Co-joined Trainers

Goodness me... more pictures

This is nice and a picture of my youngest after his stunning acting as a sheep in the school production.

This is a played with image from my phone... the location is St Luke's Church in Cambridge and the picture is taken from outside the Blockbusters shop (now closed).

I must be getting creative in my old age.

Three Glitter Girls

I like this a lot... it's a representation of a work that I printed out on OHP. Each layer of grey is a layer of film and the whole lot rest upon an A4 sheet of glitter paper. Think I'll give it to my Brother and his wife at Christmas. It looks really effective I think.

Posters

I've been making some posters, I've done 2 so far, the 1st uses nice Web 2.0 rounded corners and some images found on google image search that have been played with in PhotoShop and then converted to curves in Inkscape and then send back into PhotoShop.

The 2nd is based on the cover for a DVD I saw online. Again I pretty much only used Inkscape and PhotoShop and I'm well impressed with how well they work with each other too!

This is me...?

Apparently, this is what I look like:

I think I'll continue my rather odd and rambling discussion of structured data in a while though not now as I'm far too knackered!

Waxing lyrical

It was when a friend was talking to me in the school playground whilst waiting for our respective children and I started to imagine structuring her conversation in my head and creating suitable uls, spans and subsequent styles that I realized that I might have something of a problem. I knew I'd been running the risk of having a problem at some point as I had been told I would by a lecturer but I stupidly thought that such a problem wouldn't be a problem. It isn't really, in fact it's getting so that I don't see it as a problem at all, which is odd considering my usual anarchist approach to things. Though maybe I've been fooling myself into thinking I'm chaotic when really I'm so anal I whistle when I fart.

I remember arguing with a nursing lecturer that models were bad, that the effect of breaking down someone into a strict classification meant that something got lost; that the tools we use to assess people always left something out. Let me expand on this a little further.

Imagine being given a rock, just any old normal rock, say from your driveway or garden. Now you're being asked to describe that rock. Actually, might it not be better to have more than one person doing this exercise? Let's say there's a group of you, you and some friends well in your cups, and you're presented with a rock and told to talk about it - say a sentence at a time. So you say your sentence and pass it on and the next person says theirs before passing it on again... and again. You describe each bit of the rock; what a certain feature looks like to you like you're engaged in some sort of mad Rorschach test fuelled by cheap wine, where it's likely to have come from, what's happened to it over the millions of years of it's existence. How long could such an exercise go on? A bloody long time if there were more than one bottle of wine I'd guess. Would you have said everything you could say about it when you'd finally got bored silly of the whole exercise?

Pity then the poor student nurse who's presented by a nice Roper-Logan-Tierney based assessment tool and told to report back with a detailed assessment of a client after an interview. The client is obviously distressed, else why else would they be in hospital, so you're not seeing them all phlegmatic after waking up with a killer hangover or all happy after their first kiss with a new love. How then can you carry out an assessment? It just didn't ring true to me, it still doesn't to be fair, though I'm well aware that it might be the best of a bad lot it still isn't all that good. It does beg the question of what might be better though, doesn't it?

Anyway, what was I saying? Ahh yes, I was waxing lyrical about structure and how I find it anathema. Yet I remember talking about therapy and discovering research to suggest that it isn't the model that makes the difference but rather the therapist. Someone might practice Jungian or Freudian or whatever the particular brand of psychotherapy but if they're a knob then their success rate will be crap whatever they use. Whereas a good therapist might try shaking chicken bones onto a linen cloth and have as golden a success as if they spent six sessions hypnotizing someone and getting then to relive their most embarrassing memories. A tool or a model is merely a tool, a way of organising one's head into a place where they might do some good. At their most basic most - if not all - require an assessment, a plan, the implementation of the plan and an evaluation of the implementation. Pretty much common sense really I'd have thought but is it? Might it not be a hangover from our rationalist, scientific history stemming from the age of reason? One imagines that any other approach might be as successful as a pig with wings but to some extent we simply cannot imagine any other approach, I don't think so anyway.

