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Modelling Bacteria
My first article in a while looks at Modelling Bacteria Using the JDK, and includes a brand new Java applet to play with.

Anthony Daniels
C3PO talks to Gen5! In one of our best interviews to date, Anthony discusses C3PO, Star Wars, emotions and machines, modern-day robotics research and a lot more. A must read.!

aiSomPic
This article continues to be one of my favourite, looking at how to use SOMs to categorize and discover similar images..

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Poll

Changelog

13.01.04 18:10	What's New XML feed is now appropriately titled and directed to the What's New page.
11.01.04 17:04	Fixed some bugs with the XML feed. Authors and descriptions now are HTML encoded to ensure things like &'s are converts to &amps;. Couple of changes to the admin system too.
06.01.04 17:11	Added BibTeX support for articles. A popup window will display a rough BibTeX entry for the article using the unpublished phrase and assuming the url package is being used.
13.11.03 12:44	Fixed a glaring bug pointed out by Professor Dr. Niall Palfreyman. The site wasn't browser friendly for text-based browsers on the article pages. Furthermore, this should have a much better effect on the stability of the site, since it should help spiders and automated browsers navigate the site with few problems.
02.08.03 01:37	The 11.07.03 bugfix caused its own bug, which is now also fixed! Actually the above bugfix caused me to finally implement a flurry of changes to the underlying code, as well as include several new features, including: Better cross-referencing between subcategories Article toolbox Additional feature(s) for 'Contributors' A lot more streamlining, adding stored procedures, additional security checks. Also a few updates to my personal site.
12.07.03 13:06	Fixed two bugs in the articles script. Well, not so much bugs but additionally error-checking to make the script more robust. :)
11.07.03 13:13	Fixed a bug in the archives script.
27.06.03 20:47	Added a check within the smart 404 script to ensure circular 404 errors won't occur. This shouldn't occur most of the time, but if a database item is incorrectly added, problems may occur. Numerous other small changes.
17.06.03 23:09	Daniel Byström suggested that I implement a feature that colours new news items slightly different to that of older news items. I've added this, by using the date that the visitor last logged in on. New news items are a slightly darker grey and have a little "New" icon.
17.06.03 17:05	Spent all day tuning the main code of the site. It seems that something on this server is very unstable. Tollon (hosters) assured me it probably wasn't Generation5, but I thought I'd check anyway. I have tuned about 25 scripts, and found one bottle-neck on the main page (poll script) which I've tweaked and will hopefully further improve on later. I've now stress tested the site with Microsoft's Web Application Stress Tool at it handled 25 requests per second consistently for 5 minutes without any errors. This should be more than enough for Generation5's current traffic requirements.
15.06.03 09:57	Responding to comments that the front page needs a little more colour, and perhaps more emphasis on reading the articles, I've added a "Featured Articles" box in place of the standard "What's New" box. The Features Articles have icons, and are more colourful. The standard box can be tabbed in too, if desired. Furthermore, I've edited nearly 100 articles to ensure their links are all correct. This takes a little more strain off the smart 404 script, which is currently handling nearly 35% of all page requests!
13.06.03 16:44	Uploaded a new version of my personal site.
12.06.03 16:44	A few small bugs have been fixed.
11.06.03 12:03	Generation5 is live!
13.05.03 17:44	Fixed a couple of bugs in the interviews script. Additionally, I changing the file layout of Generation5. Generation5 is too big to have all files in one master directory, so I am splitting everything up into the years they were submitted. The means moving over 300 files and well over 1000 images into their correct directories manually, but it should be worth it in the end. The smart 404 script can handle changes in directory too, so broken links won't occur.
17.04.03 19:22	Made all generated pages (including mobile) HTML 4.01 Transitional- compliant. This nvolved a little formatting change, but nothing significant. Now the only non-compliant HTML code will be in the articles themselves.
8.04.03 12:54	It has been a while since I've worked on the site, but I've spent the last two days increasing the general efficiency and interoperability of the site. I've added a custom script for interviews, much like reviews. Removed the remaining inline SQL and replaced them with pre- compiled SQL procedures. Ensured the CSS stylesheet was completely valid; no errors or warnings are now produced for the main sheet. Additional code clean-up, FIXMEs, and efficiency tweaks have been done.
24.01.03 15:23	Removed the entire "Programs" section and moved them all into the Articles section under a "Applications/Code" subsection. I did this since many programs come with mini-articles describing the theory making them pseudo-articles. The ones that don't could benefit from potentially having explantory essays on the same page. Reduces the complexity of the system and aids navigation I think. Also makes the site look bigger. :) Improved site performance in key places (articles/search engine) with stored procedures. I'll be converting the other queries to stored procedures soon too. Makes the code look neater in places as well.
16.1.03 11:16	Removed the XML feed for new articles and added a RSS feed instead! Added all the information present in the XML feed but in the portable RSS form. Also doubled the number of articles listed to 10.
16.1.03 00:57	Removed the XML and RDF news feeds and replaced them with a much better RSS feed. The RSS contains all the information both the RDF and XML feeds contained and is parseable by most RSS/RDF tickers since they will ignore the gen5 namespaced information. For authors wanting to read the extra Generation5 information, they can parse the XML themselves (or used XSL).
15.1.03 21:42	Added a personal site for myself and any articles/programs/ramblings that do not fit within Generation5.
14.1.03 20:30	Worked on a few efficiency issues. Added review support to the mobile site. You can now search and view the information presented in the review boxes from the mobile site. This is primarily aimed at people that want Generation5's quick "opinion" on the go.
13.1.03 11:29	Added a glossary lookup to the search engine.
11.1.03 11:16	Redesigned Generation5 Mobile to better suit mobile devices. The logo has been redesigned and sized to be much smaller and use web-safe colours only. I also reduced the size of the text, and moved formatting out of the CSS, since most mobile devices don't yet support CSS. I also added ACCESSKEYs to the menu. This allows devices that support access keys (like Smartphones) to quickly access the menu options. Added @media print support to the main Generation5 CSS. This way, people using "proper" browsers (ones that support W3C standards) should be able to print any Generation5 page without it looking horrible. The LHS/RHS boxes disappear, as well as a few other items. Clicking on "Printable Version" will tidy things up a bit more, since I have more control over the formatting, but it works either way now!
20.12.02 12:19	Added change password feature, and added more security to registration routines to prevent SQL injection attacks. Profile changing also didn't feature a password check, this has been added. Updated AWS boxes to be a little more useful. Performance still not good though. Increased security with news process - both SQL and HTML injection attacks. Changed some of the routines to use regular expressions instead of a simplier (less efficient and less comprehensive!) replace function. Paged news results. Archived news would only return the first 20 results of any search result. The system will now return all results in pages of 20 results. You can now read through all 300 or so news items with the word 'robot' in them! Removed adminmode directly in articles due to security concerns. Added the ratings to the reviews listing. Additional code cleanup and modularizing.
18.12.02 11:59	Changed the article New!/Updated format. New articles less than two weeks old have a New! marker, new articles less than 4 weeks old have a Recent marker, updated articles less than two weeks old have an Updated marker, and updated articles less than four weeks old have an Updated marker.
16.12.02 13:01	Added support for Amazon Web Services. This seems to incur a fair performance penalty since the data is grabbed and formatted using Amazon's Web Services and their XSLT processor. Nevertheless, I've made the book recommendations dynamic(-ish), so it can return some good results.
13.12.02 16:12	Added XSL support to the newsfeeds. This should allow people to download the XML feeds to their computers (or servers) and display the information how they wish without programming (ASP/PHP).
4.12.02 22:39	Change log created. A run-down of the new features can be found here.