tcbutler.co.uk

Very exciting news for iRiver H120/140 owners – the Rockbox firmware is 75% working! What’s Rockbox, I hear you ask. What’s a firmware. Sigh. (more…)

I’ll probably build this out quite a bit over the next few months; I’ve always wanted to write my reviews and opinions down for the benefit/ boredom of others, but I’ve made a start with this very simple guide to choosing a digital camera.

Feedback always welcome.

Tom’s guide to choosing a digital camera

For work I recently had to compare two contact databases from different sources to find common entries. We got most of the way comparing postcodes and surnames, but realised that a certain amount of fuzziness was required in the match/ no-match process. Many commercial packages and services offer very ingenious ways to do this, but as usual I started pursuing it of my own accord. I discovered the SOUNDEX function included in many SQL systems, and then the general basis for this, metaphonics; ways of encoding certain sounds with an algorithm to allow words to be compared.

After doing all the usual Google searches I couldn’t find a nice straightforward VBA implementation to stick into my Access database, and after reading a few pages on the subject (will post links when I find them again) realised that for 20 mins work I could save myself searching. So, let me introduce v1 of Metaphonics for VBA; your feedback is welcome.

http://www.tcbutler.co.uk/vba-metaphonics-implementation-v1/

Remarkably, after years of owning this domain, it’s taken this long to actually set up my gallery of my round-the-world trip photos. I haven’t captioned most of the pictures yet, but they’re there to see at http://www.tcbutler.co.uk/gallery.

Expect to see a load more photos appearing there soon!

I’ve been building justwanna.com with mambo for a while now. I’ve done a bit more reading (mainly on www.opensourcecms.com) and a lot more playing on my offline version of the site, and think that drupal might be a better alternative. Why?

• It’s written a lot more simply (ie – I can understand most of the code)
• It has an ingenious category system (you define a series of category structures, each of which can be hierarchical, and which can overlap as you attach any number of categories to an article, post, comment etc, which are just nodes in a multi-dimensional category structure – just how I wanted to do it when I was drafting a CMS a few months ago!)
• Has the same kind of community support as Mambo (though modules aren’t quite as innovative)
• Seems much better-suited to community-led sites

So maybe I’ll transfer it later this week.