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20/06/08: At long last OS X 10.4 has been upraded to 10.5 on my MacBook. It's not that there was anything wrong with 10.4, it's just that I like to keep abreast of the latest developments and technologies. There was little point in upgrading when it was released last year, but now after several updates - OS X 10.5.3 is now out - it is much more stable and improved. Some people have found it slow, but it's not that much slower than 10.4 on my MacBook, but then it's onlye year old so it has a fast processor.

Time Machine is often touted as one of its best features, but this only works if you have an external USB or FireWire disk and if you use a Macbook away from your desk you won't have one. Time Machine came up with a message recently saying it hadn't backed up for 11 days or something. That's because I've not plugged in my USB hard disk recently.

I went into the Apple store with a pocket full of cash the other day, but they've removed all the tills. Don't they sell anything any more? I came out without buying anything. OK I'm not that stupid, but try to buy something when the store's busy and all the assistants are busy. There's nowhere to queue up, so you just stand around like a dummy not knowing what to do. You could try getting some attention by walking out and setting off the alarm!

07/05/08: This page has been rather neglected and hasn't been updated as often as I was intending. However, the website as a whole is expanding rapidly. The reason I've not been spending time updating this page is because I've been so busy updating other pages. There is quiet a lot here and there are lots of articles to read, software to download and hints and tips.

There are now quite a few XP, Vista and OS X tips, and this section will carry on growing rapidly. There are now three Mac programs too and I have at long last updated to OS X 10.5 Leopard. Too many people argue about which is best, the Mac or Windows PC, so I won't get into that here. If you like the Mac then you'll like OS X 10.5, but it won't convince Vista users to switch. Similarly, Vista is nice, but it won't convince Mac users to switch either. You either like one platform or another, or if you're like me, you like both!

30/12/07: Christmas is over and the sales are on, so a trip to my local shopping centre was essential. With a wad of cash in my pocket I headed off to the shops looking to pick up a few bargains. The Apple store was a huge disappointment and there was nothing off any hardware at all. Everything was full price just the same as usual. There were very few bargains to be had in the software department and £10 off Microsoft Office was just one of about three or four exceedingly dull offers in the whole store. I walked out without buying anything. Just a short walk away were stores selling PCs, accessories and software at knock-down prices and I picked up three Windows games at rock bottom prices and a replacement DVD-writer for a faulty one in one of my old PCs. There were lots of people in the Apple store playing with the kit, but few people buying anything. In contrast, I had to queue for 15 minutes at the checkout at the PC store the queue was so long! It's not surprising that Windows PCs dominate the market.

06/10/07: Lottery Cracker World has been updated to version 7.2.0. There aren't any new features and the changes are very minor. Some old contact information that was out of date has been taken out and the US Mega Millions download link has been updated - it had changed and LCW wouldn't download the draws. If you are happy with the way LCW works, there's no need to update it. If you do download it, delete cracker.ini in the Lottery Cracker World folder so that the new settings are written, otherwise it'll carry on with the old settings.

Lottery Cracker World for the Apple Mac is in development and it'll be similar to the PC version, but not quite the same. It won't have any more features, but it will be nicer to use (hopefully). This isn't anything to do with the Mac, it's just that with having to start from scratch, there's an opportunity to make things better.

The new Apple Macs look fantastic and are almost works of art. However, Apple tends to focus more on design and looks than functions and features. There's not a screw to be found in the case and even if you could get the cover off, there's no space inside to install anything. It must be packed as tight as a laptop. Looking over one in the Apple store, I couldn't even see how you'd install more RAM, never mind a second hard disk or a video card upgrade. So the new Macs are brilliant right now, but in two years the hardware will be dated and you won't be able to upgrade. A PC may not look anywhere near as good, but it's so easy to remove old components and slot in new ones it's worth putting up with. The screen display on an old PC was breaking up, particularly with 3D games. The video card was the suspect, so I removed the cover, replaced the video card, and the PC's fine. In fact, it's faster than before thanks to the new video card. This just isn't possible with one of the new Macs. Apple Macs are fantastic, but they do have their drawbacks.

