This should be the final fix for anyone having a problem getting the add-in loaded

Download: ActionFTP Beta 5.

Enjoy

Related posts

• ActionFTP WindowClippings Add-in: Beta (4)
• ActionFTP Beta 4 (0)
• ActionFTP Beta 3 (0)

Among many useful and very needed blogging tips for novice bloggers, providing with handful WordPress tips, plugins and everything else related to it, Alex Cristache the man behind Blogsessive.com today has just released a new free WordPress theme. A brief description from Alex concerning the theme is as follows:

Simple Balance theme is a 3 column widget-ready WordPress theme. Some of the features include:

1. Widget-ready left and right sidebars;
2. Top 468×60 ad space;
3. Right sidebar built-in ad space for 125×125 banners;
4. SEO smart coding for titles and content;
5. WordPress 2.5 ready;
6. Valid cross-browser tested XHTML and CSS;
7. Possibility to fully display the latest X posts on homepage instead of the post excerpt (to prevent duplicate content issues);
8. Not to forget, beautifully balanced design;

If you want to get a feeling of theme’s look you can view the provided demo here, but I truly recommend that you go and download here instantly.

A little bit of more info can be found in this link.
For this accomplished work, I think Alex deserves to be hailed, do so if you drop by his place and leave him a comment.

What I hate about Digital TV, in this case, a DVB-T signal, is that it either works or it doesn’t. When I was in London I purchased an EyeTV for DTT stick, which is a small USB based TV tuner for Mac. It comes with a very nice software package called EyeTV.

Next up, where I live. I’m around 30 miles from the Sutton Coldfield transmitter, which, according to a couple of sites I searched for, is 1) uber powerful, spitting out 1000kW of analogue power (and I think about 50kW of digital power), and 2) services a ton of people, including the whole of Birmingham.

Except that doesn’t help. Because annoyingly, our house can’t even pick it up. Basically, we get average analogue reception, and really crap digital reception. Both the TV and an old Freeview box I had manages to lock onto most of the BBC channels, and some of ITV, plus a few others, but that’s it. Channel 4 and 5 and a lot of the other channels were extremely dodgy and dropped out wayyy too much to be watchable. Still, I only really wanted to watch the channels that we do get, so I got the EyeTV thing anyway.

I bring it home, plug it into both the upstairs and downstairs jacks, and, nothing. Not even the BBC which works fine downstairs.

So our antenna is either broken, not plugged in, pointing at the wrong place, or not big enough. I wonder if that means I need to get one of those ultra high antennas that are 10 meters high and need to be attatched with long steel cables so they don’t blow away?

Otherwise, I basically have a spare EyeTV here now doing nothing.

21 hours ago I received an e-mail from adsense-noreply@google.com about the planned retirement of Google’s AdSense Referral program. It’s really not an urgency but they’re giving AdSense users a clue to start cleaning up unnecessary and future useless code so to speak. The last appearance of Referral links will stop showing in the last week of August 2008.

I didn’t really profit that much from this program, actually not from the whole AdSense at all, hence it’s not influencing me in any way. Last time I checked my total income through AdSense was only $0.91, which really is to be ashamed of. However, I know some people who earned hell of a benefit from it, and this news could find them unprepared.

The newly implemented strategy is totally different comparing to the old Referrals. Google has acquired DoubleClick Performics, hence their Affiliate Program will be functioning as part of the Google Affiliate Network. From all this inflection, considering that Google is always “constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers”, there was a sentence that caught my eye for a second while, reading through that email letter:

Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States.

I’m not aware if AdSense Referrals worked the same way only for US advertisers, as I told you I wasn’t much of an AdSense fortunate, but the above statement tells me more or less that users from other countries won’t profit anything using this newly implemented program. At least not for the beginning, probably later on it’ll widen it’s possibilities. Thus, this means that as long as I’m leaving in Kosova, I shall not plan on using this service, instead search for other alternatives. Period.

