Solid State Dual-Core Media Center PC - Teaser

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

At this stage, it looks like completely-passive-cooling a 35W Athlon with an Orochi is entirely possible. However, the 790GX northbridge may be a bit of a problem...

Completely Solid State 64-bit Dual-Core Media Center PC

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

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 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.

fwrite() returning ULONG_MAX

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).

My Adobe Flex T-Shirt

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!"

TinyMCE Button Bars in Drupal

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 TinyMCE editor itself has no such limitation), which meant that the last line of buttons was unnecessarily long, and caused all sorts of layout issues.

Calculating CPU Usage from /proc/stat

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.

Patching jqSOAPClient for Google Chrome

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 :(

Who wants DB2 Express-C 9.5.2?

Rav Ahuja (an IBM product manager) has just posted a very interesting question over at the IBM DB2 Express Forum titled Who wants DB2 Express-C 9.5.2? As you can see in my reply, I, for one, am very interested in getting my hands on a DB2 Express-C 9.5.2 release, as I live in hope that it will solve some my db2text grievances!! :(

Browser Wars: Attack of the Chrome(s)

So, finally we get to see the innovations of Google implemented in browser form. For those not "in the know", Google Chrome is a new browser recently "accidentally" announced by Google via this comic.

One thing I've been excited to try out is the new tabs system. I remember, back when I first got IE7, that I had a gripe with the tabs. I thought, "The tabs should be on top, so they don't get in my way." (Among other things).