@madpilot makes

…until webdirections 06. I’m starting to get rather excited about it all now. Even though I don’t actually have accomodation yet :)

I’ve quite looking forward to meeting the international and national speakers – it will be really cool to meet the big thinkers in the web industry, like Molly Holzschlag, Derek Featherstone and Andy Clarke (not to mention the others!). Hopefully it will leave me motivated and full of beans. Not that I’m not motivated at the moment, but you can never have to much.

Tim Lucas and Cameron Adams obviously have way to much time on their hands, as they released Web directions connections. Cool little app – both Miles and I spent a little too much time playing with it this morning, even though neither really could afford to (work hasn’t really eased up).

Speaking of 88 Miles (Leave me alone – it’s been a big week and I can’t be bothered coming up with a proper segway*), things are ramping up. I’ve made a few tweaks with the design and copy, and it seems to be attracting more sign-ups like a bees to the honeypot. It would be cool to get some big names in the web industry to have a look and blog about it. Now, where to find some poeple of high-enough profile… Hmmm.

On a personal note, I finally graduated last night, so I’m now officially a Bachelor of Computer Science (Hons). Thankyou god it is all over…

It would be a safe bet that my next post will be from Sydney (if my laptop makes it back in time), so until then…

• Is this even the correct spelling on the word in theis context?!

I’m sorry, I don’t remember authorising anyone to make it the end of August already. The last 30 days have been CRAZY. In no particular order:

The business and mobile phone versions of 88 Miles was released, so not you can track your time when you are out of the office. The business version allows one person to manage the time of many other people, which makes running a small office much easier.

My laptop video card decided to goto the big ol’ interweb in the sky, so I have been with out it for the last two weeks. Apparently trying to source a motherboard for a computer that is barely two years old is a less that trivial task. This has meant that I have had to use my Linux machine for day-to-day use (other than at work) which has been interesting to say the least. One tidbit of wisdom – don’t try running major OS updates of a production server late on a Saturday night. It results in spending much of Sunday testing backup systems :)

The WA Web Awards have come and gone. I  had the honour of chairing the awards this year, and might I say, even though a stupid amount of time went into organising it, it was well worth it. We had 130 enteries, sold out all 114 tickets in a week and managed to pull the whole thing together all whilst working fulltime.

The new sit down dinner format really added to the night, it felt so much more awards night like. I must put out a big thankyou to the rest of the committee – there were some hairy moments in the last couple of weeks, but it all came together on the night. Congratulations to all of the winners – especially Freckle Creative, who took out the coverted “Best overall” award. There are photos for your viewing pleasure on Flickr.

The Sunday after the web awards (that is 2 days after the web awards) Bam Creative moved offices. And, I must say that I like the new digs – they have a much better feel about them and it seems to be much more condusive to work (Which is a handy thing for a work place).

Work at Bam has been non-stop of the past two weeks, the three of four major projects I’ve been working on have pushed the boundries of my sanity, but since some would argue I was already insane, there may not be too much difference… On top of that my MadPilot work still seems to be trickling in, regardless of how much I tell people that I’m working full time now.

Luckily, next month is Web Directions, so I can at least enjoy a couple of days off. I’m really excited about the event, it’ll be great to meet some of the big names in the web industry. I find these sorts of events really inspiring and invigorating. I’ll try and blog my way through it, just like every other man and his dog!

Oh, what a fun Sunday morning I had. I wake up, chill out and go make myself some breakfast. At around 11, I decide to go and check my email. Turn on the laptop – Blue screen of death. Huh? Something about Windows not being able to load the SOFTWARE hive because it doesn’t exist or is corrupt. Oh crap.

OK. No need to panic. I try booting in Safe Mode. No sugar – same BSOD. Not good.  After a quick google, I find http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_sys32.htm which tells me that I can restore my SYSTEM and SOFTWARE hive to a clean state by booting into the recovery console. For those playing at home, there are a number of files located in the system32/config directory of your windows install that hold some fairly critical tid-bits of information, such as application settings and such. Without them, your computer doesn’t know what is installed, or how they should run.

