This site has mostly been a frontend for my server and various other sites. The time has come to revamp the whole site, perhaps upgrade to a new CMS and what not… Ii’m thinking purple as the new base color… and with a new design, new color scheme comes ofcourse a decent domain: as of now the site is available through www.cyberwizzard.nl 🙂 More news will follow once I actually get round to rebuild the site.
Finally I managed to pull myself together and upload the photos of the London EVE-Online 2006 meet in de Hoggshead. This brilliant meeting was an unofficial meeting set up by DJ Xyliana and pulled hundreds of EVE players from all over the world.
You can find the photos in the Photo Gallery.
After watching Top Gear and the Bugatti Veyron I looked for some decent wallpapers for widescreen laptops. Guess what, there are none! Rediculously most wallpapers out there are 800×600 or if you’re lucky 1024×768 – a resolution none of my computers uses anymore.
So I decided to whack up some of my own and while I was at it I thought about sharing them 🙂
Mind you that this first batch is all the same wallpaper but with different finishing touches. Right now I made them at 1440×900 as thats my native resolution. If and when I create more wallpapers I will post it here. Meanwhile, use the Contact form for requests 🙂
You can find the wallpapers in the gallery, under the random storage gallery (hard to miss as it shows the first wallpaper as a highlight 😉 )
Previews:
This is my first How-to so bear with me 🙂
This guide is written for people who want to use an old Alcatel Speedtouch ADSL modem under linux. The first part of the guide will tell you how to set up the uplink using the modem. After that, I’ll explain how to turn the gentoo machine which controls the uplink into a internet router.
Note: this is a copy from the original article I posted on Gentoo Wiki. By now there might be differences in the content but this is the original.
Updated: Reformatted by hand to clean up the HTML to fix the layout.
Remembering the saying:
It if ain’t broken, do not fix it!
I left my server untouched as pretty much everything on there is in use so wrecking stuff might be a problem 🙂
However, after 9 months or so I decided it was about time to update the server and make sure everything works as expected (again). I extracted the database content as the update guide explained and started the mysql compile for upgrade. 15 minutes or so in the compile I discovered that the SQL export file was empty… After cursing and some frantic Googling I decided to stop the compile, copy the raw database files back and keep my fingers crossed as I fired up the incomplete mysql server.
Although I saw loads of errors it seemed to come online – sorta.
I tried extracting the data once more, copied the backup, backed up that one once more, moved it off site and then made the whole collection read-only – just to be sure, ya know 😛
After 3 more hours of compiling (why did I shut down the compiler again?!) it was finally done and after some agonising moments after entering the startup and import commands I was relieved to see the whole shabang coming back to life.
I was planning on doing the apache server next but for now l think I’ll leave it at this 🙂
Cyberwizzard signing off at 4:31 AM…
I found a plugin for LCD Smartie for people who want to show TS data on their display. Unfortunately the original plugin couldn’t show one speaker for each line – which looked the coolest in my opinion. So I started coding in the plugin and after 30 minutes I got a modified version ready to go 🙂
Download the the binary version of the dll using the download menu or grab it on the next page.
Continue to the main text for instructions, source code and downloads.
Yes, you read it coming from me – the idiot who practically worshipped Java because of its easy structures and I used to be convinced that its almost up for every task… “ALMOST”….
I found a tool called PalmOrb which allows me to use my PDA – Palm Tungsten T3 – as a matrix display for my computer while its in the cradle. Useless but cool – non?
Anyway, the guy maintining this piece of brilliance is dropping the project because he has so many real lcd’s hooked up he no longer needs to (ab)use a pda for the task.
Ofcourse this code is written in C and I have more experience with Java at this point. So I decided to try to do this in Java.
Ooohhh I just came up with yet another extension for this site: a list of my publications.
You see, I work freelance for a dutch computer magazine called PC-Active. Although the list of publications isn’t world shocking yet I thought it might be nice to record it anyway – perhaps even re-release my writings online (after a while offcourse – I can imagine my boss getting a tad pissed off when I publish in his magazine as well as online).
Ahh well – lets see if I can set this up 
So far I got an alpha version of the book search working. Instead of writing my own version of the library thats already available I decided to start out with a popup window which is run by my (external) parsing system.
So far I managed to found one more addition to Mambo: a module to keep track of all the books I own. Although this thing exists its still under heavy development but so far there seems to be no support for Dutch books (nor any intention of adding it).
So I decided to see if I couldn’t come up with a way to create my own book gallery. It seems the Mambo API is forthcoming enough to plug anything in without trouble (haven’t found db access yet but that shouldn’t be too hard).
The next big problem is the source for book information. I’m not parsing Amazon yet because the other parser had that one covered, rather I decided to parse www.bol.com. This site offers books in lotsa languages, including Dutch and English and if I’m not mistaken I can flip the parser to another language by changing 2 parameters so I instantly have at least 2 languages covered. Next on my list are www.play.com and finally www.amazon.com. That should provide enough coverage for pretty much every book I own.
I’m calling it a night after writing the english bol.com parser, after fighting with regular expressions and the overwhelming lack of documentation for the ereg function (the lads at php should learn that including some debug options would be really really nice for something more than parsing a freaking date) I threw in the towel and resorted to the down and dirty parsing by looking for HTML tags and splitting the whole result page that way. Works like a charm but its really dirty as adding one tag or moving one kills the script.
Ah well, this is work in progress anyway 🙂
For the impatient visitor: Click here – please remember that this is a draft, nothing close to a working concept…