Whatsoever, there is a sign I’ve usually noticed when a company gets acquired by a bigger one. They usually lack the time to update they’re website once they get pwned. The same detail I noticed at Performics Affiliate Marketing page (see for yourself if page is not altered yet). The Google Affiliate Network logo used there is of the highest resolution possible, they didn’t even think of resizing it. Probably it could be a matter of “feeling proud to be Google” thing or either “I don’t want to use Microsoft Paint to destroy Google’s Logo quality”. Either ways it looks not nice.

Last but not least, AdSense for Search & AdSense for Content are not altered from this deflation. So consider continuing to earn income, if until now you did so. I wish I would though.

A few people have had problems getting ActionFTP to register with WindowClippings, so this beta should hopefully fix that

Read the original or any subsequent posts on ActionFTP for more info.

Download: ActionFTP Beta 4.

Enjoy

Related posts

• ActionFTP WindowClippings Add-in: Beta (4)
• ActionFTP Beta 3 (0)
• ActionFTP Beta 2 (1)

I went to London this past weekend. Left by car on Friday, came back last night (Sunday), and had quite a good weekend. I went on the Eye (twice), had a wonder around London, saw the Apple Store in Regent Street (I got an EyeTV DTT stick from there, which now doesn’t work. I think it’s a reception issue. ), had dinner and food at a couple of places, then went to Thorpe Park on Sunday.

Thorpe Park ended up being a bit of a mess, as I managed to lose dad in the afternoon, so I spent about an hour trying to find him and by then we had:
1) Missed out on going on Stealth, Logger’s Leap, Slammer, Colossus (it was closed), Rush (it looked very broken), Samurai, Zodiac and Depth Charge, and
2) Had to go and pick mum up from Central London again and drive all the way back up to Stafford.

I did, however, manage to ride the Tidal Wave (which is wet…and I mean wet. It’s like having a bath, twice, in a period of 5 seconds), Detonator, Nemesis Inferno, Rumba Rapids (which, FYI, is rubbish compared to Alton’s Congo River Rapids), Quantum, Vortex, X:\ No Way Out (which was awesome), and a couple of others.

So, I’ll have to try out those rides again in either August (my birthday) or October (going to see James Blunt) when we’re most likely next going to London.

I also took a small selection of photos, which can be found on my Flickr Photostream, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/williamhook/sets/72157605901566515/

I’m indeed feeling a little bit angry. Why do I always have to be the last one to be aware of new things about WordPress. Although I haven’t posted in a while now, keeping track of WordPress events is something that can’t keep me silent.

Ryan Boren just posted about the latest made changes, and believe me the list is quite impressive. He states that 2.6 isn’t a big release as 2.5 was, but I honestly think that this is it, this is how WordPress should be actually. Probably this should have been the “big” 2.5 release. But anyway, here’s the list of new stuff one can experience if one gets 2.6 installed.

• Post Revisioning
• A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
• Caching of static files with Gears for faster Admin page loads
• A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
• Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
• Built-in word counting in the post editor
• The ability to disable remote publishing for the security conscious
• XML-RPC API for changing blog options
• Better SSL support for the Admin
• Hierarchy-aware paging in the Manage Pages and Manage Categories admin pages.
• The ability to relocate your content directory
• The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Customizable default avatars
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• Check box range selection with shift-click
• TinyMCE 3.1.0.1 with lots of bug fixes
• jQuery 1.2.6 with some nice performance improvements
• jQuery UI 1.5
• Lots of bug fixes and performance improvements

I’m preparing to go out for a tennis match with my cousin, but surely as soon as I return, a brand new WP 2.6 review is expected to show up here. In mean time, if your curiosity pushes you to get hands dirty on 2.6 earlier click and grab it here right away. Laterz.

Well, kinda. Basically, I was at Alton Towers today and I (as usual) went on the Spinball Whizzer first. So, I queued for about 20 minutes (I generally always use the single rider queue as it’s generally quicker), got on the ride, and it starts off, round the first bend and then…..stops. On the very bottom of the lift hill.

