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.
Archive for June, 2005
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).