Now we are getting somewhere, I think. So I boot into the recovery console. It is at this point that I realise that I don’t know my administrator password. It is also at this point that I realise that I cannot go any further without knowing my administrator password.

Some more googling and I find a number of applications that claim to be able to reset windows passwords from a bootable CD. I download a couple, but find them less than helpful – It would have been more productive for me to throw nerf balls at a number of post-it notes with letters on them, and entered the resulting characters in a megre attempt at a brute force attack.

It is at this point that I realise I should do something I should have done in the first place – I dropped my trusty Knoppix CD into the drive. Luckily, Knoppix 4.0 can mount and write to NTFS drives, so I could complete the steps in the above tutorial. This is what I did:

This mounts the windows drive to the /mnt/hda1 directory in full read/write mode. I needed to add the force option because I has rebooted XP incompletely and the Filesystem was complaining that I needed to run chkdsk.

Next I copied the /mnt/hda1/WINDOWS/repair/software to /mnt/hda1/WINDOWS/system32/config/software

After rebooting, and waiting the 30 minutes it takes for chkdsk to check everything, Windows was booting! Woohoo! Oh. not quite. All of my user settings were gone. And on closer inspection so where all of my program settings, and hardware settings – in fact Windows was denying all knowledge of any of my software. Whilst choking back tears (I really didn’t have time this week to re-install everything all over – I only did it a month ago) I tried to do a System Restore. Guess what? The registry clean out had hosed them as well. (A big thanks to Microsoft for putting this information in the registry, which is what you are trying to restore…)

Not to be deterred, I figured that the System Restore info would still have to be there somewhere, after all, it is saved as files in a hidden directory right? After a quick Google, I found out that my hypothesis was indeed correct via http://wiki.djlizard.net/SVI.

Booting back into Knoppix and mounting the drive again, I went into the System Volume Information directory. I had two  _restore{insert_stupid_amount_of_characters_here} in there. A quick ls -la gave me the older directory. In I went to a fairly recent RP folder and lo and behold I find the files that I needed. I copied them over (according to the tutorial) and voila! Everything was back up and running! God bless System Restore points. I want to glass the registry though.

As an active member of the Port80 community, I am more often than not in attendence at the Port 80 monthly meetups at the pub. It is amazing what crazy ideas are hatched at these informal meetups (It’s a great system – a group of like-minded people meetup and and talk shop over a couple of beers).

I was chatting about 88 Miles and SEO and Kay piped up and said that if I could get people to link to it using the term Simple time tracking, it would help my rankings for that particular term. My response (and I don’t know if this says something about me) was:

“Right, I’ll by everyone one who links to it using the term “Simple time tracking” a beer at the next meeting.

Well Nick Cowie was the first to comply with his less than subte approach, which I find mildly amusing.

So I’m putting the call out. If you are in WA or going to be in WA, and you are going to show up at the next meeting (on 2 August 2006) AND you link to http://www.88miles.net in your blog using a title attribute or text of “Simple time tracking”, I’ll buy you a beer.

That’s right. It’s in writing, so I can’t get out of it :P

I was going through my referrer logs for 88 Miles, and I can across the url http://screeniac.com/ – I followed it (as if I wouldn’t) and found this really cool site.

Bascially, they create “screencasts” of websites in the form of a review. Basically, each review is a short video demonstrating the use of an online application with narration. The link to the 88 Miles review is here.

This would save so much time if you see a site and want to know if it worth the effort signing up.

As I said – a really cool idea.

Oh yeah, by the way: 88 Miles webservice API has been released. Still a couple of small bugs to iron out, so consider it beta, but the interface isn’t going to change (for this version). Roll on some time tracking mash-ups!

Phew! What a week.

