for it found they could fill it by loading files directly into memory, making their job

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1133281104706948642005-11-29T16:07:00.000Z2005-11-29T16:18:24.720Z

I have noticed something - lots of people write very rude emails, almost out of habit. It seems to be especially prevailent in larger organsiations. The standard example would be:Alex,We need XXX. Could you supply us with timescales.JohnNow it may be just me but I always find such emails grate. There is no greetings, no please, no thankyou, not even (which I hate) "rgds".In the old days of

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1133003468856536822005-11-26T10:21:00.000Z2005-11-26T11:11:08.900Z

If you're of a "how it works" bent, every new piece of tech offers up new possibilities beyond the manufacturer's specifications. The PSP is no exception - in fact it could be the best yet. Large companies don't like people using their tech outside the intended purpose, so try their upmost to stop you.Luckily there are always holes for the dedicated few. Ultimately a soldering iron can be used,

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1132824419917032192005-11-24T08:43:00.000Z2005-11-24T09:26:59.936Z

So the 360 has launched on time, and without too much fuss. The PS3 seems to be as far off as it ever was and MS have a clear field ahead for the next round of console wars.The 360 seems to be a bit of a radiator - one site estimating the CPU gives off 100W. That's going to cause lots of people problems - though probably not in chilly blighty. Top tip: don't box one into a small space - those

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1132313869567410062005-11-18T07:37:00.000Z2005-11-18T11:48:00.300Z

Just been mucking about with MS Project 2003. It now has a handy export to XML feature - Project has always been the was always the bastard child of interoperability, but this is a grudging move in the right direction. Before this feature the only options (other than MS MPP format - which isn't always the same, as Project 95 cannot seem to open later versions) were really ugly data extract

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1131809585450654502005-11-12T15:11:00.000Z2005-11-12T15:33:05.463Z

I have just been designing webpages. Now most of the stuff I do tends to be at the back end. A little time is spent getting it to the screen, but I mostly use the "stick to what you know" route. Once I discovered DIVs in IE, and js, I stopped worrying to much about it. All of it tends to be for IE, so cross browser issues can be ignored.All the mucking about with wikis made me want to make a new

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1130957524339136812005-11-02T18:24:00.000Z2005-11-02T18:52:04.353Z

My experiments with Mediawiki have been extended into an examination of PHP itself. I wanted to interrogate the Mediawiki db.I started with ASP and found (unsurprisingly) that ADO's blobs are not capable of dealing with MySQL. The variant object returned from a binaryblob is "unknown" to Javascript. Much swearing. So I decided to bite the bullet and write what I wanted in PHP directly - a

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1130748256095893822005-10-31T08:20:00.000Z2005-10-31T08:44:16.106Z

Just spend the last few days working on Media Wiki. Version 1.5 has just been released, and so I thought I'd give it another go. Being an IIS/Windows man the first attempts I had ended in abject failure, after lots of head scratching.This time I hit it a little harder. First up was PHP 5.To get this working is relatively straight forward, install it then (bizarrely) copy across all the missing

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1130082879187944892005-10-23T16:22:00.000+01:002005-10-23T16:55:31.540+01:00

Apple's recent release of the iPod video - though evidently not in the UK as I could find no high street store with one this weekend - has produced lots of column inches recently. Since I have been banging on about downloadable TV for ages I think I might bang on about the iPod video - PSP debate that seems to be raging in the media.First I must at this point say I am now proud owner of a PSP,

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1128073961424617162005-09-30T08:50:00.000+01:002005-09-30T10:52:41.436+01:00

I have been a fan of Google (like almost everyone else) for the last 5 years or so. I have lauded praise on them in the past in this blog, but recently I have been disappointed. In the early days, Google's search sought things out with an almost unworldly accuracy, and huge speed. Since then we have seen that it can do far more - the superb GMail, GTalk, GMaps, Desktop search, and lots of cool

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1126858549491659692005-09-16T09:00:00.000+01:002005-09-16T09:15:49.500+01:00

Looking here Nintendo has announced what the new controller looks like for the revolution. Being a long time fan of wavey mice I am glad to see them get closer to the mainstream, but I hope they will be quicker responding than mine. I wouldn't want to play a game with it thats for sure. Maybe there will be a resurgence of strategy games on consoles because of it?Now when I was looking at the

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1126123343395050982005-09-07T20:59:00.000+01:002005-09-07T21:02:23.400+01:00

Decided to splash out on the wonder of some LED light bulbs. 2.2W, life span of 14 years, 9 pound price tag. Sounded interesting.Unfortunately 2.2W looks just like it sounds - rubbish. compare to the 50W halogen it replaced is like comparing to a torch. You'd need almost 4 times as many to light to the same amount. So the experiment was interesting, but ultimately pointless.Now I know why B&Q

