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September 24th, 2008
I looked away from a page for a few seconds and when I looked back this was the rather disturbing message on my screen. As adverts go, it certainly got my attention.
It was only after it had looped once that I saw that this might be being directed at viruses.
August 8th, 2008
We spent the start of this week transferring our furniture across the corridor to a new, more studio-like unit.
July 14th, 2008
So I’ve had a holiday in a caravan with my family in rainy Cornwall during the week that had possibly the worst forecast for July ever. So bad in fact that our local presenter David Braine was demonstrating rainfall as dyed blue water in glasses, comparing the monthly average, which wasn’t very much, against a full glass symbolising what was expected to fall in just one day.
However it turned out nowhere near as bad as this and from the sounds it was further up nearer home that got all this rain. So we managed to visit some very beautiful places of which I have taken and uploaded photos to Flickr. I also managed to take a couple of quite successful panoramic photoshop-merged shots.
May 28th, 2008
When I first acquired Half Life 2, Episode 2 I just had to see how many of the quests I could complete once I had got past the act of playing the storyline properly once through. And of course I attempted to complete the particularly aggravating Little Rocket Man quest, which essentially sees you carry an ornamental gnome (found hidden in a radio station at the very beginning) throughout the entire game all while doing the challenges you face normally.
May 18th, 2008
I have experimentally planted some of my African Cape Sundew’s offspring (drosera capensis) down by our garden pond where they seem to have settled in quite nicely with the thousands of flies that hover about around there. I found a broken pot in which to plant them, that I partially buried on its side so that a bit of water would be pooled in it, but also begin draining off if the level gets too high.
May 12th, 2008
I have decided to start redeveloping my own website’s design again, this time finishing the things I wanted from it in the beginning but couldn’t quite achieve the first time around, from the design through to the administration.
While visually the difference will be pretty unnoticeable (still black, dark purple, light green and golden-white), underneath there is all change again as I shift everything from separate templated pages to an entirely Wordpress-driven site, hopefully allowing me to quickly and easily update things when time becomes a much more valuable commodity in the final year. Of course, this has required some serious customisation but should hopefully make the site much more robust.
And then finally I might get around to producing some nice flash content to fill in that dynamic header section at the top of the pages!
April 16th, 2008
I decided that what our wordpress-cross-CMS for Ocean Addict required was the ability to browse through the thousands of expected Pages (pages because of the fact they exist outside of the post timeline as a form of static content) forming the school listings via the inbuilt category system. This was easily achievable by creating a page template specifically for displaying a school listing with the Comments and Categories shown and by using the useful plugin Page Category Plus for replicating the Category selection interface in the admin (I was already aware that this was possible since Pages are simply Posts that are treated differently but still have all the same mySQL fields).
While this side of things worked exactly as expected it threw up a unique issue I hadn’t considered.
March 21st, 2008
I was fixing my second year idat203 Negotiated Project (since moving it caused various hyperlinks to break, making viewing it in action pointless) when the flurry of discontented emails about the new i-dat website design started in the DAT forum (roughly around two hundred… million so far methinks).
So while testing my project I decided to see what it would make of the site, bearing in mind that the idea of this piece was to reveal what you aren’t meant to see in a website. This project will react to the quality of the underlying code in a site in the sense that it looks for individual words to fit into ever smaller spaces. Crap websites, ie. ones that haven’t been hand-coded but are rather churned out of some program like MS Word tend to clog up the project with huge chunks of code, which never get displayed. However humanly-readable, XHTML compliant sites, the sort that have had effort put into the coding side produce wonderful results like as can be seen in this example of the i-dat site:
Based on a couple of puzzles I received a long time ago, this flash generates a random puzzle and then jumbles the pieces up for the player to solve.
The flash actionscript behind this is flexible enough to allow for any size
puzzle to be created and jumbled as many times as I like. In addition to this,
the difficulty of rotating pieces is also a feature.
