mysqldump --all-databases

It does mean that all my databases are backed up into one massive single file; so it makes it a little bit tricky to pull out the database I was after, however I stumbled across a MySQL backup bash script that will automatically separate out the databases into their own files making it allot easier to manage.

I decided to change the script slightly so that the mysqldump command is a bit more reliable (handling UTF-8, stored procedures, not breaking foreign key indexes etc) and so that it can handle multiple config files. It can also automatically rotate archive backups for x number of months, weeks and days.

Being the open source kinda guy that I am; you can download modified script here:

mysqlbackup.sh

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#! /bin/bash
 
# MySQL database backup (databases in separate files) with daily, weekly and monthly rotation
 
# Sebastian Flippence (http://seb.flippence.net) originally based on code from: Ameir Abdeldayem (http://www.ameir.net)
# You are free to modify and distribute this code,
# so long as you keep the authors name and URL in it.
 
# By default it will search for the config file in the same directory as this script, otherwise you can choose it (e.g. ./mysqlbackup.sh /path/to/mysqlbackup.conf)
 
# Read the config file
if [ "$1" = "" ]; then
	CONFIG_FILE="`dirname $0`/mysqlbackup.conf"
else
	CONFIG_FILE="$1"
fi
 
if [ -f "$CONFIG_FILE" ]; then
	echo "Loading config file ($CONFIG_FILE)"
	. $CONFIG_FILE
else
	echo "Config file not found ($CONFIG_FILE)"
	exit 1
fi
 
# Setup some command defaults (can be overriden by the config)
MYSQL=${MYSQL:-`which mysql`}
MYSQLDUMP=${MYSQLDUMP:-`which mysqldump`}
PHP=${PHP:-`which php`}
 
# Date format that is appended to filename
DATE=`date +'%Y-%m-%d'`
 
# Setup paths
ARCHIVE_PATH="${BACKDIR}/${ARCHIVE_PATH}"
 
ORGBACKDIR="${BACKDIR}"
BACKDIR="${BACKDIR}/${LATEST_PATH}/${DATE}"
 
# Check backup directory exists
# if not, create it
if  [ -e $BACKDIR ]; then
	echo "Backup directory exists (${BACKDIR})"
else
	mkdir -p $BACKDIR
	echo "Created backup directory (${BACKDIR})"
fi
 
if  [ $DUMPALL = "y" ]; then
	echo "Creating list of databases on: ${HOST}..."
 
	$MYSQL -N -h $HOST --user=$USER --password=$PASS -e "show databases;" > ${BACKDIR}/dbs_on_${SERVER}.txt
 
	# redefine list of databases to be backed up
	DBS=`sed -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' -e 's/Database //g' ${BACKDIR}/dbs_on_${SERVER}.txt`
fi
 
echo "Backing up MySQL databases..."
 
for database in $DBS; do
	echo "${database}..."
	$MYSQLDUMP --host=$HOST --user=$USER --password=$PASS --default-character-set=utf8 --skip-set-charset --routines --disable-keys --force --single-transaction --allow-keywords --dump-date $database > ${BACKDIR}/${SERVER}-MySQL-backup-$database-${DATE}.sql
	bzip2 ${BACKDIR}/${SERVER}-MySQL-backup-$database-${DATE}.sql
done
 
if  [ $DUMPALL = "y" ]; then
	rm ${BACKDIR}/dbs_on_${SERVER}.txt
fi
 
if [ $MOVETAR = "y" ]; then
echo "Moving sql.bz2 files to tar"
	for file in `ls *.bz2`; do
		tar -rf ${BACKDIR}/${SERVER}-MySQL-backup-${DATE}.tar $file
		rm $file
	done
	EXT="tar"
else
	EXT="sql.bz2"
fi
 