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1125586431686304062005-08-31T18:41:00.000+01:002005-09-01T15:53:51.693+01:00

This article is more interesting than it first looks. They actually played the games, rather than run time demos as all reviewers seem to do these days.I then set about trying to compare what other reviews say you should get and found this article.Both using 7800GTX and A64 3500+ (was suprisingly hard to find someone that had used roughly same config).Basically the actual game logic will knock

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1124964579106907442005-08-25T10:59:00.000+01:002005-08-25T11:09:43.276+01:00

Missed release day due to being in Scotland. Has anyone actually installed it? I cannot see anyone in my address book online.Looks to me like rather an early version. So much for overdelivering Google...Things I have noticed:Install quick - like all google things.Removes Gmail notifier - don't do this, as the replacement doesn't seem to be as good - the icon doesn't change if you have a new

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1123277197475369792005-08-05T22:03:00.000+01:002005-08-05T22:26:37.483+01:00

Gabe Newell of HL2 fame has been whining about the next gen consoles. I agree with him: multi processor hard, as I said in a previous post.When I was trying to think of threads for a game I came up with display, logic and input. The Xbox 360 has 3 cores. Ain't no way that 1 core needs to do input. So efficient use is going to require another approach. Splitting it further I guess you could put

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1123057461524009892005-08-03T08:34:00.000+01:002005-08-03T09:24:21.533+01:00

So the cat is out of the bag as to MS's next plan for world domination - Vista. I for one will be resisting it as long as humanly possible. When I was younger a new OS was like Christmas - playing with all the new toys seeing how it had got better. Ever since Windows 2000, each version seems to become more restrictive, and less "on my side". I like being able to be an administrator and write

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1122376453505519202005-07-26T13:19:00.000+01:002005-07-26T12:14:13.513+01:00

America seems to be going mad over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas at the moment. To me the whole argument beggars belief. This is a game where you can walk down the street, shoot a prositude in the head, and then repeatedly stamp/kick her till she dies. After than you can steal all her money, oh and rob her car for good measure.Does this cause outcry from the US? No. In fact, we'll give it an

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1120817623816806382005-07-08T11:01:00.000+01:002005-07-08T11:14:17.520+01:00

Finally got an iPod Mini. Neither myself or my wife commute by public transport, so an iPod would have rapidly found its way to the back of a drawer. However my wife has started going to the gym, so I seized the opportunity to spend some cash. I am impressed by its design, though I am surprised no one has made one better (in the public's perception). The wheel interface has a nice look, but can

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1120218717698224122005-07-01T12:43:00.000+01:002005-07-01T12:51:57.706+01:00

Interest rates are strange things. When I was at school I remember rates soaring, and a worried father. They peaked at 14%, but now most people fret over a .5% rise. We are a massively overextended economy. Reading the BBC today confirms that people are finally waking up to this fact. French Connections rapid drop in profits today is just one of many little signs that people are thinking

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1120169443763565462005-06-30T23:01:00.000+01:002005-06-30T23:10:43.766+01:00

Been having a busy time with Javascript. Validating keypresses is much harder than it should be in browsers - why the W3C hasn't specc'ed full validation masks into HTML input fields is beyond me. I have been trying to make good user experience when entering fields. Most people validate at the end. I'd like to do it on the fly. Fine, I thought. I'll tap into onkeydown and throw out the events

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1119184696114151952005-06-19T13:01:00.000+01:002005-06-19T14:31:25.243+01:00

Finally I see the X2 processors for sale at Dabs. Quite pricey units - cheapest at £330. I was considering upgrading my desktop to one of those about 2 months ago, but stayed my hand, and bought the epia instead. My Athlon XP gets little enough serious use as it is, so as much as I would like it I cannot justify it.What was also interesting is the Pentium D's were no where to be seen. Come on

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1118680251741493492005-06-13T17:25:00.000+01:002005-06-13T17:30:51.756+01:00

The Inquirer is reporting the new 7800GTX graphics card will cost $639. Is it me or does each gen of top end card move the price bar upwards, so as not to affect the sale of the lower models? I guess Nvidia discovered just how much disposable income the average twenty something office worker has to spend on his PC when they released SLI - twice as much as they thought.I am waiting for 4 way SLI.

