Paul Nicholls

I got this today…

Hi, my name is …. and I’m PC Today’s collaborator.

PC Today is one of the best selling computer magazine in Spain and is published every two weeks. We have planned some special contents for our readers, and we’re planning to include a special CD with the best freeware and shareware programs available. This is a very special occasion for us, as we do not use to include software with our magazine. We rely solely on our editorial contents to sell the magazine and that makes this CD and its contents a unique giveaway.

We plan to include this CD in PC Today’s N.157, which will be on sale on the end of October. This CD will be enclosed with every PC Today’s N. 157 issue at no additional cost and the planned circulation is 65.000 issues. In that number we’ll also include some editorial pages explaining how to use some of the selected programs.

Since yours is one of the chosen applications, we’d like to get your permission so we can include iTunes2MSN in this CD.

I really really need to start making my software multilingual!
64,000 CDs with my software on? Wow, Really!? Wow!

Well you might have noticed the new look thats been developing over the last few weeks, its all in aid of me finally moving onto some decent web hosting [Dreamhost]! No more things floating around all over the place on various servers, its now all rooted at my new domain name, r9paul.org.

These massive behind the scenes changes prompted me to spruce up the interface a little, and you might find things have moved from where they used to be. Currently everything apart from the blog is static, but I’ll sort out a nice CMS later (add it to that summer list… the one I’ve barely touched more than 6 weeks after leaving school…)

The main reason for getting decent hosting was to cut the bandwidth going though my server, with the popularity of iTunes2MSN ever increasing – I was starting to notice the dips in my connection speed. So, if you are still linking to the old domain, saps2.mine.nu, please update your bookmarks [although you will be redirected anyway]. The saph.co.uk has been transfered to Dreamhost, and will be maintained (since it distinguishes stuff I host for people, from stuff that is mine).

Fed up of my crumbling CMS, and too busy (ok.. lazy…) to rebuild I figured I’d let someone else do the hard work, and migrate to blogger. Apart from a painful few hours trying to get the style to look vaguely like my main site the transition was fairly easy, just a bit of copying and pasting. I think I’ve got everything worthwhile from the old blog, if not, its not lost – just forgotten.

You might notice the blog isn’t hosted on my regular server, saps2.mine.nu, thats because I’m beginning to move all my “stuff” from saps2 (which is my home server, low bandwidth and generally slow and ugly) to saph.co.uk, which is a shiney high bandwidth host I pay for. In the short term the site will jump between the two hosts, but eventually saps2 should end up purely for dev work and odds and ends.

I’m hoping this move to blogger might stimulate me to blog more – and about more interesting things, as site updates will remain on the “home” page, and the “blog” has been seperated as a different entity.

Hah, I said I wasn’t going to talk about site updates, but I think I’ll just mention some of the exciting stuff we’re working on with iTunes2MSN at the moment (yes… “we”! There is now a team!) On the one hand I’ve got automated uploads sorted, so now your images can be popped straight onto the internet (hosted on this server) with no fuss, ready to use on blogs, forums, etc. On the other side, Ben’s making major breakthroughs with Windows Media Player. The current plan is for a complete rebuild (which will be under a new name, since iTunes2MSN isn’t really appropriate anymore..) due out in “The Summer”.

“The Summer” … I think I need to start making a list of things I’ve said I’ll do over The Summer. I keep putting everything non-essential off until then, “Oh there’ll be plenty of the time in the summer, what with not being at school any more…”. I seem to be forgetting when doing this that I’m supposed to be working over the summer (thrice, with 3 different jobs).. and having a holiday .. and visiting all sorts of places, and rebuilding my CMS, and migrating to the hi-bandwidth server, and working in the garden, and fitting central locking to the car, and rebuilding iTunes2MSN, and having a social life, not to mention everything else I’ve already forgotten.

The iTunes2MSN program is finally at verion 1.0! It now has its own dedicated site here.

After a long break, iTunes2MSN went beta today, just now in fact… Any feedback on this is greatly appreciated, and a final version should be around sometime, probably not all that soon (shall I say Christmas, I’m plucking that date from nowhere…)

Uptime is gone, I rebooted it to get my new KVM gear working

URMANT is now in the project listing, an off-shoot of this was the need for a spell check class in php. Since I don’t want to be dependant on aspell, pspell etc. I went back to basics building one from scratch using a mysql table and soundex for suggestions. You can see this here. Source is a nice class, feel free to use, available here.

I keep meaning to get back to iTunes to MSN, but don’t have the time, its still the biggest hit to my site~