# If you have the mail program 'mutt' installed on
# your server, this script will have mutt attach the backup
# and send it to the email addresses in $EMAILS
 
if  [ $MAIL = "y" ] && [ $EMAILSENDON = $EMAILTODAY  ]; then
	BODY="MySQL backup is ready"
	ATTACH=`for file in ${BACKDIR}/*${DATE}.${EXT}; do echo -n "-a ${file} ";  done`
 
	echo "${BODY}" | mutt -s "${SUBJECT}" $ATTACH $EMAILS
 
	echo -e "MySQL backup has been emailed"
fi
 
if  [ $FTP = "y" ]; then
	echo "Initiating FTP connection..."
	cd $BACKDIR
	ATTACH=`for file in ${BACKDIR}/*${DATE}.${EXT}; do echo -n -e "put ${file}\n"; done`
 
	ftp -nv < <EOF
open $FTPHOST
user $FTPUSER $FTPPASS
cd $FTPDIR
$ATTACH
quit
EOF
	echo -e  "FTP transfer complete"
fi
 
if  [ $ROTATE = "y" ]; then
	echo "Performing backup rotation..."	
 
	# Convert the number of weeks and months to days
	MAX_WEEKS=$(($MAX_WEEKS * 7))
	MAX_MONTHS=$(($MAX_MONTHS * 31))
 
	# Daily backups
	if [ ! -d $ARCHIVE_PATH/$DAILY_PATH/$DATE ] && [ "$MAX_DAYS" -gt "0" ]; then
		mkdir -p $ARCHIVE_PATH/$DAILY_PATH/$DATE
		# Copy files into archive dir 
		find $BACKDIR -name "*.$EXT" -exec cp {} $ARCHIVE_PATH/$DAILY_PATH/$DATE/. \;
	fi
 
	# Delete old daily backups
	if [ -d $ARCHIVE_PATH/$DAILY_PATH ]; then
		find $ARCHIVE_PATH/$DAILY_PATH/ -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name $DAILY_PATH -mtime +$MAX_DAYS -exec rm -Rf {} \;
 
		if [ "$MAX_DAYS" -lt "1" ]; then
			rm -Rf $ARCHIVE_PATH/$DAILY_PATH/
		fi		
	fi
 
	# Weekly backups
	WEEK_NO=`$PHP -r 'echo ceil(date("j", time())/7);'`
	DATE_WEEK="`date +'%Y-%m-'`$WEEK_NO"
 
	if [ ! -d $ARCHIVE_PATH/$WEEKLY_PATH/$DATE_WEEK ] && [ "$MAX_WEEKS" -gt "0" ]; then
		mkdir -p $ARCHIVE_PATH/$WEEKLY_PATH/$DATE_WEEK
		# Copy files into archive dir 
		find $BACKDIR -name "*.$EXT" -exec cp {} $ARCHIVE_PATH/$WEEKLY_PATH/$DATE_WEEK/. \;
	fi
 
	# Delete old weekly backups
	if [ -d $ARCHIVE_PATH/$WEEKLY_PATH ]; then
		find $ARCHIVE_PATH/$WEEKLY_PATH/ -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name $WEEKLY_PATH -mtime +$MAX_WEEKS -exec rm -Rf {} \;
 
		if [ "$MAX_WEEKS" -lt "1" ]; then
			rm -Rf $ARCHIVE_PATH/$WEEKLY_PATH/
		fi		
	fi
 
	# Monthly backups
	DATE_MONTH=`date +'%Y-%m'`
 
	if [ ! -d $ARCHIVE_PATH/$MONTHLY_PATH/$DATE_MONTH ] && [ "$MAX_MONTHS" -gt "0" ]; then
		mkdir -p $ARCHIVE_PATH/$MONTHLY_PATH/$DATE_MONTH
		# Copy files into archive dir 
		find $BACKDIR -name "*.$EXT" -exec cp {} $ARCHIVE_PATH/$MONTHLY_PATH/$DATE_MONTH/. \;
	fi
 
	# Delete old monthly backups
	if [ -d $ARCHIVE_PATH/$MONTHLY_PATH ]; then
		find $ARCHIVE_PATH/$MONTHLY_PATH/ -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name $MONTHLY_PATH -mtime +$MAX_MONTHS -exec rm -Rf {} \;
 
		if [ "$MAX_MONTHS" -lt "1" ]; then
			rm -Rf $ARCHIVE_PATH/$MONTHLY_PATH/
		fi		
	fi
 
