Archive for August, 2008
2009 One Page Excel Calendar
Following on from my 2008 Excel one page calendar I've produced a new yearly calendar for 2009. This time I've done a blank one with just the days / months marked out, and one with the UK bank holidays highlighted. 2009 Excel calendar - blank (7kb) 2009 Excel calendar - with UK Bank Holidays highlighted (7kb) Like before you should [...]
Graphing the AXA Sun Life 50 Plus Protector
Following on from my post where I graphed the AXA Sun Life Guaranteed Over 50 plan I thought I'd look at a more complex product to see what kind of graphs I could get out of it. Unlike the Over 50 plan, the AXA Sun Life 50 Plus Protector features a lump sum and premium that increases over time. There is also a maximum number of years that the [...]
HMS Belfast visit in London
As it was a bank holiday weekend I decided to visit the HMS Belfast. It was a Royal Navy warship, which is now permanently moored in the Thames as a museum. You'll find it near London Bridge tube station. It served in World War II and for around 20 years afterwards. You can explore the ship seven days a week. On the day I visited it was [...]
Graphing the AXA Sun Life Guaranteed Over 50 Plan
On TV recently I've been bombarded by adverts about the AXA Sun Life Guaranteed Over 50 Plan. The current version of the advert is presented by Michael Parkinson. Previous versions have been presented by June Whitfield. I am no way near the age of 50 and these plans have no relevance to me. I should also point out that I am not a financial [...]
Are your website and blog earnings at risk?
There are a lot of websites out there telling you how you can make money out of your website or blog. You may have decided to try some of these ideas to make some money out of your web presence. Perhaps you even rely on your web-generated money for a significant slice of your income. If you have then have you ever analysed how secure this income [...]
Picking the 5th from last element in a singly linked list
Here's another of those fun coding interview puzzles. The kind that companies like Microsoft or Google might ask you. Given a singly linked list, select the 5th from last element. I'm writing the solution in C++ but the solution in Java would be almost identical. I'm also putting up my test code. The restrictions are - you can only make one [...]
How I stay safe from viruses and spyware for free
Being connected to the internet has - according to various news sources - got more and more dangerous over the years. A metric that is commonly quoted is the average time it takes for an unprotected PC to become infected by viruses / spyware after it has been connected to the internet. In 2004 the time was apparently 20 minutes. By 2005 the [...]
Starting a group of programs from a DOS batch file
I use my computer for a variety of purposes - for example writing web content, programming, or word processing. For each of these activities I need a different set of programs to be loaded. To take one example when I'm writing or modifying web pages I need: NoteTab Pro which I use to edit the HTML files' WS_FTP Pro for uploading the [...]
Batch processing photos with DOS and ImageMagick
For my recent walking project I knew I was going to be taking lots of photos. I wanted a DOS script which would batch process the JPEG photos from my camera into the 'full sized images' (which are much smaller than the raw camera images), and the poloroid-like thumbnails. The excellent ImageMagick tool provides a way to generate poloroid-like [...]
Speeding up a WordPress blog with caching
I decided to investigate some methods of speeding up page load times on my this blog. An obvious way to do this seemed to be to add some caching to the site to reduce the load on the MySQL server. Searching for WordPress caching information gives a lot of references to adding a define('WP_CACHE', true); line to your wp-config.php file. [...]
