Well the time has finally arrived!

At approximately 10.10pm on the 24/05/2008, Ruby Skye Glenn was born. Weighing in at 7 pounds 2 ounces, she is absolutely gorgeous.

See below for some pictures of the new girl in my life!

Well it seems I haven’t posted about this yet, so I might as well do that now!

It just so happens that my mum is pregnant! Measuring 40 weeks at time of writing and we are all anxiously waiting the new arrival (A girl, Ruby) and we are trying all sorts to start her off! Including making her eat a full pineapple, eat currys etc! None of which have worked so far, haha.

I will post here as soon as anything happens, which brings me nicely onto my next point.

I have decided to take up photography, and bought myself a Canon EOS 400D. So I will be able to take some nice high quality shots of the new addition to our family and get them posted up here asap!

On another note, since I haven’t been blogging for months I also forgot to mention that my girlfriend and I have been together now for over 3 years (3 years on April 8th) which is quite a milestone if you ask me!

Well, hopefully we will hear something soon and I will post back here as soon as I do!

As you may have noticed, the new site design has been rolled out over the past two days and is coming to a neat finish.

I still have a little bit of work left to do, and then some code clean up but I believe the site should be fully finished by the end of next week.

I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on the new design so please feel free to leave your comments!

If you are reading this, chances are you will have noticed that my last post was back in September of 2007! Heck, when I say it back to myself like that it seems like forever!

As you may have guessed I have been busy during my absence, what with taking on extra days at work and college assignments etc. However, I have decided that with the college year coming to an end, and a bit more free time on my hands, that I will get back into the swing of things here.

The first thing I would like to announce is that there will be a redesign of the site coming soon, hopefully to be rolled out by the end of the month. I have a few things left to do on the design side of things, and I will then work on integrating wordpress into it.

Secondly, I have started to work extensively with the MooTools JavaScript framework, and without sounding too big headed I believe I am now able to create some pretty nifty functionality with it. Therefore, I will be creating a new section on this site titled ‘Projects’. Any scripts that I create with MooTools from now on will be posted/updated there, and they will be released under a full MIT License, meaning you are free to copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the software (Though credits would be nice! =])

Although up until now I have managed to create some pretty large and complex scripts with the MooTools framework, the scripts I have produced are not really standalone, as they were produced to work in conjuction with sections of my employers intranet. Therefore, I will begin by releasing some smaller, standalone, scripts before tackling the big ones (I hopefully aim to create a Modular UI object with the framework sometime in the not too distant future, similar to Mocha UI).

So check back soon!

Well it has recently been announced that Apple have released a new series of their extremely popular iPods. They have gone and re-designed the entire range, right from the shuffle all the way up to the latest generation of iPods, the iPod Touch.

This new iPod boasts the same Multi-Touch Technology as the iPhone, which i’m sure you all will have already read about by now. Not only this, but the iPod Touch comes with built in WiFi capability, and comes armed with an internet browser and YouTube viewer.

So why the reason for the controversial title? Well you may or may not have heard about the huge rucus going on about “hacking the iPhone” to allow it to be used as an “iPDA” (No phone functionality, just access to it’s software (Such as the built in iPod) and Multi Touch Technology). Well, now people can stop trying to crack/hack the iPhone, because Apple have done it for them, and slashed the price by almost 50%!

There are also rumours that the new iPod Touch has built in Bluetooth capability (Although it is definitely not activated by default). These rumours have spawned from a image of the iPod Touch that Apple released on their German website (And it can also be viewed on the US and UK stores) which clearly shows the Bluetooth logo in the top right corner of the iPod. However, Apple has specifically stated that this image was not an official Photo of the new iPod, and that it is an error on their part.

However, could this merely be a cover up on Apple’s behalf? Some claim that the internals of the iPod Touch are similar, if not the same, as the Apple iPhone. In which case, there is Bluetooth hardware in there, we just need to know how to “Flip The Switch”.

If Bluetooth were to be enabled on the iPod Touch, it would mean that with the addition of a Wireless Bluetooth Headset and a VoIP application, the iPod Touch would in essentially become an iPhone.

I guess we will just have to wait and see! Check it out here!

Hi all,

So I got back from the Lake District last Friday. Had an absolutely amazing time let me tell you!

We arrived there on the Monday morning at about 9am (Left at about 6am but the sat nav took us through country lanes not the motorway!). Couldn’t check in until 11:30am, so we had a walk around for a bit until we could. Our room was lovely, chocolate brown with a stunning double bed and en-suite.

We made sure to visit the Dalton Wild Life Park and the Aquarium Of The Lakes, both of which were extremely interesting and I would highly recommend them if you visit he Windermere area. We also went on two ferry trips whilst we were there. One around the islands and one to Lakeside (Which is where the Aquarium is located) and back.

