Alan Jeeves Blog

I love Bit Torrent. The Shield series 6 has just started and won’t be shown over here (UK) for ages – channel Five showed the last series – haven’t got a clue when they will show this one.

But the great thing is even the US don’t get to watch it first – France TV is showing two episodes a week and started the same time as the US, and Bit Torrent / the Internet being so great there is someone recording it – cutting out the ads and posting it up on bit torrent straight after … Continue Reading

A lot has been said about this but it is crazy – they are charging 190% more for Adobe CS3 in the UK over the US proce.

They say its because it costs more to support the product over here but thats just over the top pricing.

It costs the same price to buy a ticket to fly to America  and buy the product over there than it does to buy CS3 here! See this post for more about this.

Gameloft’s Connect application is a great idea implemented well. Basically it allows you to buy Gameloft’s mobile (Java – J2ME) games and installed them straight to the phone via the data cable.

Works well – although sometimes i find gameseither dont install or remove themselves when the cable is disconnected, but Gameloft email support re-allocated the game for me to install again which was nice of them.

Shame they don’t allow other game developers to sell their games through the same app.

Also it can be slow loading pages – but hopefully that will improve.

The good thing is that … Continue Reading

Went to Wales for the first sunny bank holiday of the year, with work colleagues Silvia and Andrew. We are all currently single so we called it a Singles Road Trip!

Had great fun, saw some dinosaurs, caves and farm animals – all at one place! It was called Dan-yr-Ogof.

Went up some mountains to look through the valley and at Black Mountain.

Also went to Caldicot Castle – though Silvia was not impressed with.

See lots of photos here at my Picasa Album

The first night we were at Oxwich Bay. I made the best fire here, … Continue Reading

Went to Barcelona for a long weekend break (12/01/07 – 16/01/07) to celebrate Sarah reaching 30!

It was really amazing and inspirational – the Gaudi’s buildings were like nothing I’ve seen!

Check him and them out on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Gaud%C3%AD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Guell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Familia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Batll%C3%B3

Check out my first Flickr album here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/87809769@N00/sets/72157594484604506/show/

Wasn’t that impressed with Flickr so created a Picasa album too: here

I have now got the travelling bug and hope to travel the world in the near future!

… Continue Reading

In the end this was very easy, with help from a couple of sites as usual.

Heres how:

gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
and add:
# James Cameron’s PPTP GUI packaging

deb http://quozl.netrek.org/pptp/pptpconfig ./

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pptpconfig
Saying Yes / Ok to authentication warning etc.

gksudo pptpconfig

And then enter vpn server details, click routing and select routing type
And then click connect!

Thats it!

Well wasn’t for me as i tried to be clever and do it the manual way because i forgot about sudo and
thought i couldn’t edit /etc/apt/sources.list and so couldn’t get pptpconfig.

But all good now 

Pages used:
http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/howto-ubuntu.phtml
And while trying to do it manually:
http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/routing.phtml#all-to-tunnel
http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/howto-diagnosis.phtml#649

Just got back from camping near Bodiam castle.

Had a lovely time, really sunny all weekend, Sarah, Sacha, Del, Niki and little Lily went. Was a squeeze in sacha’s car but was worth it.

First time i spent any decent amount of time with Del and Niki, but got on with them very well.

Found out we went a week after their annual festival called Hope Festival, which apparently was not officially on but went ahead any how and attracted 2000 people! Note for next year – festival time is beginning of June!

Got pissed off not remembering to take warm clothing for the … Continue Reading

Moved to our new office in May.

Had to go in on the saturday to sort out the network and PCs – but was worth it.

Its just next to Tower Bridge and a lovely walk in along the river from London bridge, past the Mayor’s Building.  And most importantly i don’t have to cross any roads!

Stayed all night a few times – just easier than taking a couple of hours going home and coming back in the morning, and as its soo homely its hard to leave!

See morelondon

I’ve been to Durban twice, and had a fun time.

Went to Tala safari park – wicked place – check out the photos.

Didn’t get to the beach until the second time, and a storm started afterwards!

See the photos taken at Tala here (Picasa Album)

JPontoon is a multiplayer card game written in Java. Developed as an individual HND project, to show how a three tier architecture can work. All three tiers / layers (front end UI / core / back end DB) are transparent – the core has plug-in points. So for example different UI’s can be implemented that call these points.

Download JPontoon (198KB zip)

I recently made the game into client/server – where the front end layer is run on the client linking to the core and back end on a server.

See below for screenshots of the game (click to enlarge)… Continue Reading