Josh1 - Work

Alpine Image Converter 2

2009-07-14T12:12:11.813Z

Hello everybody,

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (last year on here) there was a tool for people who, like me, own a certain Alpine in car head unit. A magical tool that enabled magical things (loose definition of magic being used here). A tool for the Alpine IDA-X100 and now the Alpine IDA-X305 (I'm told the latter works too, but alas I have none to test on).

Basically, cutting all the nonsense, these head units have a nice LCD display on them, with a nice swooshy blue or red backdrop. The Alpine Image Converter enabled people to easily change the background image on these wonderful Alpine head units. All you had to do was upload your image and click "download". What could be simpler? Sneezing, perhaps. But that can come with added complications - this didn't. And sneezing doesn't make you look cool in your car, it just makes you steer wonky.

After becoming quite a little surprise success, the server that used to power this tool collapsed under the strain - sort of. It ran out of space for the gallery photos. Oh by the way, in the new one there is a lovely gallery of uploaded pics for your browsing and downloading-in-Alpine-format pleasure.

Since the days when the old image converter was launched I have moved on and am now doing my own thing on this website and as a result it seemed like a mighty good idea to move across the old, broken and weeping tool to a new home.

And here it is. Tadaa.

The new one works just like the old one, only now there is a gallery of uploaded photos, as I've previously mentioned. You can, of course, opt for your image to not be made public.

So what are you waiting for? If you have the player, get on with it and change your background picture to something cool like a... a... I'm not cool enough to think of something cool. That's your job, so get on with it!

Happy Birthday Victoria / Web Poacher

2009-07-19T09:34:07.167Z

It was my friends' birthday the other week, and I haven't got much money to spare. So I cheapskated her and made her a present.

Basically, I made her Web Poacher. If you've ever needed to download a whole website, then this tool will help you. To give you an idea of her predicament and why she will find it useful, I will explain it to you. Good that, innit?

So, my friend Victoria makes websites for people. She's very good and I can recommend her services at her wonderful site. She's quite professional and uses Visual Studio just like many web developers out there. (I can't hear you PHP/Ruby/Perl/Python/Java people. You can all still use it, you just choose not to!). Using Visual Studio makes it easier for her to take advantage of such loveliness as Master Pages to try to keep herself DRY. This is all great, but sometimes she's giving her website to someone who is going to put it on their server, without support for ASP.NET or other such server side platforms. At this point, she has two choices: either repeat herself in Plain Old HTML for all the headers, footers, menus etc. that repeat across all the pages, or load up her favourite browser and File -> Save as all the HTML pages. But then you have to mess around making sure you've got all the CSS and images and JavaScript in the right places without being repeated. Ugh. Both are uglier than a cat's backside after accidentally eating the left over curry from the night before. (sorry about that image).

Welcome Web Poacher. It will save you much time if you are in either Victoria's situation, a similar one. Or if you indeed have to copy a whole website to pure HTML.

You can see a recent poaching of the BBC News website here (to 5 levels deep):

http://webpoacher.com/bbcnews/

So what are you waiting for? Try it!

Oh, and Victoria:

I hope you like your present!

The end of the beginning

2009-07-14T12:11:01.693Z

Welcome to my new blog - on here you will find the musings, mutterings and ramblings of me on my journey through programming.

Except, no one ever reads the first blog post, because nobody yet knows about the blog. When they do eventually know about it, they're hardly ever likely to think "Ooh, I know what, I'll go and read their introductorary blog post, that'll be useful, informative and interesting". So to anyone reading this: why? Thanks, though. No, really.

So, without further ado or spangly fanciness and noise, let the blogging commence.

I'll leave with with the note that as of 28/06/2009, "blog" is not in Chrome's spell checker because it keeps being underlined with red. Shame on your Chrome.

See you all in more useful future blogs!

Josh