Website Archives

As you will have no doubt read, I'm in the process of moving house. The website will therefore go down from the time at which I unplug the server. It will resume when the stars align and we get to our new house and find that the services have been turned back on.

I will send a broadcast mail to all those who've signed up as a member to let you know when the site is going down.

Don't know how many people out there look at the photos I've been taking at the weekend, but if you do, I've added the tags to the double click image and the slideshow. (You can select whether or not to view the tags on the slideshow - default is to show them).

The idea of this being that if you want to know what a particular bird is that you're looking at you can double click it to find out. Well, I say to find out - you'll find a tag with a bird name on it which will be my best effort based on research, but I have to admit that sometimes it's particularly difficult to identify some of the species. So if I get something wrong, I apologize and would welcome an email to let me know what needs correcting.

You may or may not be aware, but alongside the irrelevant ramblings of Mr O and myself, there is actually some useful stuff on this site - some bug fixes to applications and little bits of code here and there. From time to time I get hits on the site and someone will download something and this generally makes me happy as I get the sense that I've helped someone - the most recent of which was an Internet / Business Solution Service Provide based in Kazakhstan.

Most of these hits are around the fix to the upload progress in PHP that just brings up a pop up window with a bar that indicates the progress a file has made for upload (when a user submits a file to you). When a user downloads a file, the progress indicator is controlled on the user's machine. Anyway, you get the picture.

What's really confusing me is that I got a series of random emails submitted on the web-form with complete garbage as the content and random links to pages that don't exist. And I don't just mean pages that sound right, most of the links were to things like http://hdfafklad.com. Unless I'm missing something (which could always be the case, lets face it) these seem really odd. Only thing I can think is that somebody's looking for something in the wrong place. The email web-form does allow attachments, but it doesn't utilize the upload progress. If you want to see the upload progress, that is on the upload file form that you can get to from that link or from the contact page (click on the “submit file to EBR” link) or directly from the contact menu at the bottom of any page (again click “submit file to EBR”).

My only plea is that if you send something, try and make it interesting. Also, if you are just doing a test, please put something like test in the text so I know to ignore it and just delete it rather than getting me spending my time trying to decipher something. Last, if you have any problems or questions - you should just email me them directly (web-form is fine) - I will respond.

Anyone who noticed that the site was down on Wednesday may be interested in the fact that this was due to a corrupt driver. In all my years of having computers, I've never had this happen to me before. I'm sure there's people out there who will read this and think “well, you're lucky, it happens to me all the time.” I moved the computers a while back and they now wireless connect to my LAN. The driver for the wireless USB adapter had become corrupt and stopped working.

Simple fix - just uninstall and then re-install the driver. Everything working fine. Just seems odd to me that it happened. But I won't loose too much sleep over it.

Sadly, for many of you, these are videos of the family and not more of my creations for your amusement. On the other hand, these are probably more informative and of more interest to family and friends that want to see the progression of young master William and the things that he's getting up to. There are two new videos - William on his scooter and William at the Gym. These can be found on the Family Videos Home Page.

Those nutty bumpkins have been at it again. And this time it was the turn of someone different to set the quiz - my dad. I have to be honest, I was expecting something completely obscure particularly as promises were made that the picture round would follow a theme of “identify the livestock”, however this round was not include (shame as my knowledge of cattle and sheep is second to none - if these wellies could tell stories ....) Anyway, take a trip to the Bumpkin Quiz and filter for “Dad Quiz 1” to view the latest offering.

It wasn't long before I got asked (told) to make a couple of enhancements to the RabBox. Told being the operative word as her indoors said that she needed the ability to save a playlist if it was to be of use. So, we've added the ability to create and edit your own playlists. You need to be registered with the site to do this as it checks your name and password before you can create a playlist.

In addition to that, we fixed a few bugs, although you may still experience some problems - if you do, let me know. I seem to get different results depending on the browser - MSIE seems to be more stable than FireFox. MSIE seems to wait until a song has loaded before playing whereas FireFox is using the streaming. More things for me to play with to figure out what's going on.

Back to the more user friendly stuff - I've added a timer so you can see how much of a song has played. So you know whether it's still working or crashed or if you're in that blank bit that some artists put at the end of a CD before adding a “hidden/bonus” track.

Also created a search button. Not sure if this will be of any use to anyone as you won't really know what you're searching for. That's why I've not linked it to the select screens as I think what's already there - the abilty to search by artist and/or album is probably enough for everyone.

Finally, the whizz bang - I created RagBoxLight for use on mobiles. One snag - you need Adobe Flash Player and there aren't too many devices that have this capability yet including mine (Blackberry Curve). Thing is I created it before I realized I couldn't use it. Never Mind.

No, not a reference to something of Karen's. I was playing with a bit of software, SoundManager2, to get a little bit of music to play on the home page and I got to thinking maybe I could make a music player to stream my music on the web so I can listen to it remotely. So I did.

RagBox is the result of this effort which is linked from the Fun Stuff Home Page. I've built out quite a lot of functionality with it - you can shuffle the entire catalog by clicking the play button, but you can also create shuffle lists either by genre, format or artist. You can also build out your own playlists by album or song (although you can't save them - I'm thinking about adding this functionality, but am not sure yet). Or you can pick from one of my playlists (albeit there's only one at the minute that I created for this purpose).

This probably needs a bit of work as I don't have any error trapping in place yet and it has bugged out on me a few times during development. Generally, it locks up when changing song, particularly if you use the advance button just after a song has started playing. If you do play with the RagBox and find bugs, feel free to email me so I can try and fix them. Also, I have no idea whether it's going to load fast enough with my connection so it may get jumpy if you are in the UK for example.

Last, yes, anyone who looks in detail may wonder why I've got the media and format as selections when there's only CD and album. Well, that's because that's all I've got loaded. Once I move and get my collection sent over this will expand to include vinyl with single and EP.

Now you can comment on the current vote. Many thanks to ED for the suggestion - we've listened and updated to add the functionality. There is now a place to comment when you make a vote - you can either do this from the Vote Home Page or when your vote is registered (e.g. through the email link). Get into a discussion on why you voted the way you did. Let others know your thoughts.

Also, per the suggestion have started a page for links to sites that I find interesting or that have been helpful to me when I've been researching stuff.

Great to get suggestions - if you want to make suggestions, either use the contact page to get a message to me or if you're feeling bold, post to the forum on website design

Slowly catching up with my backlog of things to post. One of which is the latest Bumpkin Quiz that Mr O set a few weeks ago (Mr O currently being in Vegas at the Motor Speedway watching the NASCAR without me unfortunately, but hoping for a good race and good luck in the gambling).

Try the quiz (filter on quiz 6 if you just want to see the latest questions).