15/07/07: I've had a laptop running Windows XP for several years - it's an old Acer with an AMD Athlon processor running at 1.3GHz with a 20Gb hard disk and 512Mb of RAM. It's been a good computer and I've used it a lot, but it is getting past its use-by date. When you switch it on some of the keys don't work for about 10 minutes, but when it warms up they magically start working again. It's irritating to say the least. It's old, underpowered, and temperamental, so it needed replacing. But what with?

Despite there being lots of lovely Vista laptops around, I actually got an Apple Macbook. It was expensive, but I've never used a Mac and have always wanted to try one, and mac users are always going on about how fantastic they are. I've had it for a couple of weeks now. Is an Apple Mac better than a Windows PC? I can't say I'm that excited about it. It has some very good features, but it also has some poor ones too. It's not better than a Windows PC, it's just different.

If you believe the hype and the fanatical Apple enthusiasts you'd think it was the best thing since sliced bread, but I've crashed applications and had problems just as I do with PCs, so it's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Will I grow to love it like other Mac users? Will I permanently switch to Macs? At the moment it's hard to see that happening. It's just a tool and it's there to do a job. You use one tool for one job and another tool for another job, so in some circumstances the Mac may be better, but the PC will be better for others.

06/06/07: There haven't been any entries here for a long time, so I thought it was about time I updated this news/blog. Regular visitors will know that the old website was thrown out and a new one has been created. The content is pretty much the same, but the design is different. The reason is that I got a new PC a while back and couldn't use the old web design software I was using on my old PC.

Wysiwyg web designers are great and you can create whole sites without knowing any HTML at all. However, sometimes the code they produce is long winded or unnecessary, leading to bloated sites. They can also screw up bits of code you add yourself as they try to format it. So I thought I'd hand code a new site.

It's harder, but you get a better understanding of the code and can put in as much or as little as you want. The code is more compact and you get to learn more about HTML and other web design technologies.

I have plans to update the programs in the software section, but then something always gets in the way. A money manager program is almost complete, so when that's done, I should do some updates. I also want to add some more articles too.

All the software works on Vista, but UAC (User Account Control) gets in the way. This is a new security feature of Vista and it stops some programs from working - several of mine. If you have problems running any programs in Vista, right click the menu item on the Start menu and select Run As Administrator. Alternatively, you can turn off UAC by going to User Accounts in the Control Panel.

The problem is that some programs save data to the folder they are installed to - configuration files, data files and so on. Vista makes the folders read-only, so the programs can't save anything. When you Run As Administrator you allow the program to save data in its own folder. You need to select Run As Administrator even if you log on as an administrator because Vista secretly logs administrators on as standard users. (Microsoft is trying to wean people off administrator accounts in Windows.)

01/11/06: It's been a while since I last posted anything, so here's an update. InfoManager has been released and this is a great personal information manager, but then I would say that wouldn't I? You can try it for yourself anyway.

A big problem with having public email addresses is that they get a lot of junk mail. Recently, I got around 200 emails to one account in one day and there are three accounts here! Getting a few junk messages each day isn't a problem because they are easily deleted, but when there are 200+, it is difficult to manage.

I tried using a few anti-spam programs and some are OK and some aren't. Looking at all the spam, it often seems quite easy to detect manually and you can tell within one second whether a message is interesting or junk. (Note: if you email me, you get one second to catch my attention before I hit the delete key!) This made me wonder whether it would be just as easy to write a program to do it for me. I know there are lots of anti-spam programs already, but firstly it's fun writing stuff yourself and secondly you get exactly what you want.

So that's my next project, an anti spam program. It's actually nearing completion and it just needs a few tweaks here and there. I'm already using it on some accounts and it catches a lot of spam. Nothing catches 100%, but even if it clears 75% of spam from my inbox, that'll be 150 junk messages I don't have to read each day!

Spam Cleaner should be finished by this time next month and you'll be able to download it and use it to keep your inbox clean too.

25/06/06: I had a couple of emails recently which I think are of general interest, so I'll answer them here.

Q: "I am interested in purchasing program. Pa lottery is only updated to 4/11/06. Will these databases be automatically updated after the purchase?"

A: Some lottery companies provide a download link on their web site so that people can download the lottery results. Last time I looked, the PA databases were not available. If you can find a download link then I will add it to the program. You may be wondering how I got the results in the databases you have got. They were displayed across multiple web pages and I had to copy and paste them into one text file, then write a program to turn them into a form acceptable for LCW. It took a lot of fiddling and it is not possible for the program to do this. To see what I mean, go to the Megamillions site at www.megamillions.com/winningpicks/download_numbers.asp and you will see a Download button. Basically LCW clicks the button and gets the results. There isn't one that I could find for the draws you are interested in. Let me know if you can find a download link on the PA site.