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1118613551662578052005-06-12T22:47:00.000+01:002005-06-12T22:59:11.666+01:00

I have now fitted the eden to my server box. The box is a large kids toybox from Homebase made of cheap pine. I used to use an expensive camphor wood box, but a cheap pine one seemed better for drilling holes in :).Now I have the old P4 facing off the Eden across a frame of 12 Harddrives. The P4 is working again, but the eden is awaiting a power supply with an SATA power adaptor. Unfortunately I

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1118250476693960942005-06-08T17:52:00.000+01:002005-06-08T18:07:56.696+01:00

Last weekend I was very busy. Had a pub crawl, Sin City to watch, and a set of fitted bedroom cupboards to construct. Now that most of the cupboards are up and all trace of hangovers has gone, I can turn my attention to my latest toy: a Via Mini-ITX Eden motherboard.I decided with all my power worries of earlier to go with a fanless low power server. Stack it full of harddrives and put it in a

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1117445098885428042005-05-30T10:08:00.000+01:002005-05-30T10:24:58.890+01:00

This bank holiday I have been looking for high thread count sheets. It started off as a simple trip to John Lewis and sprawled into a 7 hr trek around London. In which we learnt a few things:* High thread count sheets are not really available in England - 410 at Selfridges was the best we could find.* They are much more expensive here than in NY. In NY we found 600 count sheets for approximately

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1116754832073058852005-05-22T10:26:00.000+01:002005-05-22T10:45:20.546+01:00

Google is a great thing for finding out how to do stuff that you cannot be bothered to figure out. So this post is designed to help anyone that has the above problem. Hopefully it will find its way into the index and be of some use to someone who wants to know.The basic problem is this. Given a table that looks like this:IDItemIDDescription1ID1Historic2ID1Latest for ID13ID2Historic

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1116090854444275042005-05-14T18:04:00.000+01:002005-05-14T18:14:14.456+01:00

Have just spent the afternoon mucking about with the Win32 Power Management APIs. Unfortunately my server is Windows 2000 so half of the functions cannot be used. My aim was to write a quick and dirty app that would tell me whether my harddrives were asleep or not, and this I was able to do. The results are HardwareMon. Its not to big or clever, but it shows some rudimentary stuff about your

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1115978521047781512005-05-13T10:58:00.000+01:002005-05-13T11:02:01.053+01:00

See the Xbox 360 specs have begun to surface. Feasible ones that is!Nice looking specs. Basically will be about equivalent to the top end PC available when released - the GDDR3 should give it quite a leg up in the performance stakes.The multicores whilst maybe not so good for AI will be superb at physics - probably the most important thing for next gen stuff. The Altivec design is basically a big

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1115571571007351802005-05-08T17:23:00.000+01:002005-05-08T17:59:31.050+01:00

I have now completed my look at power needs. My intial guess of 500 quid a year to run the server luckily seems to be an overestimate. Actually its closer to 120 at my current energy prices. The machine is a 2.4 GHz Celeron PIV with 9 harddrives in it. It is set to sleep, but it runs filesharing stuff and Thunderbird 24/365.Looking at the apps I was running CPU load seemed important. I don't want

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1115112514098045012005-05-03T09:41:00.000+01:002005-05-03T10:28:34.100+01:00

This weekend I was moping around a bit, so needed some project to occupy myself. DIY is always a good way out I find. Numerous trips to B&Q/Homebase/Wickes later I had bought myself a clamp meter. It wasn't the only thing I bought, but was the most fun.You see I have a server which I leave on 24/7. I have never known how much power it draws. It has a 2.4 GHz Celeron with 9 hard drives in it. I

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1114877454904908322005-04-30T16:59:00.001+01:002005-04-30T17:10:54.906+01:00

This last week has been hell for my wife and I. We were given the bad news on monday that our child was suffering from a neural tube defect, and there was nothing that medical science could do. We could either continue to term and have it stillborn or abort. We opted for the abortion. We then had a 20 hr wait to sign the papers, then a 48 hr wait for the pill that begins the process to start

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1114338657752748512005-04-24T10:57:00.000+01:002005-04-24T11:30:57.753+01:00

Recently I have been using UKNova to catch up on telly I missed. Its making an effort to be quasi legal by not allowing DVD available series on its lists. It acts as a sort of VCR to anyone that misses something. It requires a registration, and the whole thing is quite community based - upload ratios are enforced etc.It seems to me to be a shame that the TV companies have not yet done this -

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1111297598542614772005-04-17T05:46:00.000+01:002005-04-17T15:36:00.390+01:00

SQL stands for "Structured Query Language". For developers it is anything but. Why the hell do the 4 basic commands of SQL - Select, Insert, Update, Delete all have different formatting? Most programs need to add a record, then once its there update it. If the SQL used to do the update was similar, much code could be removed - always a boon.Even better why not add "Update or Insert" as standard

