I had an interesting task today, my manager came in in a blind panic telling me that all of her files on her computer have been deleted and the hard drive has broken, is there anything I can do? Well ok, let me have a look…she boots up the machine into Windows, which was the first odd thing, and when she signs in a program pops up called Windows Recovery looking fairly official and there are a ton of “Critical Errors” popping up from the system tray, the desktop background is blank and every file on the computer is gone. I can see why she’s panicing. For a moment I’m confused as this laptop is always run on a secure network so I thought it unlikely to be malware, but it’s obvious that the hard drive isn’t busted, it’s booted into windows so malware is the only logical conclusion.
So how can it be fixed? Interestingly as soon as I tried doing anything slightly complicated such as opening a CMD window it restarts the computer which resets it going through the myriad of “error” windows. So I need to quit this application before I can do anything at all, the task manager won’t open so I need to find another application to do it for me. A quick google and I find iExplore (Download) that successfully killed the application. Nice.
Next is to get all of the offending programs deleted, would be easy if our network wasn’t blocking every useful site under the sun, ok I’ll tether my mac with the iphone and dl it that way. A quick USB switch later and it’s on the affected laptop. Spybot should get it done but just in case I’ll aso put on the free version of Malwarebytes. Install both of those and run the scans. They take a while but it’s best to be thorough. They find quite a lot, get rid of the malware and restart to complete.
Great, but on restart all of the files are still missing…crap. I doubt that the software deleted the files and an obvious ‘show hidden files’ isn’t going to cut it and I’m not going to go through every individual file and show the hidden files even if it did. Need another way. Another quick google comes up with this little gem: unhide.exe. Download (once again through the tethered mac) and run, it took a while giving me reason to think that it wouldn’t run at all, but eventually all of the files pop back up on the window and a quick check shows that all of the files have been restored.
So a lot of work to undo something that loos like it was downloaded by clicking through a link on a dodgy website. Moral? On the web, if you don’t know if it’s real don’t go near it. However the manager was delighted as she thought the whole computer was a lost call…sometimes it pays to know about computers
So we have several new projects at work which we are working on concurrently which is getting quite mental. My favourite of which is our new design for the old Dream Weddings website (which is desperately needed!). So this is the design so far:
One of my favourite things about this site so far is the map on the home page. We have used an SVG so the whole thing is generated by a page of coordinates and styled by CSS. SVGs aren’t compatible with IE so if you look at it in IE then we use an awesome tool to convert it to Flash so it still works! Pretty cool no?
At the time of writing the site is about a month away from completion and will only truly work in Chrome, Safari or Firefox (and maybe Opera), and the other tabs don’t go anywhere at the moment but the map does and you can browse all of the destinations. I have taken off the link to the site as it’s passworded now as it’s obviously been trawled by google and is coming up in searches, but once it’s live I will shout about it on here!
So I have finally been tempted by the processors in the new line of macbook pros, I mean a 4 threaded beast in a 13″ laptop, it’s pretty impressive. I even managed to scrounge a student discount off the guy in the apple store – so 15% off! It seems that it may become a tradition that I update my mac when they put in a new processor architecture since my last one was on the Core 2 Due update (almost 5 years ago!!)
I have been using it for a couple of days now and it is super quick on everything from Photoshop to Call of Duty! If anyone is thinking of updating I would say don’t hesitate.
So I have been working as an in-house developer for Miles Morgan Travel for six months now and the experience so far has been pretty great, let me explain.
My previous projects either at university or freelance have been very fleeting, you would work on one project and then let it go for another one that has to take all of your attention, even though it’s not perfect you have no choice but to go on to the next one. With in-house development you get to work on a project, just like any other. It has the same lifecycle, but once that project is finished you know that you can come back to it and carry on development, so when you have a great idea 3 months down the line you can actually go back and implement it. With this potential in the evolution of my projects they become much more meaningful to me and that means that I’m proud of them which makes me work all the more harder on them.
So the main website has been finished for a couple of months now and it would be great if you would take a look at it here. So there have definitely been ups and downs on this project just like any other; the backend admin isn’t very usable, the number of destinations isn’t where we would like it to be, some of the page layouts are basic, but these are problems that we can fix over time.
