Chris Worfolk's Blog


Maze Radio launches

July 18th, 2004 | Life

Although it has been around for ages, Maze Radio was not officially launched – that is until now. The homepage now offers links, the streaming audio works and plans are being put into, well actually, more plans are being drawn up. Whatever, it gives the overall effect that Maze Radio is now once again in motion. It’s it just so exciting!

You can now listen online. There is also information about the radio station and a forum. It’s still phpBB subSilver at the moment there is no integration or customisation at all. But it will come with time. There is also a link to Nerd Federation as many of our Maze Radio hosts are also part of Nerd Federation so we are using this as our official blog base :).

What’s with the re-activation of Maze Radio. Well it’s mainly down to my new found facination with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. As well as the fact I am totally addicted to the game I just love Pressing Issues on Vice City Public Radio. I found myself just leaving the game running on my laptop so I could listen to the show. Then two things occured to me – one we should have a cool talk radio show like that. Two I happen to operate a talk radio station.

And so I decided to try and breathe new life into Maze Radio. We need listeners so get everyone you know and many more people who you don’t know listening to the show. If you have any ideas for topics too, feel free to post them in the comments section below.

The Dot Com Show

July 18th, 2004 | Life

I said I would eventually get the stuff together and thanks to some quality nagging I have actually done it. Last Friday myself, JD and Andy put together our new rivial for the Dot Net Show on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/) hosted by the almighty Robert Hess. I think once you watch it though (not that we are going to be putting it online though lol) you will see its the best show ever.

Today is Sunday so only two days gap I don’t think is bad for me. Out of interest, today is Hooton’s birthday (I think) so happy b-day Hooton. Your now older than JD for exactly a month. Anyway so back to the subject, we did manage to get a picture of the crew…

Sorry, this image is no longer available.

From left to right – myself with the trademark headphones, Andy at the back and JD on the right.

We also plan to bring you a host of new shows including Who show Carl S? and the Carlman show.

ASP.net url rewriting

July 16th, 2004 | Life

Perhaps the thing about Robert Hess and involving pictures and stuff is a pipe stream. I plan to do it tommorow but seen as tommorow is like 12 minutes away as I write I mean tommorow tommorow not just tommorow literally. Still, I may just be telling myself that I will do it tommorow and never actually get round to hit. Who can say what the future will bring?

I have spent most of the night trying to get an ASP.net url rewriting thing to work. Why oh why it couldn’t be simple like Apache’s mod_rewrite I will never know although I couldn’t get that working and resorted to using forcetype instead at the end so not much of a starter really. I tried to use the demos out of the box as it were though too with no success.

Anyway for those crazy enough to follow in my footsteps here are some useful web links:

http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/URLRewriter.asp?select=867132&df=100&forumid=4228&exp=0
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/030522.htm
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/020417.htm
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/community/authors/scottmitchell/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/urlrewriting.asp

Hope you have more sucess than I did, if so, email me your code! 😉

My exact double

July 13th, 2004 | Life

I was just watching the episode of the Simpsons where Homer gets chucked out of Moe’s and Marge is scared of flying. I managed to get a quality photo of Homer’s exact double :). That will provide some nice entertainment when I am next flicking through what is contained on my compact flash card. Out of interest they are bringing out a 2GB one soon!

I did have point for this post previously but I can’t rememer now – it was a few days ago that I had the idea and I wanted to space it out between the Antitrust. Ah well, how about writing about writing about how Craig disappeared – there is a topic for you rawpulse. Anyway I like these posts to have a point that can be found on a search engine lol so today’s problem is when we were trying to log in on the Chain of Addiction forum we got page cannot be displayed error.

The solution? Yeah I knew you would come clicking. Anyway the problem was in the configuration of the board. To solve it, go into the admin panel and click on configuration and check the domain and folder path. Hope it works!

A point about Antitrust

July 12th, 2004 | Life

Antitrust maybe many things, the one I am refering to is the movie. For those of us in the UK it was on Channel 5 last Thursday. It was quite a good movie too. The basic plot was Milo is brought into NERV, a huge computer software company that everybody hates and is getting hit with antitrust lawsuits. Anyway the point is, to complete Synapse their latest project which will link every device in the world together they need really good code.