But back to structure! XHTML is a structured language and has something of an interesting history. It is the marrying of XML (a language designed to describe data) and HTML (a language designed to display data). It's something of an incestuous marriage as well. Both XML and HTML are children of SGML. HTML is a broad though shallow implementation of it where as XML is a narrow but deep implementation and they've come together to form something which is better than the sum of its parts, at least it shows the promise to be.

Along with XHTML there is CSS. Each browser has it's own ideas about how a page should be drawn and it's own defaults, CSS allows for the designer to dictate how they want their work to be displayed. It isn't perfect though, as a language it isn't neat like XML is, in fact it's really rather messy and a bit of a dark art... but it might be argues that that is all to the good... too much structure can't be all good can it?

Fish!

So it’s about 11 o'clock and I’ve been asleep no more than an hour and a quarter after dropping the boys off at school. I'm picking 'em up at quarter past 3 and I'll need a bit of time in order to wake properly so I'll be up at half past two. I'm well groggy and knackered as you can imagine.

There's a bump from above and I can hear at least two people talking, then there's the pitter-patter of someone walking above me and a crack of wood followed by a louder bump of someone jumping down onto the back of the boat... no more than 6 feet away from where I'm slowly waking and getting increasingly concerned that someone's trying to break in.

What's to do? I could phone the police but I could be dead in my bed before they get here. So I decide to confront whoever it is, thing is: It was warm and I’m sleeping nekkid!

Two things are running through my head. The first is that if I'm to confront someone then the element of surprise is key and getting up and going to the other end of the boat in order to grab my clothes and put 'em on is going to alert them that someone is aboard. The second is that if I'm to confront someone there'll be nothing more frightening than me nekkid and screaming like a banshee!

So I've decided to go at 'em nekkid and that's what I do. Jumping from my bed, in a fashion which isn't all that bad for someone who's only just had a little sleep, I rush at the door and fling it back growling fit to scare off a tiger and there's a fish in the doorway.

Holding the fish is a Polish chap, he's got his finger wedged in the bit under its jaw and has obviously been happily whacking the shite out of it with a couple of bits of wood from the roof of the boat. He doesn't bat an eye at me and smiling says:

"Sorry mate. Fish!"

And remember: (This is not my sentiment it's just an image I've been playing with TBH.)

More images

Been messing around with The Gimp of late and came across this online which needed so much to be turned into an avatar or something...

I also came across this on LJ and it needed to be played with so much!

I like this a lot!

Fake Models

I came across this via Kiwi's and just had to have a go with some images from Live Local and it's bird's eye view thing.

Created these:

I'm quite pleased with the results TBH.

Wow! Just WOW!

White & Nerdy

Couldn't resist this test:

How White and Nerdy Are You?

And another (This browsing LJ is going to kill me... what is it with Russians and pictures of mushrooms?):

How evil are you?

I really have to stop doing these soon...

What type of Fae are you?

Polytricks

Neo-Liberal You scored 58% Personal Liberty and 39% Economic Liberty!

A neo-liberal believes in moderate government intervention on personal matters and moderate to high government intervention on economic matters. They believe in a social safety net or welfare state and try to balance personal liberty with safety or security. Some neo-liberals believe in more foreign intervention or war then most other leftists. Others are more like Centrist Democrats. More authoritarian-leaning Neo-liberals (such as personal 40/economic 30) are the result of a "fusion" between "old left" and "new right" tendencies.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 29% on Personal You scored higher than 36% on Economic

Link: The Politics Test written by brainpolice on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

IE7 right at your door

I've a friend who writes lovely reviews of the films he watches and I'm well grateful for them. I, however, rarely write reviews of films as I see so very many of 'em... most are pants (Don't even ask me about The Wickerman or Miami Vice), but every so often one sticks out as being particularly bad. The most recent member of this category has got to be Right At Your Door.

I was quite looking forwards to it TBH as I'd heard that it had a twist at the end, but it wasn't a nice metaphysical twist where you find out the whole scenario has been set up by a "TV Company"/"The Government"/"Aliens" in order to test the poor, sad, excuse of a fella. Ohh no, it was a crappy twist that left the basic assumptions of the film in place... in fact it even seemed to set out to assert that a government knows WTF it is doing!

