Well, in case you didn’t notice, I’ve redesigned my website! I spent a few days creating the new site, and I think it turned out fairly well. Everything, except the WordPress blog, was designed by me. The blog is using a simplified theme I found and tweaked slightly. The rest of the site was created using HTML/CSS and JavaScript. One thing I especially like about the new site is the use of WordPress outside of the blog. The “News” section was created using the WordPress API. Also, if you go to Programming Projects->Minor Projects, you’ll see that the page is simply retrieving posts in the “Software Releases” category.

I hope everyone else enjoys the new design! As always, feel free to leave praise/suggestions in the comments.

I know I haven’t posted anything new in quite awhile, so I figured I would give you guys some updates on the state of this site and my applications.

Drive Backup has reached 10,050 runs! What this means is that my server has been pinged 10,050 times by instances of Drive Backup (my programs ping when they check for updates). It seems at least somebody is enjoying Drive Backup:-). Unfortunately, my other software isn’t doing nearly as-well (although I’m not keeping stats for all of my programs).

Although I haven’t updated the content on this site in awhile, I have made some significant changes to it. This website was running on a Pentium 4 machine with 512KB of RAM. I’ve had an old Mac mini sitting in a closest for awhile, so I decided to migrate the site. The new server is an Intel Dual Core 1.66GHz machine with 2GB of DDR2 RAM. The server is running Xubuntu. Also, our internet connection;s upload rate has been upped from ~80Kbps to ~150Kbps (not a huge improvement, but still). I may be adding a load-balancer in the future using the old Gateway Xeon blade server I have laying around the house (I just need to find a damn SCSI hard drive and another Xeon processor).

On another note, I’ve been contemplating shutting down TabRunner. It was a cool experiment, but it didn’t take off like I was hoping. The domain renewal will be coming up soon, and I’m not sure it’s worth keeping alive (hell, right now the backend server isn’t even running). I’m considering making the project opensource if I shut it down, which means I would release the plugin code, perl/HTML files and the C# backend server. If anyone out there likes TabRunner, please let me know and I’ll keep it running (alex@awhite.us).

Finally, as you have probably noticed, the site now has ads. I’ve kept it to one banner a page, so I’m hoping they are not overly intrusive. I realize everyone hates ads, but by clicking the ads you are helping me to keep this site running. If you are really against clicking ads, but still want to help, you can also click the donate button on the homepage (http://awhite.us).

-Alex

I was looking through my Google profile and found a link to an old blog I was writing. I didn’t keep at it for long, but there are some cool tutorials on the site: http://toastersmcs.blogspot.com/

I’m excited to release my newest project, TabRunner! TabRunner is a new service that stores all of your open links in one, easy to remember link. For example, if you have some work related websites open on your desktop machine, and you need to use your laptop, simply click the TabRunner button and you’ll be given a link. Use this link on your laptop, and every page you had on your desktop machine will automatically open! Here is a quick overview of TabRunner’s features:

• Access multiple links with a single, memorable link
• Access your links from any device with a web browser
• Plugins available for Firefox and Chrome (more browsers coming soon, the plugin is necessary to retrieve the currently open pages on your browser)

Check out TabRunner at: http://www.tabrun.net

I’ve finally purchased a domain name for this website! The new address is: http://awhite.us. My new email address is: alex@awhite.us (so much easier to remember then the old address!). Also, I have recently been informed of an incompatibility with Drive Backup and Windows XP, it seems the new WPF forms are crashing on Windows XP, so as of now, Drive Backup is NOT compatible with anything before Vista. I am working on this problem, and will have an update released as soon as possible. As for a temporary solution, users should refrain from upgrading or roll back to a previous version (older versions can be found at here) Sorry for any inconvenience!

I just wanted to provide an update on the current progress of Drive Backup. I am currently working on adding some really cool new features, improving the GUI, and fixing some bugs. One main bug that was present in the current DB version caused DB to crash when backing up more then once on the same day. This bug has been resolved and will be included in the update (or you can download a fixed version here: http://awnet.homedns.org/files/dbTest71310.zip). as always, feel free to send me an email (alex@awnet.homedns.org) with suggestions or problems with the program!

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the changes:

When I was twelve I bought an Atari 400 for two dollars at a yard sale. The system came with two joysticks, some games, the BASIC cartridge, an Atari 410 tape recorder, and an introduction to BASIC programming. I spent that summer learning BASIC and creating Atari games, some of which I recorded to cassettes. Today I actually found one of my old program cassettes! According to the writing on the tape, the cassette was supposed to include a Drawing program, “space dot”, and a “2 player dot attack” game. After many hours of searching how to load these programs onto a modern computer, I finally succeeded.