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1112973292654374812005-04-09T15:47:00.000+01:002005-04-09T10:08:24.220+01:00

Enjoying amateur futurology I like to try and spot things before they actually make a difference. Slashdot had an article a little while back on someone claiming blackholes don't exist. Good to see that a journal such as Nature would publish it. It is very important that people question accepted norms up to the highest level. Whilst the scope of the theory lies mostly unproven, it could easily be

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1112909455915854262005-04-07T22:12:00.000+01:002005-04-07T22:30:55.916+01:00

OK, so many years ago there was a little program called Windows. It made graphics appear on your machine, and allowed you to run other stuff in it. The other stuff used little files called INI files to store their data.Windows had its own little file called Win.ini, to store its own stuff, and so they coexisted.Unfortunately the default for the functions to manipulate inis used win.ini. So the

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1112563201091791312005-04-04T22:01:00.000+01:002005-04-04T12:34:34.956+01:00

This story is all about eBooks on phones. Its good to see this application getting the recognition it deserves. I began reading ebooks about 5 years ago on my Palm V. I found them to be an excellent way of reading. No more cumbersome books, illuminated display, easy bookmarking. Even less strain on the hands - the forward backward button slipped nicely into one's thumb.Then I ran out of books,

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1112523372402510302005-04-03T10:53:00.000+01:002005-04-03T11:25:32.533+01:00

Read on the Inquirer that the new Xbox may feature downloadable games from day 1. I was thinking therefore how they could achieve a total removal of shops from the sales process - other than for the console itself. Valve with Steam have demonstrated that the principle of fully online distributed games can work - albeit a little shakily for the first few months. The Valve boys were also

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1112110974785838922005-04-02T20:59:00.000+01:002005-04-01T08:12:09.190+01:00

John Carmack has updated his blog again. Lots of cool stuff for geeks in there, and once you decipher what he's doing he writes quite readably. This time he has a long hard look at Java phones. His main beef is that Java is not fast enough for games. Most of this performance loss is because of the Java sandbox. He seems to have had fun taking the whole thing to bits in a way that few professional

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1112077446189001942005-03-29T06:40:00.000+01:002005-03-29T07:24:45.960+01:00

Now Easter's done with I turn my thoughts back to work. Really helpfully at 3.40am this morning. We've been having problems with some client side Javascript that is not working the way it should on all a machines on all networks. This morning I suddenly realized what was going on.The fault reported was vague, and unreproducable.Other problems we had had with the setup meant that it had been

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1112039069318268222005-03-28T20:40:00.000+01:002005-03-28T20:44:29.320+01:00

I hope everyone had a good easter! I am now findable from Yahoo. Interestingly Google has not woken up to my existence yet, even though the site has been submitted. I used an auto submission bot, and also manual pages for Yahoo and Google. Google gave me a whinge on the manual submission that I haven't yet investigated. Maybe thats whats taking the time.I need to get the ftp for Blogger working I

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1111512892515214802005-03-22T18:51:00.000Z2005-03-22T17:34:52.520Z

Saw on Slashdot Channel 5 in the UK is trialling a downloadable episode of its 5th Gear series. Good to see TV stations slowly waking up to the need. In the UK we suffer from slow lag times on almost all TV series, which is driving many to piracy. When you can bittorrent a new episode of an American series months (or possibly years) before you see it on UK TV, the TV companies are missing a trick

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1111503350322953172005-03-22T14:54:00.000Z2005-03-22T14:55:50.323Z

I have added a link for the RSS feed - suddenly realized it wasn't visible! Also I have added a few ads. Please feel free to click on them should you so desire!

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1111490922733187502005-03-22T10:50:00.000Z2005-03-22T11:28:42.736Z

Yesterday the British seemed to have woken up to how bad dinners are in schools. Jamie Oliver obviously hit a nerve with his show. Personnally I think Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me had more to do with it, and the British have just realized they too have a problem. As an expectant father I am glad this issue is being brought up now - with luck some change will have happened in time for me to

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1111323303538458702005-03-20T12:34:00.000Z2005-03-20T13:33:58.003Z

Physics accelerators to me sound like the next big thing. However is there room for them, given gamers already stretched purse? Or do people really have that much disposable income?Physics in games weak at the moment, with most objects behaving like a collection of rigid bodies. 3D cards have given us objects with thousands of polygons, but left the objects largely static. Deformation mostly

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1111297634884714702005-03-20T05:46:00.000Z2005-03-20T06:23:41.216Z