Q: "I have just downloaded and had a look at Form Cracker. I only looked at two races and there seems to be a bug in the program. If I click the button a second time to predict the outcome of the race, the horses get different scores and the top two or three swap positions. This might explain why sometimes 2nd rated horses out perform the top rated."

A: It's not a bug. Suppose you analyse a race and one of the horses has never run before and has no form. What score should the program give it? Clearly with no form it cannot judge how good a horse is. It cannot give a score of zero because it might be a good horse. It cannot give it a really high score because it might not be that good. What should the program do? It must guess! This is why when you analyse a race some horses get different scores. It is because some things are unknown and the program must guess. You need to take this into consideration when choosing which horse to back.

A horse with no form is an extreme example and more often there are horses that have run a couple of races. Two races isn't really enough to establish the form reliably, so there is some element of guesswork involved here too. Suppose a horse was brought down in its last race through no fault of its own. It's there in the form, but how is the program expected to score it? The horse might have won had the incident not happened. More unknowns and more guesswork.

This is why it is so difficult to predict the outcome of horse races. Form Cracker does its best to analyse the data, but it won't get it right every single time. Most top racing tipsters in the daily newspapers get 20 to 25% of races right, according to data at the Racing Post website. I have found that Form Cracker gets it right about 30% of the time if you pick the right races to analyse. That's better than any racing tipster.

Form Cracker is a tool - something to help you analyse races and provide that extra bit of information that other people don't have. No program in the world gets it right every time. If it exists, then tell me. I'll buy it and give up the day job.

07/04/06: Form Cracker has been updated, so go and download it. There aren't any new features, but there are some changes. A bug when archiving races has been fixed. The race archive has been reversed. This makes more sense and new races are placed at the start of the archive instead of at the end. This means that when you go to browse the archive, the most recent races are shown first and they get older as you go. It is much easier to browse recently added races this way.

As I added the latest race to the databases, the horse database ran out of space and the program stopped with an error message. I've added a check so that a friendly warning is displayed that the database is full instead. No-one else has reached the limit, or at least they've not emailed me to point out the error, so maybe it's just me trying to track too many horses.

There is a limit of 2,000 horses in a database, but there is the option to create more databasese. You can create databases for jumps and for flat, which would mean you can track more horses because the databases will fill up more slowly. I may start doing this. I could have extended the limit to 3,000 or 4,000 horses, but then I thought that there's no point in trying to track every horse. So I went through and deleted any horse with a low rating that always comes last, or near to last. After all, what's the point in tracking useless horses? The horse database is now a bit smaller. I think I'll only add the first four or five in each race instead of the whole field and see how it goes. I only want to track the best horses, so I might prune any that consistently come way down the field. If I run out of space again, I'll increase the limit and post an update.

08/03/06: One of the most tedious aspects of Form Cracker is entering the race details. All those horses, jockeys, trainers and so on is a pain in the neck. However, there is a way to save you time and typing. Take a look at this and then use the same technique in Form Cracker.

When you right click on the word Databases on the right of the toolbar an Import menu appears on the File menu. If you display the Form pop-up windows at the Ladbrokes or Paddy Power websites, you can copy the race card into Form Cracker. Click and drag over the whole race card and then press Ctrl+C. Switch to the Form Cracker window and select File, Import, Ladbrokes (or Paddy Power). The race card is automatically created.

Any missing information will cause problems, so you need to make sure everything is present and correct, and that you copy everything you need to copy. It doesn't tolerate mistakes, but the worst that will happen is that the program will freeze. Just run it again.

13/02/06: Every so often a virus spreads around the Internet like wildfire. Millions of people's computers are infected in a very short space of time. It is a different virus each time and right now it is one McAfee calls W32/Mydoom.bg@MM!zip (other anti virus companies may have slightly different names for it). My inbox was flooded with them this morning.

