Domain active
noates.com should now be going fine. I had a problem with my .htaccess which worked fine in the old location but not in the new subdomain (thanks to bur.st support for working out the problem!) which meant there was a 403 forbidden for most of a day. Most things should work fine (not the /blog shortcut though), but as I gradually move all the links over, some things on the bur.st/~cazlar/ domain may get broken, so try to use noates.com from now on.

Domain disruption
Having received my first ever donation, I decided to in turn donate to bur.st which hosts this website. They provide a great service for free, and survive on member's donations. As a bonus for donating, your webspace increases to 1Gb, so I'll finally be able to host all my files here rather than on my current ISP account (which I will likely close next year sometime when I move).

While all this was happening, I decided to move the noates.com domain over to the bur.st nameservers, rather than leave the ugly forwarding that was here before. However, never having done this, I bumbled through it and the domain was in limbo for a while before I worked out that it wouldn't be enabled on bur.st's end until early tomorrow. Plus it stuffed up my email (please email me again if you tried and I bounced). So I've put it back to normal hopefully, but will try again soon.

btw if you need to reach me and my email bounces, try noates at zipworld dot com dot au.

ToFi progress report
I just thought I'd say where I was up to in regards to ToFi. The app works well on USB 2 machines but seems to fail usually on USB 1.1 transfers. Using an old hub, I could replicate the problem, but so far I have been unable to solve it. By tweaking the maximum packet size, I was able to get one firmware transfer to complete fine, but another firmware file failed. However the good news is that the failures always seem to occur in the same spots (for a given packet size and file), so I just need to work out why!

Until I sort that out, I'll release an interim version (v0.2) of ToFi soon. It has a great new icon and simplified layout (thanks to Angus Hume!) and a German localization. I'll leave the (semi-successful) tweak in too, if anyone finds it has improved things please tell me.

MacTF-EPG 1.0 released
Well, actually it was released a few days ago but I forgot to write about it. Most of the changes are to enable UK support. Nigel from toppy.org.uk wrote the great little perl and php scripts that do the fetching and converting to TGD format, and I wrapped them up, much like I did with JavaXMLTV. Due to differences in how the data comes down, the UK functionality only has the one progress bar and currently doesn't have proxy support or configuration on how many days to load. Otherwise, it should work just like the Australian part.

Other changes include a few additions to the keyword logic. Although the live search bar searched within titles, subtitles, descriptions, etc, the keyword matching was on title alone. I've now added the channel, subtitle, category, and other parts of the "shortinfo" section to the keyword search. This is especially useful for the UK people as the repeat flag will show up here, so you can now put a "repeat" keyword in the negative column to cut all these matches out. The side-effect of this is a slightly increased risk of false matches, especially for really common keywords such as "lost". In this case you may need to get a bit more specific by filtering by channel or time.

Speaking of time, dates and times have also been tricky to search on. I've added these to the keyword search now in two ways. Firstly, the start time can be a direct keyword. Secondly, you can use the special keywords in the form "<xx:xx" or ">xx:xx". These will then match any starttimes that fit the condition. So you could have a keyword entry of "lost" ">13:00" "<18:00" to find those matches to lost between 1pm and 6pm. Note that these searches don't handle midnight at all, so 00:01 is considered less than 23:59. So if you want your time period to stretch over midnight, you might need two separate entries (or use the negative column to choose which times it should not cover).

Site reorganized
The main page was getting a bit bulky, so I split it into different pages for each product, with the main page as an index. It should allow me to edit the pages easier as I usually get lost in all the nested tables...
I also added Google AdSense ads, I'm not sure it's worth it but I thought why not give it a try.