So maybe the greatest strength of being an in-house developer can also be it’s weakness. We had a deadline for this project and as soon as it was ready we were told to put it live. Now I am a bit of a perfectionist and I didn’t feel like this project was finished, but I didn’t have a choice, and now I am working on other projects it may be a while before we get the chance to come back and implement the next phase, but at least I will get the chance.
So it has recently come to my attention that Google are ending development for their inspired Google Wave. While it doesn’t surprise me in the least it does make me sad, as even though it did have functionality problems, usability problems and the titanic foe of email, it also had some epic brilliance.
For those of you who don’t know what Google Wave is, I wrote a fairly short wiki entry on it for a university project which should get you up to speed.
So what was the problem with Wave? Having pushed the technology time and time again at University as a medium to use while writing projects in a group, I see myself as somewhat of a Wave Crusader…but it was very rarely used in a significant way. I attributed this down to people wanting to stick to what they know, and that is Microsoft Office, but it was very successful as a way of combining notes on the layout of a project and for assigning tasks once the layout was finished.
In fact, looking down my list of waves, the majority of them are lists and I have never used the extra functionality they have on there such as photos, maps, polls and games. While the idea behind all of these are good, without some functionality that everyone one would use in a collaborative setting there is just no point in having these ‘gimmicky’ functions. By functionality that everyone would use I mean spreadsheets, presentation software along with the word processing, and then being able to have them all in one wave.
But wouldn’t Wave then start competing with Google Docs? I think that is exactly the problem. Wave tried to pass itself off as email reinvented but came to sit between a messaging app and a word processing environment, neither of which people really need, and that confused everyone. At university I had to do a presentation on Google Wave to show everyone what it actually was, and it wasn’t an easy task. I came from the angle of ‘email replacement’, but having used it I don’t feel that it is. The best way I can describe it now is instant messaging but with added functionality such as inserting images and it keeps all the conversation in a well organised and readable manner.
The best we can now hope for is that some of what Google has learned with Wave will come through in Docs, because it is in dire need of an update. Welcome additions would be some sort of easy to use commenting system, easy embedding and better controls for document manipulation, not to mention more compatibility between spreadsheets, presentations and word processing.
Wave was a brilliant idea, and if it was a bit more polished with a few more useful bits of functionality it could have stood a real chance of becoming successful, so it makes me a bit sad to say goodbye, but I really hope something useful can be brought to Google’s future products.
A good friend of mine, Sam Gardener, is in the process of writing a play called Mylar Baggs. The play is a murder mystery based around heroes and villains, comic book style. There are songs and all, we have even recorded one of them:
This is only an evening’s work, but gives an impression of how far Sam has come with the show.
I really enjoy photography, and since investing in a DSLR (Canon naturally), a decent lense, and a tripod I have tried to improve my eye for it. You can view some of my selected images here, but I also make selected albums available to view on my MobileMe server.
These days I have been tending to focus (excuse the pun) on HDR landscapes, creating one image from several variably exposed images to give depth and contrast to the colour, here are a couple of examples:
Image release was built for Neil Edbrooke, a very talented photographer based in Bristol. This site incorporates a gallery framework called Plogger. It took a lot of time to work out how Plogger worked and edit the code so just the gallery was left, this is because it gives the user an entire page rather than just the picture content that was needed. It has a very easy to use content management system, allowing Neil to upload as many photos as he wants and giving him the ability to edit the size and quality in the admin section.
Research on other photography sites has shown me that many are cluttered by superfluous links that increase the difficulty of navigation. I built Image Release with a very clean design, trying to make the navigation as simple as possible. I believe this enhances the function of the site, as the simplistic design does not interfere with the viewing of the photography. This was reinforced by making the site very dark to make the images and their colours stand out against the background.
The site can be viewed here.
Sqeakr was my final year project for my degree and was a pretty big task. It is a collaborative application for musicians which allows them to sign up and post threads asking other musicians for support on how to record music. It is basically a forum that allows the users to post up their tracks for appraisals from other musicians.
I decided to build Sqeakr from the ground up in PHP and it turned out to be a mammoth task. The site didn’t get fully completed but the general functionality is in place along with most of the styling. The extensive bug log and wish list can be seen here, while the blog for the project can be viewed here.
