In addition to getting good results and winning the contest held by O’Reilly I also got a new job as a software developer, so now when I’m not at home programming, I’m at work programming! It’s been a bit tough making the transition from the life of a student to doing five full days of work every week but I can’t complain as I am doing something I love and I am working with nice people who are helping me get to grips with their way of doing things. As a result of starting my new job one of my new projects has been slowed down a bit, as well as the development of EDK (which is now nearly finished) but I’m slowly picking the pace back up as I get adjusted to working life. My new project is another Xbox LIVE game which I will also make available on the PC, I have managed to get quite a lot of people on board so far; at the moment the team consists of:

• One developer (myself as you can imagine)
• One artist
• Two graphics designers
• Five level designers
• Two audio engineers

The only thing really missing at the moment is someone to come up with a storyline, but if I fail to find anyone to come up with a plot I’ll just throw in more blood and violence – that is a suitable replacement for a good story isn’t it?

Check out phpAnalyzer at: http://www.phpanalyzer.co.uk/

What is phpAnalyzer?

phpAnalyzer allows users to upload a script to the system, at which point it will scan the script for bad PHP development practise; once the file has been fully scanned a report will be displayed to the user which indicates what they need to revise and display possible solutions to the problems, which in most cases will contain links to the appropriate pages in the online PHP manual which will aid the user in implementing the updated and correct methods and or global objects.

Who is phpAnalyzer aimed at?

It is primarily aimed towards students / people learning PHP as with an ever growing number of students and freelance developers turning to online resources it is important that a tool be available that will allow the developer-to-be to ensure what they are reading about is indeed the way they should be tackling a given problem.

Joo is a lightweight and portable OODBMS for Java developers which was originally being developed to support some of the functionality being implemented in the new major update of SPG2 before being branched off into its own project. If you are interested in getting involved with Joo or want to try it out for yourself you can get the latest release and information at http://www.joodbms.co.uk/

The next major update that has been planned for SPG2 is going to contain a complete redesign of the GUI and will add new functionality in the way you can store your passwords; to be more specific it will contain an encrypted password bank which will allow you to store your generated passwords with notes along side them as a means of identifying what they are for. If you want to follow the progression of this update you can do so via the 2.5.x branch in the repository at the Google Code page.

Updates to SPG2 and Joo are currently taking a bit longer than expected as I am studying for my final exams at the moment, but within the next fortnight I will be finished with education for good – leaving me with more time to commit to the progression of these projects and others that I am currently prototyping and designing

CrackerHash -  a program I developed originally for the purpose of demonstrating how inefficient brute forcing can be as the number of potential combinations increases, however can be an effective tool for reverse engineering MD5 hashes. It should be noted I take no responsibility for any activity you use this application for, it has been released as a means of data recovery and as an educational tool and I do not encourage this to be used for any illegal activity.

MyVimeo -  a WordPress widget which allows you to display your latest activity on Vimeo in the sidebar of your blog. It is fully customisable in that it allows you to specify how many activities you wish to display and allows you to customise the title of the plugin in the sidebar to whatever you want.

tweetbox – a WordPress plugin that let’s you display your latest tweet(s) in the sidebar of your blog, in a manner which will not disrupt the rest of your blog should Twitter be slow in responding.

The reception of tweetbox in particular has been rather amazing; within the first 24 hours of it being released it had over 230 installations via its page on the WordPress Plugin Repository and was featured in Blogging Inside’s Top 100 Twitter Tools!

If you are a user of tweetbox or MyVimeo please head over to their WordPress pages and rate them to help them become easier to find in search results

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetbox/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/myvimeo/

It took me a while to get my head around it and had to mither a friend of mine for some advice (check out his band The Portlands), but I am pretty happy with the quality that some of the recordings were coming out.

Click the play button on the small media player below to check out a sample of a recording I did. There has been no editing on the recording other than lowering the master track’s volume, a pretty impressive sound for just a raw recording in my opinion; let me know what you think though.

This bass is absolutely awesome, managed to pick it up for £170 and it sounds brilliant; this is proof that Squier are fully capable of creating a bass equally as good as Fender. The Duncans on this bass sound amazing compared to the pickups on my other jazz bass (from a Fender American jazz).

In addition to how awesome it sounds, it looks brilliant! As far as I am concerned there is no better looking bass than the 75 jazz, I’ve opted to not have any pick guards though as I always feel a bit restricted when they are on (never been keen on them).

I’ve posted a little demonstration video on YouTube, but it really does not do the bass any justice, I recorded it with just my camera as I currently have no recording equipment so the sound has come out very low and a bit distorted at places, but believe me this bass is worth every penny!

At the start of the fight switch your paradigm to Medic – Medic and continue to heal, typically he targets only one person and sticks on that target; if he is targeting Hope then be sure to start casting your heals before he attacks as Hope will take big damage.

Once Odin uses his shield ability (it will indicate he is using a shield in text above his head, and he will be standing still not attacking) switch the paradigm to Commando – Ravager and spam your auto-attack.

Keep repeating these steps and you should beat the doom timer in no time!

I did this and finished with a five star rating and didn’t come close to dying once.

The drum kit consists of four highly durable pads (similar to those you would find on any retail electric drum kit) and one pedal which connect to the MadCatz RB module via male stereo connections on the end of each pad. Once the pads are connected to the module, the module then connects to the computer via USB.

As can be seen in the demonstration video below the interaction code is fully working, along with the resource management (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to load and use the sounds), however there is still quite a long way to go before it is of much use to anyone as I still have to work on the GUI that allows for customisation; it is all coming all very nicely though.

If you have the time leave some feedback and let me know what you think of it so far

In light of nearly finishing my BSc I have also decided to join my old band as they were looking for a replacement bassist for the bassist who originally replaced me (that was a mouthfull…). If you’re on Facebook then Become a Fan of Doctor Science now!

In other news I have finished and released version 1.4 of SPG2 and it is now up for download