 
	# Delete old backups in latest folder (-mtime +0 is 24 hours or older)
	find $ORGBACKDIR/$LATEST_PATH/ -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name $LATEST_PATH -mtime +0 -exec rm -Rf {} \;
 
	echo "Backups rotation complete"
fi
 
echo "MySQL backup is complete"

mysqlbackup.conf

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# MySQL backup config file
 
#----------------------General Settings--------------------#
 
# MySQL server's name
SERVER="Servers-hostname"
 
# Directory to backup to
BACKDIR="/path/to/backup/folder"
 
#----------------------MySQL Settings--------------------#
 
# MySQL server's hostname or IP address
HOST="localhost"
 
# MySQL username
USER="username"
 
# MySQL password
PASS="password"
 
# List all of the MySQL databases that you want to backup, 
# each separated by a space. Or set the option below to backup all database
DBS="db1 db2"
 
# Set to 'y' if you want to backup all your databases. This will override
# the database selection above.
DUMPALL="y"
 
# Move compressed bzip2 database dumps into a single tar file
# otherwise move them into a year-month-day folder
MOVETAR="n"
 
# Custom path to system commands (enable these if you want use a different 
# location for PHP and MySQL or if you are having problems running this script)
#PHP="/opt/local/bin/php"
#MYSQL="/opt/local/bin/mysql"
#MYSQLDUMP="/opt/local/bin/mysqldump"
 
#----------------------Mail Settings--------------------#
 
# Set to 'y' if you'd like to be emailed the backup (requires mutt)
MAIL="n"
 
# Email addresses to send backups to, separated by a space
EMAILS="your-email@example.com"
 
SUBJECT="MySQL backup on $SERVER ($DATE)"
 
# Only email on the first day of the month
EMAILSENDON="01"
EMAILTODAY=`date +'%d'`
 
#----------------------FTP Settings--------------------#
 
# Set "FTP=y" if you want to enable FTP backups
FTP="n"
 
# FTP server settings; should be self-explanatory
FTPHOST="ftp.server.com"
FTPUSER="username"
FTPPASS="password"
 
# Directory to backup to. if it doesn't exist, file will be uploaded to 
# first logged-in directory
FTPDIR="backups"
 
#-------------------Backup Rotation Settings-------------------#
 
# Rotate old files?
ROTATE="y"
 
# How many backups do you want to keep? (rotate setting above must be y)
MAX_DAYS=5		#default 5
MAX_WEEKS=4		#default 4
MAX_MONTHS=3	#default 3
 
# Paths
LATEST_PATH="latest"
ARCHIVE_PATH="archive"
 
DAILY_PATH="daily"
WEEKLY_PATH="weekly"
MONTHLY_PATH="monthly"
 
#----------------------End of Settings------------------#

Continuing their promotional campaign Apple in 1997 started to use the slogan: “Think Different”, which has also ended up on some of the icons in Mac OS itself.

However in 2008 Apple released its App Store for its shiny new iPhone and its SDK, which in turn has reversed their “Think Different” and anti 1984 adverts from the past.
Apple now sees itself as Big Brother scrutinising over every App submission; making sure that it fits in with their regime before allowing them into the App Store (sometimes taking up to a month to approve).

Some Apps are rejected before they have even seen the light of day, though the developers may have had the best of intentions and spent 100’s of man hours creating them; such as Google Voice which could see Apple and AT&T (and other networks) lose out on profits over charging customers for voice and text messages. Background applications are another no no, so Apps like Locale could never make it on to the iPhone. Using Apples own internal private API can also land you in trouble, without you even knowing about it.

“The government attempts to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects, labelling unapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime.” ~ Thought Police

Some Apps were published on the App Store only to be later removed or resubmitted with limited functionally just because Apple now deems it inappropriate or because it competes/replicates existing functionality. Which doesn’t give much hope for running your favourite browsers like Firefox or Opera on your device.

“Rectifying” historical Apps to concord with Big Brother’s current pronouncements ~ Ministry of Truth

My previous phone allowed you to use it as a modem (e.g. connecting to a laptop via bluetooth) free of charge using my phones Internet connection and existing data plan, but Apple have made it easy for operators to charge extra for this functionally, essentially allowing them to charge customers twice for the same service. Higher bandwidth Apps such as VoIP and video streaming also struggle on Apples platform as 3G connections are denied; usually not because the network operators can’t handle all this data, but because they will lose out on being able to bill talk time (hopefully this restriction is to be removed soon).

