I was a very loyal customer to Mesh computers up until a week ago. My previous computer, which I've had for 5 years, my parents old computer and my current server have all been Mesh purchases. I usually go with them for a few reasons: firstly, they offer various systems at different price levels and then allow you to totally customise everything, secondly, they allow you to buy computers without an operating system and finally, they don't install a load of junk software on your computer. I've never had any problems with the computers I've bought, so have never had to deal with their customer services.

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A few days ago I was desperately trying to solve a bug which made no sense. In most circumstances everything worked fine, but then when you added more data, everything broke. Steven eventually discovered it was because I was overriding my JavaScript object's length attribute causing problems when trying to loop over every element in the object.

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Demand Five is Channel Five's online TV player, and it claims not to work on Windows 7 when you want to purchase a program to download/watch. When you try and buy the programs, the website does a check for "system requirements" and if you are running Windows 7, this will fail, like in Screenshot 1. I have found a way around this, and was able to purchase my program and watch it on my Windows 7 laptop.

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In my final part of this tutorial on using some of Word’s nifty features, I explain how to number pages correctly in a thesis or long essay. My previous entries explain using styles and referencing.

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In my previous post, I mentioned how to use Styles properly. Here I will explain referencing and making an automatic bibliography.

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I keep being asked to show people all the cool features in Microsoft Word that not many people realise exist or how to take advantage of. Many people struggle with auto generating contents pages, bibliographies and proper page numbering when Word 2007 makes it so easy. I will do a three part series explaining how to use Word 2007 properly: starting with using Styles.

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I like backing stuff up. I have not yet actually had a computer crash on me and lose everything, but I do quite regularly reinstall Windows XP when it gets too slow. To make this an effortless process I used to have the C:\Documents and Settings folder live on a different partition, so when I reinstalled Windows on the other partition, all my stuff was still there – just needed a few registry values changed. I can’t really be bothered with that any more, some programs got quite confused to where my home directory was and resizing the partitions when I ran out of space on one was a bit of a hassle. If you’re interested, this is how to do it.

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I made this script a while back now to populate a database with all the music on my computer (so excuse any poor Python!). It assumes you are on Windows and have all your music in one folder, arranged by artist with sub folder albums with songs in them. It also assumes you'll use PostgreSQL, but it's trivial to change this to mySQL or even SQLite which comes with Python2.5 or higher. You can tell it to ignore certain folders by adding to the ignorables set. It will automatically grab any album art it finds and try and get the genre, track number and composer etc from MP3 meta data (I couldn't find a way of doing any other kind of music type).

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You may have noticed I have added a search bar at the top of the website. Here is how to make use of PostgreSQL's full text search facility with SQLAlchemy, a Python SQL Toolkit and Object Relational Mapper. 

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1. BBC Reader (free)
This app downloads and caches the latest headlines from the BBC website from three categories (I have world news, UK and Entertainment for example). What's great for iPod Touch users is that you can download the news when you have internet and read the articles later when you don't. When you click on a link, it takes you to the BBC article page with its inbuilt browser and it is easy to navigate around. The only annoying feature is that it auto refreshes the news, but not very well. A button of some sort to force it to search for new stories would be useful.

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Once the script to generate captchas is set up (see previous post) this can be easily tied into a Python web page. This assumes you are using Werkzeug and Mako, but I'm sure Django/Pylons with Jinja etc won't be too different. 

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Creating the blog tags for this website was a bit tricky because I wasn't sure how to make the tags have different sizes according to their significance. I started off with 5 spans and ordered the tags in terms of frequency and divided them equally into the spans. However tags are not evenly distributed, so instead I calculated the normalized weight of the tag according to the others, and made the font size a percentage of that.

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In making this website and in my 4^th year honours project I implemented a captcha (which you can see if you try and make a comment). I thought this would be a bit of a nightmare to do, but with Steven's help and the awesomeness of Python, it was quite easy. The code originally comes from here, but I have made a few edits such as keeping the image in memory.

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