Earlier this year I made the decision to stop updating the BMTG site as-and-when and more formally as packages. Yesterday I launched the 4th such package – Deoxys.

Unlike some of my other packages which have had more visible changes, this is more “back end”. Having said that, to me, it’s exciting stuff. The site is performing more caching and I’ve completely re-written most of the MySQL – it’s more efficient and protected against SQL injection (I hope).

There’s also detection of MySQL failures – when this happens a message bar appears at the top of each page indicating that a problem is occuring and that the site may be affected. The site pages are then designed to degrade gracefully – in other words, either cope with the lack of database access (easier for some pages) or simply display an appropriate message to indicate that no information is currently unavailable. In the past any database problems have simply lead to the site erroring and generally looking shabby.

Additionally, I’ve added some flags to the back-end database. These indicate either a major problem or that the site is undergoing maintenace – I can then flick these flags on when required and a message will appear on the site. The maintenance is particularly handy to turn on whilst I’m upgrading the site.

Lastly, and one of the few visible changes, I updated the member profiles – they’re a bit plainer than before but I think they work a lot more effectively now, as they’re less “fussy”.

Now I’ve started work on the Eevee package – I’ve already written the maintenance changes (including the width of the pages being increased, whilst still ensuring that a horizontal scrollbar doesn’t appear on 800 pixel wide monitors), but the main changes is to the online shop, which helps to generate some much-needed cash for the society.

Meantime, if you can guess (no looking on Wikipedia!) the naming convention I’m using then… you’re sad. Ok, that makes me sad too. And Catherine Furber, who also knew it.

When I originally reviewed Google Chrome I did at as a home user. I’d just got my mits on it, installed it, browsed with it and gave my comments. And they still stand – it’s not very exciting and the speed increases they spoke about, I can barely notice them.

However, having spent some time reading more about the Chrome browser it becomes evident that this is far more important that it may first appear.

First of all, we have the OpenSource V8 JavaScript engine – written from scratch in machine code (rather than a higher level language, as others are).

Secondly, we have the fact that Chrome manages each tab as a seperate process. This means if a website crashes, it only takes down that tab.

Lastly, we have the various commands that can be typed in to display memory and process managers. A bit like the information on Windows Task Manager (you know, CTRL, ALT, DEL).

All of this means two things…

1. Once we get the plugins and all the other nice stuff that makes Firefox so cool and froody, this could pan out to be a superb browser.
2. If Google is not (and the moment they say they’re not) intending this to be their own OS then I’ll eat… my arse.

And by that second point, I mean the Chrome has all the components that makes it an OS – everything runs in separate processes, with memory and process management, etc. We all knew that with so many applications going online, then something as basic as a browser was the future of OS’ (although you still need something “backend” to run it on, and sort out hardware, etc) and this certainly looks like that way.

And, I’ll be honest, as a Beta release Chrome is pretty damn stable and un-buggy.

Now I just want to be able to change that default theme…

I visited my brother-in-laws yesterday (I mentioned that in my previous post). My wife had mentioned to me that their PC was running very slow and was very noisy. Now I know they’re not overly IT literate, so I thought I’d help out.

My external 2.5 hard drive was packed full of software, I had a PC toolkit with me and a box full of hardware goodies. And a pencil and paper.

We got there whilst they were out – thankfully we knew where the key was, so we were able to get in – and I set to work. The side of the base unit came off and I started it up. Good lord that was noisy. It’s not an overly powerful machine and only has 2 fans in entirety (one rear case fan and the processor fan). The rear fan was, well, rubbish – it was very low quality and had a PSU power connector, so was bypassing the “proper” connection on the motherboard. I had a spare so swapped it over and connected it appropriately. The processor fan was okay but dusty – as was the heat sink underneath. I used my compressed air can to give that a good clean. In fact, I cleaned the rest quite thoroughly too.

The memory.. well I didn’t have any spare of that type so I wasn’t able to help. But they were running XP Pro with 1GB of memory, which should have been fine.

So, I booted into the BIOS and ensured that Cool N’ Quiet was active (it was an AMD machine) and all other measures of that sort.

After that, a swift boot into Windows showed the root of many of the problems – some spyware. That was swiftly removed. I also installed the latest AMD processor driver, did a thorough clean of the system (Ccleaner coming in handy, as always) as well as various de-fragmentations (main file system, registry and page). They also had so many IE toolbars installed that the main browser window was only about half the screen – many of these toolbars have come, by default, from the ISP software and various other software they’ve installed (shame on BT for the former). They don’t actually have a great amount of software on their machine so it was easy to pick over where things had come from.

And that was it. I was down a fan but had a cracking Indian meal that evening, and they were very grateful for my help.

The noise isn’t 100% though. Although Cool n Quiet is definitely switched on, etc, the fan doesn’t appear to be powering down so is still hammering along at full speed – strange. But it’s still a hell of a lot better than it was.

I’m also available for weddings and Bar Mitzvah’s