Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Sunday this week was very successful on the web-development front as it involved the very successful completion of a long running project and the chance to drink some nice coffee with my friend! Although not quite polished to absolute perfection yet, my ATP (Adventure, Travel and Photography) theme/plugin for wordpress is pretty much complete. The area that needed my attention was the photo display part. To give you some background, here was my own design brief;

1. Front page to show a dynamic map of some sort that plots the positions of the articles.
2. Small excerpts with a thumbnail image of each entry.
3. A self generating menu that cross references location and activities.
4. A random image of only my travel photos.
5. Each article was to have an album of photos displayed within it that would create a neat pop-up viewer, rather than link to my gallery.
6. The design had to be ‘compatible’ with my existing website.

After about 3 months of coding and tweaking, I had everything working. The only aspect I was not 100% happy with was the implementation of the photos. I was using an application that involved loading the photos into the post itself and from there, would create a pop-up viewer and could even generate the random image I was after. What concerned me was that if I wanted the photos in my main gallery, they would be duplicated there. What I needed was a way of pulling in my gallery photos and a new way of viewing them. This was solved by actually writing a plugin that would pull the images from the gallery album and display them. A new seperate pop-up viewer was needed so that a clean-popup window could show the images with a navigation system to browse through the pictures.

I had spent all of Sunday morning creating these parts and was working on the viewer when Gringod showed up. Fueled by proper Italian coffee, we polished off the pop-up viewer and even found the time to include some Javascript that would dynamically resize the window to the photo contained within. Now the system is complete, I have added one story about when I went shark diving in South Africa. To see how the system works, browse over to http://adventure.phrixus.co.uk. As I am leaving for my holiday on Saturday, expect it to start growing soon. For major updates I will post on this part of the site but the main stories will be found there.

What should I do about computers? I am now somewhat unsure of which way I need to move. At the moment I have a Mac mini, a Windows PC, 2 Linux Servers and a laptop (that has been commandeered by my mother who has been eaten by the eBay bug). I need a new laptop as a priority but my main computer could do with an extensive upgrade aswell. Two weeks ago I was set to buy a Powerbook initially to cover the laptop side of things. This would let me retire the Linux servers into other homes and use the Mac mini as my main server. The plan was to then get all of the software I would need on the Mac platform before shutting down my PC and investing in a Power Mac. Unfortunately, things change… including the architecture of Apple’s computers! At this stage, I am not sure I can move to Mac’s completely until the new machines are released. Apple has claimed that they will support PPC for a long time, but in computers that could be just a few months. My instincts tell me to keep my current PC for as long as possible (It’s not really that bad, I just like to have the latest and greatest!) and buy a new PC laptop to use for the next couple of years. Is that the right way to go? I am not sure but if you have any thoughts, please feel free to offer advice!

For anyone that is interested, Gringod and I have finally uploaded the new Aquasail.net homepage. This will allow you to see each of the loactions that the yacht Spinalonga has been to and will link to the relevant article. Have a look and see what you think. The map system is also being heavily used in a project that I am working on at the moment to ducument location photography and travel articles.

Dave will very soon have a presence online as we are building him a photoblog. Links and details to follow over the next few days. If anyone has any ideas for sub-domain names for him… let me know! We hope this will make him use his camera little more and get used to posting online!

With my seemingly never-ending list of things I want to achieve with my time, somehow, posting to my website does not happen as often as I would like. Especially in these summer months, I barely have enough time to eat, let alone read, write and photograph. I have been very busy with Mystere over the last few weeks and have even spent some time away in France. You can read the full story of our experience in the Blenheim Triangle Race on The Sailing Bug. This coming week-end, most of us will be off to Jersey to compete in the annual Dresdner, Channel Island Yacht Race. Aidy will be absent as he will be on his way to an adventure in Norway. Last year we came 10th in this race from over 100 boats, this year we are not expecting such great things… though we will of course try as hard as we always do!! The weather report this year is not looking ideal for us but at least it will be sunny (fingers crossed)!! Dave, myself and Helen will be heading over a day earlier so that we can do some shopping and visit a couple of the local attractions. With any luck, Dave and I will have our cameras and so might have something to show for it aswell!! Leigh will be heading over Friday evening for the start on Saturday.

It has to be said that FedEx rule! I have been impressed by them and other courier companies in the past but this time they have truly outdone themselves… let me explain;

Monday 16th May: 10PM
I order the ‘Big Kahuna’ set of DVD’s from the Luminous Landscape site. I will go into detail about these in another post but essentially a box containing 12 DVD’s is to be posted from Canada.

Wednesday 18th May: 11.04Am
The ‘Big Kahuna’ set of DVD’s arrives at my house!! That is just 37 hours from Order to arrival!!! The package covered approximately 5000 miles. I dont think you could travel much quicker that that!

Well done FedEx… have some pagerank on me!!

The Little Britain Spring Regatta was held here in Guernsey this year. With over 30 boats from the UK and Channel Islands there was quite a lot of action out on the water. A few of us headed out on the Sunseeker to watch. Some of the best photographs of the week-end can be found at Encaptured.com. If you were sailing in the Little Britain Regatta, you should check out the pictures as there are some great shots!!

Having just finished a 2 day MS Access Course my mind is full of the potential application that I could create to make my life much easier! Being that I barely have time to eat sometimes I am trying to put these out of my mind and focus on the real project that I am going to be attempting with my new knowledge. Because corporations value their data and security so highly, I am unable to directly access the DB where the data I need to manpulate for my daily work is held but I can get hold of all the data in a CSV file. I am not able to access my works SQL servers directly or run my own servers so I am left with one option, use the best (only) tool available… Access!! Now that I have learnt just how the query builder works, I feel that my chances of success have been greatly increased. Either way, I now think I should go on the advanced course so that I can the VB code needed to allow prompted queries and the like. Tomorrow will be update, append and split day me thinks!!

Leigh has placed a post on his site about the last couple of races and a small note about the ‘Boathouse’ in Guernsey where we ate breakfast. I would like to expand on his comments as I am still in shock over how bad the service actually was, I mean, how many times should you have to ask for milk?? There was not one part of the transaction that went through with no mistakes. The staff do not speak a work of English and one strutting Eastern-European-like person has a face like stone and an attitude akin to an unemployed German who has been given a uniform and instructed to manage some traffic. Now if he should read this, I would like to point out that people usually ask for things to be excluded from the plate because they don’t like them, not because they do not have enough money to pay!!! I can categorically state that I will not be (willingly) going there again!

What is Google doing now?? They no longer offer 1GB of storage for their GMail accounts. Sometimes I am amazed by the thinking that must go on there!! No not Infinity+1, its april fools day remember, even though it would be a very good idea! Instead, as they have been running for a year, they are now giving 2GB of storage for every user!! Thanks Google!

They have also integrated Rich Text formatting… at last!!!

I have a number of invitations available if anyone would like one (I am quite sure though that everyone has a Gmail account!)… please leave a comment.

I have written my first plugin for WordPress and I am pleased to say that all seems to be well!! You can find more details on the PXS Mail Form page. 10 people downloaded it during the first 30 minutes of it being mentioned in the WordPress forums which was a promising start. I hope it proves to meet peoples needs. To see the script in action and try out its verification functions, check the contact page on this site. The plugin is available to anyone that would like a copy!

EDIT: I forgot to mention on this page that the plugin was based on the design by Ryan Duff!! You will see this noted everywhere else though. Apologies for any feelings that may have been hurt! And just to further clarify… when I say ‘My First Plugin’… I actually mean… ‘The First Plugin I have Offered for Download from my site that I have made based on the layout of Ryan Duff’s plugin’… I know, it doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely but this is a political world we live in

Whilst in Jersey, ‘H’ and I completed another Cache. This time it was a webcam cache in which we had to get our picture taken. Thanks to Leigh for sitting there and taking the time to direct us around the square at 1 minute intervals, at least he was able to sit in the dry and warm unlike us! This was our second cache and we have plans to complete some more in the next few weeks. This post is also a test for a new Gallery plugin from geoffhutchison.net. With any luck the image of the cows will link direct to the gallery!

What a film! A bit slow in places, confusing in others, definately not an ‘H’ film but I liked it. I would have to say that the main reason I liked this film was that it was focussed around a number of things I like and would really like to do. The lifestyle of the characters is pretty much what we are aiming for but perhaps on a slightly smaller scale with less funding!! I dont want to say too much about the film but although it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I am really looking forward to the DVD release.
‘H’ and I went to Cineworld in Jersey to watch it and were given the opportunity to have a VIP box as the heating in the main cinema was broken. We had a small room with its own sound system, telephone to the bar, volume controls and great big comfy seats… all in all quite nice… till the film started and the light in the ceiling stayed on and I got to see the film with a superimposed image of myself on it. The sound system was nowhere near the quality of the main cinema, admittedly it may have been a bit too loud as I had been playing with the volume controls while the ambient music was playing, no-one turned it down during the film so we got blasted big time! The seats were big and comfy so can’t complain about them!

To see what the film is about and get an idea of why I liked it… check out the trailer… well worth a quick look!

To see the poster and foreward… (more…)

Many a happy memory of working in the engine bay of the Sunseeker was brought to light when Dave and I arrived at 8AM to go out and get the GPS positions of the race marks in the channel. The adventure started when one of the batteries was too flat to get the V8 going and Dave, being determined to use a powerboat instead of the yacht, dived in and started moving them around. We eventually left at 9AM to get some fuel and then head off on our mission. My job in the scheme was to take photos and get waypoints for each mark on my Garmin. An hour later and we had finished with all the information and photos that we needed, not too bad considering how cold it was when you got up to 40 knots… strangely only on top of your head though! On the whole, it was quite a pleasant morning. This adventure was followed by an hour and a half of trying to figure out how you convert GPS files between different formats then a nice lunch at the yacht club.

To see the fruits of our labour, have a look at this map of local race marks I have put together.

I am truly astounded… no, I am in awe and cannot help but be absolutely amazed and grateful for the service that I have just received from GPS4Less.co.uk. Yesterday afternoon at about 4 o’clock, I ordered a Garmin handheld GPS unit. It arrived this morning (Next Day) at 10.30!! How did this happen? If I had been partying at some stage in the week, I would seriously question if I had ordered it much earlier… babbling and speechless so off to play…. thanks GPS4Less.co.uk.