You may know that I am part of community radio station in the North East. We have been using IP to stream from the studio to the transmitter for many months now, and we have started to do more outside broadcasts using the Internet. We have done most of this using the Ogg Vorbis audio compression. It is my intention to blog about this in the future.

At the start of 2008 it cam to my attention that 3 Mobile had reduced there data charges and how now introduced a pay as you go service for the same cost as the subscription one. The dongle that acts like a modem cost £100.

After a previous broadcast from the Gateshead Swallow Hotel was complete disaster because the Cloud wifi let us down we decided to give 3G a go. For reference the problem was not the actual wifi connection that was good, but the Internet connection behind it being overloaded, and we did get a refund for the night.

Sadly the data rates promised were nothing like those theoretically possible but after a switching to SimpleCast to stream MP3Pro we managed to get by with a reliable 23kbps stream running. Not ideal for FM broadcast, but it was passable and most listeners would not have noticed.

Things went very well for almost 2 hours, and then it all went a little haywire. In the end, after many dropouts, I decided to move the dongle. I stuck it to the window with some tape and everything sprung back to life for the rest of the night. There was then even some bandwidth for me to do things like start this blog posting.

In the end this showed it can be done, but it is not yet 100% reliable. Since the broadcast I have learned that the bandwidth problem was because I only had a 3G connection and not a HSDPA (Turbo) connection in the OB location. I will continue to experiment and will report back on this blog. If you are interested in doing the same then do get in touch.

Over a year ago I blogged about how to protect your PC from viruses and spywhere. Time and technology has moved on and I will be updating this soon, but I thought I would note that I have changed the setup of my main laptop.

I was using McAfee VirusScan Plus (Special edition) that is available for free from AOL. This was doing a good job without hassle and I still recommend it as a free and simple solution. The problem was that it was slowing my commuter down, especially at boot time.

I had a look at Comodo that I found out about through a couple of podcasts. This looks like a very good “Intelligent” firewall, and the company now has a virus scanner is available in beta. Sadly my installation of Apache has a problem when it was installed so I have decided to leave it for now and test it properly later.

In the end I have rolled back to the Sunbelt personal firewall that was originally developed by Kerio.

For virus scanning I did not want a scanner that dramatically slowed down the computer and had almost resigned myself to having to leave any scanner disabled and enable it when I thought it was necessary. I am only prepared to do this because any email entering our network or stored on the server have already been checked. Interestingly the McAfee scanner only ever found things in the IE cache because of this.

I then read about the open source Moon Secure scanner. This scanner you can not actually turn off, but it is very fast, and appears to find the viruses found by the other scanners. This basic solution is all I need so I will be sticking with it for a while, seeing how it goes, and will report back later.

I have managed to get a ticket to BarCampBrighton2 being held at Sussex University Student Union next month. As in the past spaces went quickly, but there are still 30 being released on Monday if you are feeling lucky.

It will be interesting to see how this second Brighton event pans out as BarCampBrighton was my joint favorite camp, with BarCampLondon06 being the other. I believe that this was mainly because of the number of people, and who those people were. The venue also does make a big difference.

This time there are a whopping 150 places in Brighton, with some of the tickets being allocated to first time attendees, some geek girls, and some students from the venue. My gut reaction is the allocation for first time attendees is a great idea to keep things fresh without overly complicating things. The numbers are a little high, and a more public space like a university will not be as friendly as we are use to, but with luck the people will be what makes it and it will be another stunningly good event.

I have just noticed that I have passed the monumental 1GB mark of email stored in my GMail account. I was invited to join the beta in August 2004 when this was the limit, and way more than other webmail services. Not long after it was upped to 2GB storage, and now with the Infinity+1 and other increases my available storage has risen to over 6.3GB. :-)

I have been working on a pet PHP project that will be maintained by others who are not professional developers. They are intelligent people but are probably unaware of code and SQL injection, never mind know how to avoid it. As a result I have been encapsulating all the client interaction and a set of easy to understand libraries. It was while working on this I came across a scenario that I would not otherwise have come across, that being problems caused by a trailing backslash in an edit field.

Although a training backslash is rarely a problem nowadays as we have magic_quotes_gpc enabled by default on most new servers, there are occasions when you need to strip the slashes and encode as HTML using htmlspecialchars or the like. The problem is that if the last character is a backslash, and a string is appended to another (like when building an SQL query), then it will cause the first character in the appended string to be escaped.

Although the risk of attach is small as it would rely on two sets of data from the user being fed through, and the user knowing the order, it is still a risk, and an easy way to screw with a site.

As an experiment I decided to try screwing with some popular open source projects by ending my field values with a backslash, and guess what, on a small few it caused chaos. The common problem is that the server goes in to overdrive until it times out, that or you get back an interesting error message. If I have time I will look at the potability of using this as a way to inject my SQL, and then look at easy ways to fix it.

