Loading files with Internet Explorer
While constructing various websites i have slowly learned to hate Internet Explorer completely and in all its forms, from messing up the appearance of your site, to corrupting files up for download though PHP.
Since i had so much trouble with it i thought it would be worthwhile to post the solution to internet explorer corrupting some files that are loaded through PHP e.g.
header('Content-Description: File Transfer'); header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream'); header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='.basename($path)); header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary'); header('Expires: 0'); header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0'); header('Pragma: public'); header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($path)); ob_clean(); flush(); readfile($path);
The simplest way i found to correct the problem was to comment (or remove) out the line declaring the length of the file
//header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($path));
The downside to this method is that for downloading large files, users wont know the total size of the file being downloaded, luckily for me the files been downloaded were small enough for this not to cause problems.
I hope that by writing this i manage to save somebody some time and frustration, leave a comment if you have any other fixes for internet explorers many problems.
New Address
Have finally managed to move the site onto its own web address (www.importsoul.net), the old one will redirect to here for a while but not for long. Hope i haven't broken anything in the move, if i have let me know.
Edit: I had broken all of the images but they have now been fixed
Melting Aluminum
I had some spare time last weekend and decided to see if i could melt down the aluminum cases of some old hard drives. I intended to (if i managed to melt it) be able to mold some metal puzzles.
To start i broke up the hard drive casings into small chunks and as it turns out they are surprisingly brittle and could be broken apart using a hammer with little difficulty (jar in right of photo). I then set up a small barrier out of some old firebricks to try and keep the heat in and placed some chunks into a spare steel food can and used a torch to try and melt them.
Well this kind of turned out as a failed project, but i plan to have another go at it another time with a better insulated crucible to keep the heat in better and keep the molten metal hot.
Playing with fire
At ventures we decided to brighten up a construction activity that we were running for another scout group and got some awesome pictures. Balloons and LPG is fun.
And a video
Hope you enjoyed the pictures
NCSS Programming Comp
I just finished the NCSS programming comp (http://challenge.ncss.edu.au/). The competition runs over 5 week with 5 problems a week and 6 problems on the final week
NCSS offers two courses Simple and advanced, last year i participated in the Simple division and managed to come first, this year i went in the advanced division and found it much more challenging but still managed to achieve a 6th. However the course did teach me about things like regular expressions.
This year NCSS was also offering an embedded course (i participated in the beta for this, where was given the arduino board in my other projects). for the embedded course you paid for a circuit board based of the arduino with many sensors and outputs already built in.
The embedded division still has one more week to go, so il update this post with my results in that then.