I made some animated gif images of popular websites showing how they changed over the years. The old versions of the sites are taken from The Wayback Machine. Unfortunately some images were blocked from being spidered by archive.org and are shown as gray boxes. So far I have done a time-lapse of Google , Yahoo and AltaVista.

For a while now I have been running a bot to serve out RSS feeds. The bot runs on four networks (AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Google talk) and is subscription only. A few weeks ago I noticed that it was having problems connecting to AIM. It was reporting the username and password were incorrect. I was puzzled as I hadn't changed these since I created the account. I tried mailing AOL to attain why they killed the account with no reply. So I created another account to serve the bot and again it was killed, and again no warning or response from AOL. This is somewhat insulting as AOL added its bots to the friend list of all their users yet they kill other peoples bots without any explanation.

I have been working on this IM BBS idea for a couple of weeks now. Its basically a bulleting board which you can connect to using your instant messenger. Currently the most useful function is the direct RSS link delivery. Every time there is a new entry in an RSS feed you are subscribed to the thing messages you the story and a link. Much more convenient to receive an interrupt than polling by repetitively hitting refresh on the slashdot page.

I have had some time off recently so I concentrated on my pet projects. One of these being a "mapper" to find people who are similar and group them together. Its working quite well and the php frontend is very easy to write. So far I have just made up some little pointless questions (a lot of them were submitted by others). Strangest thing is the correlation between the different maps.
For example this is a map of Tea vs Coffee has a very similar layout as the C vs Java
Shocking! People who drink coffee like Java

I noticed today that Google seems to link to redirection pages rather than directly to the sites. This is a strategy used by many search engines to get more information about the search hits. Although I don't mind google using information of my browsing habits, I heavily rely on the recently seen links appearing in a different colour. This behaviour appears to be cookie based and only one of the four accounts I use seems to be affected. The redirection address is in the form of "http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=&q=&e=7415" I'm not sure as to what the e=??? is about nor do I know how to turn it off (without clearing cookies). I do hope this is not the end of google as it tries to squeeze every last penny out of the site.

I have finally released KMD version 0.9.11 under GPL.

KMD is a graphical debugger. It can debug hardware over
serial ports such as the Manchester ARM Board or with software
emulators (ARM and MIPS emulators are included in the project). Using the
pipe option you can debug over the network or any other communication
medium. It can load many executable formats such as ELF and display and
follow the original source even from multiple source file programs. There
is support for breakpoints and watchpoints which can trap specific
instructions (such as loading or executing specific instructions).
Support for other features such as FPGA's is also available, allowing
loading or any control required to drive a specific hardware device. The
project uses chump to allow
disassembly and line assembly. Chump also allows
new architectures to be easily added without the need to recompile the
system. Communication with the backend is done using two pipes/fifos using
a simple set of codes. Back end communication program can be created using
very little memory on the target device.

Is it just me or is the Sci-Fi logo the scaryest thing ever? Whenever I see it I an just skip past the story as I am too scared to look at it. Just look at it! Look at its evil eyes! It wants to suck out your brain.

I was thinking about doing this for some time and after considering some rather complex methods I decided that this one is as good as any.
"Distributed Mirror Project" is a method of creating mirrors and distributing the information that you are hosting a mirror to others. There are two main sections of it.
Firstly there is your end. Using a script you can easily make a mirror of a site and then submit the information that you have a mirror of a site or a file to the server site.
The other end is the server site which collects the information about the mirrors. It then allows users to search for mirrors of sites or files.
Its really as simple as that. The download a site and submit the information to a mirror server script is three lines. The server end is a little more complex but I am very happy about the way its working so far.
Try it out. (It won't work with some characters yet but thats next on the todo list)

EE Times is reporting on China's BLX IC Design Corp nearing the completion of their first 64-bit CPU. Based on the MIPS instruction set the 500-MHz Godson-2 microprocessor is aimed toward distributed grid computing. To avoid MIPS patent issues, several instructions (unaligned loads and storeds in the 32 bit version) have not been implemented but with the support of over 60 software providers such as Red Flag Linux and the ability to tweak compilers to not use these instructions this should not be a problem. The Godson-1 processor (also patent free) was announced last year and was aimed at the embedded market. Although there are no patent issues MIPS have been known to be very aggressive toward people who try to create compatible systems.

When I was making the webcam the only way to get the power out of the PC was to do this. I was wondering why there is no external power connectors for things such as modems, hubs, external zip drives etc. I concluded that none of the companies would agree on the standard and there wouldn't be that much demand for it anyway.
A couple weeks ago I decided to buy a tiny ikkle network hub. I went for the Gigabyte SW005 and as a very cute feature it not only comes with a power adaptor but also with a usb power lead. As you can very easily use up two extension leads to plug in two computers along with all their peripherals I thought the idea was great.
And what happened to my theory that there simply isn't any demand for power from a PC connections? Well how far can I get from the truth. You can now get lights, toothbrushes, heat blankets and hot drinks cups (note it works on Mac as well as Win!). All all wasting valueable USB ports (only one or two on a laptop).
So what does Mr "No one will want those" have to say? I think they will start making USB power only connections on planes, in hotel bathrooms, and coffee shops. Everything will be USB powered. One of my least liked connectors powering everything and me being frustrated because I can't tell which way is up on the things. Ah well, at least I don't have to carry those plug converters.