And as for those who “Think Different” (“The crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers”) who decide to jailbrake their iPhones and start installing software that isn’t vetted by Apple they are able to free themselves from the communist Apple regime and customise the way their device looks and behaves; they are caught in a “cat and mouse game” against the system.

Don’t get me wrong I do love Apple’s initiative new mobile operating system for its iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. However its communist App Store is just limiting developer innovation and progression. It also locks users into the Apple ecosphere; if they were to buy Bejeweled for their iPod touch they wouldn’t be able to transfer it to their new Android phone.

I just hope this isn’t the shape of things to come on new mobile phone platforms or computer operating systems, as I strongly believe users should be free to choose what Apps they want to install on their phones, computers or media devices. Just imagine if Microsoft had the same policy with Windows: not allowing people to use anything other than Internet Explorer just because it competes and replicates existing functionality of the OS.

An ideal App Store would be one where developers can publish applications instantly and users are able to warn other users if it’s unsuitable, buggy or inappropriate. Users should be able to use their applications on all of their devices and developers should not be restricted to what they can and can’t do. I just hope that the Orange and O2 App Store and others can live up to this ideology.

For the most part its been a very good experience, however there where a few things that my old phone did slightly better like running multiple applications at the same time, letting you choose your own SMS ringtone (rather than limiting you to only 6!) and my biggest annoyance:

When composing a new text message every phone I owned in past told you how many characters you have left (before it starts sending multiple messages) and how many messages it was going to send in total.

This crucial feature surprisingly seems to have been left out on the iPhone! Which could leave me accidentally wasting my credit by sending 2 messages at once and annoying people with 2 messages (when I go over the 160 character limit). As the iPhone has one of the most advanced web browsers Safari built-in (with copy and paste support) I set out to try and fix it myself.

My solution: http://www.sebflipper.co.uk/iPhoneSMS (best viewed on an iPhone)

Update: Source is now available on GitHub

Using a bit of HTML and JavaScript I quickly knocked up a proof of concept, but it didn’t look too pretty. So to spice things up I decided to have a look at what new HTML5 features I could use and being a developer I wanted to create a kinda “Hello World” HTML5 application.

My JavaScript ingredients:

• IUI – a JavaScript library for creating iPhoneish interfaces in a web page
• jQuery – a well used JavaScript library for simplifying common tasks

New HTML5 features I wanted to try out:

• Storing files for offline usage (allowing you view the web app when you have poor or no network coverage)
• Using SQLite for offline databases
• Geolocation using the iPhones built-in A-GPS

Storing files for offline usage

This bits quite easy and involves creating a file called: "<app-name>.manifest" this contains a list of files that you want the browser to download and store for offline usage, one thing to note when the server sends this manifest file it needs send the header: text/cache-manifest which can be added as a .htaccess file (if your using Apache) via:

AddType text/cache-manifest .manifest

Then in your index file add the following HTML5 tag before the head tag like:
<!doctype html>
<html manifest="sms.manifest">
<head>

Using SQLite for offline databases

This bit is a bit more complex and requires knowledge of SQL/SQLite, but it essentially uses JavaScript to create a new database object and run any initial SQL commands to setup the table structure. For a better example see the db.js file which shows database support detection and creating the table structure then see the $('#save').click function in sms.js on how to insert and delete rows.

Geolocation

HTML5 adds a new set of JavaScript calls that can be used to get the computers or devices location (by getting the longitude and latitude based on a GPS fix, or cellular network triangulation or by using your IP address and a database of WiFi networks and their locations). For a better example see: Merge Design on Geolocation or geolocation.js

Fall Back

By default all the buttons for accessing the database and geolocation features are not displayed, however there are a few JavaScript checks to see if the browser supports these features and if it does it will display the appropriate buttons, see db.js and geolocation.js (search for supportsDbs and supportsGeolocation)

The result: http://www.sebflipper.co.uk/iPhoneSMS (best viewed on an iPhone)

One thing I have been waiting for on the Apple TV is access to the BBC’s iPlayer. I recently discovered Boxee which is an open-source media centre for Mac, Windows and Apple TV based on a fork of XBMC. It has a very nice and easy to use interface which will index all your video, music and photos and show you summary, ratings, trailers etc based around your content. Very handy for finding info about movies I have copied onto the Apple TV!

