Daniel’s Stuff

Somewhere where I can muse about the things that interest me

Archive for the 'Web' Category

Bob Lives!

August 14th, 2010 | Category: Hardware,Programming,Web

After a couple of false starts with dead voltage regulators, Bob (my daughter named it) the PIC based ethernet device lives in a more permanent incarnation.  Bob is made from bits and pieces I had around the place (I now have several very dead network hubs).  The budget for the project was zero ;)
My Dad provided me with the PIC prototyping board pictured above and many of the pieces as well as the PIC18F452.  The ENC28J60 ethernet controller was kindly provided by Microchip through their very generous free samples.
The original voltage regulator on the PIC prototyping board didn’t seem to be up to powering both the PIC and the ethernet controller, so I went through my old retired networking gear until I found a 3.3V regulator.  Unfortunately I think I popped it in the process of removing it from the board and it no longer worked :( .  In the end I used a 7805 5V regulator and then ran the output of that through a pair of diodes in a bridge rectifier (thank again for the help with that one Dad) to drop the voltage down to about 3.5V or so.
Now I need to get my PIC Forth running on this hardware and then I’ll have a networked Forth device I can play with :)
1 comment

What I’ve been up to lately

August 10th, 2010 | Category: Hardware,Programming,Web
I’ve been really busy recently and have not had much time to work on my side projects.
One that I’ve been working on off and on for some time is a networked PIC micro-controller.
This morning I finally got it responding to ICMP echo request (ping) :)

The next thing I need to do is make a board for it.  That brings me to another project I’ve just started.  I have started a port of the awesome PCB program to Cocoa.  Things are coming along really nicely :)
No comments

What I’ve been doing recently

July 26th, 2009 | Category: Web
Today I found out that an application I built for the iPhone has become available on the iTunes store.  It’s a simple little app to estimate electricity bills for a household.  Check it out on the iTunes store via the following link :) AGL Energy Efficiency
I’ve also been working on the Windows Live Mail compression code some more and have gotten some good results.  Below in an example of what I’m getting

X-Message-Delivery: Vj0xLjE7dXM9MDtsPTA7YT0wO0Q9MTtTQ0w9MA==

X-Message-Status: n:0

X-SID-PRA: Daniel Parnell <me@danie******pl <m********.com>-Status: n:0Info: JGTYoYF78jHVrAq/T4xfKLLpTvwPwE0t6g/vyq6tyzbqln5iNnXwcSMg41wQCSulCxd5N8UB57Lq6un/ug7i0YsGX30yo+pm

ReceLjEE7*d: from randymail-a4.g.dreamhostm>-S ([208.97.132.207]) by bay0-mc8-f11.bay00***.hot-a4. ([2*with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.2668);

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:06:38 -080


and this is what I should be getting.


X-Message-Delivery: Vj0xLjE7dXM9MDtsPTA7YT0wO0Q9MTtTQ0w9MA==

X-Message-Status: n:0

X-SID-PRA: Daniel Parnell <me@danielparnell.com>

X-Message-Info: JGTYoYF78jHVrAq/T4xfKLLpTvwPwE0t6g/vyq6tyzbqln5iNnXwcSMg41wQCSulCxd5N8UB57Lq6un/ug7i0YsGX30yo+pm

Received: from randymail-a4.g.dreamhost.com ([208.97.132.207]) by bay0-mc8-f11.bay0.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.2668);

         Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:06:38 -0800


1 comment

I’ve been throttled

June 06th, 2009 | Category: Web

OH NO!  I’ve used up all of my download limit for the month and have been throttled down to 64kb/s.  It’s like being back on dialup again :(

localhost.localdomain-billion-month.png

Admittedly it is all my own fault.  As you can see from the chart above there was a period of sustained download earlier this month when I was downloading a very large torrent.

Ah well…  I just have to wait another 5 days for the next billing cycle to kick in to get my speed back to normal.

