Journal

Added sIFR to the Site

19th September, 2009

Tired with the poor antialiasing observed in big header fonts, I decided to introduce sIFR to the site. Here’s a preview shot allowing me to use High Tower Text as my page heading:

New SRJM Logo Design

14th September, 2009

I’ve started work on a new logo design for myself:

Completed a Flash Drag and Drop Demo

10th September, 2009

Following applying for a position at spongeuk I had to produce a demonstration Adobe Flash and Actionscript piece from a sample brief creating a drag and drop e-learning game.

This involved forming an interface based on the style of their website and creating actionscripted animation for button and label motion, as well as learning a bit about SLR cameras myself in the process! I await to see if this demonstrates suitable skills for the position.

Update: the company was suitably impressed by this demo however my application was too late before they had to hire another person.

New Site Design Underway

30th August, 2009

I have actually been slowly working on this (slowly being a bit of an understatement) for a while but keep having to put it off for other commitments. Usually this means I get a bit of time when I’m tired and not up to doing much else and a stint on Fallout III is only going to make things worse.

However here are a couple more screenshots of a general basic layout and more button-y bits since the last lot of menu icons!

Other plans include a bigger better blog post preview image, related posts links, using the excerpt field of posts and some form of proper search function that includes AJAX-ed suggestions.

PHP, Adobe PDF and Server Response Headers

28th August, 2009

I’ve been rather busy lately producing the PHP backend code for a document storage website and when it came to the question of where to actually store the files the answer naturally was somewhere outside of public_html so that control could be limited using the user authentication already available for the PHP pages. This meant that PHP would have to deliver a response as if the actual file itself was being accessed.

It’s pretty easy to find how to send alternative headers and a the source data from a PDF file: for example http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/function.header.php Additionally, there is plenty of information out there if you want to use ‘Content-Disposition’ to force the client’s browser to behave as if the file was a download rather than load Adobe Reader in the window itself.

However this was all fine until we discovered that Adobe Reader’s usual behaviour of displaying the first page and loading the document as it is being read was broken. This system is intended for some fairly large documents and the browser was choosing to download and cache the entire file before displaying anything. I knew immediately it would be something to do with the headers.

There is very little I could find that expanded on this issue, so using an online tool that can be found at http://www.askapache.com/online-tools/http-headers-tool/ I examined what response would be sent by accessing a PDF file directly from the server. Using this I could replicate the header in PHP and as I guessed, the issue was resolved:


header('Accept-Ranges: bytes');
header('Content-Length: '.$filesize);
header('Connection: close');
header('Content-Type: application/pdf');


Bee Photography

27th August, 2009

While out the other day I managed to take a few shots of a variety of summery, garden-y things including spending time trying to get closeups of bees. Here are a couple of the results:

Referrer Message Plugin for WordPress

20th August, 2009

I was looking through some old del.icio.us tags when clicking on a link brought me to a blog that had implemented a specialised greeting message based on the referer. I know grabbing a referer isn’t that hard but having never seen it put to this use before I actually felt this was quite clever.

A link to the plugin: http://www.phoenixheart.net/wp-plugins/referrer-detector/

Marathon Sketch Upload to Flickr

19th August, 2009

I’ve scanned and uploaded a whole load of things I had intended to for quite a while. This is because I had my scanner out to scan a sketch for the new site’s header image:

Among some pretty random old stuff, there were also a couple of concept sketches for my recent Final Year Project:

Website menu buttons in vector:

And a quick scribble of an idea for the idat menu button: