Java Library for Rcon access
I've recently joined the development team at RconEd. Current games supported are Half Life, Half Life 2 and all Source based games, BattleField 2 (& BF2 CC) and Call of Duty (and all their derivatives)

Reported: Tue, 07 Nov 2006 14:47:00 +0000
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Song Translator En->Es
A cool website allowing you to see songs translated from English to Spanish. You can even request songs to be translated.

Reported: Mon, 06 Nov 2006 22:01:10 +0000
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Things are getting annoying
Why is this happening? I test my website on my local host, all is fine. I test it on the main host, it all breaks. It's a conspiracy I tell you!

Reported: Wed, 01 Nov 2006 23:57:00 +0000

Updated Site
We've taken a bit more effort, and updated the site, we've made the look a little cleaner, and added Google AdSense (well, we might as well try to make a little bit of money!). You'll also notice the news mini section at the top right. Here you'll see the latest 5 stories from this site.

Reported: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 08:30:00 +0000
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How to get to the Wedding
It is a long way for most of you to travel, and the roads up here in Scotland can be awfully strange at times. Let us give you an honest set of directions to the wedding.

Reported: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 07:58:00 +0100
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One Week to the Wedding
Well, it is only one week until the wedding, and it is time to reflect on a couple of things.

Reported: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 07:44:00 +0100
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Connection Pooling
Everything database driven in this site now should be running just that little bit faster now. SmarterThings.co.uk looked at all the Java Connection Pooling technologies out in the market place, and decided that none of them were suitable for a shared hosting solution. Some were walking Stack-Overflow time-bombs, whilst others did not give any strategies for predicting influx of requests by pre-creating connections. The Connection Pool created by SmarterThings.co.uk allows for the user to call the common getConnection() method, but rather than having to know specifically which method you need to call to return the connection to the pool, simply calling the Connection.close() method, will return this thread to the pool. In fact, we've even made it so that should you forget to program the close() method, the Pool will close the connection automatically for you at a later time. Just another SmarterThing!

Reported: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 23:47:00 +0000

Found Kitten
With the help of the Scottish SPCA, we have managed to catch Clio. About 6:30pm tonight, the sound of the trap went, and David went to check to see what animal we had caught, and how delighted we were that the first time it snapped shut, our darling Clio was caught inside. We'd like to thank everybody that helped, by letting us have posters up, by letting us know of sightings, by helping us find her, and for lending us suitable trapping equipment. Without everybody's help, we'd still be without Clio. Thanks, David and Fiona.

Reported: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 19:24:00 +0000
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Updated RSS Delivery
We were never completely happy with the solution we had previously for the RSS. It worked, but was a tad on the ugly side. It used to rely on us entering a link for every record in the rss table, pointing to the relevant news item. Whilst it should be the case that news should link to something, it shouldn't be the case that this news should have in the table, the link direct to the news item itself, that should be inferred. Well, now by applying a query to the end of news.jsp, of ?id=, you can now specify the news item you want to view. Given that this exists, the RSS feed now simply points to link to the news.jsp with the correct ID on the end. This frees the link field in the database to store a related link, and not point to the news item itself. We are much happier.

Reported: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 13:28:00 +0000

Lost Kitten (UPDATE)
Well, our kitten Clio may have gone outside, but thankfully she has not ventured TOO far. We have seen her repeatadly over the last couple of days hanging around near and around our garden. Our hope is that we will be able to catch her before she widens her area of roam. Thankfully, the nice inspector at the SSPCA will be coming round today to drop off a cat trap to help us catch her. Once it's set, it should just be a case of waiting for the trap to work, and free any other cats that wrongfully enter it.

Reported: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 12:50:00 +0000
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Lost Kitten
Our new kitten Clio went missing this morning. Our other cat managed to break the cat-flap, and let Clio out. She has now gone missing, and we are desperately trying to find her. If anybody see's her please contact us. Many thanks, David and Fiona.

Reported: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 15:00:00 +0000
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New File Storage Database
Well, when we were playing around with the images, we found a problem with uploading binary files to our database remotely. We could upload large image files, but not large binary files. We found we were limited to under a 512k amount for binary data per record in the table. We weren't happy, so we thought of many ways to get around this limitation, and SmarterThings.co.uk has done so. By separating the file into smaller chunks, it is easy to store the data in the table in smaller BLOB objects. A simple cut and shunt of the existing image script means that now we can allow for large binary data to be stored, and retrieved. This of course benefits from the same things the image service does, like Conditional-GET, download manager, and also filename replacement. NOTE: The link to the file points to a MP3 file that the author at SmarterThings.co.uk has created, and allows for this content to be available on the website. The copyright of this material still lies with the creator, and whilst you have access to download and listen to the music, you do not have the right to sell the music, or "sample" it

Reported: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:13:03 +0000

New Imaging Database
SmarterThings.co.uk have unveiled more development work on their website. Now they can happily store images in a database, and retrieve the images direct to your browser. As standard, we support the conditional get, and Download managers. Not bad for just a little JSP programming!

Reported: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:06:00 +0000

Google Indexed Finally
Much excitement here at SmarterThings.co.uk when we saw that the GoogleBot had dropped in for a visit, and within 24 hours, a search for SmarterThings (all one word) reveals us as the number 1 hit. Now if only we had content! :-)

Reported: Wed, 09 Feb 2005 23:59:00 +0000
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More server glitches over now
We've had a couple of glitches over the last few days. Lets hope that our hosts are able to nail the problems they're having with Tomcat!

Reported: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 10:39:00 +0000