test/share your code at www.codepad.org

codepad.org is an online compiler/interpreter, and a simple collaboration tool.
Paste your code into the textbox, and codepad will run it and give you a short URL you can use to share it in chat or email.

This is a great idea which allows you to get/offer debugging help without the hassle or risks of supplying FTP details to another person, installing compilers etc.

Supported languages are PHP,Perl,C,Ruby,Python,C++,TCL etc etc

What it is
codepad.org is an online compiler/interpreter, and a simple collaboration tool. It's a pastebin that executes code for you. You paste your code, and codepad runs it and gives you a short URL you can use to share it. Paste the URL into chat or email to get help or to show someone how to do something. Or just try things out when you don't have an interpreter handy. It works well on many phones.

MK14 Corner

My first business venture, I made and sold accessories for Sinclair's First Home Computer the MK14 which cost just £39.95. Boy was it primitive but great fun, used a calculator display as a "screen". A dreadful 16 key touch pad (I sold a real mechanical keyboard). It had no permanent memory, you had to manually enter the program in machine code.

I remember the duckshoot game and you could make it play a tune.

FireFox 3 New Features

What is extraordinarily useful in the new FireFox is the predictive URL when you type in the URL toolbar. Formerly these operated on the beginning or the URL eg www.go would autmatically flash up all urls you'd typed beginning www.go in your history log. Now if FF3 it will match any text anywhere in the URL or in the description. So if I wanted to recall a page about goats, all I'd have to do is type goat and the URL would pop-up. Excellent

Backup Your PC to the Internet

Backing up is a dull but essential chore. Authors have lost the entire manuscript of their latest book because they didn't bother/know-how-to/know-they-needed-to backup. Even seasoned programmers have known disaster either because they didn't have a recent enough backup or worse found they had been a glitch in the backup process that they hadn't noticed. Backups should be automatic and not rely on human intervention. This is one of the many advantages of Internet backup services, no requirement to insert a fresh tape/DVD, automatic backups can be programmed daily at midnight, the backups are always off premises.
Amazon provides the A3 backup service, but a techie friend recommended me the Mozy.com 2GB Totally Free Online Backup by Mozy. This is free but I will be upgrading to their paid service soon so I get even more space and extra features, by the way if you sign up to their Paid Service you can use the code "June" to get a 10% discount.

Solve your backup problems forever with Mozy.com and relieve yourself of one more chore and the guilt feeling when once again you don'y get round to it.

Creosote: The Surprising Most Important Communications Invention

The Victorian Forerunner of the Internet was the Telegraph. The Telegraph curiously was "digital" as the information sent was encoded, the later analog telephone was in this sense a step backwards. Anyway the problem for the development of the telegraph was that the wooden telegraph poles rotted or were eaten by insects. It was the invention of creosote which allowed effective protection of these poles allowing Telegraph to spread across the USA and become a commercial success. The rest is history.

Wonderful WordPress

Somehow I've only recently realised how marvellous WordPress is. I am now using WordPress not just as a Blog but as a rapid website generator with CMS. I've tried so many of the Website CMS systems and found then too complicated/non-intuitive (and I'm a techie).

The toughest part of creating a mini-Wordpress website is choosing from the hundreds of free templates.

Here are two of my first attempts:-

• oswaldcouldrey.co.uk
  
• farmparking.co.uk
  

Top Quality Free Web Hosting
The Internet constantly surprises me; free web hosting used mean that you had to display their adverts and any technical extra such as database was charged for. Well now 000webhost.com where 000 means $0.00 dollars offer a very high specification free web hosting with PHP/MySQL and Cpanel and Fantastico, what's more it's not just free for the first year but forever, don't believe me well click below to learn more!

ASP / PHP Cross Reference

The following page allows you to quickly convert ASP to PHP or vice-versa by showing at a glance the different syntax for say comments, concatenation etc

http://www.design215.com/toolbox/asp.php

Free Remote Login to your PC/MAC with LogMeIn

GoToMyPC allows me to access my PC from anywhere on the Internet as though I were sitting in front of it. So when I am on vacation I can deal with urgent email and see if I've got any eBay or Amazon orders. Now what is wonderful about this is that I don't have the hassle of trying to load everything I think I'll need onto a laptop and then having all the subsequent problems of re-updating my main PC. GoToMyPC has allowed me to take working holidays and I love it. It's not cheap though so I'm amazed to see that www.logmein.com are offering a FREE remote login service, they hope you'll upgrade to their professional service of course. So there's nothing to stop you giving this a try. You can even use this on your home network to maintain other PCs without leaving your desk.

Does Any Hate Microsoft Vista as Much as Me?

It's not just that it is super slow, that many of my applications don't work so I have to keep my old PC going, or that what used to be 2 clicks is now many clicks, blah blah blah. No it's Vistas disappearing tricks, my Control Panel which won't open, and applications that have their icons which appear in the the little panel next to the clock have their icons disappear even though the app is still working.

I often see people moaning about Vista but do they really hate it like I do?