Although you may blame computers, Microsoft, or Windows, the truth is that most viruses are spread by people. Viruses rarely spread by themselves and they require the help of people. More often than not, a virus arrives as an attachment to an email message. You actually have to open the attached file in order to be infected. If you don't open attachments to emails, you won't get infected by a virus. Open the attachment (usually the message tell you to do this and people stupidly do exactly this), and the virus executes and then sends copies of itself to every email address it can find on your PC. This means all your friends and work contacts.

Remember, people spread viruses and if people stopped opening email attachments there would be a lot fewer viruses on the Internet.

18/01/06: Advantages of writing your own software are that if you want a feature, you can simply put it in, if there's a problem, you can fix it, and you're always one version ahead of everyone else. This leads me on to a couple of extra features coming up in Form Cracker.

I've been tweaking this for ages, trying to make it better at predicting winners. One way of doing this is to experiment with the prediction parameters (select Tools, Options) and adjust the points awarded to the form, weight, days since last race, and so on. There must surely be an optimum value for each of these that gives the maximum number of winners, if only there was some way of discovering them.

Of course, the solution is to analyse lots of races using different prediction parameters and see which set of parameters gives the most winners. This is a feature that is coming up in the next version of Form Cracker. You just click a menu and it analyses all the past races you have saved using up to 100 different sets of parameters chosen at random. The best set is then saved so you can use it to predict future races. The results look good so far and the accuracy of predictions is much improved.

Another feature addition coming up soon is the ability to copy race cards from websites. You can go to Ladbrokes or Paddy Power websites using Internet Explorer and display a race card. One keypress and one mouse click later and the whole race card is in Form Cracker. It saves a huge amount of tedious typing.

Grabbing race cards from websites is prone to problems though, so this will be enabled as an undocumented feature. A sort of cheat mode. It's been in the program for ages and it works if you know what you're doing. If you don't, the program will get stuck in a loop somewhere and stop responding. There's also an import routine for race cards on the Racing Post website too, but that's even less stable, so it'll remain hidden.

These updates will be in the next version of Form Cracker that will be posted in about a week's time. Updates are free.

09/01/06: I don't know about you, but I've been doing pretty badly on the horses lately. After a run of loosers, it's making me doubt the ability of Form Cracker to predict winners. However, I'm sure that it is simply down to the winter weather. Today was typical and I didn't win anything. The problem is that with the weather and going the way it is at the moment, betting has become more like a lottery and it is just luck if you win. Out of an eight-horse race today that I analysed and put money on, only three horses finished the course. The rest either fell or unseated their riders. When most of the horses can't even make it to the finish line, it doesn't make much sense spending hours analysing the form. This type of thing is far too common at the moment and horses that ordinarily wouldn't come anywhere find themselves right up at the front. Roll on summer!

31/12/05: Out of 50 emails in one of my inboxes this morning, 49 of them were infected with a virus. McAfee calls it Generic Malware.a!zip Trojan. This has been building up over the last few days. Another email inbox has been receiving up to a dozen W32.Sober.X@mm!zip viruses a day over the last few weeks. I can't understand why people put up with infected PCs. Not only do they have the potential to steal your usernames and passwords, they can log your credit card and bank details too.

My ISP scans my email for viruses me, so I don't even get to see them, never mind get infected. I just get a polite message from my ISP telling me that email X was deleted because it was a virus. On another account, McAfee scans incoming messages and automatically deletes virus-infected ones. It's just so easy to avoid viruses (and prevent them from spreading), it's hard to work out why more people don't do this.

Two programs are currently being worked on, pBase and Greyhound Cracker. The latter is basically Form Cracker, but for greyhound racing. You'll be able to analyse the form and other information for a greyhound race and the program will predict the dog with the best chance of winning. pBase (Personal Database) is a database creator.

There are several good database programs, such as Microsoft Access, but they tend to be expensive and there aren't any programs at the budget end of the market. There are lots of specific databases, such as a video/DVD or music database, but no general programs that let you design your own database. pBase will let you create simple databases containing text, numbers, URLs, pictures, links to external files, money, and so on. You can define the number and type of files, view using table and form views, search and sort and so on.

18/12/05: Anyone remember the Psion Series 5? This was a hand-held computer that was around in the mid 1990s. I had one, in fact, I still have it and it is gathering dust in a cupboard. Maybe I'll sell it on eBay some time - even broken ones have been fetching a nice price. Anyway, I have extracted the Psion section from an old website I had in 1999 and have posted it here. If you don't know what a Psion Series 5 is, it won't interest you.