Milo is brought into the company to  help although the only real way they can do it is to kill the worlds best coders, make it look like a themed attack such as racial, etc and then steal the developers code. It is working pretty well until Milo stumbles onto the plan and makes the source code publically available.

The point is though that this movie came out in 2001 and was likely to have been writen in 2000. And what have Microsoft done between then and now. Unveiled, the Dot Net initiative, an XML platform which allows every device to communicate with each other. Seeing the connection?

Tis a new day

July 12th, 2004 | Life

Well who would have thought we could sustain interest for more than 24 hours? Ah well we have like an hour to spill out in ICT although we could do to get some law revision done. Anyway I have loads to post but have stuff to do now. Back later.

MySQL Timestamp

July 11th, 2004 | Life

Although officially I hate PHP, date() is pretty cool. The thing is that PHP uses a different timestamp format to the standard MySQL timestamp. Therefore the majority of timestamps stored in MySQL are actually stored as intergers. Or at least this is how phpBB do it. And that is how my latest site does it. But enough about quick plugs. What’s happening here?

Ah right, the thing about MySQL timestamp is that it updates to the current time everytime you update the column. Therefore when I had to make a change to the database to set a post to a different user, it updated the timestamp and moved the post to the top. Hmm, I posted this, maybe it evens it out or at least dislodges it from the top.

So, Malcolm in the Middle has just ended. Ok, here I am just trying to fill out space. Here’s a picture of Fonze again:

Remind you of anyone? Ayyyyy!

Resource album added to the site

July 11th, 2004 | Life

Hu, I lasted about 20 minutes. Not unexpected though really. I am still exploring the features of the site. On the left of the main page you can see a link called albums at the bottom, below the about link. This offers you the chance to see all our albums (well currently 1) and all the photos within these albums (again, 1). Enjoy!

I can add resources to posts apparently too, so if you go on the full link or permalink or whatever it’s called you should be able to see the full resource.

Or, if you are already on this page, you should be able to see it below ;):

Remind you of anyone? Ayyyyy!

Domain propogation time

July 11th, 2004 | Life

It would be cool if domains propogated faster – like instantly :). There is nothing worse than waiting around for them especially considering that they take anywhere from 12 to 48 hours. It will be good once Nerd Federation is officially back at the point we can start spreading the URL around again. Ah well, the time should come soon.

Time for today is publishing on and I really should start law revision but I am finally making visible process on my new site. It has an intergrated forum and I am moving towards finishing the posting and editing section then I only have the move topics section and the forum code guide and editor. Oh, its going to be a long night / a long week.

Remember exit() after location

July 11th, 2004 | Life

Well best get started with the random tips and information. One thing I am not happy about is this editor tells me I am using Verdana 8px, but when it comes out in the page it is Times New Roman! The blow is slightly cushioned for myself however as my browser, Beonex, uses Arial as the default font. A nice bit of scripting in the editor though means it is not compatable with Beonex – neither is vBulletin!

So before the moans side tracked me, I was getting into my story. Having started doing some stuff in PHP to make sure of forcetype and stats on subdomains (just wait until I get an ASP.net rewrite engin!) I found a few helpful bits of information that spent much time annoying me and ended up really simple. Most notably, not remember == for comparissions.

One other thing I noticed is that although you can redirect a user using the header location tag, it doesn’t actually stop the PHP script running. So the user may have been sent elsewhere but the thing they were not allowed to do and you had throught been stopped doing it because of the header location code you added, is still actually being done. It’s easy to fix though, all you need is:

Header ("Location: whateverpage.php");
Exit ();

Hmm, yet another over complication of PHP if you ask me. Still I’m kind of on a high right now as this editor is pretty cool. It has some quite extensive image adding features and plenty of HTML options. I give it my offical stamp of "neeto!" Well, I will probably be able to keep myself away for like an hour at tops, see you then.