Today I stumbled across a plugin for Boxee/XBMC which allows you to view content from the BBC iPlayer, it doesn’t come preinstalled with Boxee however instructions can be found on their forums, I found that it works very well on the Apple TV playing content from all their channels and most popular lists with minimal effort.

If you haven’t patched your Apple TV to run SSH already theres a handy patch stick creator that will unlock your Apple TV and install Boxee aptly called atvusb-creator and your ready to go with Boxee. However if have already have SSH and nitoTV installed (like did) you can simply copy the atv-xbmc-launcher installer onto you Apple TV and follow the instructions on their Wiki once the menu item is installed you can press Update and it will download and install Boxee for you.

Once you have Boxee up and running on your Apple TV copy the plugin across and edit the source.xml then should should see a nice BBC iPlayer icon under Video->Internet!

Enter the cloud, online backup is nothing new the only difference these days is you normally get more storage for your money. Over the last few weeks I have been keeping an eye out for different solutions:

Service	Pros	Cons
Drop Box	Backs up all your documents and photos online incrementally Keeps things synced across machines (and cross platform) Keeps revision history (so you can go back to previous versions of a document) Allows you to make files or folders public and gives a link to download or generates a photo gallery for you Works on Windows, Mac and Linux	Currently in beta (no public signup) 2GB for free account
	Unlimited storage (paid accounts) Social network for sharing with friends/family and tagging Easy to manage and setup galleries	Photos and videos only 100MB upload per month on free accounts Manual backup process
Mozy	Unlimited automatic incremental backups Set it up and forget it	2GB free account Doesn’t support Linux
Self Hosted	Can be used for backup as well as hosting websites, blogs and galleries etc. Backups work with open-source software like rsync Most hosting companies normally provide 100GB+ of storage space	Manual setup Complex to initially setup

Find out which one I chose after the jump.

As I have already have a hosting plan with Site5 who provide 110GB of storage it only really made sense to make the most of my hosting package.

The process:

1. Create a public/private key to connect over SSH
2. Write a bash script to perform the backup
3. Setup a con job to run it automatically
4. Sit back and let rsync do its job, once the initial backup has succeeded it will then start doing incremental backups (e.g. only uploading changed files/folders)

This process works on Mac and Linux out of the box, but if you are using Windows you will need to tinker around with Cygwin to run bash scripts, rsync and cron jobs etc or you could always use SyncBack in FTP mode.

Step 1: SSH into your web host and enter the following commands:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

When prompted for a path and password just press enter twice. Then:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Next download ~/.ssh/id_rsa into your document folder and rename to your-site.pk this will be used in the bash script below

Step 2: Write a bash script to backup your data, this step involves playing around with rsync to upload/backup your data. You will need to change values in the config section to match your setup. (Extra bonus if you are using a Mac with growlnotify installed (in the Growl Extras folder) as you will get a notifcation when it starts and finishes backing up)

backup.sh

#! /bin/bash
 
# rsync backup
# Sebastian Flippence
# http://sebflipper.co.uk
# You are free to modify and distribute this code,
# so long as you keep my name and URL in it.
 
# Must be run with sudo (e.g. sudo ./backup.sh)
 
# For some reason rsync doesn't like tilde (home directory) being used in a passed in path variable
# Please use full paths for source and private key
 
# Config
SOURCE="/Users/Seb/" # Your home directory
TARGET="~/backup/Sebs-Mac-Mini" # Where should we save on the remote server
USER="ssh username"
HOST="domain or ip"
PRIVKEY="/Users/Seb/Documents/your-site.pk"
# Uncomment to exclude your Downloads folder
#EXCLUDE="Downloads"
 
# Log Files
TIMESTAMP=`date +%Y-%m`
LOG="/var/log/sf-"$TIMESTAMP"-rsync-backup.log"
 
if [ `id -u` != '0' ] ; then
    echo "You must use sudo to run this command"
    exit 1
fi
 
