Paul Maunders | Web log

Recently we were looking for a Flash video player to use on our websites. Youtube’s default player was a little bloated, so one of our developers at Fubra built an alternative youtube flv player, which looks a bit like this: We’ve also released this as a wordpress plugin. You can install it via subversion if [...]

Last month, the government launched a new “feed-in tariff” subsidy scheme for renewable energy installations that will see them pay up to 36.5p per KWh of energy produced. At current prices, an installed 2 KW PV system costs around £12,000 (£6 per installed watt), and it’s estimated you would save / earn around £830 a [...]

As part of our commitment to open source, we have begun work on PHP class to make it easier to for developers to work with the UK’s government gateway. The project is hosted on Google Code, and is called php govtalk. GovTalk is a set of standards for interacting electronically with government services. In the [...]

In February of this year we invested in a startup called Furnish.co.uk, and I’m pleased to say that as of yesterday they have now gone live with their sleek new website. Furnish.co.uk, as it’s name suggests, is a new way to find and buy luxury home furniture online. The site acts as a shop window [...]

Today I have been attempting to set up Google Calendar so that it automatically synchronises with an iPhone and also iCal on a Mac computers. It was a bit trickier than I expected, so here are some of my observations. Hopefully they will help someone else! Google Sync  Here are some of the main things [...]

If you are an iPhone developer and have been running one of the beta versions of the 3.0 firmware then you might find that iTunes will not update you to the latest official 3.0 release, as it already thinks you are using the most recent version. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally found [...]

Installing First, download the Yii Framework to somewhere sensible. I prefer to use subversion to check out the code: svn co http://yii.googlecode.com/svn/branches/1.0 /usr/share/php/Yii This will take a few minutes. Once it’s done, you can use the Yii Command Runner (yiic) to set up your web application: /usr/share/php/Yii/framework/yiic webapp /var/www/html/appname If everything went well, you should [...]

Today I’m going to be helping one of our investment companies, ByteWire set themselves up with a subversion based development environment for their Street Crime game. They will use a straight forward workflow whereby they will develop and test their code locally on their iMacs, commit working code to a subversion repository, and then check [...]

If you are running WAMP and you want to be able to send outgoing e-mails via PHP’s mail function, then you will need to edit the php.ini file and change SMTP = localhost to SMTP = smtp.yourisp.com Replacing smtp.yourisp.com with the address of your ISP’s SMTP server, e.g. smtp.ntlworld.com. The php.ini is in the bin directory [...]

If you factor Employee’s and Employer’s National Insurance Contributions into the total deductions made by the tax man, then most people pay closer to 30% tax than the headline basic rate of 20%. The following graph shows the total % tax paid by an employer + employee for a given nominal gross salary. This includes [...]