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.

Today marks a year since my MacBook arrived at my door thanks to the UPS man.

It’s seen a lot of usage, has my MacBook over this past year. Since it shipped with 10.4.8, it has been through several revisions of Tiger, the Leopard upgrade recently and with any luck, should see some more OS X upgrades to come.

I really don’t have any complaints about the machine, other than the minor issue of the fact that there should be (at least) one more USB port, because two isn’t always enough, and the odd minor annoyance here and there.

To be honest, the most worrying thing now is that there are only two years left on my AppleCare.

So, I guess it’s happy birthday MacBook.

UPDATE: This still is fine for 2.0.0.x, but UnPlug does not run properly on Firefox 3 and later, so if you’re on 3.0, this unfortunately will not work.

Firefox extension UnPlug is a very useful tool for extracting embedded video from all sorts of websites.

It can be a bit alien to work out how to use at first though, so I’ve put together a quick video of just over a minute that walks you through the process. It assumes you’ve already got UnPlug installed and loaded into Firefox.

… is the little Time Machine icon in the menu bar. It saves a Dock space as I can access everything I need to do with Time Machine in a much more compact way.

The new Stacks stuff is nice, but while I use Stacks, I don’t use it for collections of enough items to warrant using the new list view.

One thing I might like back, though, is the ability to put an icon for my home folder on the right side of the Dock that with one click opens ~ in Finder. Yes, I know, I could click the Finder icon at the left, but that works ever so slightly differently; it might focus an existing Finder window.

Did anyone else notice the TM backup done straight after 10.5.2 took ages to ‘prepare’? I understand why, because there were a lot of individual files that changed in the update, and it had to query the FSEvents database to list all those changes, but I wonder if anyone else experienced that step taking 20 minutes or more.

I was pleasantly surprised to read that The Times Magazine for the 9th February includes a section on the latest internet meme of FAIL (page 12, left hand box if you’re interested).

I was not so pleasantly surprised to notice that half way down, you are invited to “Visit timesonline.co.uk/microtrends for an epic shipment of fail”.

Why? Well, in my opinion, FAIL is subject to special grammar requirements. It should have been “a shipment of epic fail”, not “an epic shipment of fail”.

The lack of capitalisation also concerns me, but it might be a little harsh to be critical on that point as well – and the capitalisation of the word isn’t necessarily a set-in-stone rule, either.

You can read the article that appears in print over on their site.

Yeah, they cost too much, but they are awesome. So here are my completely unrefined first impressions.

Mail is by far the best mobile email client I’ve ever used. To be fair, I haven’t really used that many, but it beats going to the Gmail web interface hands down. On a full-sized computer, Gmail webmail is pretty workable, but is sluggish on a device like the iPod.

Here, the richness of a local app improves the experience significantly, especially on slower and unreliable dodgy wi-fi connections. And I can have as many POP/IMAP accounts as I want loaded in and synced up. The best part of Mail for me is that it caches email you’ve downloaded (even on IMAP), so you can look at email again even when you don’t have a connection to remind yourself of a detail or something. I actually love Mail on the iPod Touch. 😀

Maps is pretty cool – haven’t had much real use for it yet, considering I only got the apps this afternoon. It’s less useful than on the iPhone as you’ll have to find an open connection to use it, rather than using the cell network. Still, it’s an impressive maps experience considering the portability of the device you’re running it on.

Weather’s useful, and as far as I can tell, also caches data so you can still see something when you’re not connected.

Notes is a genuinely useful app and should in my opinion have shipped with the iPod in the first place. Shame about the lack of syncing, but it’s useful for quickly jotting something down without finding a pen and paper.

I don’t really care much for Stocks, not at the moment anyway. 😛

The customisable home screen and web clips are a nice touch too, although I’m not sure about the wobbling icons. It sort of distracts you from what you’re doing – I think something a little more subtle might have been better to let you know that you’re in editing mode.

Overall – they’re worth getting, but I am still quite annoyed at the fact that it isn’t a free update. Roll on the SDK. 🙂

I’m not going to make predictions per se, because they’ll be wrong.

I am going to list what I’d like to see announced by good old Mr Jobs in tomorrow’s keynote. Well, OK, they are sort of predictions, but they are more than likely very inaccurate and I take no responsibility if I end up looking stupid this time tomorrow.

• A new MacBook of some sort, but please don’t call it the MacBook Air. Not just a minor bump, something big and new.
• iTunes Movie Rentals – this one’s been on the cards for a while, and I think it’s happening tomorrow. Maybe just Disney to start with? 😉
• News about the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK and/or 1.1.3.
• Something that no-one’s expecting and no-one predicted (pretty much can’t go wrong with that one, can I?!).

So, by this time tomorrow, things will be kicking off (if I’ve done my time calculations correctly). We’ll see!

It has been far too long since I first released SleekTabs, my PHP class which makes it easy to create tabs on your web page.

Finally, after a lot of doing not a lot, and some sporadic bursts of development, I’d like to introduce SleekTabs 0.2. First of all, I want to thank Richard Fitzgerald, who initially contacted me with an idea for this release’s main feature – caching, and has advised me on various things during its development and continues to help me with the project.

Now, let’s take a look at the main features of this release:

• Caching – if you so wish, you can enable caching, so multiple requests for the same tab are fetched from the user’s local cache, rather than resulting in another request to your server.
• IE bug fix – this release works around a bug in Internet Explorer that causes it to undesirably cache the tab results, by introducing a timestamp into the SleekTabs request URI.
• Overhauled example script – the index.php example script included has been completely reworked, fully documented and commented to explain how to implement SleekTabs in your site and how it works.

I really have to apologise for how long this has taken – it’s been literally months since the initial release and this release isn’t exactly groundbreaking. However, it is a step forward in SleekTabs’ evolution and makes the installation and integration process much clearer.

You can download SleekTabs from the project page here and give it a try for yourself. It is also available from PHP Classes. All genuine feedback is appreciated – and if you do use it on your site, thanks!

SleekTabs is licensed under a BSD style licence – see the headers in the files in the download for more information.

Just a quick post to wish all my readers a Happy New Year and a very happy and prosperous 2008. Hope it’s a good one!

Just under 45 minutes of 2007 to go here, so I’ll see you all on the other side.

Here are some photos from the unboxing of my iPod Touch. I’ve had it for a few days now, and I am absolutely loving it thus far.

Strangely though, I don’t really feel like jailbreaking it and messing around with it at the moment. Whether I’ll stick with that attitude and wait until February, considering it’s not long now, or whether I’ll change my mind will yet to be seen, I guess.

In the meantime, enjoy the photos below, or view the full set on my Flickr.

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