GROWL=$(which growlnotify)
 
if [ $GROWL ]
then
	$GROWL -st 'rsync' -m 'Backup process has started'
fi
 
if [ -z "$EXCLUDE" ]
then
	rsync -rltDzh --log-file=$LOG --chmod=a+r --delete $SOURCE -e "ssh -p 22 -i $PRIVKEY" $USER@$HOST:$TARGET
else
	rsync -rltDzh --log-file=$LOG --chmod=a+r --delete --delete-excluded --exclude=$EXCLUDE $SOURCE -e "ssh -p 22 -i $PRIVKEY" $USER@$HOST:$TARGET
fi
 
if [ $GROWL ]
then
	$GROWL -st 'rsync' -m 'Backup process has finished'
fi

Step 3: On your machine enter the following command:

sudo crontab -e

Then paste the following:

0 20 * * * /Users/your-username/Documents/backup.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

This will now run at 8pm everyday backing up your precious data.

So after much playing around with it and getting it up and running I thought I would create a how to guide on the Site5 Wiki about setting up Subversion for multiple users, with permissions and desktop setup (this guide should also work on other shared web hosts).

http://wiki.site5.com/SVN/Subversion_(SVN)_Setup_Guide

Bizarrely with the amount of accuracy with GPS these days you can actually see what lane you were in at the time and even if you were changing lanes. My findings are it takes longer in the mornings to get to work, in the worse case it took 1 hour 9 minutes to get in, where as it only took 41 minutes to get home, almost 30 minute difference! I think the main problem is the school run in the mornings seem to clog the roads quite a bit. Going different ways didn’t seem to save much time unless the motorway was totally jammed.

I can see people like TomTom building this sort thing into their next generation of GPS devices so that they can accurately model and predict what roads and at what time they will be jammed, as well as sending back live data to a central database to which can inform other GPS users to avoid certain roads.

You can also monitor my dodgy parking with the previous route overlays!

• Location bar allows you to search through your history as well as bookmarks and most often visited sites (see screen shot below)
• Improved bookmarks, smart bookmarks and a bookmark manager which supports tagging
• Customised skins based around what ever operating system you are using it on (Windows, Mac, Linux etc)
• Improved download manager
• Faster page rendering and improved memory management

The main feature which is very impressive is the smarter location bar that allows you to quickly access most often visited sites and bookmarks, I don’t think I could go back to Firefox 2 as I would be lost without it!

The only niggles that I have had with it so far is the Home and End buttons on my keyboard seem to be acting as Page Up/Down buttons on my Mac, which is kinda pointless having 2 sets of buttons that do the same thing, but luckily someone has fixed it (if only it would make it into the final version, rather than being a hack!) and the Foxmarks plug-in has only just been upgraded to support Firefox 3 (which synchronizes your bookmarks between computers).

Whats even better for me as a Web/PHP Developer, is that it fully supports ACID2 which insures that Firefox is standards compliant and will hopefully mean that it will be allot easier to make the design of a website look pretty much identical between other ACID2 compliant browsers (such as Opera, Safari and even the IE8 beta). Now all they need to do is make it ACID3 compliant!

On another note I updated WordPress (which powers this blog) to 2.5, which has under gone a revamped admin interface and its surprisingly painless to upgrade as all your custom themes and uploads are stored in a separate folder and I haven’t had to touch my custom template/theme since I installed it a few years back.

iTunes has the habit of marking all the files all the files it can’t find with an exclamation and then not syncing with iPods etc, which is why I wrote a an Automator script for my Mac to detect if my hard drive is connected:

tell application "Finder"
	if exists folder "LaCie 500GB Mini Hub:Music:" then
		launch application "iTunes"
		tell application "iTunes"
			launch
		end tell
	else
		display dialog "Please turn on LaCie 500GB Mini Hub" buttons {"OK"} default button 1
	end if
end tell

To use, open up Automator paste the code in and change “LaCie 500GB Mini Hub:Music:” to the name of your drive and location of your music collection, then save as an application, then just drag it on your dock and remove the original iTunes icon (you can even give it the same icon as iTunes by following this guide). If it detects your drive it will automatically load iTunes otherwise it display a message.

Norway

I took a few panoramas as well, 3 of them came out quite well:

Cross-country skiing  is pretty good fun, but does involve allot of up hilling e.g. climbing a mountain for 2 hours for a 10 minute ski down! Though you do get the reward of conquering the mountain, next time I will have to try down-hilling and let the ski lift do all the hard work.

