James Lloyd

I have this weekend completed a new upgrade to my media center solution at home,  replacing the old Silverstone LC-16 based xbmc-live system with a mac mini. This upgrade is largely for aesthetics how ever I have had some other minor success.  the Mac Mini in question is the 2010 model, not because still has the DVD drive in it as i agree with apple that optical media is dead. The bluray drive in my LC-16 still only having been used once to check if it worked. The 2010 model was instead because the 2011 models have a choice of intel or ATI graphics which IMHO are a bit less than awesome.

Had a discussion yesterday with a colleague around what is cloud, where I found us in a fairly heated discussion around what cloud actually meant, so I thought I’d write down where I’m coming from. For the consumer cloud represents a wonderful world where your data is accessible where ever you go via web based applications provided as SaaS.  However enterprise appears to hijacking the term to identify how they would actually provision these services.  This though only subtly different, is an incredible poor piece of marketing and doesn't do what service providers can actually offer any justice. My point is that anyone can provide a Software as a Service (SaaS) by going into Best Buy and purchasing a DL360 putting it in a data centre somewhere. That is a cloud service, granted probably a terrible one.  What service providers can and should provide on top of that is resilience and scalability.  One of the areas getting talked about a lot as being “cloud”, in my neck of the woods is t...

I have been using XBMC on ATV2 now for a just over a month as the media centre for the main bedroom and it is proving to be well worth the £101 or $99 (Grrrr) for the hardware. Since the initial release Greenpois0n has released an un-tethered Jailbreak.  Which makes life a lot easier; previously you would have to boot the ATV2 whilst it was hooked up to your laptop. Which when doing your initial configuration would be a right PITA. There are still a couple of issues of note. The wifi didn’t work for me at all after the jailbreak which I need as have no Ethernet in the bedroom.  This was actually easily fixed by ssh on the ATV2 and running the following:

My ATV2 arrived today, which I ordered straight away after I header on twitter that the xbmc team had ported to iOS .  Obviously im being a bit bleeding edge here.  However I'm currently watching a 1080p trailer from my nas with zero visible frame drops. XBMC is a bit buggy currently but we'll let them off its only been out a couple of days. My main issue currently is the resolution of the AppleTV 2 it natively outputs in 1280x720 or 720p.  Which is fine im currently using it on a 1080p Samsung 2333hd and looks better than you'd expect for upscaling.  The big problem is ironically on a 720p,  now because of reasons I fail to understand (despite trying) 720p TV's generally have a resolution of 1366 x 768, a signal of 1280x720 is going to appear out of focus. It's still unclear as to whether the 720p output is hardware limited or whether we can adjust it to better suit 720p tv's (madness). Conclusion is it works and it works well,  the number of features xbmc brin...

I have just put my TMDB class up on github at https://github.com/jameslloyd/tmdb-class couple of updates since the last version i posted.   Lots of extra error checking and now will return search results with only one result properly.

Many many moons ago when my Voodoo 3DFX card was the height of PC chic. I had my first Multiplayer FPS experience with Quake2.  Up until that point, multiplayer gaming meant playing red alert with a friend and a rather shonky serial cross over cable.  Many hours were waisted and many many MB's of space taken up with extra maps and models.  Models that almost instantly got banned due to being impossible to see, and effectively making you invisible to your opponents.  And many frags were clocked up whilst grappling madly around the map with the Lithium MOD. Fun was had by all then we moved on to newer games with slightly higher resolutions and slightly better textures, that were never quite as much fun as the original Quake 2 Lithuim experience. Well <Farnsworth>Good News Everybody</Farnsworth> as is the current trend to revive all those 8-bit games, now is the time to relive the 16-bit age, after all the only decent thing to come out 8-bit was Gauntlet 2. Where this rath...

This has been superceeded by This Post This class I have written has been some time in the making, its currently the whats powering the alpha version of 2statereviews V2.    Things it will do for you: Will pull down Actor or Movie information from themoviedb.org using the API (currently defaults to V2.1) and sort info into an array i.e. $tmdb->movie_info('11'); $tmdb->actor_info('738'); Will pull down Actor or Movie Searches into an Array $tmdb->actor_search('John Cussack'); $tmdb->movie_search('the empire strikes back'); will cache the output from themoviedb.org locally with a configurable TTL so as to speed things up. Some examples have been provided. Note: you'll need to provide your own API key. Download V1 here

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="479" caption="Iphone Restore EPIC FAIL!"] [/caption] Past couple of days have been a slight horror, when I rebooted my Iphone and it didn't come back. Just sat stuck on the Apple logo, with spinner on top not spinning. So I went through an horrific day without my phone. That night I frantically tried to restore the firmware 3.1.2, I kept getting the 1604 Error. Reading online there is lots of talk about deleting or moving your Iphone profile from the app settings directory, none of these solutions worked for me including the tool Ireb. I tried several USB leads, having had one previously fail, but still nothing. Solution for me was to use another machine windows 7 this time, was previously trying on XP, and It worked first time. Can only assume this is some very picky code in the usb communication.