On a lighter note I've been doing some work in the sphere of web-design in the form of NECT. The stuff I've been working on is here and I'm quite impressed with myself in all honesty. I was having all sorts of problems getting the CSS to work across all browsers correctly and I was coming to the point of not giving a monkey's about supporting IE6 but then I remembered a post on /. about a JavaScript that forced IE to be standards-like. That script was IE7, "IE7 is a JavaScript library to make IE behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6". Wow, cool!

My Heritage

It's amazing what you can do with PhotoShop and 10 sexy movie men .

And...

Favicons are cool!

Fun obituary

All your base...

Starting all over again on DRMsite

Found this somewhere but had to put it up as it is just so bloody aweful!

interesting bit of xml

<?xml version="1.0">        
<cv>
  <styles>
    <style id="1">
      <size>22</size>

      <colour>102,102,102</colour>
    </style>
    <style id="2">
      <size>12</size>
      <colour>0,0,0</colour>

    </style>
  </styles>
  <body>
    <section text="Dominic R Myers">
      <multiline text="07791005861"/>
      <multiline text="annoyingmouse@gmail.com"/>

      <multiline text="http://gojobby.com/webgeek/Jobby/Resume/1997/dominic_myers"/>
    </section>
    <section text="Summary">
      <multiline text="A creative technologist with a human side; happy with both
                       server and client side technologies, working on code or design
                       and more than happy to learn new techniques. I'm a psychiatric
                       nurse with ability to talk, and more importantly, to listen."/>
    </section>
    <section text="Skills">

      <multiline text="advanced:">
        <line>AJAX, CMS, DOM, HTML, JavaScript, ECMAScript, SVG, web, XML,
              XMLHttpRequest, XHTML, DHTML, Web Standards</line>
      </multiline>
      <multiline text="skilled:">
        <line>blogging, CSS, Data Architect, DBA, LAMP, MacOS, MySQL, PHP,
              RDBMS, Web 2.0, Windows, Semantic Web</line>

      </multiline>
      <multiline text="newbie:">
        <line>Apache, C, Information Architecture, JSON, Network Architecture,
              ODBC, Programming, RSS, SQL, TCP/IP, VBScript, W3C, Web Services,
              XML Schema, XSLT, XQuery</line>
      </multiline>
    </section>

    <section text="Education, qualifications and training">
      <multiline text="2001-2006">
        <line>ARU - MSc Computer Science (distinction)</line>
        <line>Dissertation title: "Little Bits of Changes: Comparing
              traditional web applications with applications built using the
              AJAX paradigm in the context of a module choice milieu within an
              academic community"
              http://tinyurl.com/htcf4</line>
        <line>Work also carried out on using JavaScript to parse OWL
              ontology and generate an SVG image -
              http://tinyurl.com/gsbw6</line>

      </multiline>
      <multiline text="1994-1998">
        <line>ARU - BSc Professional Nursing Practice</line>
      </multiline>
      <multiline text="1993-1994">

        <line>University of Sheffield - Foundation course in Art Therapy</line>
      </multiline>
      <multiline text="1991-1994">
        <line>University of Sheffield - P2K diploma in MH nursing</line>
      </multiline>

    </section>
    <section text="Experiences/achievements">
      <multiline text="2005">
        <line>http://indigo-architecture.com - DHTML site using DOM-scripting</line>
      </multiline>

      <multiline text="2003-2004">
        <line>Mike Hobbs - Research assistant working on semantic web and web ontology,
              attended 6th international Protégé workshop</line>
      </multiline>
      <multiline text="2003-">
        <line>http://tinyurl.com/sxoav - is my personal site and serves as a test bed for
              various programming and artistic experiments</line>

        <line>http://tinyurl.com/jofg3 - CMS/blog example</line>
        <line>http://tinyurl.com/f2c97 - example of online gallery</line>
        <line>http://tinyurl.com/fzptm - various other examples</line>
      </multiline>

      <multiline text="1998-">
        <line>Fulbourn Hospital - working as RMN on acute admission ward</line>
      </multiline>
      <multiline text="1994-1997">
        <line>Kneesworth House Hospital - worked as RMN within this private forensic
              psychiatric hospital</line>

      </multiline>
    </section>
  </body>
</cv>

This is a rough of my own CV. Now I need to get SimpleXML to read this and put the right bits into FPDF and output the file... which should be easy enough really. Then I need a way of writing this type of XML to a database using a form... or something like that anyway... sorry, just mumbling to myself!

