I’ve moved Urban Art from my 5-minute coding job over to WordPress. I’ve had to do quite a bit of hacking around with WordPress and I’ve customised the image upload admin page considerably. Hopefully this will make it easier and quicker for me to upload new pictures as they come in. I still have to do a bit more tweaking but it will be much more scalable for the future, as the site expands, and it allows for many more future features.
archive for June, 2005
This site of Nintendo tat for the NES brought lots of childhood memories back. I used to go to my friend Marks house almost every day after school and play for hours on his NES. He had one way before me and had awesome games like Duck Hunt (stupid dog…) and MegaMan. Fun Times.
In the current warm weather I have to run my PC with both sides off, lying on its side with a fan pointed at it:
Awesome, totally up there with Spiderman 2 in the brilliant comic book movie list. There is a lot of story before batman becomes the batman we know, kicking ass in Gotham City. It’s all good though as this mostly involves ninja training, more ninjas and amazing scenery in the far east. Christian Bale is pretty awesome as the Bat and he certainly looks the part with his chiselled looks. The casting of other characters is also great; Michael Caine as Alfred, Morgan Freeman as the bat weapons expert and Rutger Hauer as the evil company chairman. The batmobile in this movie is quite a change from the streamlined, sleak versions of earlier movies. It’s more like a souped-up tank, which kicks ass :). The only downsides were Bale’s silly “batman voice” and the lack of the original batman theme.
Blimey it’s busy on here tonight…anyway, photos from the Common Riding last weekend are up for your viewing pleasure.
Thank you to everyone who clicked through my threadless links and bought something! Last week I had enough points for a free t-shirt and picked this beauty:
A fantastic blog written by a guy stationed in Antarctica on the Brunt Ice Shelf, at one of the British research stations. I spend ages just flicking through his gallery of photos.
Google have added world satellite coverage to Google Maps with high-res stuff for a lot of big cities around the world. Needless to say, the submission queue over on GGSS is creaking under the flood of new (non-US) submissions. Maybe now people will stop emailing us saying “you guys suck, how come you don’t have maps for country X” 🙂
Yesterday was my 24th birthday and Kerry took me out for a very nice dinner at the Tower, the swanky restaurant above the National Museum. We’ve been in the past and it has always been great but very expensive, so it’s saved for special occasions. I have some lovely carrot, corriander and ginger soup to start and then beef strips in a mustard, vegetable and lentil sauce with rice. It was very nice and I was surprisingly full after it. Kerry had mushroom soup and a smoked haddock and spinach penne pasta dish which smelt fantastic and tasted good aswell (when I manged to steal bits). Kerry, of course, had to have a chocolately dessert while I settled for just a strong coffee. It was a really good evening and thankfully the restaurant had huge opening windows as it was a humid summer evening.
My main hard disk decided to make clicky noises and die the other night :(. I’m getting a shiny new 120GB one from ebuyer tomorrow, along with a DVD writer. But the tinkering will have to wait as I’m off for a long weekend in Selkirk with Kerry for the Common Riding.
I’m ploughing through this at the moment at about 200 pages a night. It is just ridiculously easy to read, typical Crichton style.
You can almost see the film script in the back of his mind as he was writing it. Not to say it is a bad book, its a terrific thriller so far. He throws in plenty of quasi-geek references and science to stop you getting bored with the relentless pace.
A quick update on the aftermath of the slashdotting of GgSs last Thursday. The server only fell over for about 30 minutes or so, which I assume was just under the sheer weight of requests to Apache. For that single day we had in excess of 1 million hits and pushed just under 10 Gigs of bandwidth! I’m glad our web host likes us!
BusMonster combines traffic information, real-time bus locations, bus routes and timetables for Seattle and plots it all onto Google Maps. This is a very nice piece of work, executed extremely well. I’ve thought of doing something like this for Edinburgh buses (or some sort of ‘accessible lothian buses’) but calculated/generating the route data would be a major pain. If only lothian buses published their ‘Bus Tracker’ location data online…
I’ve posted my photos from Rick & Rach’s wedding in the gallery for your viewing pleasure.
The gallery has been having a bit of a scrub lately. Using some mod-rewrite dark magic I’ve made the URLs much nicer and easier to read. Instead of having:
/gallery/index.php?mode=gallery&id=38
we now have:
/gallery/38/
A vast improvement!
The other main change is now when viewing a gallery the page is much simpler. Before I had things like: the image size, resolution, data and the filename. People won’t actually care about those things! All they want is to see all the images and maybe click on one to see a larger version. Working on customer facing e-commerce stuff has taught me a lot about removing barriers to navigation and generally making a users life easier. I figured it’s time I implemented some of it around here.
One of my student drinking pals Douglas was back in Edinburgh last night with his Mrs so I met up for a drink. It turned into a general old skool night out, with past flat-mates and friends from university all turning up. I’d been pretty slack at the keeping in touch stuff after university, even though most people haven’t moved away. We just picked up like nothing had happened though and were jabbering away about all the usual stuff: comics, films, music, jobs etc. To cap it all off and make it an a typical night out we ended up in Opium at the end of the night. Good stuff.
Crikey, looks like GoogleSightseeing got slashdotted. The server is a bit sluggish at the moment, but it’s hanging in there. If it totally drops off at any point, mirrordot has an archive of the front page.
Gmail Hard Drive.com turns gmail into a super easy web-enabled file archive. Neat.
The Forestry Commission logo has been a favourite of mine for a while now. The simpleness of the overlapping trees is great, and the two different trees help to represent the range of trees the commission must look after. It is also remarkably similar to the Ordnance Survey symbols for forests (shown left).
An article over on EurasiaNet describes the scrap merchants in Kazakhstan who live off space junk that has fallen off soviet rockets. It is accompanied by a photo essay which includes some amazing photos. The one shown is my personal favourite and has a magical feel to it.
Someone on the Keyhole beta test program reviews the latest verison, now re-branded as “Google Earth”. The new 3-D views look pretty amazing!
I nice write-up of the backstage project over on the O’Reilly Radar with a link to my Travel Data Prototype.