Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

And here it is… Google Talk!! Does anyone want to join me for a chat to try this thing out?

The below quote from the programs about page on Google website makes it sound useful already and it does a lot more! It seems that the rumours are true… Google will take over everything… and I am sure they will do it with a clean, neat and user friendly interface! I think that the 900kb download is quite impressive to, MSN Messenger is 8.71MB so is it 1/10th the product or is it just quality coding?!?

Your Gmail contacts are pre-loaded and the people you communicate with most often will show up in your Google Talk Friends list. You can go to your Gmail Inbox from the Google Talk interface, and you can even email your contacts directly using your Gmail account. Google Talk also does everything the Gmail Notifier used to do, and can show notifications for new messages in your Gmail account, as well as for incoming calls or chats.

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.

I have recently either been deep in development mode on a new project or taking short breaks living a second life. My second life is in the game/environment of Second Life. This is essentially a massive online world where you can meet and interact with other people… or their avatars at least and explore an entire world of homes, shops and arcades. One of the most amazing things about the game is that you have a complete arsenal of tools to customise the environment, inside the environment. There are 3d modelling tools and even a scripting language which is loosely based on Java and C. The possibilities seem endless and both Gringod and myself are keen to learn and push some boundaries. We have come to an arrangement whereby I will learn as much as possible about the building and design tools and he will push the limits of the scripting engine. If all goes to plan after the trial period, we will get some land and build our dream home. I will make some nice structures, he will come in and program the ‘entertainment system’! It will be the cutting edge batchelor pad we have always discussed except we will be able to fly around! To see Gringods experiences to date, have a look at his second life posts.

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!!

About a year ago, I purchased the iMatch Image database to catalogue my collection of photos and hopefully allow me to find a particular image quicker. The application is very powerful and completely exceeds my requirements as I dont have enough time to learn about the advanced features. I am sure I have a number of uses for the scripting language it supports, but I have no idea how to use it. The biggest feature that I have wanted to use is the categories view. An image can be assigned to multiple categories that you will have decided upon. I have opted for location, type of image, what and who is in the image.

Yesterday I completed the categorisation of every single photo. I can now click on ‘Mystere’ and see all of the pictures of the boat. I can click on ‘Shane’ and see all photos that have me in them. To further this, I can combine these and select ‘Mystere’ and ‘Shane’ to see all pictures of me on the boat.

I have calculated that the images have an average of 4 categories assigned to them, as I have 4200+ photos, that equates to more than 16,000 checkboxes ticked!! I am off out now to buy a new mouse as my left button has melted!!

I have decided to call my code plotMe for the time being as it seems a lot more generic and unmarketed as the names I was coming up with previously. I have also added a new category to my Blog!

More progress now. On this version you can click a location and the place you click becomes the location of the spot. Now that I have this functionality it should be fairly easy to get some more dynamic information passed to my code. I think a little tidying up is needed and I need to clean up the maths so that I can use real location figures. That will be one of many steps involved in furthering this project! I need to come up with a new name aswell… any ideas??

Okay so I have been researching and learning about the PHP GD library. I have managed to make a start on my mapping system with a lot of help from various sources on the net and my trusty PHP book. If you are interested in my prototype system have a look here… comments welcome! I have dubbed it GeoCODE but that will need to be reviewed in the future when I get some inspiration!

An excellent Windows shell extension that allows you to create a storage drive from your Gmail account. You can find further details and download a copy from viksoe.dk. This seems like a great use of that 1GB space that we have!!

What fun can be had with Linux. For the first time in maybe a year, I had to delve into my webserver operating system and make some changes. It has been such a long time that I had to re-download PuTTy to get access as it was nowhere in sight… it had obviously been lost in the many re-installs of my Windows PC!! As I could not remember the ports I used for VNC, I jumped into BASH and the Vi editor to make various changes to config files and the file system. You know, it was actually quite good fun. The best bit though was that I got everything working that I needed to and as of yet, didn’t break anything in the process.

When I tried to install the Logitech software, I was informed that there was already a Bluetooth stack installed. I previously had a NewLink adaper but it was uninstalled some time ago. Essentially, because of this existing piece of software, I am unable to install the Logitech Bluetooth suite or use the hub for anything other than the keyboard and mouse (Which are still working even though I keep deleting system files!).

Searching the Logitech site provided no answers and the forums weren’t much help either which was unusual and indicated that the problem must be new or unique to me. What have I done recently?? Hmm.. installed Windows XP SP2 with its new and improved Bluetooth functionality. I think this might be the cause. After some searching and attempts at disabling the M$ Bluetooth I came accross a Knowledgebase article that seemed to have the information I needed. When I get around to trying this, I will be sure to post my findings as I doubt I will be the first person to have this problem. My first tutorial… since the last one anyway!!

IrfanView is a free image program that I can now highly reccommend. It has nearly all of the features you might want from your editing software and includes support for plugins, video, slideshows and even command line operations. You should head over to the website and look at what it can do. Thanks Irfan for a great piece of software!

At last, an opportunity to do something that has about as much use as the time I wired an old hard drive to a stereo amplifier and made it work like a speaker. BoingBoing have linked out to a kernelthread.com article where the authors have managed to load Unix onto a Gameboy Advance… amazing.

For doing Math calculations, what is the most powerful bit of kit in your PC? … Whats that you say?… Your 64Bit 3GHz AMD Athlon 64! Nope.. try your graphics card. On average today, a PC’s main processor is capable of 5 or so gigaflops, the same as the Cray 3 Supercomputer in 1989. A cutting edge graphics card is generally capable of about 40 gigaflops or more. The innovative company, BionicFX, noticed this and has created the world’s first commercial application to process non-graphic data on your GPU. The new application relies on Audio Video EXchange (AVEX), a technology which transforms real-time audio into video and performs effect processing on your NVIDIA GPU. It will be interesting to see what the next stage of this revolution will be! Good work guys!!