Matthew Peach

Lost for words

Archive for June, 2008

It’s been a really long time since I’ve worked on any web project for myself, but quite some time ago I had an idea for an online workout logging application; something you can use to keep track of your gym workouts and see how much weight you’re lifting and how your progress is going.

Last week I got a prototype of the site online at strengthfu.com; it’s not open to the public just yet, but if you want to be the first to know when sign-ups are open then please register your interest on the site.

I’ll have more news on this soon.

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  • Filed under: Web
  • Diablo III announced!

    Blizzard has announced Diablo III! There is of course no word on a release date yet, but there’s no doubt that it will be one of the biggest games of the year… whichever year that may be.

    Check out the official site for trailers etc.

    We’ve pencilled it in for late 2009 at this stage, and you can pre-order now.

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  • Filed under: Gaming
  • The Tiger Effect

    Who says golf is boring? Tiger Woods’ U.S. Open win this week caused measurable traffic spikes in the U.S.A., with numerous ISPs apparently initially believing the spikes to be a denial of service attack.

    You can read the full story here, but here’s the summary:

    Starting around 9 am Pacific and peaking at 1:30 pm yesterday, many ISPs noticed an unusual increase in traffic. At first, a few security engineers worried they were under some type of new DDoS attack. But the flood of traffic did not appear directed at any individual customer — the gigabits of anomaly traffic surged to almost all customers from multi-national banks to the bakery down the street and home DSL / Cable users. For several ISPs, traffic into their network grew by 15-25%. In one provider, inbound traffic nearly doubled.

    It turns out that the U.S. Open played at Torrey Pines yesterday generated one of the larger Internet-wide flash crowds this year. Traffic dipped and peaked corresponding to Tiger’s initial
    misses and subsequent spectacular comeback as millions of office bound fans tuned in to the live NBC and ESPN coverage.

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  • Filed under: Sports, Web
  • Firefox 3 is out!

    Firefox 3 is out today. I urge you to download it.

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  • Filed under: Web
  • Freeview update

    To expand on my earlier post about running Freeview to my TV via my laptop, I’ve made some improvements and now it’s actually quite good. :D Here’s what I’ve changed;

    • Dumped MediaPortal in favour of dvbviewer, so it’s now stable and I can actually do other things at the same time;
    • Bought a 3m HDMI cable so my laptop can reach the couch and the TV;
    • Found a $5 S/PDIF to optical adaptor so I can run digital sound directly to my 5.1 speaker system (hopefully something on Freeview actually has surround sound…)

    There’s still nothing on, though. ;(

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  • Filed under: Uncategorized