Today I spent a fair chunk of time trying to find a solution to the never ending problem of syncing PIM, e.g. syncing Thunderbird email, calendar and contacts with Google Mail/Google Calendar and a mobile phone. Email is fine, as that just uses Gmail’s IMAP which works pretty much anywhere and with the aid of 2 extensions for Thunderbird and 1 application for my phone:

• Provider for Google Calendar
  
• SyncSW (for contacts only, as the calendar sync doesn’t work that well)
• Funambol (for my mobile phone, which handles contacts and calendar)

I have now got everything talking with each other via ScheduleWorld, the only downside is that contacts aren’t synced with Gmail, but they will sync with Thunderbird (which isn’t all that bad as Gmail tends to add any email address you use to its address book). Handy if my phone goes walkies as I will have all the data backed up.

I got it home set it up and it sounded superb, really crisp and sharp even when playing pretty loud, at one stage it even got the neighbours around twice! All was fine until I setup the clock/timer, switching it over to DAB digital radio automatically set the clock which is pretty cool I thought and I set the timer to wake me up at 7am for work.

As with all new alarm clocks I am pretty wary and I some how managed to wake up at 6:59am and was expecting my alarm clock to go off, but at 7:05am I thought it should be blaring off at me by now? Turn it on to find out why and the clock had lost an hour over night. I thought it must just have got the wrong time. But the next day it did the same thing even when I manually set the clock!

And what’s even stranger: at 8pm on the dot the clock just resets to 00:00?! Bizarre, so I emailed Yamaha who said it was most likely due to a fault in the system and said to take it back, so I took it back and got it replaced. Got my brand new 2^nd Yamaha M170 back today:

• Plugged it in
• Switched the source to Radio
• Changed the band to DAB
• Changed the station to Radio 1
• Switched to AUX1
• At 20:00 on the dot, it reset to 00:00, again on a brand new system!

I think tomorrow I will be taking it back and buying Denon instead!

</RANT>

On Thursday I saw Alegría at the Royal Albert Hall with some mates from uni which was pretty amazing, some people are just too flexible for their own good, check out this video and you will see what I mean (I bet she will have arthritis when she’s older!). Well worth going to, even if you not into plays and performances.

My PC game of the last 3 months has to be Darwinia just because the sale managers theory is never advertise just use PR and word of mouth for advertising (the “Build it, and they will come” theory), plus it’s a great game. At first glance it looks like an old retro game, but in fact its bang up to date and can even handle my 1440×900 widescreen display. Game play is similar to Command and Conquer, eg moving you squaddies and killing the enemy, only gripe with this game is that it wasn’t very long and could probably be completed within 7 hours of play, but what do expect for a tenner.

Also watch out for space profanity and crop circles on Google Earth.

More Here

I have also finished building a website for friend called Halls 2 House making use of the UK Postcode/Google Maps API I developed the other month. It allows landlords to register up and advertise their houses online. Coded in PHP it features unlimited landlords and houses, automatic payment processing via PayPal, and a fully fledged admin centre for managing everything. The site is now live at halls2house.co.uk I will be adding it to my portfolio section soon. (If you’re a landlord in the Uxbridge area adding houses to the website is currently free!)

In gaming news I got GTA Liberty City Stories for my PSP last month and it is awesome, one of the best games on the PSP. It’s just like GTA3 but with bikes and different missions, graphics game play are exactly the same as the PS2/PC version. A must have game if you have a PSP. I have also being playing Fahrenheit (called Indigo Prophecy in the US) on the PC for a couple of months which is a sort of RPG style game where the storyline changes based on how you play the game, it has quite a bizarre plot which is worth a play.
Oh and don’t get Quake 4, it uses the Doom 3 graphics engine which kinda sucks as the original Quake games had their own engines which was much better. Quake 4 might as well be called Doom 4 as it just seems like a carry on from Doom 3, nothing like the last 3 Quakes.

In movies Oldboy is well worth a watch, the plot deals with one of the worse taboos imaginable and it worth a watch just for that alone! Also if you are into your weekly Podcasts Digg Nation is worth subscribing to, it covers most of the top stories from digg.com. Checkout the worlds most annoying/additive flash game and Parkour I wish I could do that!