Civil aircraft design seems to have remained pretty static since after the introduction of the comet. Basically you have a tube with a couple of wings. The luggage goes in the hold, and the passengers sit on top.It seems to me that this model does not best suite modern air travel. Whenever I travel on short haul flights, the majority of people carry all their luggage in the overhead locker. This

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1111063428678695962005-03-17T12:22:00.000Z2005-03-17T12:43:48.680Z

Now I have the tea thing off my chest I think its time for a bit of economics. Last time I visited NY (99) prices were by and large cheaper than the UK. The dollar stood at 1.40ish and all was merry in consumer land.This time I felt there was a different story going on. Once sales tax has been taken into account most things are now the same price as the UK. Globalisation has solved the release

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1110996157940212722005-03-16T18:01:00.000Z2005-03-16T18:03:23.396Z

I have just returned from a holiday from NY, and feel as an Englishman I need to explain to the world how to make tea properly. Lots of the restaurants we visited had very fancy teas, and its obviously becoming a more popular drink. Personnally I prefer it in bulk to coffee, as coffee tends to quickly give me a headache. Tea is a much cleaner drink for me.So what's my gripe? Making tea is simple,

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1110293026928108642005-03-08T14:37:00.000Z2005-03-16T18:01:19.730Z

Got forwarded this interesting article on .Net:http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=9211/ddj050201dnn/Seems to me that only C# will remain, which is not necessarily a bad thing.I played with the Avalon preview, and I suspect that it is very much as the man says: a new markup language for a browser. The starkest thing about the .Net readme's was the admission that .Net Forms was now "done and no longer

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1110189431098796492005-03-07T09:47:00.000Z2005-03-07T09:57:11.100Z

Seems the world is still going mad about Sony/IBM's Cell Chip. Articles from people espousing the virtues of an as yet unreleased chip are always amusing. I think its on the rocks already. Biggest clue: nVidia are back in the picture to "help with the graphics". Why does the awesome cell require nVidia to do graphics? Because general purpose CPUs are never as good at shading billions of pixels in

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1110145677320730682005-03-06T20:16:00.000Z2005-03-06T21:47:57.333Z

I love titles like that. Slashdot seems to produce one every few weeks. Certainly Geek opinion is that this is inevitable. Dvorak put an interesting spin on the other side, enough to get many hot under the collar. Since this is my blog, and I am currently short of material I thought I'd take my stab at it.What has happenedLinux burst on to the scene in '95 (yes I know it is actually older than

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1110058255434108222005-03-05T20:57:00.000Z2005-03-05T21:46:19.136Z

Ok, so I like the idea of free software. Who doesn't? Since the browser war collapsed in 96-7 everyone in the software business has been looking for the seeds that could bring it back.Browsers are now a core feature (ironically much as MS claimed in their antitrust case) of the platform you run. Last year Firefox burst on to the scene, and from reading slashdot, you'd think they had never had an

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1110056250367148092005-03-05T20:47:00.000Z2005-03-05T20:57:30.370Z

Amusing to see the latest Forbes article asking is "Is apple the new microsoft"? As if Apple's court room games were anything new. Obviously people have short memories of Steve Jobs. After all the first thing he did when regaining control of Apple was to kill off all Apple clones. If anyone thinks Apple is into the hippie opensource movement more fool them. Apple has spent its entire life as an

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1110028095020587162005-03-05T13:06:00.000Z2005-03-05T13:09:29.586Z

A few years ago I started running a website for about 1 month:http://web.archive.org/web/20010401131759/http://www.whatweretheyon.co.uk/I found the job of writing all the back end meant that writing content never happened. Fast forward to now, and I realized that a blog really describes the site I wanted to run. Hence the name. Now quit bugging me!

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1110027693280784832005-03-05T12:48:00.000Z2005-03-05T13:01:33.283Z

In my opinion the perfect scrambled egg needs to be prepared by contradiction. Firstly, place all ingredients in a small saucepan.I go for:2-3 large eggs a personabout a tablespoon of milka lump of butter (or butter substitude)saltpeppersome mixed herbs Now begin to heat on a low heat. This is where to contradiction comes in. You must not let the egg clump together. Since the egg does this

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11249385.post-1110022759813422252005-03-05T11:30:00.000Z2005-03-05T11:39:19.813Z

Welcome to Alex's Blog. Here I intend to cast my views on the world, much like everyone else writing these things. It has taken me sometime to realize that that is the way I want to go, but, hey, I get there in the end.Hopefully someone will find my ramblings useful.So who am I? I work for a company called AdVal, a small training provider in the UK. I am the principle developer of our Learning

Alex Powellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04473304983089725257noreply@blogger.com0