LOST in CODE: Archive

We Are Hunted

This site has just launched and I have to say it is… Wicked. Awesome. http://wearehunted.com It sits and automatically scours social networking sites, forums and even P2P networks to calculate the most popular, emerging music and then builds a top 99 chart. And if the concept wasn’t cool enough the implementation is amazing. A design that is plain gorgeous, very slick...

May 6th

Watch

Smack My Enya Up

Mar 16th

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave...”

– Anatole France

Jan 28th

Bring easy SOAP communication back into Flash AS3 →

Dec 21st

Dec 3rd

Nov 23rd

Install IE 6 without having to downgrade - makes... →

Sep 15th

PHP Explorer - Update

I’ve just done a few updates to my little PHP Explorer application for navigating and editing files on a webserver and it’s suddenly shaping up to quite a handy wee app. Here’s the main updates: Completely hide specified file types Turn off editing Turn off deleting Turn off file/folder creation Tooltips now show filesize and last modified time/date Users cannot navigate...

Aug 21st

Badly Placed Internet Ads →

Aug 12th

Who Will Win? →

Jul 19th

Who Will Win?

I was looking at my web stats for the first time in quite a while the other day and was surprised to see the second most popular page on the entire site is Who Will Win? Who Will Win was a little web game I’d built using ASP and an Access database, it was essentially a huge stack of mini binary-choice polls, things like Transformers vs Thundercats. This game stopped being an active part of...

Jul 4th

The last hour of Transformers 2

Big robots that all look the same shooting at each other Explosion Aerial shot of a plane – we need more air support! Big robots that all look the same shooting at each other Explosion Megan Fox pouting her lips in slow motion Big robots that all look the same shooting at each other Explosion Aerial shot of a plane – we need more air support! Big robots that all look the same...

Jun 24th

Chipmunks and Star Wars figures →

Jun 22nd

Thymer

In my office it’s long been accepted that we need to get a proper project management system in place - the vicious circle of course is not having the time to find one that suits our needs and investing the time to use it properly (and get other people using it!). Enter Thymer, while every other system is boasting about the raft of features it has, Thymer is going the other route and is very...

Jun 12th

Pixar's Up

Seeing how Up was just released in the US I assumed (like most big releases in this modern age of the internet and what not) that it would be out here in the UK either this weekend or next so went to look up showing times only to find nothing… because it’s not out until October! What’s that all about then - release in May in the US and October in the UK… not that I’m...

Jun 5th

Microsoft Natal

So Microsoft (and Lionhead) made their big reveal at their pre-E3 conference today and it’s this bonkers Natal thing, an unearthly combination of the Wii-mote and Playstation’s iPlay thing - a camera you mount on your TV and does motion detection so instead of swinging your Wiimote to play tennis, it detects your swing your arm like a tennis racket and reacts accordingly. If it works...

Jun 2nd

Swoopo

This site was recently brought to my attention, I had initially thought it was just another eBay want-to-be but it is actually bringing something new to the online auction table, whether it’s actually worth while though is something else. How the site works is kind of hard to explain, you bid on an item in 10p intervals and placing a bid costs 50p (even if you don’t win) the theory...

May 26th

Star Trek's cameo product placement →

May 11th

Watch

I wasn’t that excited about Pixar’s next film ‘Up’… until I saw this

May 4th

We Were Promised Jetpacks

Apr 30th

When April Fools Go Bad

My favourite April Fool from yesterday was music site The Sixty One’s rebranding as The Sixty Nine (apparently with a 200% increase in traffic). They even went so far as to redirect www.thesixtyone.com to www.thesixtynine.com, which was very cool at the time but this morning seems to have back fired as each url is now forwarding to the other making the actual site inaccessible behind an...

Apr 2nd

Javascript AJAX function

I’ve been using AJAX for awhile but had been always using JQuery’s AJAX function which most of the time does the job very well and very elegantly however I started having problems with it on Internet Explorer so had to use a backup method (although also using JQuery) and then more recently when I need to wrap a Javascript application up a standalone application using the rather nifty...

Mar 31st

Complexification - maths made beautiful →

Mar 25th

Harder Better Faster Stronger Soundboard →

Mar 12th

Star Wars Mice - Harry Potter Mice - Genius! →

Mar 10th

Cakes - just say no kids. →

Mar 9th

IE8

Apparently, by default, IE8 won’t be able to render the Google search page properly. How is that even possible?

