I had reason to rip some Karaoke CDs to a hard disk recently, and knew there must be some free software to do this. It was hard to find, so I’m listing it here. Hope it is useful. These tools are Windows only, and only tested on Windows XP, so I have no idea how they perform on Vista or Windows 7. The first thing I needed to do was to rip the Karaoke disks to the hard drive. Now, …
Blog: General Blogging
Got a new camera
It’s an Olympus SP-590UZ super-zoom. The photos below give you some idea of the range of the zoom on this thing. These photos were taken without a tripod, on a dark overcast day. [flickrset id="72157618881198922" thumbnail="square" overlay="true" size="medium"] I was looking at a full SLR, and if I were a professional photographer then it would make sense. But for the same price as a decent SLR, I could afford the Olympus, and a pocket compact camera, and renew them both …
Pure CSS Rollover Map Demo – England Regions
A tutorial for producing these maps will be provided soon. With the help of InkScape and a spreadsheet, they are not quite as fiddly as you would expect. Each map consists of a single image, with all the roll-over images as a part of the main map image. It uses a ‘sprite’ technique to move the roll-over background images into position when the mouse hovers over the [square] regions. Why do it like this? Firstly there is no JavaScript involved. …
PHPlist Entity Relationship Diagram (2.10.9)
I’ve started to put together a diagram using the excellent MySQL Workbench (from Sun). The ERD does need splitting up into functional units, but here is what I have done so far: The complete model: phplist-2109.mwb The ERD as a PDF: model2.pdf Hope this is of some help. I will post updates when I get around to them, depending on feedback.
Coffee (part 1)
We at Consilience are privy to some day to day luxuries during our time in the office; my personal favourite are our 10:20 caffe lattes courtesy of Ruth. I find that a good cup of coffee kickstarts the day and helps me out from, what is usually, a very zombie-like state. A morning coffee has become part of my daily routine, whether I am at home, at work, or on the train to university. Recently, I’ve started building up my …
Consilience Mulled Wine
To get into the Christmas spirit – or perhaps as an excuse to get out the Christmas spirits – we are keeping a pan of hot mulled wine on the go leading up to Christmas. Here is our recipe. If you have any variations on this or any tips on how to improve it further (if perfection can be improved) please add your comments. Ingredients Six cloves Two cinnamon sticks (about 6 inches of stick in total) Quarter of a …
Cookie Pass-through (ASP)
As a part of my integration tasks, I had the following sequence of systems to deal with: This is the chain of applications that handle a single-signin for a user. At one end we have the Member Management system, written in ASP Classic, that acts as the main authentication system. For various reasons we had to use that system as the main login system. Once a user logs in, a HTTP request is sent to the Xaraya CMS, along with user …
Battery finally died in my calculator
The battery in my trusty Casio fx-570x calculator finally died. I thought it was broken at first, until I remembered it used a battery. The tiny LR14 was the original battery (made in Japan) in the calculator when I bought it. It got me through A-levels and University back in the late 1980s, and has been calculating for me ever since. Except now the blasted battery died. Oh why can’t we rely on electronic gadgets these days? I’ve put a new battery …
Transferring files from a failed laptop – puppy power
I was recently tasked with transferring files from a failed laptop. The laptop kind of worked, but some bad sectors had started to appear in a number of vital system files, so it was very unstable. This was an old WIndows 98 system, and I could not simply plug in a USB drive, because there were no Windows 98 drivers around for the external USB drives that I had. In the end the disk had to be removed, and connected …
In Search of a Newsletter System – Part 2
Just to be clear about what I am looking for in a newsletter system, here are my major requirements: Easy to use; difficult to make mistakes. Once set up, and end client should be able to use it, and it should be very clear what the client needs to do, and what the system is doing for the client. No queues to get stuck. I don’t want to be unlocking files, killing background processes and not knowing how far the sending has …