So I wait. And wait. And wait…and eventually the one assistant girl comes over and says “sorry, someone jumped over the queue line and because of the sensors in the ride area, it automatically shut off so we have to reset the whole ride”. So I stay on it for about 10 more minutes, and eventually they come over again and say “right, we need to get you off, so, <blah blah safety info blah blah>, and then you’ll need to sign a form with your name and address on it for insurance reasons for us”. So they gave me a long explanation of how to get out the car because it was more then a 1cm drop (blame Tony Blair’s STUPID health and safety rubbish), so I ignored that and just jumped down off the car. They didn’t like that.

Anyway, I managed to get two free passes for either Oblivion or the Spinball Whizzer to get in the priority queue, for two people, so I went with my dad on both.

Before I went on Oblivion though, I decided to do a quick ride on Enterprise, which…..broke down. So, it was about an hour and a half I had been at the park, and not ridden anything.

Eventually though, I managed to ride most of the stuff, bar Air, Nemesis, and Rita (they ALWAYS have long queue lines), and one of the other rides, Ripsaw, broke down just as I was about to go on it…3rd time unlucky today.

Not plizz! originally uploaded by Arian.x

It’s been a while since I’ve uploaded a new photo in my Flickr photostream.

P.S. i’ve kept this write post window opened for half of the day now while not knowing what to say about it. So now I think I’m finishing it.
Enjoy my last image :).

Just a quick update to the previous release of ActionFTP, that fixes a large bug in the settings saving/loading code which often prevented the settings window from opening and a small, rare bug I encountered regarding the FTP port option (which may have been related to the settings bug, but who knows)

See the original or beta 2 posts for more info.

Download: ActionFTP Beta 3.

Enjoy

Related posts

• ActionFTP WindowClippings Add-in: Beta (4)
• ActionFTP Beta 4 (0)
• ActionFTP Beta 2 (1)

I got an iMac yesterday, from the Apple Store in Birmingham.

It’s the 2.8Ghz 24 inch model, and it’s awesome. The screen is uber clear, and OS X is superb - I can’t believe I lived without it for so long since I had a Mac mini.

Anyway, I put some unboxing pics on my photostream so have a look here.

I’m still getting used to some of OS X’s quirks again, but so far I’m almost spot on, except for mainly copy and paste (CMD+C instead of Ctrl+C).

This is just a small update to the previous release of ActionFTP which adds an option to change the FTP port used to upload to your server.

Please see the previous post for more info on ActionFTP, or perhaps you’d like to view a screenshot of the configuration window

Download: ActionFTP Beta 2.

Enjoy

Related posts

• ActionFTP WindowClippings Add-in: Beta (4)
• ActionFTP Beta 4 (0)
• ActionFTP Beta 3 (0)

Even occasional surf leads to interesting stuff. Sometimes you just drop on a strange site you’ve never ever seen nor heard before. But there’s something that attracts you by any means. And then it’s kinda nice to share it with others.

This is how I currently feel, probably you won’t laugh as much as I did, or even not find it funny but it’s always worth giving it a try. Hope you’ll find it a little entertaining. Whether yes or not, don’t hesitate to shout a comment, it costs you only a few words

Credit: to Travors

But despite of the image, we as humans are expected to always try hard. Even if we’re mushrooms.

Two blog posts within an hour(ish), a record!

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to let readers of my blog in on a little secret, and it helps if you’re a regular on TVF as well.

So basically, two bits of news, first of all, TVF v3. I made a very simple small banner for advertising it, and, as much as I would like to say what it is, I’m not allowed to, bahaha. But I will say that it’s something that should make the whole site quite a bit better, and more intergrated, but that’s all I’m saying. So, just enjoy the banner for now:

Secondly, and I can talk about this more openly, is that we’re planning on giving away an Xbox 360 (and possibly some games, too) in the coming months, so look out for that too. I’m not sure exactly which model it will be yet, but it’ll most likely be the Elite or the one below that, the Premium. First prize will probably also get a free game too, but don’t hold me on that, as we’re still discussing the specifics.

You will need to do a little work to be able to win it, but, for a free 360 it’s worth it, yes?

That Dell 2407WFP-HC that I ordered last month actually wasn’t a 2407WFP-HC. It was the older 2407WFP revision A04 model, which is the one before the “-HC”, which has more colour then the one I have right now.

