wwwFAIL.

Enter a URL, and it will be displayed, with FAIL written on top. Simple, and, may I say, quite brilliant. It made me laugh anyway.

I got an opportunity recently to play around with some old iMac DVs (late 1999 or early 2000 by the looks of things) that had been lying around unused for a while at college.

So now, instead of lying around with no system software loaded on them, they are being put to use. Two are running OS X 10.1 and the other one that is up and running is running OS 8.6.

It’s always good to play with older stuff, and it’s nice now that they can be put to use (which I imagine will involve reinstalling Mac OS lots of times as part of the Operating Systems unit).

OK, so cross-linking is bad and stuff, but it’s been a long time since I last did it, so it’s OK, right? 😛

Just finished a review of PC-BSD, a BSD distribution based on FreeBSD for desktop system.

I was really impressed at how easy it was when compared to the big bad FreeBSD install, which I seem to always mess up right at the last moment thanks to the far from intuitive menu system.

But I digress. PC-BSD is as slick as any desktop Linux, and I think it makes a fine general purpose desktop OS, as you can read more about in the full review.

And yes, I’m trying to post a bit more regularly here too. It’s working, so far. 😉

UPDATE: Windows users, you now have a version too. More details on the new project page.

This post is no longer up-to-date. Please go to the DfontSplitter project page.

Mac OS X does some weird things sometimes. One of these is that some fonts are packaged in a format with a .dfont extension. This format allows multiple files to be contained within one dfont file, but doesn’t really make an awful lot of sense to me (why not just use a standard bundle?).

But anyway, there’s a BSD-licensed program called Fondu, designed to split these dfont files so you can get at the goodies inside. That’s all very well and good, but it’s a command line program, so not everyone will be comfortable using it.

As a sort of messing about with AppleScript project, I’ve put together an AppleScript based application that wraps around Fondu and allows you to pick a dfont file, pick a destination folder and it will do the rest.

Here’s a video of it in action. It’s simple enough not to need one, but if you want to see how it works before downloading…

Download now (120 KB)

Enjoy.

UPDATE: Please note that DfontSplitter is only tested on Mac OS X Leopard, 10.5. It should work on both Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5), but is known not to work on Panther. Unfortunately I do not have the resources to fix it for Panther, as I only have an Intel Mac.

My server (and subsequently this site) is going to be down tomorrow between 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM GMT, for scheduled maintenance. Basically a clear out the cobwebs (which is scarily literal) job, and the opportunity to double-check that everything hardware-wise is hunky-dory. Also I’ll be doing a couple of special backups so I have even higher levels of redundancy, while I get the opportunity of the server being down.

See you on the other side.

UPDATE: Completed successfully, and I didn’t break anything.

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve put some brand new open source code out there, and I think it’s about time to change that. I’ve had a download statistic tracking system, written in PHP, running on here for the downloads of WPGet, SleekTabs and others for some time now.

The idea of it is simple, it takes a request for a download file, tracks the information about the request (the file downloaded, IP address, time, user agent etc.) and then at the management end provides an easy interface to look at statistics about the downloads of your files.

Usually, the problem you face with metrics on file downloads is that you can’t embed a JavaScript snippet for a traditional service such as Google Analytics. This PHP class will provide the download statistics so you can accurately discover that information about any downloads you offer on your site. People like metrics.

The code I have running here on my site is very simple. It works fine for what I need it for, but I’m only really using it as inspiration for this project. I will write it from the ground up and modularise it as much as possible so that in the future it perhaps can be integrated within existing CMS systems.

It’s slightly ambitious, yes, and I don’t have excessive amounts of free time, but it’s something to get my teeth into and keep myself programming.

Now, I don’t have a name for this project, and I want a good one. Something that sort of sums up what I’ve described its function as, but that is reasonably unique and memorable.

So here I throw it out to my audience (yes, all three of you). Any ideas? Or if you’ve got any other sensible input on this project, I’d love to hear it too.