I have changed my blog theme back to the Wordpress default; it is arguable better than my poor excuse for a theme and has the added benefit of being able to support more than three pages and a much longer sidebar. I am still working on my custom one, and have the idea down on paper - just need to translate it in to HTML and CSS which is taking some time given my asinine attention to detail.
Today I finally deployed Formatilicious 2.0 after a few months of sporadic development, it is a complete rewrite from the original and this has certainly benefited the code quality and ease of modification. The major change is that the upload box and the output format selection box are now spread over two pages; this is because I am hoping to support new formats soon and it would be nicer to only list the possible formats that the input file can be converted to, rather than every single format available. I was eager to get copy from URL support in to this update, but I have been having trouble limiting the file size that downloaded files can be - so this has been put off for now, hopefully I will be able to enable it soon though.
The next major stepping stone will be in developing further format support (I’m really interested in audio conversion, as well as perhaps video conversion) and providing an API so that there is an additional revenue stream and I can use multiple application servers if desired (this may be necessary for audio conversion to be feasible). Statistics also interest me, this will take a bit of work and is a bit pointless for the time being given the low usage level.
Ever since moving my computer I’ve been having trouble with the wi-fi connection, adding a USB extension lead didn’t clear this up and I suspect that the wireless stick is simply nearing the end of its life. I had two other wireless adapters to try out (one from Linksys and one from Belkin) that I could never get working before, after much experimentation the software for neither worked - from what I could tell it was half finished and untested. In the end I removed them both and plugged the LAN cable back in, routed through the windows.
Today Homplug arrived, it seemed worth a try given the amount of failure wireless had given me so far. I am, quite frankly, amazed. All I needed to do was plug both the adapters in and it just worked; no messing with software or drivers, just plug and play. I’m very happy now, and the quality of the connection is also brilliant (100mbps). This will allow me to try out Ubuntu since there will be no need to mess about with setting up a wireless connection, just need to make myself a live CD that actually works.
Last weekend I rearranged my room, and sadly in the process I managed to put my desk in to a place which had ultra poor wireless signal quality so my internet was breaking up all last week. Last night this finally got to me so I threw together a small cable holding rig (see below, need to find some elastic bands to hold it together instead of the parcel tape and twist cables) and chucked my 30 meter network cable out the window. I’ll be having to do this every day until I can afford home plug (ethernet over mains) or persuade someone to drill a hole in to the extensions loft space and run the cable around there (since I’m not permitted to run a cable through the house itself).
I also managed to make a major error in positioning my wardrobe and will need to reconsider its position.
Currently I am in the process of cleaning my room out and redecorating it, and needed to reorangize the furniture so that my TV would be in a more convenient place. Rather than experiment with moving everything around (which isn’t really very efficient) I decided to cut it out in paper to try out layouts in small - it is quite effective. Later this evening or once I’ve got the tonne of homework that I’ve got to do over the weekend out of the way I plan on implementing this as an actual program, hopefully being more precise and better overall.