I only noticed this a few days ago when Fr3d posted a screenshot of his device manager in IRC, and his showed an “-HC” model, whereas mine didn’t. So, I looked around a bit, and mine is indeed the wrong one.

So, since dad had placed the order I got him to email the guy, Mark, at MCS, and check, and I was indeed correct, it’s the wrong one. So, after a couple of emails, a courier is coming next week with an actual -HC, and at the same time pick up the box with mine in it (so I’ll be without a monitor for half an hour).

Overall, very good service on behalf of MCS, so, I would highly recommend them. It was also pretty good value, even though it’s a refurb, the 2407WFP that I have now basically arrived brand new, the only sign of use was a tiny scratch on the left (and I mean tiny), but for the sake of saving over £100 off the retail price, who cares?

It became what it should have been in the beginning. Windows Live Writer team has released an update of their product with significant changes which directly impact Writer users. If they’d have made this improvements a little bit earlier, probably would have saved my time from being forced to finalize my posts from within WordPress admin panel. Speaking of it, Windows Live Writer is publishers number one favorite tool for blogging. If you ever got a chance to drink a coffee with me, most probably you could hear me declare: “There are only two products Microsoft deserves to be acknowledged of, Visual Studio and Windows Live Writer.” In a nutshell, following are the latest changes.

New Features for users:

Video and Image Publishing Enhancements

• Upload videos to Soapbox
• Image cropping and tilting
• Additional border styles
• Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
• Support for centering images

Editing Enhancements

• Auto Linking
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count

UI Improvements

• Revised main toolbar
• Tabs for view switching
• Improved category control with search/filtering

New for developers:
SDK Updates
What is pretty much obvious once you fire up Live Writer are the tabs to change from three different modes: Edit, Preview and Source. In previous versions this was done only through main menu, now tabs came as a very useful addition.

Image manipulation just got better. Earlier we weren’t able to align any post image left, right or center it. But now when you select an inserted image you’ll have the opportunity to align it as you wish, even various types of borders can be applied. I’ll use the Rounded Corners on this post for they seem to look just nice.

As stated above, cropping & tilting is now the newest opportunity one can experience within Live Writer.

The main menu is much better organized and specific tasks are in appropriate places. Although there’s something I would have made different though. In the top-right of Live Writer’s window there’s this button which has completely the same options as the Weblog menu. If they’d have asked me I would turn that into a Switch blogs button. Thus, giving the user an easier way to select within blogs.
Actual functionality

My suggested modification

And finally, there’s an option called Word Count. Honestly this is where Windows Live Writer Team beats Automattic. WordPress still lacks this function promising to bring it with the future 2.6 release, hopefully.
In Live Writer now you can check how many words your post consists of, paragraphs, characters with and without spaces.
And this post overall consists of

This is the first (and hopefully the last) beta of ActionFTP, an add-in I have written in C# for Kenny Kerr’s WindowClippings - a simple, yet incredible easy and very high-quality screenshot utility for Windows.

Two Important Notes:

• This is a beta, so I’ve set it to expire in July (just to stop people from using old code that could (but hopefully won’t) contain bugs).
• You will require a license to use this, as WindowClippings doesn’t allow unregistered users to use add-ins.
• Update: The current (and newer) versions of WindowClippings no longer require licenses to use add-ins!

To save me rewriting it, I’ve taken this from the readme file I wrote earlier:

ActionFTP is a “Send To” add-in: it takes the processed clipping (after any extra “Filter” add-ins have done their stuff), saves a copy to your “temp” folder, and then opens it for editing/annotating/etc in a program of your choice (eg. Photoshop, Paint.Net, The GIMP), before automatically uploading it to any FTP server of your choice, and then copying the direct web-facing URL to the new clipping to your clipboard.

ActionFTP shares a number of features and similarities with Ari Glaizel’s “Send to FTP” add-in, which I used for months before developing ActionFTP. If you’re used to “Send to FTP”, you should find ActionFTP very familiar!