1 comment

IT LIVES :)

September 16th, 2008 | Category: Linux,Programming,Web
After a bit of playing about I’ve got my water level sensor working :)
I’m using Munin to log the data coming back from the unit attached to the sensor.
The unit is overkill for my needs, but since I had it lying about here and I didn’t want to spend anything to do this job it’ll have to do ;)
It’s a nice little PIC based board with 4 analog inputs, 8 digital inputs and 8 mains switchable outputs.  It also has an ethernet adaptor and the software I’m using responds to modbus commands.  I’ve had fun getting everything working.
I’d forgotten how much fun it is to make computers actually do something in the real world!
4 comments

Windows Live Mail

August 27th, 2008 | Category: Cocoa,HTTPMail,Mac OS X,Programming,Web
Just a quick note to let everybody know that I’m making good progress reverse engineering the Windows Live Mail protocol.  With the help of a couple of other people I’ve managed to determine the nature of the compression used on the message data.  We’ve successfully managed to build the decompression table and I’m now working through the routine to do the actual decompression.  IDA Pro is an amazing piece of software and I highly recommend it if you ever need to do any reverse engineering of compiled programs.

23 comments

HTTPMail 1.52 released

June 17th, 2008 | Category: Cocoa,HTTPMail,Mac OS X,Web

I’ve received quite a lot of email about 10.5.3 breaking the plugin, and finally got around to looking into it today. I have uploaded a new version of the plugin that seems to work for me ;)
As always the latest version can be grabbed from my downloads page.

103 comments

Microsoft is going to disable WebDav access to Hotmail

April 22nd, 2008 | Category: Web
Well, it was fun while it lasted, but Microsoft has finally decided to close access to its servers via the WebDav (or HttpMail) protocol.  As my hotmail plugin uses this protocol to communicate with the hotmail servers this means that as of June 30th 2008 my plugin will no longer work :(

I am looking into their new protocol called DeltaSync, but from what I can see Microsoft is using some proprietry encryption/compression on message contents, so it might take a little while (if ever) for it to see the light of day.
Thanks to everyone for all the donations and support over the last 5 years or so.
If I manage to figure out the compression then a new plugin supporting Windows Live mail should be fairly easy to create.  I’ll post progress here if there is any ;)
60 comments

Weird characters in the previous post

April 18th, 2008 | Category: Cocoa,Mac OS X,Programming,Web
Something really strange happened in the previous post.  There were these weird characters appearing in the text.  From what I can see it is WebKit trying to be helpful and create non-breaking spaces.  Unfortunately rather than insert a good old &nbsp; it is inserting 0xA0 characters.  I’ve just added some code to look for these characters and replace then with &nbsp;.  It should be interesting to see if it works ;)

3 comments

WebView woes

April 18th, 2008 | Category: Cocoa,Mac OS X,Programming,Web
I have been working on a little blog posting app for my wife for some time called BlogThing.  The first version worked well enough that I released it for download from the Automagic Software site.  It used some pretty nasty stuff that iterated over the chunks in an NSAttributedString, and while it worked pretty well I decided I wanted something a little more future proof.  To that end I decided to look into using WebView in edit mode.  Under 10.4 this worked really nicely.  I could drag in imanges, set the fonts and do all sorts of really neat things.  Unfortunately under 10.5 dragging and pasting images into the blog posting just stopped working :( and I’ve not had a lot of time to look into it.  Tonight I’ve managed to get it working well enough that I think I can finally give it to my wife to play with.
The following is an example of what I’ve had to do to get dragging to work the way I want it do.  I really don’t like it though

- (unsigned)webView:(WebView *)sender dragDestinationActionMaskForDraggingInfo:(id <NSDraggingInfo>)draggingInfo {

NSPasteboard* pb = [draggingInfo draggingPasteboard];

if([pb availableTypeFromArray: [NSArray arrayWithObject: NSFilenamesPboardType]]) {

// @TODO: this code assumes that any file dragged in is an image!  Bad things will probably happen if they aren’t

NSArray* filenames = [pb propertyListForType: NSFilenamesPboardType];

NSMutableString* html = [NSMutableString string];

for(NSString* filename in filenames) {

[html appendFormat: @"<img src=\"%@\"/>", [[[NSURL alloc] initFileURLWithPath: filename] absoluteString]];

}

[pb declareTypes: [NSArray arrayWithObject: NSHTMLPboardType] owner: self];

[pb setString: html forType: NSHTMLPboardType];

}

return WebDragDestinationActionAny;

}

Incidentally I’m posting this with BlogThing 2.0

1 comment

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