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I have been working on a complex set of tests for a review I am putting together of 4 defragmentation tools.

The aim of my tests are to benchmark defragmentation performance, refragmentation (both in terms of number of fragments AND performance).

The tests are complex enough (and repeatable) to show how significant the differences between defragmentation tools AND I have also included a test without defragmentation as a baseline to highlight the significance of defragmentation in general.

The results are rather clear, with the results clearly split down the middle. I am just finishing off a few further tests and then I will start writing up my findings.

The full article should be completed over the weekend.

Below is a list of tasks I am working on. Which I will convert into something more permanent when I have more spare time.
I just thought I would share with you the kinda work I do in my spare time when I'm not with my friends and family, watching movies or on my motorbike.

1. Image Gallery.
   I am working on this tonight and hope to have it finished tomorrow, I just have the templating to do.
2. Defrag tool test.
   I have been testing a few defragmentation tools and have a few loose ends to finish off and write up my findings, which are very interesting indeed.
3. www.ngr78.co.uk.
   I need to look at a new domain name and add a lot of images (which is one reason for me working on item 1 first), and start putting together some articles and better structuring my site (no content will be deleted).
4. www.room42hairsalon.co.uk.
   A change in direction of Jen's hairdressing business requires a complete new site (but will be based on the cool YACS template I had 95% finished).
5. www.angelofsin.co.uk.
   This is a big project, which requires their site converting to YACS and various cool features like video and music player integration (as well the gallery code I am writting) and I need to brush up on my graphic design skills, to produce a design for their website (and other media).
   Should make great use of YACS's configuration and flexibility in recreating the upcoming gigs pages and mini guide.

As I previously mentioned, I wanted to take my blogging more seriously.

So I am here to annouce the start of the www.moneytrafficblog.net project.

I was pondering over a couple of issues. This site is not focused and I just use it for random content and thoughts.

Also, when looking for information on google about how to improve my blog, I realised how many of the search results are junk, either people wanting to sell you their secrets, also lots of sites just ripping off other peoples content.

I came up with an idea that will help myself and others, by creating a blog that will hand pick the best information there is, into a quality guide, with my on commentary, critique and unique articles drawing from my experience as a Web Developer.

What I hope is that MoneyTrafficBlog site will provide a great foundation (I don't expect it to become the next www.problogger.net or www.shoemoney.com), but will allow people to delve further into the more niche areas, maybe you want to become a professional blogger, maybe you simply want to popularise your site to promote a specific topic. I also want to concentrate on the big wins, that is doing tasks that will offer you the most benefit for the time spent. This goes hand in hand with being a foundation rather than specialised, niche blog.

The domain name www.moneytrafficblog.net is an experiment itself, to see how important a domain name is to a blogs popularity, and I picked the words in the name carefully (which is another topic completely that I have yet to write).

I want MoneyTrafficBLog to become a popular, quality resource for those interested in promoting and/or monetising their blog.

I am hoping to make a little income. My baseline is to cover any hosting costs. My initial goal is to make enough income to cover the time spent on this project. The flip side of this, I will be using ALL and ONLY the techniques that I write or blog about, so will be proof itself the techniques work.

I have currently tweaked the position of my Top and menu adverts. The top advert is now closer to the supposed hotspot (according to the google heatmap)



The menu advert is now small and positioned to the center of the menu.

I have also added a link bar across the top of the page.

What I would like to know is what people think to the colouring and positioning of these adverts, if they are obtrusive or OK. Feel free to leave comments.

Riding out of Leeds about 5:30, on the A65 and the road is dual carriage way under the viaduct and changes into normal road which is single lane, but wide enough for 2 cars then 50 meters stays goes into marked 2 lanes. Just after the dual carriage way finishes, I am doing 20 mph approx, I see a car indicating to turn right, stationary on the other side of the road, so I position my self pretty much exactly in the middle of the lane, with a big gap in front me and at the last moment, the car waiting to turn right decides to pull out in front of me, I know I'm going to hit and hit the front corner of the car about 2 foot from the cycle lane. I roll over the bonnet, whacking my foot into and smashing the windscreen and somehow land on my feet at the other side. I somehow managed to come out uninjured.

Lady was shocked at what happened, but relieved I was OK, car was drivable and I could push my bike and we cleared the road and all witnesses buggered off.

I decided to make the most of my comprehensive NCI breakdown cover and called them about 6:15 after exchanging details. After waiting an hour (they said 45 minutes) I call back. They say another half an hour, so I wait another 45 minutes and call back, eventually after 2 more phone calls recovery truck arrives at bang on 9pm, 2 hours 45 minutes wait !

