I’ve created a news site which aggregates the feeds of several web developers and web development oriented websites. You can check it out here:

Planet WebDev

The site uses the cool PlanetPlanet Feed Reader, highly recommended peice of software. It’s pretty cool because it’s simple and good!

If you’d like me to add your feed, please get in touch (johnrhunt_ATNOSPAM_gmail.com).

Yup, Microsoft’s IE7 is finally out. You’ll notice every link here actually goes to www.getfirefox.com instead of Microsoft’s site. This is because there’s no point in getting IE7 as firefox has been able to do everything IE7 does and more, and still continues to. Check it out, it’s far more stable, you can get loads of cool extensions for it and it doesn’t support Microsoft.

Using IE7 also makes it much harder for people like me (web master guy), as we now have to make work arounds for yet another of Microsoft’s buggy browsers that don’t support well known standards. Can you imagine being a kettle maker and having to supply 6 different plugs for your kettle? Same thing.

Well, hopefully anyway!
Check out the Penguin.SWF blog here! I can’t wait to be able to watch youtube/google video stuff properly!

So anyway, for those of you that don’t know…Laura and I are moving to Australia next year. This means we’ll need to sort out a proper voice over IP solution, but with so many different deals and packages around, what’s best?

I’ve ruled out Skype as it’s non-standard and therefore you’re quite limited on what hardware and software you can use, also I don’t like the idea that other people’s phone traffic will pass through my internet connection. I’ve also recently started using a SIP provider called sipgate which is really cool as you get a free local PSTN number. However, I’ve just learnt that some friends of mine are using Tesco Internet phone.

If anyone has any experience with the Tesco internet phone, please leave a comment…I could do with knowing whether it uses SIP, whether it’s easy to use with analogue telephone adapters and SIP routers…what the settings are, whether it’s possible to dial an internet IP etc.. thanks!

[Update]

Ok, I’m pretty sure Tesco Internet Phone is the way to go:

• The rates, although not the best are still pretty competetive.
• It’s very easy for someone else to get a tesco phone and use it.
• The mobile call rates are also good.

When you put the tesco solution together with Pipex’s free local/international calls adsl package and this Billion VGP router, it’s quite cool.

[Update]

Well, today I went out and bought two of the tesco internet phones…I’ve since discovered they use the IAX protocol (and not SIP), which although open, isn’t the best as not many clients (and pretty much no hardware) supports it.

So looks like I’m taking one of them back.. I don’t think I’ll be allowed to take back the other as I’ve used some of the free credit for testing. Not a total loss though, the handset will come in handy, and is worth a tenner itself. Seems to work fine just by plugging it in on Ubuntu dapper.

[Update]
There is some hardware out there. And software, and I also managed to connect to the Tesco service using a different client which confirms that it is indeed IAX2. Unfortunately it isn’t as popular as SIP, which is a bit annoying. However, I think it could well be the way to go once I get the right software/hardware… Ekiga should support IAX2 soon. And I found the AG-168V which is perfect, although it’s hard to get hold of.

[Update]
After buying two atcom 168V’s, I discovered atcom is a terrible make of ATA and should be avoided at all costs. They basically don’t work. Lots of problems connecting to the net.

I’ve recently started using CakePHP, I don’t really understand it too well, but the first thing I noticed was that any static pages you have normally would go under www.site.com/pages. I thought ‘this sucks’, so I’ve made a very simple work-around, which isn’t great, but it seems to work.

The idea is that someone will go to www.site.com/something and then cake will look for the something controller, if it can’t find it, it will normally throw up an error. By altering this error page, we can get cake to do the pages controller action instead of the error one.

So what I did was add the file: views/errors/missing_controller.thtml which contains:

$this->requestAction('pages'.stripslashes($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));

That seemed to do it. Not elegant at all, I know, so if you find a nicer way of doing it, or write some nicer code, please give it to me and I’ll post it on here.

Check out my new ebay items for sale section, it works via RSS so is always up to date. Bag yourself a bargain!!

Apologies for the gallery downtime over the weekend, I’ve been moving around web servers… it shouldn’t be too long now until there’s a proper web address for it, like gallery.john-hunt.com, rather than this: http://83.149.126.39:81/gallery/. You can always use the gallery link on this page (to the right) to access the gallery.

[edit]

You can just use http://gallery.john-hunt.com, it’ll always direct you to the right place.

[edit]

Gallery is offline completely for the foreseeable future.. however, we still have all the photos, so don’t worry!