07/12/05: Form Cracker is able to download race cards so you don't have to type them in. OK, I only post one or at most two a day, but the for the last six races I posted, Form Cracker correctly predicted the winner. If you'd put £10 on each one, you'd now have several hundred pounds in your pocket! Of course, hindsight is a wonderfull thing - I don't always bet on every race myself and when I do, I only place a pound. I suppose it'll teach me to have more faith in my software! No doubt if I put £10 on the next race, my selection will come last! Sod's law!

23/11/05: I checked my email at 8am this morning and there were 20 emails infected with viruses. I deleted them all. I logged on again at 1pm and there were another 29 virus-infected emails. At 6pm there was another 21. This is a record!

It's all the same virus. McAfee calls it W32/Sober.gen@MM, but other anti virus companies might give it a slightly different name. What's so hard about preventing the spread of viruses? GET SOME ANTI VIRUS SOFTWARE!!!

Here are some useful links: Go to Panda Software and click the Active Scan button half way down the page to scan your PC for viruses and kill them. It's free. Symantec has a good collection of free virus removal tools.

12/11/05: The horse, jockey and trainer databases in Form Cracker are steadily growing and will continue to grow. Every race that is entered becomes part of the database, so in a few months it will be pretty big. In a year, it will be huge. The latest databases are on the download page - download the zip file and copy the contents to the Form Cracker folder.

Work continues with Share Cracker, a program designed to analyse the stock market. It looks good and will be ready in about a month.

Some articles have been posted. These were written for Live Publishing magazines which closed over the summer. Take a look, you might find them interesting.

16/10/05: I had an email today that raised some interesting points, so I'll answer it here so that everyone can read it. The email asked why Predict Race in Form Cracker sometimes gave different results when run twice, and also why the Form Cracker database is so small.

When you use the Predict Race function, sometimes there are unknowns. For example, in some races there are horses that have little or sometimes even no form. Obviously it would not be right to give a horse with no form a score of zero and it could, in fact, turn out to be a winner. We just don't know how the horse will perform, so it is given a random value. Similarly, if a horse has run only one race, it is harder to predict than a horse that has run six races and has well established form. So once again, a lack of form means it is given random values.

What you should do is select Predict Race a few times and see what the results are. Unpredictable horses will result in different scores and so will have different predicted finish positions. Really, it is better to avoid races that have lots of horses with little or no form because they are unpredictable. This is not just good advice for using the program, but for betting on horse racing in general.

The database is not intended to be a complete list of horses, jockeys and trainers. The idea is for you to track your favourites over the season. Many racing experts advise that you do this, so you can better predict when a horse is on form or running below par.

Having said that though, every race analysed adds to the database, so although it started off small, this time next year hundreds of races will have been analysed and it will be much bigger. Form Cracker updates are free, so you will be able to download database updates on a regular basis.

There are programs you can buy that contain every horse, every jockey, every trainer, and every race. However, they cost up to £55 a month - that's over £600 a year. I wanted to create a program that was much more affordable. This means that it has a limited database, but over time it will just get better and better as it grows.

11/10/05: Some people have been experiencing problems with LCAE and LCW downloading lottery results, and with FC downloading race cards. The programs just time out and do not download anything. This is almost certainly due to security software blocking the programs from accessing the Internet. If you don't let the programs access the Internet, it is not surprising that the Internet features fail.

You need to tell your firewall to allow the program to access the Internet. In addition to this, the program uses Internet Explorer's features, so if IE is locked down tight with all the maximum security settings, the programs might not work. It is possible that the programs are being blocked without your knowledge. Check your firewall logs.

09/10/05: Putting your email on a Web site makes it public domain and it attracts spam and viruses like bees to a honeypot. It is actually quite interesting in a way. You get to see all the latest phishing scams, for example, and I frequently get emails about my PayPal or eBay account, bank accounts and so on. They all ask me to click a link and log on - as if I would! I guess some people are taken in by these things. However, sometimes I get phishing scams for banks I've never even heard of, never mind got an account with! I presume they are in the US (I'm not).