Feb 20th

Xobni - makes Outlook less cack →

Feb 17th

Top eLearning Tips! (humour) →

Jan 30th

Moodle - Enrolment Expiry Date Block

My very first addition to Moodle, a very simple block which just displays the date on which a student’s enrolment will expire. Also marks my first proper dabble into PHP. http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=2106

Jan 28th

Lectora Focus Fix

UPDATED I’d not a huge fan of Lectora, in fact it wouldn’t be overly dramatic to say that I hate it, it’s fine for a university lecturer to quickly throw together a small eLearning module for their class or something like fire safety training but anything beyond that and it just plain sucks, it’s horrible to use, doesn’t render properly, isn’t accessible,...

Jan 27th

Spybreak - With Extra Cowbell →

Jan 14th

How Cheats Save Money (According to The Telegraph)

I’m not one of these people who have deep-seated hatred of certain newspapers (with the perfectly-acceptable exception of The Daily Mail) but this article from The Telegraph just makes me downright dirty and grimey all over - there’s a recession so apparently it’s okay to steal! Here’s their list: Using money-off coupons Reusing unwanted gifts Stopping tipping Dodging...

Dec 29th

RIP Majel Barrett Roddenberry

Gene Roddenberry’s wife passed away in her sleep yesterday morning at the age of 76 which let’s face it is a fine old way to go. Ironically her talents only came to my attention last week, as well as having played several physical roles in both the original Star Trek and The Next Generation she was also the famous voice of the ship’s computer for every series of Star Trek, every...

Dec 19th

JSON Attributes

I’ve recently been trying to parse content out of JSON objects where I can’t know for sure what the actual attributes are called, after quite a lot of searching I finally stumbled over this: yourJSONobject._attributes Which is an array of all the attribute names so you can then do things like: yourJSONobject[yourJSONobject._attributes[0]]

Dec 11th

Burger King reaches out and brings junk food to... →

Dec 5th

Dec 4th

OLED Breakthrough

This is very, very geeky but I’m rather excited about this latest breakthrough with Organic LEDs. I’ve been a fan of OLED ever since getting my Create Zen Vision:M which has one, offering, I think, a much more natural, easier on the eye way of viewing things than a traditional OLED screen. An OLED screen is (at a very basic level) just paper which has been cover with the magical OLED...

Nov 25th

World of Warcraft comes to the console →

Nov 25th

The web is going backwards

Do you remember that innocent time when the internet was this wonderful thing that knew no boundaries? That ignored political and physical borders? That brought people together and allowed ideas and content to be shared across the world? How did we manage to start stepping backwards and unravelling all this wonderful progress? No - I’m not talking about China, I’m talking about...

Oct 29th

Making Flash movies accessible in Firefox

I recently discovered (to my horror) that in Firefox, it’s impossible to focus on embedded Flash movies using only the keyboard (IE manages this fine) which is no good for making accessible content. I usually have nothing but praise for Firefox but Mozilla have really dropped the ball on this one. After a bit of online investigation and code tinkering I’ve come up with the following...

Oct 28th

What I Don't Get About Fringe

If you manage to stick with it past the first few episodes it’s a really good show but the one thing that really confuses me - sure everyone’s busy investigating exploding heads, bald men in suits and ghost networks but why has no one noticed the giant letters hovering all over Boston?

Oct 24th

Upside Down Dogs (Genius) →

Oct 17th

Steal this idea

An idea came to me the other day - currently as far as digital TV recorders go you have three choices: Get locked down with a Sky Plus box Get locked down with a V+ box Wing it one of the various Freeview recorders, none of which seem to be very reliable or offer great value for money Now what if the BBC were to launch their own version of the digital TV recorder box? They’re the ones...

Oct 15th

Forget 'Snakes on a Plane' →

Oct 7th

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection →

If you’re a fan of Japanese logic puzzles, like Suduko, Hanjie and Slitherlink then you’ll love this guy’s page, he’s put together a very impressive collection of free logic puzzles games. They all include generators so you’ve got an infinite amounts of possible puzzles, each application has a tiny file size and the graphics are all fully scalable which well handy if...

Oct 4th

Watch

Pig VS Lion

Sep 19th

Large Hadron Collider Webcams →

Sep 12th

Good Old Games

Finally got my beta access to the rather promising gog.com - selling slightly older pc games for a bargain price but with full support and guaranteed XP and Vista compatibility. Fair enough you can just for Abandonware but most of these aren’t available on Abandonware sites and there are some real crackers in there and with the games priced at either $10 or $6 it’s not exactly...

Sep 11th

EeLS

Off to the European eLearning Summit down in Nottingham next week. Technically this is a brand new conference but it’s being run by most of the same people that did EuroTAAC (The Alternative Authoring Conference) so should be pretty good. Bit of a worrying slant with about 50% of the seminars being devoted to Toolbook but there’s also going to be quite a bit about Xerte which is a...

Aug 17th