I’ve started at Bam, and I’m trying to get all of my outstanding contracts completed and trying to organise the WA Web Awards (I’m the sub-committee chairperson).

A few quick announcments:

• WA Web Awards entries are open. It’s $25 for Port80 members, $10 for Student Members, and $35 for non-members.
• 88 Miles is but days away from having a full web-service API released. It’s all working, I’m just finishing up the unit tests.
• Port80 Melbourne is starting up next week. It is piggy-backing on a Ruby on Rails user group meeting. Go and see Miles’ blog for details.
• There has been some interest in starting a Ruby on Rails special interest group on the back of Port80 over here, so I’m seriously looking in to that. Miles’ suggestion for a name was caboose. I like it

End

Well, Miles has finally managed to do it – today I signed on as the “Development Team Leader” at Bam Creative. Bam Creative is one of the coolest and most respected boutique web companies in Perth and it is an honour to become part of the team.

I’ve done quite a bit of contract work for them in the past and I think we will be a good match. There is of course that whole issue of having two Miles/Myles’ in the office. I don’t think there are too many companies that can boast that combination!

So what does this mean for MadPilot Productions? Not a great deal – I will still be actively working on 88 Miles and a some other yet-to-be-released systems (watch this space!), but I won’t be taking on any freelance contract work.

Ideas3 was the third speaking event organised by Port80 – the Australian Web Industry Organisation (of which I’m a committee member). The night was a great success with over 90 people showing up to the Melbourne hotel in Perth city.

For those of you who missed it for what ever reason, Port80 has made the podcasts and transcripts of the great talks by John Allsopp (Sydney) and Mark Boulton (UK) available at the Ideas3 website.

I have just launched a new web site called 88 Miles. I was sick and tired of trying to juggle excel spreadsheets to maintain my client timesheets – I ended up having to double input (Because it was too much of a pain to enter the time directly, so I would write them down first) and would usually leave the task until the end of the week. Not suprisingly this part of my week wasn’t my favourite.

Enter 88 Miles. This little system that I have designed is meant to be REALLY basic. There is no invoiceing system or task system and this is by design. I wanted to make it’s primary role – that is entering time – extremely quick.

When you go to the site, you click punch in to the project you are starting. When you have finished the job, click the corresponding punch out button. That’s it. Really.

At the moment, the system is in beta so it is missing some of the other features that I plan implement before the official launch (Aiming for 1 June 2006) like RSS, an API and some desktop applets, but please feel free to go and have a play with it and let me know what you think!

As a bonus, those of you that sign up before the 1st of June get the first two months of access for free if they decided to continue after that point!

Prices look like they will be $24/year for the premium account – standard accounts will be free but limited to three companies and five tasks at any one time.

The tech:

The system is built in Ruby on Rails and is running on Textdrive.

I find some of the spam I receive quite amusing. I use spam assassin on my server so I end up with quite a number of mails in my spam folder. Sometimes it fun to go through them and see what the spammers are trying to get past my filters. The following techniques often make me chuckle, and sometimes stare at my screen bewildered. Keep in mind that the idea of spam is to try and sell you something.

1. Empty spam: These are message with no body. Sometimes they don’t even have a subject line. I don’t imagine the click-through from these mails is very high…
2. Spam with no links or URLs or email addresses: Well now that you have convinced me that I need to purchase low-priced pharmaceuticals from your esteemed client, how do I actually do that?!
3. Non-sensical spam: Sending spam with random string of text. Great for confusing the spam filters. Also great for confusing the user. I really don’t think I’m going to click on a link embedded in text that resembles Lorem Ipsum. If anyone can work out what this gem means, I’d love to hear from you (From a viagra spam):

_on decoy on tibia be formica.

try pessimum try conspiracy or typography, the detest a cerebellum , exogamous it sin but company not brainwash.

and grandchildren be conjugacy some arroyo.

, consecrate but judicial but jensenor ginsburg , presbytery it quadrature.

Something in that for all of us really…