I also get lots of viruses. In fact, I got a record 20 in my inbox this morning! It is interesting because the number of virus emails tends to grow to a peak and then fade away as people clean up their PCs. Anti virus software, even freebies like AVG, easily deal with email viruses, so I presume that there are still lots of people using the Internet without any protection at all. Why? Even if you have no money at all, it's no excuse. Go and get AVG.

14/09/05: Form Cracker is nearly finished and it is looking good. You can read all about it here. Can it pick winners? Yes it can, but no computer program can predict the winner of every race every time. If such a program existed, you could put £100 on a race, put the winnings on the next race, put the winnings on the next and so on. Within a week you would be a millionaire, the bookies would go bust and betting on the horses would be abandoned because it was too predictable.

What the program can do is to help you to analyse all the data - form, going, trainer and jockey skills, and so on. Play safe and have an each way bet. On a 9 horse race with 3 places, statistically speaking you have a 1 in 3 chance of picking a placed horse even if you pick one at random. Those are good odds, but when you combine it with Form Cracker's analysis, you've got a very good chance of winning.

Form Cracker will be priced a bit higher than the other programs, but that's because you'll get free downloads of race cards. Someone has to sit at a computer and type them in so that you can download them. There are programs that have databases of every every race card, every horse, how long their legs are, and what they ate for breakfast. However, they cost anything up to £50 a month - every month on a subscription basis. What's more, they aren't any better at predicting winners than Form Cracker, which is just a one-off fee.

It'll be ready in around 2 weeks and you'll be able to buy it on CD from CCA Software or download it from here.

31/07/05: Another printing bug fixed. It only affected creating lottery ticket templates for non-powerball type lotteries. Irish lottery and New York Lotto databases posted in the download section. Added South Africa, Australian and California lottery result downloads - players in these areas just click a button to download the latest results. If you don't live in these areas, then they're not much use! I'll add some more downloads when I find them. LCW is now V7.04.

Some lottery companies seem to provide free lottery results downloads for the general public, but some don't. LCW's download feature relies on the lottery companies continuing to provide these free services, of course. If they change them, the downloads will stop working. If that happens, I'll attempt to find an alternative download and a program update will be provided.

26/07/05: A bug when printing on an HP LaserJet has been fixed and LCW is now V7.0.2. There are no new features and if you haven't got a laser printer, it won't affect you.

17/07/05: Lottery Cracker World is finally finished. This is much better than LCAE and it works with a huge number of lotteries around the world. Support for Euromillions was dropped, but this will affect only a small number of UK users. You can download it and try it without affecting your current installation of LCAE, so give it a go, it's free to try.

29/05/05: Work continues on Lottery Cracker World and it's looking really good. LCAE was designed specifically for the UK, so the idea was to create a separate version for the US and other countries. However, rather than having two programs, LCW is for everyone - US, UK... the whole world. It is much better than LCAE in many ways and if you like LCAE, but want more features, then it'll be well worth upgrading when it is available this summer.

Got an email from Softdll.com to say iDoc Writer had been awarded five stars. Most software sites rate this program very highly, so why are sales so poor? Maybe it's just the price. Will try cutting the price in half to see if it generates any interest.

30/03/05: iDoc Writer has been awarded four stars at Free Trial Downloads.com. If you have an Apple iPod, you should try it. It creates games that you can play on the iPod itself while listening to music.

Work has been started on Lottery Cracker World. This is a version of Lottery Cracker that works with all the major lotteries around the world - US Powerball, US Megamillions, Irish Lottery, France Lottery, South Australia Lotto, and so on. About 90% of it will be identical to Lottery Cracker AE, but it will have some new features too.

15/02/05: Lottery Cracker Source has been added to the list of software. Check it out! SharewarePost.com gave iDoc Writer a five-star awards. See here...

03/02/05: Added a couple of freebies - two demos of the A* pathfinding algorithm. If you are interested in writing games or how games work, then download them and take a look at the source code. Just load the .bb files into Notepad. They are of no interest to non-programmers though.

The complete source code to Lottery Cracker 1 to 5 will be available shortly. This will also include the full LC1 to 5 programs too. You'll be able to view the code and hopefully it'll help you when you are writing your own programs. They were written in Visual Basic 3, which is well out of date now, but if anyone still has it, they can load the programs, modify them, and recompile their own customised versions.

iDoc Writer now includes two games for the iPod.