Here's an update; I received £40 off a relative and I've decided to spend a majority of it on hardware for my machine.

Currently, the machine has a new lick of paint (black, of course), a new ethernet card and a new Sony CD-RW drive.

I tried using an NIC that I borrowed from college, but one of them was an ISA card that just refused to work (I suspect that ISA cards are aware of the fact that they are a massive waste of time and resign from functionality because they're ass-backward as hell) and the other one, a PCI Adaptec card, seemed to be completely broken. This new NIC is a 3Com Fast Ethernet 3c905B, and it worked the first time I tried it. It even supports DHCP, and it only cost all of £3.75 (including postage!), so I'm very pleased with that.

The CD-RW drive I bought yesterday is a Sony drive (it's installed in the machine and I can't be bothered to go upstairs to check the model) and it seems to work as a CD drive. The CDBurner app seems to pick it up as a CD-R drive and not a CD-RW, so I can't erase a disc to try it out. I may erase a disk on my main machine and see if it'll burn a few audio files - I can't seem to find an option for dragging and dropping files into a folder and burning it as a disc. Still, it's a little extra functionality, and the drive is much faster than the boring old Compaq one that was stuck in there before. It only cost £3 though, so I'm quite impressed.

Currently on the way in the post is a Zip250 IDE drive and a Matrox Millennium II graphics card. Combined, those items cost about £8. I need to find an appropriate drive bracket for the Zip drive if I want to use it properly, but I'm sure I could sandwich it between the CD drive and the floppy drive.

A friend of mine said he might have an old sound card floating about that I can have - so I should be sorted out for sound. Cheers Mark!

The only thing I can think of that needs adding is USB. I'm not sure if I can leave that for another time though.

The one thing that definitely won't be added is the second processor. I need a power module for each processor, and they are proving extremely difficult to track down. That's all I have to report on for now!

Here's a picture of my "supercomputer-on-a-budget" project. When I say budget, I mean budget. The paint job is currently done using a combination of black shoe polish and stencils.

My biggest problem with getting this project in motion was getting the operating system (BeOS) to recognise the SCSI hard drive, as it didn't support Compaq's SCSI controller. I borrowed another SCSI card from college and tried that - no joy. I decided that maybe if I try plugging it into the external SCSI connector on the processor cage, it might pick it up. Guess what! It did. Even better, I can now go out and kit the drive cage out with a luxurious five 18GB SCSI drives. But this is a budget supercomputer, so we can't do that just yet. The only problem with this solution is a very tightly stretched ribbon cable poking out of the back of an open PCI slot and then going directly into the SCSI port. Yes, it is unattractive, but this is a supercomputer on a budget, so I'm going to cut some corners.

Currently, the OS is installing. It will take a while as the machine is only a single core Pentium 3 at 550 megahertz. Still, it's pretty nippy and responsive with BeOS. When I can afford another processor (about £5 on eBay), this machine will scream. After the second CPU is installed, I'll probably be getting a sound card, and maybe a better graphics card. After that, a DVD reader and a CD burner. Wireless? It would be nice, but still, beggars can't be choosers.

http://allaboutimageediting.blogspot.com/

Check out the blog I made for college. It's not very full and probably won't be for a while, but nevermind.

There's also a partly-realistic image edit I did of Steve Jobs showing off the iMac with the "BUY NOW" screensaver from BeOS.

Here we are - a couple of months after I wrote my first article. It is definitely a longer-than-intended gap between posts. It’s not really that lack of code on which to post - it’s the lack of time to link the words together to correctly describe the ideas and aforementioned code.

So today I have decided to share a solution to a problem that bugged me for weeks. The problem appeared when I was attempting to write a Wallpaper Changer that would randomly pick a bitmap file from a given directory.

My idea was to use the System::IO::Directory:GetFiles function to pass all the file paths under a given a directory with the suffix .bmp to an System::String array. I then planned to get the length of the array and use that along with a random function to assign an object selected at random from the array to a string 'finalpath'. The final part of the code was supposed to be the easiest - using SystemParametersInfo with the SPI_SETDESKWALLPAPER and 'finalpath' as arguments.

However, this is where the problem arose. When I tried compiling my code with VS2008 I got a C2664 Error (cannot convert System::String to PVOID). I tried for at least a week to find a solution on the internet by typing the error code into Google but found no solution. The next couple of weeks were spent doing massive of work, etc so no solution was even attempted during this time.

However, finally, by a miracle of God, I found a solution! The solution involves using
char* finalpath = (char*)(void*)Marshal::StringToHGlobalAnsi(path) to change System::String to char*. This can then be used in SystemParametersInfoA (the ANSI version).

You can download the code from: Drop.io

~ Dave

A quick one - I've just opened a Hotline server.

People in IT, here's what you do!

1: Download Gloarbline. Click here. You will want Gloarbline Client for PC (second one down under the Client header). Choose a username and an icon.

2: Contact me on MSN for the login details. Add me! theradixcomplement@gmail.com

3: I'll tell you how to login to the server, and you will get familiar with Hotline as you go along.

Why a Hotline server? Well, it's a protocol which mixes IRC, IM and file sharing in one neat packet. It should be fun. It goes online part time tomorrow until next month where I can get a dedicated deck to run the whole show, 24/7 (with a day in the month of downtime to let the server relax and for some basic maintainance).

The Ericsson T28 was a phone manufactured by (guess who) Ericsson in 1999 through to 2000. It was the lightest, slimmest phone at the time at just 81 grams. Some interesting features included an intelligent battery meter, which shows you how many hours the battery has left in talk time and standby time - a feature which, I'm sure, would be very much appriciated on many phones today. The active flip was the main selling point, as the keypad cover flip mechanism is spring loaded, sort of like the Matrix phone (trivia - it was a Nokia 8110, which did not sell with the spring loaded slide. It was a modification the directors made for the movie.) but a bit more modern. Better still, it is an active flip, which means opening the flip answers a call and closing it concludes the call.
Read More...

We've been working on the PTI idea I brought back from Reading festival. The algorithm is a secret, but you can view the results here:

ABERGAVENNY: 402
LONDON: 4260

We've established some benchmarks.

Under 200: Extremely low PTI
Over 200: Very low PTI
Over 400: Low PTI
Over 1000: Normal PTI
Over 1500: High PTI
Over 2000: Very high PTI
Over 2500: Extremely high PTI

Currently we are still working with the algorithm, but for now, it looks like Abergavenny is the best place to go if you like bare streets.

Hello, it's James here posting from Windows 2000 under Parallels Desktop.

I'm pleased to say that Windows versions of our applications will be coming soon, as I now have a more direct way to test them on a Macintosh.

By the way... did you know my last post was from a HP Jornada 720?