Installation instructions and some other notes are in the “README.txt” file, so it might be worth a quick read

Please feel free to suggest any changes or report any problems you encounter using the comments form below.

If you receive the following error message: “The addin failed to register”, it’s likely that the WindowClippings.exe and/or WindowClippings.dll file is an old version.

Update: By request, I’ve added a Yes/No prompt before opening the .exe you specify - very useful if you want to quickly upload a basic clipping and have no need to wait for Photoshop/etc to open

Download: ActionFTP Beta 1.

Enjoy!

Related posts

• ActionFTP Beta 4 (0)
• ActionFTP Beta 3 (0)
• ActionFTP Beta 2 (1)

We all love it for it’s simplicity, or at least I do. However, some source claims that Gmail soon will get built-in themes available for it’s users.

I’m not even going into wondering of how the themes will look like or how many of them will be, but what pushes me to write about this, is the thought of why didn’t they make it earlier. Google’s engagement has certainly been much higher upon dealing with troubles caused by other competitors and other particular things rather than worrying about Gmail themes. Plus it could be intentional but the BETA tag still remains there, 4 years and 3 months since it’s initial launch a lot could have been accomplished, considering the fact of Google having 19,156 full-time employees under its giant empire, yet it remains there.

Ultimately, users are able to change the look & feel of GMail, but that in an indirect way of approach, through a GreesMonkey script, using a Firefox extension called Stylish with one, two, three or more user created styles, and again through another Firefox add-on.

If you ask me, there’s no certain need to do that, whether or not Gmail is skinnable makes no real impression to me.
Its functionality is what I like the most.

My honest readers!

I’m very sorry of my absence during all this time.
The last two weeks I’ve gone through a serious fuss with many issues and troubles. Hopefully managed to settle everything down and renormalize again. I’ve put to it’s end another heavy year of my military studies, in the other hand the Computer Science part is almost over, actually it’s over with lectures I just have to deal with the rest of left exams. But that’s trivial for I usually manage it right therefore I don’t panic so much. What matters to me is YOU, the reader, the returning visitor, I’m barely fine without you.

Sincerely, nothing makes more happy to see most of you returning, eventhough I haven’t served you anything new for so long. In relation to that, I wanted to say a big THANK YOU to each of you in particular, while letting you know that during these summer holidays as I’m off from school, I’ll completely engage myself to providing you with interesting articles and various stories from different topics.

While wishing you all the best and a great week, I put this announcement to it’s end and hoping for future contact with everyone.

P.S. I’ve got a new camera hence you could browse my Flickr photostream to enjoy my latest shots, I’m gonna prepare an article for my Canon Rebel XSi.

Cheers, may God bless YOU all!

I’ve been playing GTAIV since the release day, and I just passed 50% this weekend, so I thought it would be a good idea to summarise it in a bit more detail since my last (rather short) post about it.

It still remains my favourite game of all time, for sure. The look and feel of Liberty City is absolutley fantastic, and it actually feels like a real city. The hundreds, if not thousands of little touches to the game make it a superb environment to play in, and the story line so far is also very good. It does get a little confusing because there are so many characters, but it’s still an incredible game.

The fact that Rockstar also have not only thought about the game, but the out-of-game experence, is superb. Case in point, if I like a song on the radio, I simply pull up my phone, go to the phonebook, and call “ZiT”, the music service. Just like in real life, it’ll “listen” to the track you’re playing and then a moment later, you get a text message. But thats’s not all. You also get an email from Rockstar, so you can download the song yourself on your PC. Now that’s clever. Here it is, for those who don’t have the game:

However, as good as GTAIV is, I do have one complaint. The in-game phone. First of all, it’s too small, even on a 40 inch HDTV. Second of all, why are the multiplayer options there? Honestly, Rockstar, the phone is a very good tool, but it would be a whole lot better if it was bigger. I’m talking Blackberry. Niko can get the horrible standard phone at the start of the game, but then give us an option to upgrade or something!

Anyway, apart from that, and a few other minor issues, it’s still a fantastic game, and if you haven’t yet played it, get out from under your rock and go buy it!