For those who are interested I’m going to start documenting the upgrades and improvements I’m making to citynoise.org over the coming months. The site has been struggling under some pretty heavy traffic and several internal optimisations including query caching for some of the more complex database operations has gone a long way towards making the [...]

As has been widely reported, it is still possible to successfully download the x264 MPEG streams of BBC programmes from the BBC IPlayer service but that they are now XOR “encrypted” in such a way that they will only play on Apple mobile devices.

It’s not really encryption, is it
Long story short, the streams are [...]

Dave Ward has put together an excellent and extensive post on his experiences integrating jQuery with ASP.NET
There are the usual number of pitfalls you’d expect when integrating [insert widely-used microsoft technology here] with [insert useful open source technology here]
Want to consume a JSON Web Service with jQuery? Sounds simple. That’s kinda the point of JSON [...]

A collegaue of mine – a VB developer – sent me a link to this page on the Microsoft website which attempts to comapre MySQL to their own SQL Server by drawing some.. shall we say creative comparisons.
By no means is the article completely factually inaccurately. There are many valid points which no one would [...]

This evening I noticed a problem with the script which generates the image headings for this site. It had stopped working. I hadn’t noticed until now because the process caches all previously generated images and as such it hadn’t actually run for a while.
The error
imagettfbbox() [function.imagettfbbox]: Could not find/open font
The specified font file existed and [...]

It’s all to easy to dismiss the concept of the semantic web as just another one of Tim Berners-Lee’s “look at me i invented the Internet don’t you know” attempts not fall into obscurity, but today I was pointed this morning in the direction of an open email from a developer working within the BBC [...]

This is not just an advert for some O’Reilly book. Adobe AIR for JavaScript developers provides an introduction to Adobe AIR for developers interested in building AIR applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It’s been licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Which means you can go buy a copy right now from Amazon if [...]

Testing Wordpress Wordpress 2.5’s new gallery system. It seems to fit well inside my site template by default. So that’s good. I’d rather linked directly to the photo rather than the attachment page so that I can hook thickbox to popup each image directly on the page. There don’t appear to be any options for [...]

Jason Huck’s gaTracker jQuery plugin allows for unobtrusive integration of the Google Analytics tracker into a page as well as attaching tracking events to each external link, mailto and download. It works seamlessly but it does however currently use the old ‘urchin.js’ which has been superceeded by Google’s new Tracking API (ga.js)
ga.js has all the [...]

I’m sure the BBC won’t approve of this but within the last few days an XBMC plugin for the BBC iPlayer has been released for general consumption. Though it’s far from a finished product, it neatly lists and plays the H.264 encoded iPlayer streams designed for the Apple iPhone.
The BBC’s provision of non-DRM MPEG streams [...]