Personally I would have thought that putting a marker on a postcode would have been included, as it’s on of the core features of Google Maps, but it might be due to some licensing issue with Royal Mail. Instead you have to give it the longitude and latitude of a location you want to mark on the map, which is fine if you happen to remember all your locations this way! I myself prefer using postcodes, which why I found a free database of the first part of UK postcodes (which included longitude and latitude) so I tied Google Maps in with the MySQL postcode database.

A working demo can be found under the scripts section.
I have also released it for free so you can get your hands it.

In other news I got my new 60GB iPod video in black will post some photos soon. Videos look pretty cool on it, but I would have thought that the TV output would be very pixelated as the video file is only 320×240, but it looks ok and you could easily watch a movie from it.

This weeks recommended album is We Have Sound by Tom Vek and Pete Tong’s Podcast is pretty good too!

Also this week I attempted to have ago with some of that homebrew that’s been going around on PSPs. I was a bit worried about using the downgrade hack from 2.00 to 1.50 as I risked bricking my PSP. But I thought what the hell and hoped for the best, lucky all turned out well and I was back to 1.50 in less than 3 minutes. Now I have a few emulators and I am playing old Mega Drive and Gameboy games such as Tetris, Donkey Kong, Lemmings and Sonic in widescreen!

I also got a limited addition copy of F.E.A.R. which comes with the comic for the series. From the trailer and reviews the graphics looks pretty sweet with Max Payne style bullet time and Half Life 2 style graphics.

Google Earth have recently added high resolution photos of the Uxbridge, Brunel and Heathrow area, worth checking out if you haven’t use it in awhile. Hey I can see my uni house from there!

If you have ever played Counter Strike you will love this video, its dam right hilarious!

I have added all my university and other projects into my Portfolio, 13 of them at the moment (unlucky for some). The portfolio runs off a MySQL database allowing you to sort all the projects by date and type etc, it also allows you to view a specific type of project e.g. view only website designs.

Last week I bought Burnout Legends for my PSP overall it’s a pretty good and quite addictive, it rivals Ridge Racers and I would have to say it’s a must have game for the PSP. Seems quite easy to begin with but when you get into Coupe Class the computer blatantly starts cheating by having faster cars and never crashes. Can’t wait for GTA: Liberty City Stories and Lemmings for the PSP.

I also bought Day of Defeat Source for the PC by Valve (makers of Counter Strike Source and Half Life 2) the graphics are really sharp and the game play is quite interesting, as it actually seems more like a World War 2 style battle as each team has to capture and hold certain points on the map, once the team has captured all the points they win the round (which can sometimes take 5 minutes or 2 hours!). I think this game will replace Medal of Honour: Spearhead as my favourite WW2 FPS.

Oh and my favourite bit of music for the day is Arcadia by Gabriel & Dresden (Godskitchen Global Gathering 2005 Mix) works wonders at 1:45am!

Anyway I am starting up a personal section to my website which will hopefully include an about me page, gallery, blog and my portfolio of work from university, work and things I make in my spare time such as the much loved Multi-Forums script, which I have been running for the past few years. Thing is these will need to be integrated with each other (having the same template layout as each other) and not looking like separate packages such as they do at the moment.

Once that’s done I hope to keep this blog up to date with recent goings on and points of interest.

Better start her off with what I am doing now, as this is the first post and all. Currently I am on the Work Placement year at Brunel University (and that’s not Bristol! Its west London) studying Multimedia Design and Technology. My youngest brother Oli has just started 6th form doing his A levels in History, Art, Music and something else. My middle brother Jos has just started term at Bournemouth University doing Business, he tells me he choose Bournemouth as the course was meant to be pretty good, but the main reason being that its meant to have the best night life in Briton and its close to the sea!

In other news, I got back from Miami the other week which was quite cool. 40c every day and the humidity at 90%, the flight was cheap as its standby (stealing unused seats on the plane), but the rest of it wasn’t such as hotels, car rental, food and moped hire (which was pretty cool). Photos can be found here, watch out for the one of me in the snorkelling mask!!

Well I think I may have gone OTT in my first blog post, but I guess I had to start it somewhere, and hopefully I can update it once a week if I have got any thing to ramble on about!