02 Sep 2005
The rest and relaxation I got on holiday is now slowly wearing off as I trawl through the numerous photos and other media that we took whilst on holiday. Hopefully soon there will be an article posted in the Travelogue but for now I have completed a 360 panoramic image of the azure window on Gozo. Having finally managed to deal with about 100 emails I am now up to date but I feel like I need another holiday!! Things from the trip will slowly start to appear but trying to decide what is rubbish and what should be kept is the current priority. Holidays are very hard work… but I cant wait till the next one already!!
25 Aug 2005
Another milestone reached today. We successfully completed the ‘PADI Advanced Open Water’ course and are now qualified to dive down to 40 meters should we wish to. This was a cool course that involved swimming through a wreck, around another one, seahorse hunting and even doing mental arithmatic down at 30m next to a big anchor! Going to have a few days off then early next week… wreck diving again but with a camera to get some pics in the crystal clear waters!
23 Aug 2005
Exciting day today… we dived a couple of wrecks and had our sunglasses stolen by some sponging miscreant youths! It was lucky that a police car drove past and we were able to report the theft as soon as we realised it had happened. To put a positive side on things, ‘H’ did point out that its a good excuse to buy some more so Thursday afternoon is sunnie shopping. As it turns out, the oxygen tank had been taken from the truck aswell so its lucky no one needed it.
The wreck dives were excellent, the first was a ship called X131 that had been sunk during WWII by a submarine. It’s stern was down at 21m and the bow up at 5m. The second wreck was HMS Maori, a British destroyer that has been broken in two. We dived the bow section and were able to swim through one of the internal passages of the ship. This wreck was lying in the sand down at 18m.
15 Aug 2005
Sunday this week was very successful on the web-development front as it involved the very successful completion of a long running project and the chance to drink some nice coffee with my friend! Although not quite polished to absolute perfection yet, my ATP (Adventure, Travel and Photography) theme/plugin for wordpress is pretty much complete. The area that needed my attention was the photo display part. To give you some background, here was my own design brief;
- Front page to show a dynamic map of some sort that plots the positions of the articles.
- Small excerpts with a thumbnail image of each entry.
- A self generating menu that cross references location and activities.
- A random image of only my travel photos.
- Each article was to have an album of photos displayed within it that would create a neat pop-up viewer, rather than link to my gallery.
- The design had to be ‘compatible’ with my existing website.
After about 3 months of coding and tweaking, I had everything working. The only aspect I was not 100% happy with was the implementation of the photos. I was using an application that involved loading the photos into the post itself and from there, would create a pop-up viewer and could even generate the random image I was after. What concerned me was that if I wanted the photos in my main gallery, they would be duplicated there. What I needed was a way of pulling in my gallery photos and a new way of viewing them. This was solved by actually writing a plugin that would pull the images from the gallery album and display them. A new seperate pop-up viewer was needed so that a clean-popup window could show the images with a navigation system to browse through the pictures.
I had spent all of Sunday morning creating these parts and was working on the viewer when Gringod showed up. Fueled by proper Italian coffee, we polished off the pop-up viewer and even found the time to include some Javascript that would dynamically resize the window to the photo contained within. Now the system is complete, I have added one story about when I went shark diving in South Africa. To see how the system works, browse over to http://adventure.phrixus.co.uk. As I am leaving for my holiday on Saturday, expect it to start growing soon. For major updates I will post on this part of the site but the main stories will be found there.
04 Aug 2005
I have recently either been deep in development mode on a new project or taking short breaks living a second life. My second life is in the game/environment of Second Life. This is essentially a massive online world where you can meet and interact with other people… or their avatars at least and explore an entire world of homes, shops and arcades. One of the most amazing things about the game is that you have a complete arsenal of tools to customise the environment, inside the environment. There are 3d modelling tools and even a scripting language which is loosely based on Java and C. The possibilities seem endless and both Gringod and myself are keen to learn and push some boundaries. We have come to an arrangement whereby I will learn as much as possible about the building and design tools and he will push the limits of the scripting engine. If all goes to plan after the trial period, we will get some land and build our dream home. I will make some nice structures, he will come in and program the ‘entertainment system’! It will be the cutting edge batchelor pad we have always discussed except we will be able to fly around! To see Gringods experiences to date, have a look at his second life posts.
04 Aug 2005
This excellent book is about deep wreck diving, submarines and how to solve a mystery! Well, it describes how the answer to one particular mystery was pursued with voracity! ‘Shadow Divers’ was a departure from my normal reading genre by a long way. It is a factual novel that contains information gleaned from a considerable amount of research on the people and the subjects at hand. Although this is the case, it is still very readable and you can easily forget it is non-fiction when you look at the lengths these guys went to in the search of answers and adventure, they really are crazy! I really enjoyed this book and as such will consider similar titles in the future.
22 Jul 2005
‘Chainfire’ is the latest release in the ‘Sword of Truth’ series by Terry Goodkind. It is the 9th book of the series and is a continuation of the long running battle of good against evil. As ever, the foes are bigger, more evil and more powerful. The most interesting, yet most frustrating thing about the book is that it does not finish the story… a major part is concluded but it really is a case of ‘the beginning of the end’! Obviously, it is a series, but each book has its own distinct story that fits in to the whole. Chainfire, however, is part of the series-ending trilogy. The only reason I have to complain is that I really like the series and hate waiting for so long between releases! The next book has been announced, ‘Phantom’ and will be finished by January/February of next year (2006). Until then, remember the wizards 9th Rule; ‘Contradictions don’t exist, in whole or in part’.
