bitplane.net » bitplane.net

Website update

Gaz Davidson — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:10:53 +0000

I’ve finally got around to editing the Simplish template and adding pages for some of my old software projects. There’s some links at the top up there, hover over them and you get a nice drop-down menu with a list of projects.

The meat of this is JavaScript stolen from another theme and some PHP code gratuitously pasted into my header, this isn’t IP theft, and not just because it’s the season of sharing! This is what’s great about free software licenses.

PHP file list using mod_rewrite

Gaz Davidson — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:09:00 +0000

I’ve noticed that most of the traffic to this site is actually people visiting my permanent and temporary file dumps, which until today were literally a bunch of files dumped in a folder. DreamHost don’t keep my logs for over 30 days and I’d like to incorporate my file dumps into my Piwik stats, so I made a nice fancy file list in PHP. It has nice looking icons courtesy of famfamfam, though may move to stdicon in the future.

Some caveats:

The file list currently tracks directory views (via the template) but not yet file downloads, as that requires a Piwik plugin that isn’t final so I haven’t installed it, adding it should be trivial though.
As requests are passed through PHP using mod_rewrite it will result in long running scripts on your server, which may upset your shared web hosting provider.
Scripts are not yet excluded by rewrite rules! You won’t want to keep other scripts containing sensitive information in dirs under the path.
Access to files and folders beginning with “.” will be blocked.
It only works on Unices, not Windows servers as they don’t have the “file” command to get the MIME type.
You’ll obviously need an Apache installation with mod_rewrite.

To install it, just copy index.php, .htaccess and .filelist/ to the directory where you store your files. You can get the script (without icons) from SVN.

Piwik in, Google Analytics out

Gaz Davidson — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:47:29 +0000

I’ve stopped using Google Analytics and have now moved over to Piwik. I don’t have that many visitors, but there are still lots of good reasons to use Piwik. It’s better for everyone if I keep hold of my own stats instead of giving it all to Google and I may even do some Piwik hacking in the future.

Getting it working in Gallery2 was a bit of a pain, so I updated their wiki for them, but other than that it’s about the same as installing Google Analytics.

Subscribers are welcome to see my laughable stats

Irrlicht nightly builds 2.0

Gaz Davidson — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:58:56 +0000

Irrlicht nightly builds by ConvexTech are back again, not only with D3D9 compiled in to the Win32-gcc builds but we even get VisualStudio AMD64 builds too! A big thanks to Marc Burns for providing this service

I’m hosting a mirror, it’s not much compared the the overhead of compiling the builds, but every little helps, right?

New website layout

Gaz Davidson — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:39:40 +0000

So I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and install WordPress. I’ve never been much of a fan of the blog format, but over the past couple of weeks I’ve made a few interesting toys without binary demos and the e107 CMS I was using as a file store couldn’t index them. The old gallery isn’t ideal for random screenshots either. So I decided this site needed a makeover; a new layout which has permanent locations for files, a gallery and links to my SVN repositories.

So the HTTP 301 script is up and redirecting, and the new format for bitplane.net goes like this-

A gallery to store screenshots, photos and artwork.
SVN repositories for games and another for apps and scripts
My file dump, for temporary storage
A new files subdomain, for permanent file storage.
…and this blog, to index new stuff.

So, what new stuff? Well over the past couple of weeks I’ve made some loaders for Irrlicht. A TAR loader (and fixed gzip loading in Irrlicht), a Windows Icon loader and a Windows PE binary resource loader and just for fun a FIGlet font driver. Also, over the past couple of months I’ve spent a bit of time learning to sketch, and have scanned a couple of them so I can see my progress. Finally, I made a Photosynth of Glastonbury Festival, which actually captures some idea of the scale of the place.

That’s my first post out of the way. I promise not to blog unless I have something interesting to show, or less often, say.