Michael S. Clark

The online tee-time booking system that I developed at Computa Services for the Carnoustie Golf Links, is now live. It uses concurrent AJAX, calling a lightweight PHP+XML web service layer to communicate with a Microsoft SQL Server. The management application that the staff at the Links use to administer the bookings is written in C#, [...]

I’ve been playing about with a multi-threaded download manager for RapidShare in C# for a while now and I was looking around for better version control than a Windows Briefcase directory. Since this is a personal project, I didn’t want to use our SVN code repository at Computa, so I had a look at Google [...]

I recently came upon a situation where a client’s website was hosted by their ISP. They wanted it to be updated, so as always, I looked at using WordPress. Unfortunately, the hosting package they had chosen supported PHP, but database support was beyond their price range. That set me wondering if WordPress actually required MySQL [...]

Under usual circumstances, hosting WordPress on IIS7 would not normally allow permalinks to be used. There are some commercial solutions, including the ISAPI_Rewrite module (which I couldn’t get to work). Another less elegant solution was to create a replacement 404 error page that would perform the redirection. This worked, but when the redirection occurred, any [...]

As I type this Mozilla, the company behind the groovy Firefox browser, has just created a new world software download record of over 5 million downloads in less than 24 hours. You can get your 7MB download here and track the download progress here. I got a certificate too! (You can get yours here.) [Via: [...]

Today’s the day! Click here to watch for progress. Update: Those of you that want to get Firefox 3.0 right now can use this FTP link, everyone else that wants to help try to set a world record will have to wait until 10am PDT and hit up the official site.

The VeriSign timestamping service is being upgraded to provide a higher-level of security. The timestamping service currently uses the hash algorithm called MD5 to create the timestamp. Although no actual incidents of breaking MD5 have been reported, modern computing power is making it easier to mount attacks against MD5.

I’ve added PicLens support to all of my galleries. The required RSS feed is dynamically generated using PHP as are the thumbnails so you would only have to provide a gallery of images. I’ve zipped up the code here.

I’ve been waiting a while for The Courier (my local paper) to provide an RSS feed for their news stories. Anyway, I decided to do one myself. I’ve zipped up the code here and I’ve hosted it on my employer’s server here. Give me a shout if you find an errors or improvements.

Here’s a crossover that I didn’t expect -  Ricky Gervais in GTA IV: One of the most anticipated games of the year has to be GTA IV, and will be a huge hit once it is released. The game has been written about to death now and we all assume we know all there is [...]