So, if you ever use stripslashes remember to think about the trailing backslash.

You may have noticed that I am have a search option on my site for a while now. This searches my blog and other sites, and has been powered by Google. This used the Google AJAX Search API and although did an okay job, it did not give me the control I wanted.

Today, after leaving it until later many times, I decided to have a play with the Yahoo Search API and it does everything I want it to.

Now when you search from something on my site it constructs a REST query and submits it to Yahoo. The result is retuned (I am using JSON) and then I parse the data how I want it. The search is restricted to my sites alone and I also add a little icon that identifies what site the data was found on. I am keeping the layout simple and not overloading the user with information, but if you hover over the logo and title you should see the URL.

So why not give it a go and search my stuff.

I have just linked together some PHP code that allows me to update my Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook status messages from just one screen.

Originally I did not get Twitter and only updated my status when I posted something on my blog, but as I started to read what my friends were doing it kind of clicked and I started using it properly. Later I started the save on Facebook where I have other friends, but this started the annoyance of using two services to do one thing.

Before this I was using Twitter to update my Facebook status via the Twitter Facebook application. Originally this was far from ideal as it could not change the real status message, and once that was fixed it started to put an “is Twittering: ” prefix that was rather annoying. I also keep my status updates for friends only and that prevented me propagating the changes to Jaiku.

My solution was to use the various APIs to to create a service that updates all of these services from one web page. The Twitter API was the easiest, although I don’t much like having my Twitter password stored on the web server and will be changing it regularly now. Jaiku would have been just as easy but I used Jon Kossmann‘s PHP neat little library to save me the effort. Originally I started by trying to use Steve Marshal‘s code to update Facebook, but my server was having none of it, so after a lot of playing with the Facebook API I managed to get my own solution working by creating a Facebook application.

So what next? I intend to add a location field that will update Jaiku and Fire Eagle. I also want to update Pownce when the API is available, and also intend to show a summery of Twitter updates from friends. I am also looking at a visual authentication procedure that will be more secure on public terminals, and possibly turning this in to an OpenID server for me in the field.

Will I make it public? Well, it will take a little time to create a a public service and I am not planning on doing this. That being said please let me know if you wan to do this and I may change my mind.

Update: A quick update following some checking on possible message lengths. Twitter uses 140 characters (but 160 can be posted), Jaiku accepts 140 and Facebook 160.

Update: I have just added support for Pownce. Currently it does not message all users, just those who ask to be added to the set.

For BarCampLondon3 I decided to do something a little different and run a session for people to show off there favourite websites. This was built on Natalie’s show and tell from BarCampBrighton, but with the twist of showing the best and most useful new sites, and not just what we have created. Naturally these should be the same sites. ;-)

First I demonstrated Profilactic. This is a site that I found a while ago. It aggregates many of my public feeds in to one “Stalker” feed. I most like it because it is simple to use, looks good, and as it only works with public feeds you do not need to trust it with all your passwords. I also mentioned MeeCard that is in alfa and demonstrated at BarCampSheffiled.

Next we had a look at Vector Magic. With this service you can upload an image and it converts it to a vector format. This allows pixelated images to be smoothed out and allow you to blow them larger without it looking blocky.

The web site Icon Finder was recommended as a search utility to find icons. Most are free, but do check the licencing before using them. The site I could not remember was famfamfam.com that has a lot of useful icons available.

Tom Scott then had a go at demonstrating his App in a Box, a simple application generator for Facebook. Some work is still needed but it is now working.

To close I mentioned a site called Calls may be recorded that you can upload your best and worst phone calls and listen to everyone else’s. It is better that it sounds, honest.

Lastly Sound Snap was recommended as site to find royalty free audio clips for whatever you want them for.

Finally I tend to post links to anything interesting I find to my Tumblelog, so if you want to see more sites like this then keep an eye on this.

I am seriously considering buying a Eee PC 701 ultra portable PC. I have been interested in this style of low cost but functional computer and never quite understood why project such at the one laptop per child project was only focusing on the stereotypically third world communities. Making a computer more affordable to everyone including those in the West with luxuries like running water and electricity but are still disadvantaged in today’s society by the the lack of connectivity seems equally rewarding, increases production, and reduces costs and prince.

Anyway, while I was looking at these I did not expect to realise that outside of the day job and Windows programming, these basic machines are all I need. They also have the advantage of being light weight and having a good battery life in addition to being low cost. Okay I can not run games or watch DVDs, but I don’t do that anyway. Okay I will need to use another machine for programming, audio editing and web development, but I will still have the Windows PC for that. The real advantage is that this light weight device is small enough for me to grab and carry with me most of the time.

The device runs on a custom build of Linux, but can have Windows installed. It uses a 4GB flash drive instead of a traditional HDD that reduces weight and increases battery life. The best bit is that it boots in 15 seconds. :-)

The device has had many good reviews and the machines listed on Ebuyer were quickly sold out. So should I get one?