I have to mention the Indian meal we went for one the first night (and the last!). It was at a place called The Prince Of India. It was fantastic, and great value for money too! So good in-fact, that we went again on the last night of our stay. (When I say, I mean Donna and myself)

All in all, it was a brilliant holiday and it was definitely good to get away for a bit. I would most certainly go again.

On another note, I have just started playing Second Life again with my character Corey Hax, who’s been abandoned for the past few months. If any of you have Second Life accounts, look me up. I am currently looking to start a small realtor firm there (Buying/Selling/Renting land), which went pretty well on my old account (Which unfortunately got frozen as I didn’t pay my monthly fee on time) so I hope I can pull it off again.

See you there!

Well I went home for my lunch today and the sight I had been waiting to see for the past 2 weeks was there waiting for me. A light brown tape-sealed package labelled “Tom Glenn”.

Exciting, no? Okay, maybe not, but I was excited to see the contents of it that’s for sure!

I immediately took it into the living room and opened it up, to find the Logitech G5 2007 edition, with a blazing design engulfing the mouse. It looked stunning!

I had a little bit of a fiddle with it, such as trying out a few weight combinations (Thanks to it’s customisable weight cartridge) and I also got my Steelpad QcK Heavy out and tested how well it glided and handled. Let me tell you, it is awesome! The large teflon glide feet combined with the smoothness of the Steelpad make for an awesome pair (Not to mention the Logitech G5 is designed to perfectly fit the contours of your hand, providing your right handed, which luckily I am).

I have yet to have a chance to test it out on any games, but I will be giving it a good beating with a bit of Counter Strike, and then letting it cool off with World of Warcraft.

Once I have had a chance to fully test this great looking piece of kit I will be writing up a full review (Which I expect will probably be about 5-6 pages long) including photos, statistics, gaming performance, OS performance and office performance etc, which I will PDF and upload for you all to read.

I would also like you guys to be the first to know that if my review is well liked by a large number of people, I will be setting up a new website (Now that UKCashFlow is finished and running on auto-pilot). This new one will need my constant love and attention, as it is going to be a computer hardware review website.

You may be thinkin that there are already a lot of them around, and I know, but I have always wanted to have my own review site and have brands/people value an “Editor’s Choice Award” and the likes, that came from a site of my own.

I realise that it will be tough to gain the recognition and status of some of the other reputable hardware review sites out there, which is why I need your continued support with my ventures.

So if your reading this, many thanks for sticking by me!

Well I have been putting it off and off and off (Posting a blog that is) and today I have finally decided I need to write something before I forget this site even exists!

I have been extremely excited recently,  due to the fact that I am going away to the Lake District with my girlfriend on Monday for 3 nights. I am really looking forward to it!

On another note, I went on a slight spending spree the other day and spent £70 on a new Mouse and Mouse Mat… Yes, you might think I am mad (And sometimes so do I!) but they should be well worth it. My choices (For those of you who are interested) were the Logitech G5 2007 Edition and the SteelPad QcK Heavy.

I will post more on them once the Logitech arrives.

Whilst developing the new UKCashFlow, I came across the need to generate a random “key” or “token” for each member when they signed up. I’ve never really knew how to go about doing this before, and always ended up copy and pasting code. But I finally knuckled down and learnt how to do it. So, for any of you who may need to solve a similar problem, here you are:

(To generate a password rather than a key, you probably want to set $sections to 1)

// Function to create a new random token
// e.g. createToken('UG8D-', 3, 4)
// Might produce: UG8D-6T8Y-FCK7-09PL
function createToken($tokenprefix, $sections, $sectionlength)
{
	// Declare salt and prefix
	$token.=$tokenprefix;
	$salt = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890';    

	// Prepare randomizer
	srand((double)microtime() * 1000000);    

	// Create the token
	for($i=0; $i< $sections; $i++)
	{
		for($n=0; $n<$sectionlength; $n++)
		{
			$token.=substr($salt, rand() % strlen($salt), 1);
		}    

		if($i<($sections-1)){ $token.='-'; }
	}    

	// Return the token
	return $token;
}    

echo(createToken('', 1, 6));

I hope this can be of some use to some of you!

I’ve always been interested in developing web applications in PHP, and I am always keen to learn more about the language. However, for some time now I have wanted to learn how to go about building a modular PHP application. By modular, if you aren’t familiar with the term, I mean a web application that can be easily modified through the use of adding and removing plugins.

To someone who has no knowledge of how to go about achieving this, it is a very daunting task indeed.

Finally however, I managed to find an article today that explained the basics of how plugins can be used by the parent application. After reading through that, I decided to take a look at the source code to some of the available Wordpress Plugins.

This really helped me to understand the basic concept behind it, and how a modular PHP web application can be achieved in this way.

Now to have a play about with one of my own! Perhaps I will build some sort of modular structure into UKCashFlow.com.