For a little while now, we've been seeing ads on TV for a new soon-to-be-upon-us service called Freeview. Well okay, my interest was raised... mainly because of the promised "15 new free to air channels". Note, the "new" part was my misunderstanding - ie it was implied, but not declared, as we shall soon see.

As mentioned back in this post, I helped to build Job Bounty Hunter. So, I was quite pleased to see one of my own architecture diagrams appear on this Amazon Web Services blog post.

So, since that particular diagram is now publicly available, I might as well present it here - I did create it, after all ;)

This is just couple of quick pics to give you an idea of what will be coming sometime in the next few weeks ;)

This is a project that I've been plotting for quite some time now, and I'm finally about the have a go! The idea is simple, I want to build a media center PC, but with some perhaps-slightly-unusual requirements - purely to suit my own preferences.

Job Bounty Hunter (or JBH, as I like to call it) is a job recruitment advertising service with a twist - it's kind of a blend between traditional job advertisement boards such as Monster.com, and a distributed embedded advertising services such as Google AdSense. But while embedded advertising services work by clocking up lots of little micro-payments for general exposure and click-throughs, JBH advertisements each offer cash bounties of hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars to be paid out to the site that a successful applicant clicked through.

I had a strange problem recently... occasionally, one of my FastCGI programs would go into a near-infinite loop (actually, just looping approximately 18 x 10¹⁸ or 18 billion billion times!!). It was easy to trace the problem back to an fwrite() call returning ULONG_MAX (18446744073709551615 on this particular 64-bit server).

A couple of weeks ago (well actually, back in September), I received an interesting email from Lyora MacRae of Adobe. To quote the email:

Thanks so much for reporting 3 or more bugs for Flex SDK. As a thanks for your hard work, we want to send you a free t-shirt we're designing with all the developers' names on it. Therefore, we need your shirt size and mailing address to include you!"

A couple of days ago, I was setting up the TinyMCE Drupal module on a friend's blog, and the blogger wanted quite a lot of the TinyMCE buttons enabled (who doesn't?). But the problem was that the TinyMCE Drupal module only supports up to 3 lines of buttons (while the TincyMCE editor itself has no such limitation), which meant that the last line of buttons was unnecessarily long, and caused all sorts of layout issues.

I recently came across a number of forum topics asking how to calculate CPU usage from /proc/stat, which raised a very slight sense of challenge within me (was just in "the mood" to do some Bash scripting)... so, here's an example showing how to calculate CPU usage with a simple Bash script.

We've been using jQuery at work for an up-coming secret project, and frankly, I think it's great!! :) We've also been using the excellent jqSOAPClient plugin for performing SOAP requests. However, when Google Chrome was released last month, I immediately tried our app with the new browser, only to find that all jqSOAPClient requests were failing under Chrome :(

Well, I left it for a couple of weeks - hoping that the jQuery and/or jqSOAPClient developers would already be aware of the issue, and would get time to fix it pretty quickly. But unfortunately, that has not been the case (or at least not that I can tell) - and I'm in no way complaining. So today I decided to have a go a tracking down the issue myself.