Jonathan Cusick

Found this on XKCD and just had to post, remember this the next time you are developing and get tempted to make use of the goto statement.

Image by xkcd

The Onion has done it again check out the the following story and you will be amused all day:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

After a few beers David Sherlock and I devicded to emabark on an iPhone development project. So far we have established a development environment, a wiki and blog which if your interested can be found at Simple Robot.

This project is still very much an experimental one in order to establish what other types of applications we can produce for this environment. So far we are comtemplaing creating a game which takes full advantage of all the features the iPhone has to offer including location based awareness through its GPS.

Any thoughts on your current iPhone application experiences and what features you would like to see in a new application would be greatly appreciated.

After nearly 4 years since the last installment of the ever popular Grand Theft Auto series by Rockstar, GTA IV finally hit the stores on April 29th. For anyone who has not had the opportunity to play this yet, it really is a must buy, even the mini games it offers such as pool and bowling are often better than the titles that are dedicated to those genres.

Currently I have completed the main quest and now the challenge is on to try and get all the achievements… next one up is txt message cars!

TrueCrypt 5.0a has been released and in addition to supporting Linux and Windows it now fully supports Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard).

This is fantastic news for the Mac community as TrueCrypt is one of the best ways to ensure that your files can remain safe. TrueCrypt 5.0a can be downloaded from TrueCrypt.org.

This is also covered in the Security Now podcast (Episode 133) which is part of the TWIT network and is hosted by Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson. Episode 133 can be found over at the TWIT website.

This is a bit old now but it is more than worth a look especially if you have not seen it before.

While looking around on Digg I stumbled upon an excellent Linux command line reference. This is an excellent reference if you can not remember all the various command line syntax which is not an easy achievement.

The 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicks off tomorrow in Las Vegas and lasts until Jan 10th. For those not in the loop this is a yearly event where manufactures announce and preview new products. This is an important event in the tech world as many major products have been announced at CES over the years such as the Xbox, HDTV, DVD, the Commodore 64 and the VCR just to name a few.

Live coverage of the show will be appearing all over the net but for those that want streaming video check out the Mogulus site (I discovered the Mogulus link while reading the blog of Robert Scoble).

This will be my last post in 2007 and I thought a good way to end the year would be to provide a list of open source and freeware applications which I have found to be extremely useful over the last year.

FTP: FileZilla

FileZilla is an open source FTP client (a server version is also available) which can deal with the transfer of very large files (greater than 4GB) and is also supported on multiple platforms.

IM: Pidgin

Pidgin is an instant messaging application which enables the user to connect to a wide range of IM accounts at the same time, so you can keep in contact with your buddies on MSN, Yahoo, AOL etc on a single client.

Music Management: SharePod

This is a music management application for your iPod and one of its best features is that it enables you to easily extract songs from an iPod to your local machine.

Security: TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt as mentioned in a previous post enables the user to encrypt their data easily and has the flexibility to work on a USB flash drive.

Browser: Firefox

Firefox in my opinion is the best web browser currently available and with the wide range of extensions that can be easily applied to it ensures that it will not loose popularity anytime soon.

E-mail: Thunderbird

Thunderbird is an e-mail client and like Firefox has a wide range of add-ons which can be applied to provide users with a customisable application.

Office: OpenOffice

OpenOffice as you can probably guess from its name is an open source office suite which features a word processor (Writer), a presentation program (Impress), a mathematical function creator (Math), a vector drawing tool (Draw), a spreadsheet program (Calc) and a database feature (Base). One of the most useful features of OpenOffice is the built in ability to convert word processor documents into PDF format.

Text Editing: Notepad++

Notepad++ was created as an alternative to Notepad as it contains a lot of additional features and it can also be used for editing source code as it includes syntax highlighting along with the ability to zoom in and out.

Web Development: XAMPP

XAMPP provides all the tools that are required in order to run an Apache web server, MySQL database, PHP, phpMyAdmin, perl (and many more). The real advantage of this apart from having all the applications bundled together in one place is that they are already configured to work once installed, so there is no need to arrange the configuration files unless there is anything that you really want to change. XAMPP has a fantastic interface and is extremely easy to use I highly recommend it for all your PHP development and testing.

Video: VLC Media Player

VLC is not just a normal media player as it comes bundled with all the codecs that you will need to watch or listen to all your media files. In addition to this it also performs all the functions that a regular media player would such as playing DVDs and VCDs.

Audio Editing: Audacity

Audacity provides the ability to edit audio files, record audio and supports a wide range of formats such as OGG, WAV, MP3 etc. This is a fantastic program if you are producing a podcast and are looking for a free way to record and edit your show.

Graphics: GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program

GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program is the ultimate free image manipulation application as it has many professional features that you would expect from an application like Photoshop and is also cross platform so it can be installed on most major operating systems. This program is very useful for fixing any pictures from a digital camrea that did not turn out quite right or quickly resizing them.

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Portable versions of FireFox, OpenOffice and Notepad++ along with a range of other open source software can be found at PortableApps.

Happy New Year!

With the rapid expansion of e-commerce and social networking over the last few years it has become necessary for most users to store personal information, passwords and even financial information on their machines, this information is then inevitability then stored on a USB flash drive at some point. This has brought about a rather worrying security loophole as it means that if your flash drive gets stolen or misplaced that someone could then easily obtain this sensitive information.

I have been approached about this issue on many occasions and surprisingly after conducting an array research it appears that hardly any USB flash drives are shipped with a method for users to securely encrypt their data. After taking this problem into consideration and looking into the open source encryption software available, there is an easy solution to this problem and its thanks to an application called TrueCrypt.

TrueCrypt enables the user to easily encrypt their data from a wide range of industry standard algorithms. Basically you just have to load the appropriate TrueCrypt files on to your flash drive and then select an encryption algorithm and select the amount of memory you want to dedicate to being secure (kind of like a secure vault for your data). In order to encrypt you files you simply mount the secure area of your pen drive and copy the files into it has you normally would then dismount it when finished. I was initially going to create a step by step tutorial in order to show how this can be achieved, however before I started I discovered an excellent tutorial which can be found here.