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Projects

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Welcome to my projects page. This bit should really be called “standing on the shoulders of giants” because many of these projects borrow heavily on the work of people who are much smarter than I am. I have been playing with computers for several decades and have flirted with lots of projects and ideas.

Here is a list of some of my projects. Some worked quite well and are still active. Others are still in use but not actually under active development at the moment. Some were of their time but have been laid to rest. You can still see some of these but some of their original functionality has been removed. And some I have had to abandon completely, often because they are no longer useful and/or could pose a security threat by keeping them on line. For the sake of clarity, I have subdivided projects as follows:-

Most of these projects are based upon world’s ever increasing pool of open source code. I find it handy to have them all grouped together here. Most of these projects also fitted quite well in the Joomla framework that used to power this site. But then GarfNet dumped Joomla. Their look and feel may differ from the main site. So I have provided “direct links” so you can see them in a separate page, where appropriate.

Active

These projects are all in-use and under active development:-

  • Count-up/Count-down – This is the count-up/count down timer that used to grace the front page of the old Joomla GarfNet. I intend to spruce it up and deploy it in the new CMS too, in a similar fashion. Meanwhile, I have stuck it here in the projects section, while I sort it out..
    Direct Link: https://garfnet.org.uk/projects/counter/index.htm
  • Depth of Field (DoF) calculator – This project borrows heavily from an innovative web application originally developed in 1996 by Michael C Gillett. It was updated and extended using data from various sources (as cited in the application). Then I converted it to UTF8, metricated it, added a shed-load more camera types, recoded to “HTML 4.01 Transitional” standards and generally tidied it up.Granted, it still needs some polish, but it does the job.
  • Units Converter – this one actually is mostly my own work, almost from scratch – though I admit I did steal the idea from something else I saw on-line! And the basis for the code was picked up from various on-line javascript courses. But much to my surprise, it actually works remarkably well.

Dormant

These projects are still in daily-use and maintained, but there is no development work going on here, at the moment:-

  • Carpe Javascript Scientific Calculator – this is not my work at all. All I have done is make it play nicely with WordPress and no more.
  • Flash collection – in the late 1990’s and early 2000, Macromedia Flash presentations were all over the worldwide web. These are not my work. Rather, this is is a little collection I made of some of the more interesting ones, many years ago,  before Flash dropped off the IT fashion radar. Indeed, many people would consider these Flash presentations to be abandonware. Certainly many of the original author’s sites have disappeared without trace. But I like these things and I think they certainly have a place in IT history. NOTE: Adobe Flashplayer browser plug-in no longer works. You will need to install an alternative, such as Ruffle.
  • Mr Goose’s Webfooted Weblog – this is partly a project to allow my imaginary friend Mr Goose to sound off and partly to experiment with an excellent blogging content management system called WordPress. He has been a bit quiet lately. And now Garfnet CMS uses WordPress too, Mr Goose’s contribution is somewhat less valuable than it used to be. 🙂
  • Media Library based on Coppermine.

Moved

These projects are not appropriate to host here. Setting up Linux web servers for local (LAN) use is so cheap and easy, it is silly to waste internet  bandwidth trying to host them remotely:-

  • DEOSS – to some extent quite a lot of the work that used to take place here at Garfnet has been taken over by the DEOSS (Development and Education using Open Source Software) project. DEOSS currently hosts a number of commercial websites and internet services for customers.
  • Zoneminder – hosted privately on customer’s home servers.
  • EyeOS – hosted locally on one of my office servers.
  • Pydio (formerly AjaxExplorer) – hosted locally on one of my office servers.

Retired

These projects have reached their useful end of life. We keep them here because some people are still interested in them. And we don’t want to upset the search engines, if we don’t have to:-

  • Browser Info (simple). – a bit of simple “schoolboy” javascript that tells users a little about their browsers.
    Direct Link: http://www.garfnet.org.uk/projects/browser/
  • MGFaulty – very old but amusing project detailing the disaster that was MGRover and the badly-built cars it produced. Nothing clever or technical – just my ex-girlfriend and me having a jolly good grumble. MG Rover went bust shortly afterwards – nothing to do with us though!
    Direct Link: https://garfnet.org.uk/mgfaulty/
  • New Millenium EZine – The Milly was a very early EZine that ran from 1995 through to 1999. Most of it still works, even today. This link takes you to a brief introductory page, which then links to the final incarnation of the EZine.

Shelved

  • Earthquakes – a couple of scripts that collect national and global earthquake data, based on the work of Ken True. Seems there are more earthquakes than one might imagine. Unfortunately the UK script is no longer available on Ken’s site and frankly there are much better resources for this sort of thing than I could ever hope to provide. I may revisit this in the future but it is not a priority. Ken’s site is still worth a visit though.
    Direct Link: http://www.garfnet.org.uk/projects/eyeos/
  • Global Weather – based on phpWeather open source Metar interpreter. It was quite excellent too. However it had some security flaws and its original developer seems to have abandoned it completely.

Abandoned

  • Bible (ASV) – searchable American Standard Bible, based on Paul McEnery’s open source “PHP Bible Search”. This was an interesting experiment but it had it’s day. GarfNet is not a religious site and the project really didn’t fit-in here.
  • Bible (KJV) – searchable King James Bible, also based on Paul McEnery’s open source “PHP Bible Search”. Dumped for the same reason as Bible (ASV)
  • Calculator (Alternative PHP-based) I thought I’d have crack at writing an alternative style calculator in PHP. As it turns out, it was a bit of a daft idea and it doesn’t really hang together as I had hoped. But it works and it was fun trying!
  • FlamPlayer – the GarfNet MP3 player. Well it was. But it was never open source and never really fitted in with the site particularly well.
  • Joomla – I used this both for GarfNet and for various customer sites between 2006 and 2018. But the thought of having to do yet another horrendous migration to a new version of Joomla, filled me with horror. So I bravely ran away! Dumped Joomla completely and decided to focus on WordPress instead.
  • Orbtrak – Andrew T. West’s satelllite tracker, based on Predict. This was basically only a demo \and even though it had been here for nearly te years, I never did anything with it.
  • Browser Info (detailed) – based on phpSniffer). Doesn’t work on PHP7+ and frankly there seemed little point trying to make it work, since hardly anyone used it.
  • SimpleViewer – this was a demonstration of a free (but sadly not open source) Shockwave Flash image viewer.