Milburn

For those not familiar with the British school system, GCSEs are exams taken at the end of compulsory education at 16. I took them back in June but have just received my results. I got 4 As and 5 A*s(the highest grade).

This was just about what I expected but I was pleased not to receive any Bs. I wasn’t sure how well I’d done in English or in Art but I managed to pick up As in both. Read the rest of this entry »

My first WordPress plugin, the drop caps plugin has been fairly successful so I’m looking to make a new plugin and I need some ideas.

Some of my own ideas include a speedometer which measures the speed performance of your WordPress installation, analyses the speed of other plugins and your themes, checks files are cached properly and suggests ways to speed up WordPress. Read the rest of this entry »

Father’s day was celebrated here in the UK last Sunday. I decided that I’d rise to the occasion and make something special. I can’t say that I’m a whiz with Photoshop because I don’t actually own a copy of it, instead I rely on a rather old version of Paint Shop Pro.

Paint Shop Pro is a nice application. It lacks some of the more advanced canvas and brush features of Photoshop which means that it lacks the creative edge. Also I have yet to find a way to convert Photoshop brushes and documents to Paint Shop Pro documents.

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I like to develop my own PHP scripts and small applications. Up to now I’ve been uploading them to my online server. Of course that is bad practise because a small bug may open up a large security hole. My test scripts are reducing the security of things like my blog. So I’ve decided to use XAMPP to develop my scripts on my home computer before deploying them to the web.

If you’ve not heard of XAMPP it stands for

• X (meaning cross-platform)
• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP
• Perl

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Steganography is what I would call the less powerful and less well known brother of cryptography. Whereas cryptography is encoding something so it can’t be read without a key, steganography is hiding something so it can’t be found without directions. Since cryptography offers a greater level of security for less effort it has often been used as opposed to steganography.

Think of cryptography as the lock to a safe. You need a key to open the safe. Steganography is hiding the safe somewhere where it can’t be found easily such as behind the painting on the wall. To find the safe you need directions. So how is steganography useful in the modern world. It can actually be used in several ways. A secret file can be hidden on your computer so it looks like an ordinary file. I’m going to show you today how to hide an MP3 file inside a JPEG or GIF image.

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