I’ve just done a (very) rough calculation of how much bandwidth I’ve used in the last 3 days, both up & down it came to 4.38971772 gigabytes exactly. And that’s just in the last 3 days, I have a supposed cap of 2 Gb per month from Orange. Which I don’t really think is fair, my parent’s are paying £18 a month for it, under their old price structure. The speed is a constant 3 Meg (it does actually act that quick aswell). How I’ve never been kicked off before is a wonder, since in the past I’ve downloaded 4 gig+ ISO’s, thats my bandwidth out in one sweep. Maybe orange are just being kind?
My Idea for a Mac
An Apple PC is something I’d really like to get, it’s just the prices putting me off, £399 for the most basic Mac Mini. Which is great and small, but I don’t necessarily want all that smallness, since it means having to upgrade the RAM (And avoid Apple’s ridiculous prices on it) would require me fiddling in places not necessarily meant to be fiddeled in.
The Mac Pro on the other hand, is a large machine, very powerful, and expensive. But most importantly big & upgradeable, like a PC.
Which brings me to my point. Why not make a low-end Mac Pro, identical specs to the Mac Mini, but a lot cheaper. To me this makes sense, as surely production cost’s would be lowered since Apple wouldn’t be so limited to space, and the end user would be at an advantage as they would have a nice upgradeable machine.
I’ve just looked at the parts required for a system with similar specs to the Mac Mini and the total price comes to about £230 without a case, bearing in mind thats just me looking at eBuyer, not taking into account the discounts apple are bound to get through volume purchasing. Admittedly that doesn’t look at the exact hardware they would use, but it must be an approximation.
If they released something like this, I would definately be considering buying it, since it still offers the upgradeability, without spending too much money.
Posted in Mac
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iTunes Update
I’m probably a bit behind with this, but since I’d got vista iTunes hadn’t been as quick, or as nice, with random black areas whenever it was opened. But I’d lived with it, since I don’t open it that often.
About a week or so it said there was a new version, so I downloaded & left it, finally got round to installing it today. It is sooo much quicker, and doesn’t suffer any of the problems the older version had, and it doesn’t lag either.
Also it has vista style open/close/minimise icons, which is a nice touch.
Excellent 
Posted in iTunes
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New Speaker’s
I’ve just ordered some new speakers.
Hopefully these will be a great improvement over my current 2.1 system, that doesn’t like to be switched on.
The only problem is that I am going to now have even more cables, but the surround-soundness of it should be worth it!
They’ll be coming by wednesday hopefully, so I’ll judge them then, although they do seem to be rated quite well around the web.
Posted in New Buys
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PHP & Me
I was just looking through some old old old PHP code, I knew I never was the greatest coder, but I was pretty darn bad a couple of years ago.
My idea of security was just a random string of numbers, here’s a sample:
$id=$_GET['id'];
?>
IF ($id == "98493859") {
?>
The page would be displayed after that, nice and secure I see. Oh, and validation was an absolute no-no, I mean no hacker is every going to get into this are they?
Thankfully I’ve improved a bit since then, (I hope anyway).
It’s also weird to see what I’ve learnt recently, I’m still far from being an expert, but I think I know what I know quite well, I was updating a lot of the code on stuffatschool.com recently, the original had been published a few months ago, and to be quite honest, it was a security risk & then some, I’d left it displaying mysql error’s everywhere, not bothered with SQL injection, thankfully nothing every happened, and the new version is (I hope) much more secure. In fact in just the month or so I’d say I’ve made the most progress in terms of the learning curve, I’d say now I am more sensible & secure in what I do.
Anyone else ever done this? Looked back at something to realise how shoddy it was!
UAC: Off
Now, UAC may have been a great idea, I mean, it protect’s you like “root” does in unix. But root doesn’t follow your every move, watching over you like Mr. Blair, does it?
Fair enough, it is good in some cases, you may accidentaly run a virus for example, or click “destroy me now”, but I have to say, I have only ever done that once. Purely out of curiosity.
But, it get’s annoying when everytime I insert the DVD for NFS: MW it asks me if i want to run it, then I click play, asks me again, now, anyone with half a brain can remember it, and surely at least give an option to save the preferences. But no, in true MS/caveman style “We MS – You idiotic user”.
So, I may be opening myself to a gazillion security holes, but, who cares, although if I do suddenly dissapear, blame UAC 
Posted in Vista
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Visual Basic 2005
Something I’ve been wanting to do for a while is learn a programming language, other then PHP (if that’s classed as one). I’d tried Java, yes it has cross-platformability, but it is too complex for my mind, I wanted something that was relatively easy, and that’s how I ended up at visual basic. A while ago I’d tried VB6, don’t know why since I had a copy of 2005 Express, and now I have started using 2005. There are a few differences between the 2, but to be honest I didn’t really learn anything from VB6 so it wasn’t much of a schock anyway.
In terms of ease of use it is great, the UI designer work’s very well, and let’s you see exactly what the final thing will look like (ok, you don’t get Aero, but it’s no big thing). And the actual programming behing it is aided by the tips that come up as you are typing, so you can start off with a knowledge of pretty much nothing!
I have created a couple of App’s with it, both the standard thing’s just for a learning curve, although am currently working on a client for StuffAtSchool.com, but more on that another time!
Although something I don’t like about it, and probably will never be changed, is the fact that it only works with Windows, which in the narrow view is fine, since most people use windows anyway, but, it is still annoying that an application the has been developed, can’t be directly exported for other OS’s, Linux in particular.
So In conclusion if you are looking to start programming, and don’t mind going windows-only I’d reccomend Visual Basic, best of all it is available as a free download from Microsoft (A little oxymoron in there) from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/default.aspx.
Posted in Visual Basic
3 Comments
MicroZip
I have to say, I would expect even Microsoft to be able to handle Zip archives well within windows, yes it has the support for them, but it is ridiculous how bad it is, I downloaded something the earlier, in a zip archive, copied and pasted it out, was moving the files at 98 bytes/second. Even Dial-Up’s quicker than that. I would much rather they just got rid of it completely, rather than having the pathetic excuse for it that is currently there.
Just a bit of a rant from me
Posted in Vista
4 Comments
New Theme!
I’ve been working on this for a couple of day’s, It’s my first ever wordpress theme and I’m pretty pleased with it, uploaded it a few second’s ago, got some feedback about it from Adam, and thats where I am now.
I was going to use the twitter API, but it wasn’t loading and I was getting impatient, so I just left it as it was!
Any more feedback appreciated,
Lee
Posted in General
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Has Google taken over?
Something I’ve just noticed is that when I open FF I automatically open a load of tabs, all seem to be google (scarry):
Is this part of a weird plan from google to take over us all, or is it just me who uses solely google?
It just seems odd how one company can operate many succesful websites, it’s actually quite freaky in fact that i automatically go to google, is this some kind of master plan for google to control us all (or me at least)
Mwuhahahaha