It gave me plenty of time to have McDonalds and look at the damage:

Bent forks, bent front axle, broken hand guard and brake lever, broken plastics, dinted tank, ripped seat, bent exhaust, bent frame, bent pegs and probably more in good light.



The bumper was scraped, dinted wing, lights smashed, bonnet dinted by my bars/brake lever and you can just make out the smashed windscreen.



Can just make out the glass from the accident on the road, point of impact was about as far out as the back wheel of the car, about a meter back.



Shot of the junction, I was positioned about where the centre of the car in the foreground was, with a similar gap to the next car in front.

I will get some pictures of my bike tomorrow.

Yesterday I had to diagnose a performance issue with a Laptop. The machine in question is running Windows XP, fully patched and up to date, I ran a chkdsk, full disk virus and malware using Kaspersky scan (additional to the real time virus scanner installed). I left the machine and later in the day I came back .to have a look. All the scans had come back clean so I rebooted and noticed how slow things were to load, I checked task manager when I had finally logged in. I noticed that there was a svchost.exe process using 40MB of memory and sitting at 100% cpu all the time.

After quickly checking through the programs run at startup and stopping them, I worked my way onto the services. The only non-default service was Diskeeper 2007. I tried to stop this service but the system hung for a while. The service was stuck stopping. I Rebooted into safe mode and tried reinstalling Diskeeper 2007. After reboot the performance issue was still there. I went back into safe mode and uninstalled Diskeeper 2007 and then on reboot the machine was back to its original speed.

I did not have time to investigate the specific issue. This is annoying I as I did recommended Diskeeper 2007, the owner of this machine is not willing to upgrade to Diskeeper 2008 (partly cost, partly due to this issue).

Due to this machine used for music recording purposes frequently by Angel of Sin , it suffers far higher than normal office use fragmentation. The built in defragmentation tool fails to keep fragmentation under control (not helped by the 40GB HDD regularly getting filled).

The best alternative is PerfectDisk 2008, I hope to do some extensive testing this month, so maybe PerfectDisk 2008 will get my recommendation. In the mean time I have suggested using JKDefrag, which performs far better than the built in XP defragmentation tool.

Donn has posted a great review of PerfectDisk 2008.

" I have no problem in recommending PerfectDisk 2008 to new users as the best commercial defrag program available. The "StealthPatrol" option works far better than Diskeeper 2008's automatic defrag "

I look forward to seeing some benchmarks. I am currently trialling Perfectdisk and I have not encountered a single problem, but I will wait before I make any conclusions.

From TBM Forum :: View topic - Life Changes (long)

" Some of you may or may not have noticed but I haven't been on the forum for a while. Well, since 26th August actually.

Thats because that was the date I came off the XR and hit a tree ending up with a broken back and complete paralysis from the chest down.

The prognosis soon after the accident, and ever since is that I'll never walk again such was the damage to the spinal cord. The bike was unscathed, the accident happening at about 30-35 miles an hour. I spent 3 weeks in the Royal Victoria Hospital then 7 weeks at Musgrave park in rehabilitation. This consisted of teaching me how to do things in a wheelchair and look after myself out of it.

I've been out of hospital since the end of November getting back into family life (my son was 7 weeks old when the accident happened) and getting back to work. "

One of the forum members came up with the idea of collecting money for Fenty. Fenty decided that the money should goto the Mitre Trust

" MITRE Trust is a charity based at Musgrave Park Hospital, Belfast. It aims to raise money to improve patient services and to fund new developments at Musgrave, the regional centre for orthopaedics and rehabilitation in Northern Ireland. "

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A fund-raising page has been setup at Justgiving: Mark Fenton's Fundraising Page for those that wish to donate.

Raxco have just announced PerfectDisk 2008 has been released

Looking at the Professional version, the most obvious new features are a brand new GUI (which I think is better but still not as good as Diskeeper's), improved scheduling options (the StealthPatrol adds much needed idle mode scheduling), selected file defrag (great for the de fragmentation of one, or a group of fragmented files.

There really is not any ground breaking new features under the fresh new GUI, more a refinement of the previous version. If you are happy with your current defragmentation tool, then you might not feel this new version is worth the cost, but if you feel it is lacking, it is worth downloading and evaluating.

I am currently evaluating it to see if it will replace my trusty Diskeeper 10 and will post my findings.

I know Donn Edwards has been beta testing PerfectDisk 2008 and will have a full review very soon.

For more info have a look at the new design Raxco website