July 2004 in the Life of Ben (Blog)

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  2. February
  3. March
  4. April
  5. May
  6. June
  7. July
  8. August
  9. September
  10. October
  11. November
  12. December

Links Overhaul (26th July 2004)

I have been rebuilding the links section so that it is now split into a few pages, allowing me to cover categories other than just GTA sites. I will add to these sections occasionally when I discover other suitable websites and this will be reflected in the new links portal.

Index Upgrading (26th July 2004)

Over the next couple of weeks I will be working on the portal areas across the whole site to make them more consistent with each other and more useful to the people using the site. This will mean that instead of the rather unhelpful row of bracketed links which currently exist in the areas for Home, Personal, GTA 1 and GTA 2 there will be a tabular arrangement which will include a description of what each page contains.

Coming Soon: www.projectcerbera.com! (22nd July 2004)

After talking with Dave Bateman, the generous guy who hosts this site for me, I have decided to buy this domain name. He said he would sort out all the technical stuff if I sent him the money to pay for it, so I posted a cheque and am exciting about the change! Not sure how long it will be before the new domain is up and running, perhaps as long as a fortnight. No doubt that I will make an addition to the news here when it does go live.

Massive Site Changes (19th July 2004)

I have re-organised the site a little so that the personal information pages is now in a dedicated folder, with the homepage now being a simple splash screen affair which links through to the news index. The page is less than a kilobyte in size, so hopefully it will encourage people to recommend this site to others because of how speedily it loads and how simple the layout is.

Other changes have been that I have uploaded the masses of updates I made during the time the modem had been confiscated but I was still able to sneak onto the computer. I wrote what these were at the time and thanks to the fragment linking system I introduced, you can link direct to the entry for 2004-05-02. This was when I typed up what I had done.

I re-built Rescaler to look more fancy and work a bit better, I also re-wrote the Suspension Tutorial so that the exact formula Rescaler uses is now public.

One-off Home PC Access (19th July 2004)

My wonderfully benevolent mother allowed me to have the PC on for about quarter of an hour yesterday, during which time I was able to upload most of my website developments made before I got banned - I had not been able to upload them t the time. I intended to organise them and replace the current web pages with them at the library but she allowed me to have the computer on again today, from which I am typing now.

This has allowed me to upload some other projects I was working on with the aim of continuing them at the library but it has also allowed me to carry out some site renovations. I was able to sign into Windows messenger for the first time in months and catch up with some of my online friends. Dave Bateman, the host of this site, was online so I got his details from him so that I could write him a cheque for the years of fantastic, free service he has given me. The cheque is for £100, which I think must trifle in comparison to the personal expense hosting my site has cost him but he had the grace to appear thankful nonetheless, bless him.

Vice Cars Update! (6th July 2004)

I have been having some sucess making blind handling lines, where I make calculated guesses about the settings it should have based on my experience of setting up similar cars. I have done Fragdieb’s pair of Porsche 911’s at the G! Forums. He was actually so keen on the setups I made that he has allowing me to host it on my site with the handling included.

I have also managed to get decent setups for Sadistic Machine’s F1 cars, not sure if they will make it onto this site because they are for use with the Myriad Islands project. You can see his release topic for them here.

Third Quarter News Article Collection (1st July 2004)

Dave, the proprietor of the host this site is stored on, has recently moved server and just today finished getting the online file manager running so that I can alter the site from public computers - which is why I am able to make this news article collection for the third quarter of 2004. The specifications of the old and new systems are below.

Old System

New System

Incidentally, I found out that this site is using around 5GB of bandwidth per month and taking up 125MB of his disk space…and he gives me it all for free! However, I do intend to make a substantial donation to him soon as I got £100 for my birthday a few days ago.