Clever old stick

DOMINIC RICHARD MYERS

has been awarded

MASTER OF SCIENCE
DISTICTION

having followed an approved programme in

COMPUTER SCIENCE

06-JUL-2006

Module	Level	% Mark	Credits
Analysis and Design of Computer Systems	4	89	10.00
Design and Implementation of Software Systems	4	75	20.00
Logic and its Applications	4	85	10.00
Social and Ethical Issues in Computing	4	66	10.00
Computer Architecture	4	58	10.00
Development of Object Oriented Systems	4	69	20.00
Systems Analysis and Database Design	4	62	20.00
Networked Computer Systems	4	75	20.00
Database Administration	4	62	10.00
Intranets and the Internet	4	60	10.00
Postgraduate Independent Learning Module	4	48	10.00
Masters Project (30 credits)	4	71	30.00

Needless to say I'm pleased as a very pleased thing... now what to do next...?

slight update

I've done a nice image here, it'll only work in browsers that support the canvas element but it is quite funny... check the code . I used some cool code from Benjamin Joffe which is here.

Actually still having fun with this so now I've done this with a font from here.

oops

The previous post is a wee bit heavy on the old animated gif front, that's what I get for messing about with 'em I guess. Now I'm in dire need of a distraction (Actually, I've replaced the big old gifs with little gifs that link to the big gifs).

Found a distraction. Was messing around with my CV still and came across a really nice way to generate images using the canvas element. This is the CV, and this is an interesting self referencial image... basically the image is the source code, or something like that .

The font stuff uses the work of Benjamin Joffe, it's top banana too! I was also thinking of using this but didn't in the end.

Carts

Click on the images to go see the animations.

Bloody done

I've finished the dissertation... what I fantastic bit of news that is ehh? Well, I think it's fantastic anyway .

Interesting putting it all together as well as I've decided to use the built in support for pdfs included in OS X, which means that I can print it on a PC, any PC at that, which is cool!

pdf is a pretty cool tool TBH, a really rather fancy way of going about things. I've installed ghostscript and all sorts of other stuff which is helping with it too. It'd be nice to be able to add bookmarks as well, but there you go ehh?

Bouncer

A sprog bouncing:

I trust he had a good time, was £5 after all !

Oz's song

Oz's song is here.

This technique taken from here.

12K

I'm hitting the 12,000 word mark so I'm nearly there I guess. YAY!

Having a bugger of a time tracking down a nice font though as the Mac uses Helvetica Neue and I can't seem to find it anywhere for less than about 400 euros... which is just a bit steep for me and I need it to do some editing on the PC of Appendices and such like. For instance, I need to drop the page number in the Appendix to something less than 150 or I'll need to sell my liver in order to pay for it... not sure anyone'd buy my liver thinking about it....

Won the Pub Quiz at the The Green Dragon, Cambridge a couple of weeks ago, thanks to Phil and Graham!

I sent Phil a picture of my prize (They give you a voucher for a free drink if you win), which I'd framed and put on the wall of the boat... he seemed a little unimpressed... ahh well.

If anyone should be getting naffed off with links to bits of the dissertation not working then please be advised that it's moved to here as I needed somewhere that had PHP5 and thought I'd consolidate all the dissertation stuff in one place. It's password protected so you'll have to ask for access I'm afraid!

update on all sorts o' stuff

Up to 7.5K words on the old dissertation. Yay!!!!

Thoroughly enjoying it as well, which is nice I guess

That's it really... though I have been playing with animated gifs using the GIMP and came up with this to show development of my web-application dissertation:

Also decided that running DOS-Box was a wee bit silly on such a slow machine as my Mac so I got rid of it .

Feedback...?

Found the need to analyse some server stats. today and the hosting that I was using didn't have a package available so I googled and found Visitors which is damn fine. This all because of this post on Kiwi's Forums. Basically I'm after some testing of a site that I'm working on... well actually it's 2 pages on 1 site that I'm working on TBH. The 1st is a traditional web-based application the 2nd uses brand spanking new technologies (Well, they might be old but they're new to me ).