knocked up a quick function to put the links back into my twitter feed, after i pull it down using their API. it will take the text you input and create links around the @<username> #Hashtags and any links i.e.  twitpic's etc.  Not rocket science but could save you 30minutes of trying to get your head around regex again. function _twittertext($tweets) { $tweets = preg_replace('/http:\/\/([\\d\\w.\/]+)/', '<a href="http://$1">http://$1</a>', $tweets); $tweets = preg_replace('#@([\\d\\w]+)#', '<a href="http://twitter.com/$1">$0</a>', $tweets); $tweets = preg_replace('/#([\\d\\w]+)/', '<a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23$1">$0</a>', $tweets); return $tweets; }

Recently I have successfully migrated away from SKY HD and from Freeview+ to an entirely XBMC based solution.  Most importantly this solution currently has a very high WAF .  My setup is built using XBMC live in an overly powerful PC in a rather nice silverstone media center case. My current problem is now I have relegated all of my media to the lounge,  using the ipod dock in the kitchen with a meagre 16GB Ipod seems positively lacking when, your media centre is connected directly to a 5Tb NAS.  What happens now is you play music in the lounge and turn it way up to a probably neighbour unsuitable level to be able to properly enjoy it in the kitchen.  This is why I crave multi room audio, I wrote a while back why I think XBMC is a far better and cheaper solution than the Sonos solution, though Sonos still do have the killer feature present and correct.

I have this php script currently running on my nas to let me know if I have any new mail.  It works with gmail.com, googlemail.com and google app address’.  I simply use cron to execute the script every 15 minutes. i.e. (0,15,30,45 17-23 * * * php /var/www/checkgmail.php > /dev/null   #Check Gmail) 1: <?php 2: $emailaddress = 'someemailaddress@gmail.com' ; // i.e. bob@gmail.com or bob@bobsdomain.com if you use google apps 3: $password = 'somepassword' ; // email password 4: $xbmcaddress = '192.168.1.1' ; // IP or hostname of your xbmc 5: $xbmcport = '8080' ; // port the xbmc web server is running on. 6: 7: 8: $domain = explode( '@' ,$emailaddress); 9: if ($domain[ '1' ] == 'gmail.com' || $domain[ '1' ] == 'googlemail.com' ) 10: { 11: $use_googleapps = false ; 12: } else { 13: $use_googleapps = true ; 14: } 15: if ($use_googleapps == t...

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="MMS Enable your 2g Iphone"] [/caption] I have succesfully got MMS working on my Iphone 2g with BT Total Broadband anywhere / BTMobile, and have solved the problem where the mms APN settings do not save.

The revenge this time its personal! K I just setup sendmail to relay using gmail again,  thought I better post what I have done as my original now out of date post is still getting quite a lot of views. This is based on my Ubuntu 8.10 Server ( 2.6.27-11-server) all patched up todays date and then I did the below.

Im Currently spending all my spare spare time,  building 2statereviews.com with Darren Watt .  The site is based on Darrens long time Film reccomendation system which has only 2 states See! or Dont See!.   Simplicity at its best, the site allows you to search for films and vote See, Dont See for them, warning though its quite addictive.    The site is currently 80% feature complete ( this figure changes constantly as I make up new features).

Thought its probably worth explaining what I think Version 1 of phpadadmin would look and be able to do.  Things it needs to be able to do: Allow any user to edit their own Active Directory attributes.  [ In Current Release ] Allow an administrator to determine which attributes can be edited [ In Current Release ] Allow an administrator to dictate a range of choices for a field 1 [ In Current Release ] Allow the users access to all that directory information by providing a powerful search Allow the administrator to determine which fields can be used to search on and which fields can be returned in the search. Users contacts details export to vCard format Allow phone number to be formatted in a way that can be picked up by various SIP softphones i.e. phone://<number> etc.

Not a lot of new functionality added here mainly changing the back end to function better, and allowing you to set your ad password without first having to have you ad password set :S. The environment checker now tests : If Seamless authentication is enabled correctly in IIS manager If it can connect to the mysql db if php extension is in place and if it can get any info out of AD using your current user.

Quick update on progress since I started to rewrite phpadadmin again,  All the config pages are now complete, and am now pulling the adldap config directly out of the DB.   Added a couple of nice new features like being able to force the site to https if such is your want.  Added the encryption functions in for the Self Service password resets.   Done some work on the look of the whole thing ( see screen shot below).

<farnsworth>"Good news everyone"</farnsworth> I have started to code phpadadmin again, on the back of the experience i have gained from the last couple of php projects I have been doing. This time its going to be better than ever before ( Naturally).  This time I have started with the background config and working up, so to speak. The attribute conifguration is now finished and has a web UI and mysql backend. This makes it alot easier to make changes. Also I have just got ajax forms validation working :) w00t! So you have assign each attribute whether its a required field and a number of others, or none at all such is your want.

Now I have my new laptop with its 8600M GT graphics card, its only natural that I will want to stretch my gfx card legs by playing Quake 2 at 750+ FPS. Isn't it! becuase of this Darren has built a proper Q2 server accessible on the electric interweb.  The server can be found quake2://kungfudazza.game-server.cc:27910 and is running lithium so has the grapple hook.

K COD5 "World at War" Arrived today making a mochery of the release date this Friday. Which is often the case with stuff preordered from Play.com. However when you go into mutliplayer and it tells you theres about 200,000 other people playing two days before the release, any way.