My Apologies to all, the transition to the my new theme hasn’t gone as smoothly as I’d have liked, images are off line, and the adverts are all in the wrong place. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

I’ve decided to let the renewal of my domain name “calcylator.com” slip. The site was my web 2.0 idea that never got off the ground, the idea was simple, if you use ebay (as a seller) you need to calculate your costs, although ebay don’t hide fees from you the listing process doesn’t make it very obvious and if you sell a lot keeping track of your profit & loss is difficult… so I developed a site to track these and other costs (packaging etc).

I got the “beta” site up, and pestered some non-technical friends and family to try it out; I came across a fundamental problem: ebays fees are complicated, so there’s only a certain amount of simplifying you can do, general feedback was it was too much hassle… and they didn’t feel the benefit, i.e. they’d much rather just pay the fees…. isn’t funny how large companies can make a fortune by charging lots of people the odd pence here and there, and people would rather pay it than “waste” time finding a way not to pay it.

I’m quiet sad that this didn’t work, but I’m sure there’s another simpler avenue I can explore in the future, good luck to any one who decides to my old domain… well unless your one of those retailers that just buys expired domain names and then charges loads for someone genuine to use them… what I think of you couldn’t be pulished

Today has been a busy day for linickx.com the poor server must be tired, I’ve made a whole load of changes today including wordpress upgrades and url moves – I’ve removed the word “blog” from everywhere as it was kinda redundant

Some content still needs to be ported from my custom php to wordpress, but it should all be finished soon. I’ve got the wonderful redirection plug-in taking care of everything, if you experience any problems please let me know !

I thought I’d post a quick note to say thanks Tobias for letting me know that my files download area was broken, I was playing with mod_rewrite over the weekend and forgot to check that – DOH !

Anywho, all is sorted now, sorry to those that couldn’t get to my wordpress goodies!

My Last Calcylator post was full of hope… but now the site is closed.. what gives ?

Well our ISP had a spam issue, as part of the investigation, to protect calcylator I closed the site; development has been v.sloooooow after the last few months and I thought I’d take the time to reflect.

I stand by that the site is a good idea, working out true profit from ebay is important to individual sucess. The fundamental problem is working out your exact fees per transaction is difficult & time consuming, so users just don’t want to dedicate the time. I’ve been through two iterations of calcylator, and discovered that I just can’t make the process easy enough for users to be bothered. Financially it doesn’t bother me if people can’t work your their profit accurately, but I do want the site (idea) to be successful, so calcylator is moving into a new phase.

The first phase will a gimmick, but hopefully useful, from their we’ll step towards what will hopefully be a better solution… once again, another empty space to watch

Had a small hiccup with gallery, but I’m sorted now

Sorry.

It’s a bit sad, but it’s true, so this new aside is to show my appreciation.

I think the best thing about firefox is the extensions, the problem is there is sooooo many; so how do you find the good ones ? Well I’ve decided to set up my own firefox aside, this will allow me to post short notes about the latest extension I’ve found am using.

I’ve just posted three fav’s to get started (loads more to come), if you have any recommendations please let me know else check out my firefox page to see the complete list

Just spotted this…

For anyone who knows me you might think todays dilbert is about me !

It’s a shame it’s not an important exam, but the satisfaction remains the same. I’m planning to make this year quite exam heavy so I don’t suppose I’ll see this again so excuse me as I revel in my own smugness !

I’ve been thinking hard (i.e. before I posted this), and really don’t think I’ve received 100% in a formal exam before; the results in the screen shot are for Cisco’s IOS Discovery Assessment, ok yeah there was only 13 questions but hey, 100% is 100%

I now have a new site look and feel

It’s been a little while in the making, but I thought, nearly 1yr of uptime was grounds for a new site theme. I wanted something clean, simple, and different from the last one; hopefully it’s nice, readable and easy on the eye.

If you’ve been playing with the theme switcher you’ll need to delete your cookies

I thought it was about time to announce my wifes new website – http://www.allaboutmice.co.uk

It’s her personal site dedicated to providing “pet” mice lovers information on how best to care for their furry friend. To be honest I have absolutely nothing to do with the content, but I have had loads a fun messing with the techie stuff !

The site is powered by wordpress & phpbb. The wordpress theme is a hacked derivative of twilight and the phpbb theme is a purplised version of subsilver.

I’m going to look at the lic’s on the original themes to see if I can distribute them; I can say it’s been quite fun – if a little time consuming – making the new site “look” .

Anyone else want a custom theme

I’d like to introduce my new website: www.calcylator.com

Calcylator.com is personal project, targeted at ebay sellers. The site is free for people to sign up to, and provide them is a new & different profit & loss (P & L) calcylator, erm sorry, calculator

The wife & I use ebay as an on line car boot sale, one of the things we’ve noticed as sellers is how hard it is to keep track of how much you are spending on listing fees, paypal fees and P & P (postage and packaging) So in my wisdom I decided to write an application to calculate & track that information for me, and now I’m sharing it with the world !!!!

Calcylator is in it’s early stages, I’ve reached the point where we have used it at home for our own use, and now I would like users to embrace it, and help me improve it.

Most P & L calculators out there, are either OS specific download able applications, or subscription services; calcylator.com is w3c standards compliant (so will work in any web browser) and FREE ! Another difference is that most P & L calculators only offer fee calculations, they don’t take into account other expenses such as stock or packaging.

I’ve uploaded some screen shots into my gallery so people can instantly see what I’ve done, but since it’s free you might as well sign up

Over the next few weeks I hope to be implementing some new features, especially any that users contribute. The application defiantly is not stable so if anyone has any problems I’ve set up a calcylator.com contact page ; I’ve also set up a specific RSS feed for calcylator.com for users whom want to know what’s going on, but aren’t interested in my blog.

Please register, play, test and let me know how you get on !

I no longer own Calcylator the domain has moved into different hands

I know I’m breaking the code, but I’m renaming the Jak3 wallpaper hosted in my pics section, the reason is that for the 3rd month in a row it is by far the biggest bandwidth eater, & I just can’t afford it

Please don’t get me wrong, I love that game, and it makes me happy to see that so many people out there do to, but recently I’ve found a couple if forums out there using the LARGE 2MB file as an AVATAR !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yes really ! So every time someone reads a post from them, I get stung with a download / bandwidth theft.

If you want use this pic as an avatar please use my pre-shrinked version, or better still download it the image you want an host it yourself.

Thanks to all, rant over

Another day, another mini project.

My place of work pretty much demanded the need for our monitoring guys (i.e. people that stare at the nagios screen, waiting for red things) to have the ability to run traceroutes from nagios to the effected node – The twist in the story was that they wanted to do it from a browser !

So, I thought, that’d be an easy php script then , well to be honest it took a little longer than expected, mainly because I don’t really understand regular expressions (yet).

Nagios-ping-tool Is a package of small scripts :

• config.php – some simple config variables, important for telling the script where to find your nagios hosts.cfg
• index.php – the script that creates the buttons
• readhosts.php – the script that reads /etc/nagios/hosts.cfg to find names & ip addresses
• header.php & footer.php – my actual implementation went into another skinned site, so I put these in to format the pages properly

nagios-ping-tool.tgz can be downloaded from this site or the Nagios Exchange Project Page