You might have already guessed it but it's part of my dissertation and I think that I'm there in terms of the software. Now if I could only get over this cold and feel like my brain isn't swimming in snot rather than cerebral spinal fluid I'd be sorted. Then I can go about improving Rodin a little bit more and the world'll be my winkle.

Anyway, back to visitor, it can output a file that Graphviz can turn into SVG... well, you know how much I love SVG so I just had to give it a go. This is primarily for my own reference TBH but the commands I use can be used by anyone:

To output all the data I'm likely to need as html:

% visitors -A [log name] --trails --prefix [domain name]
 > [name of file].html

To output a file ready for Graphviz and then run it to create an SVG image:

% visitors [log name] --prefix [domain name] --graphviz
 > [name of file].dot
% dot [name of file].dot -Tsvg > [name of file].svg

Boxer on mac

Well I've installed Boxer 7.5a on my mac. "How?", I hear you say. "Why?", I hear others say.

The "Why" is simple enough to answer; why does someone climb a mountain? Why does someone sail around the world single-handedly? Why, ohh why, does the butter always hit the lino instead of the bread landing butter side up? "Why?", is a damn fine question and I just wish I had an answer. I guess that it's partially because I've always loved Boxer. It was the first proper piece of software that I ever bought just for the sheer love of it. I tried the demo and I was hooked (Has anyone else pondered the possibility that shareware software is a little like the small taste of smack given to the kids as they leave school by the shady character with the pierced nose hanging around the gates? No? Must just be me then ).

I think it's also because I can install Boxer on a mac TBH, I shouldn't be able to but I can and I love it... though it's getting to be a pain to configure the bugger and the screen keeps losing focus and the short-cuts keep setting off things on the mac which I wish they wouldn't! I run it on my XP machine as well, Boxer I mean, both the latest version (11 I think) and the old 7.5a as well. I seem to remember it being the dog's danglies for working with Java (the DOS version that is)... but I upgraded didn't I? Glad I did like, but all the same... I can't help feeling a little nostalgic about the DOS version. Most everything I code ends up either being written on or edited on Boxer at one stage or another and my dissertation is making full use of the colour syntax highlighting in the Appedixes (Can never figure out how to spell that ) so I can print out the code with PDF Creator.

The "How?", now there is a question worthy of an in-depth howto but I can't be arsed TBH, suffice to say that the judicial use of DOSBox was involved. Still a wee buit flacky there as there isn't support for the %PATH% variable and such like but not all that bad at all really.

Also started a new site just for my dissertation which will allow me to develop both at home, at college and at work (If time allows while I'm on breaks and such). Actually I'm nearly there I think and I'll need to brush up on my Mellel skills in order to write the bugger up properly.

That's enough for now I think. Until next time, take care.

Before I go I'd best put this in though:

2nd Appendix

The second appendix is done.

I've also been a wee bit busy with my camera and these pictures are of the Cam during a lovely sunset a week or two ago:

I'm bloody lucky to live in such a gorgeous place TBH .

Slow going

Ajax is doing my poor likkle head in! I did loads of work last week on my days off and I tried, I really tried, to do some while at work - but I justcouldn't do it! Don't know what was the matter but it really did mess my poor head up a lot.

Decided to do some collation work instead and got the 1st Appendix in shape (Imaginatively called Appendix01.pdf). Basically it is all the old stuff to do with the dissertations development. Basically it is old and nasty and I don't like it - not least because it uses txtdb, which in and of itself isn't such a bad thing as it uses a .txt file as a database, but it is so very slow... of course my noobie knowledge of coding didn't help much in terms of making the programs run faster, I'm so much better now - yet I've still got such a long way to go (I even noticed that some of the html outputted by my early work isn't W3C compliant... now that simple wouldn't do today! I'm so happy that I then converted to MySQL and thence to SQLite... Just goes to show you ehh?

The 2nd Appendix still needs a little work as I've not quite sorted out the files that'll need to go in it. But I'm getting there slowly, I guess I'll stick that on when I'm at work next as I dare say I'll not feel up to working then either .

What else is happening? Not a lot really... coming up to January the 23rd, so look after yourself ehh? I'm not Catholic but that was about the best link I could find .