Archive for April 2011
ANSI colours in Windows console
I develop a number of PHP console applications and it was annoying me that ANSI colour (or color) and other escape codes don’t work in the Windows console. I like to use colours in console output for automated test scripts and other things as it’s really helpful.
Luckily, Jason Hood has written an application that enables ANSI escaping in the Windows console. It can be found at his site. Just download it, extract the x64 or x86 directory as you require and run ansicon -i. You will now have a new environment variable called ‘ANSICON’ and ANSI escapes will work!
HTC Sense UI Data Usage
I’ve had my HTC Desire for almost a year now and I think it’s an excellent phone and still one of the best Android phones on the market.
I have had one problem with it though. It’s been using data at a rediculous rate – over 40MB a day and was costing me an extra £10 a month in data. The first step was to find out what was using all the data.
I downloaded TrafficStats Lite from the Android Marketplace which was able to display the usage on a per-app basis, but this didn’t help much.It was unable to separate out all the SenseUI apps, which was a huge selection, including:
- Flickr
- Calendar Storage
- Friend Stream
- com.htc.provider.
- HTC Location Service
- Calendar
This list continued for about another 20 items, so not much help but it gave me an idea of where to look. I next decided to look at the account synchronisation settings and turned them off one-by-one, clearing the stats in TrafficStats and seeing how much data was being used.
This led me to the culprit – Facebook for HTC Sense. This downloads profile photos and status updates for all your contacts, as well as adding your Facebook contacts to your phone contacts.
Stopping it from syncing the live feed and syncing contacts immediately stopped the data usage. The phone now uses around 2.5MB a day which is slightly cheaper!
Lloyds TSB PHP Class
This year I’m aiming to release more open source software, as part of that I’ve just finished my first mini-project.
It’s a PHP class library that logs into Lloyds TSB online personal banking and is able to retrieve information on the accounts. It is able to return the balances, available balances, overdraft limits and allowances for may different types of account. It’s very easy to use:
require_once('Lloyds.php');
$onlineBanking = new Lloyds(123456789, 'password', 'secureword1');
Full usage instructions are found with the class and it’s released under the MIT License. I will be publishing it on github at some point, but in the meantime here’s a download link:
Please use it for good, not evil. If you do use it for something interesting, let me know!
A Timely Update
As usual, I’ve been very slack in updating this site. This is more of a general catchup post detailing what’s happened between the last post and now.
epic.LAN
With 5 larger events, including our first with over 200 attendees, and 5 smaller events under our belts, epic.LAN is going great and is getting better each time. at epic.FIVE we brought back competitive tournaments with £2,000 prize money on offer.
It was the first outing of the epic.Tournament system which manages almost every aspect of running a tournament. There were some minor problems but overall it worked well. The next event is epic.SIX which has even more money on offer and should be a great summer event!
Work
I’m still working in the Web Development team at Fasthosts, bringing some great products to market. Some of the projects I’ve worked on include Virtual Servers, updated Broadband offering, hosted networks and I’m currently working on a large project that will take me through to the Summer. It’s great place to work with excellent co-workers, fully outfitted break rooms with soft drinks on-tap and a proper coffee machine.
Most of the time I’m writing PHP with the large codebase that makes up our Control Panel being my primary focus. There’s some other internal systems that are PHP based and plenty of Python used as well, so lots of opportunity to learn new things.
Web Development
The past two years have been hectic with epic.LAN taking up most of my own personal time, with the bulk of the development work done for now, I’m looking into getting involved in some open-source projects and some interesting web development for my own amusement. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the likes of BarCamp London 8 and HackCamp and aim to attend a few of these events this year. In the meantime, I’ve set up a projects website for any small and random projects I decide to write.
I’ve also updated my GPS tracking website for the third time in about 5 years. This takes GPS data from an Android phone and plots it on a map alongside Google Latitude and also draws a trail of my position. There’s more details on the website for it.
Upcoming Events
It’s looking to be a busy summer for events, with the following already lined up:
- 22nd April – Multiplay insomnia42
- 28th April – DunceLAN 3
- 6th May – StratLAN
- 27th May – epic.lite 4
- 3rd June – LAN 42 1
- 10th June – Florida Holiday
- 30th June – StratLAN Summer Party
- 7th July – British Grand Prix
- 28th July – epic.SIX
- 26th August – Multiplay insomnia43
As with everyone else in the world, I can be found on Twitter @MurrayMintUK. I tend to tweet irregularly as I’m not partial to blogging or micro-blogging. Feel free to follow and I’ll probably reciprocate.
I’m currently finding Twitter most useful for SMS alerts. Anytime anyone pays for an epic.LAN event, the website automatically tweets to a private Twitter account followed by myself and other members of the epic.TEAM. It’s a really cheap way of mass notifications and was a great place to test Twitter API integration.
That’s it for this post, but stay tuned for I have some good content lined up including some analysis of web development in the year 2011, a defence of PHP against critics and some articles covering the technical side of epic.LAN and what goes on behind the scenes.
Read more : Comments(1) : Apr 16 2011