Happy New Year

I want to wish everyone I know a happy new year. I hope it's better than the year just gone by :)

Connection Problems

I'm currently having problems with my internet connection if anyone was wondering why I haven't been online as much as I usually am. It started on Wednesday evening with the adsl dropping out every now and then, and it continued all through Thursday and into the evening. The adsl drops out, then when it comes back, I tell the router to connect again, which it does (well, some of the time), but then when I attempt to load a webpage the adsl drops out again and I have to repeat the process over again. Sometimes I can't get the router to connect, so I spend ages rebooting the router or pulling out the phoneline and putting it back in to force a new connection. It's starting to get annoying now though!

UPDATE: It seems to be fixed now, hopefully. I phoned up about it and the guy on the line had me on hold for a few minutes while he was checking the exchange and he flicked a switch that reset something (something about a build up). This fixed it for a few hours but then it started playing up again. I then received a reply email from the support people saying that they had taken a closer look at my connection in the exchange and noticed that the exchange was sending at a faster speed than I was connected at (sending at 14.5 mbps when I was connected at 13 mbps) which was causing data loss and corruption. They changed the speeds to match and it has been fine so far. Lets hope it stays fine for a while now as I want to check if the other problem has been fixed (about people phoning causing the connection to be dropped; possibly caused by extra line noise).

Christmas Presents

Quite a decent haul this year and even things that I wanted :) I got the usual clothes that I ask for (t-shirts, socks, jogging bottoms) as well as a few other bits like a long sleeved t-shirt (I only have two of them, now three) and a khaki type pair of black trousers (although I need to lose a bit of weight before I can get into them! woopsy!). I also got a 4-port Doctor Who Tardis usb hub for my computer which is great, an electronic sudoku pad, a microwavable duck bed warmer (heat it in the microwave for 90 seconds and it warms up and you can use it like a hot water bottle), and a few other bits that I can't remember right at this moment in time. The main part of my presents was an exercise set which is made up of a mini-trampoline, a skipping rope, an exercise mat, a stepping machine and a set of dumbbells. I also got a wrist exercise squeezers set, but I'm not sure if they were part of the exercise set or if they came seperately. Oh, I also got a fluid bottle and three juggling balls, not that I can juggle!

For my sister I bought a 16 piece cutlery set (eight forks and eight knives) as hers always seem to bend, an indoor aerial for her bedroom tv, a set of seven socks, and a pink steering wheel cover.

For my mum I bought a set of two gas lighters (for lighting things like ovens and candles, the long reach one, not a cigarette lighter) as she sometimes has trouble lighting the oven, a red jumper (picked out by my sister as I didn't know what type she wanted), and a set of seven socks (same as my sisters).

Finally, for my dad I bought a 16 ounce rubber mallet and a stanley knife set with 18 spare blades.

Now you'll understand when I said that my presents might have been cheap to buy, but at least they'll be used!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!

New Server

On Friday evening I took in three computers that were going to be dumped. I've since installed Ubuntu Linux (Edgy version) on it, as well as the necessary server software (Apache etc.). As of a few hours ago the server was visible to the world, but I'm going to be making a few changes to it to make it a bit more usable for me. At the moment it's only running one website (my health one), and I want to do a few more websites, but it can only support one in the state that it's in. I know what to do to change it but it's a lot more harder than what I've done to get it working so far, so I'm going to leave it for a few days to make sure that it's working fine as it is now before attempting to change anything. Hopefully it'll be up and running by the end of the week, and then I just have to make sure that the website looks ok (which I've also been changing).

Opera 9.10 released

Just in time for Christmas, Opera have released Opera 9.10 for download. It's the same build as the latest weekly beta (8679 if you were wondering), so if you're running the weeklies (like me) then you don't really need to install it.

The bleary eyed monster

Ever wake up in the morning really groggy and bleary eyed and it takes you some time to become alert? As it gets dark your brain releases melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate your sleep cycle, which also makes you tired in the evenings so that you can get to sleep more easily. It is also produced while you're sleeping, so when you wake up your body is still full of melatonin which makes you really sleepy and groggy when you wake up.

There's a simple solution. Within a few minutes of waking, all you have to do is expose your eyes to natural sunshine for a minute or two. The sunshine burns away the melatonin and makes you feel alert in a lot less time than it would take normally. Most people usually drag themselves to the kitchen to have their morning cereal and to drink coffee to make them alert, but they do this in the dull light, so the melatonin doesn't get burnt away quickly. Just look towards the morning sun with your eyes closed and let the sun take care of your morning need, then you won't need to pollute your body with caffeine that gives you a stronger downer than it does an upper!

Dancing Christmas Tree

Qnext

I saw a link to Qnext today so I decided to check it out. It's a communications bit of software and lets you do VoIP, video conferencing, chatting, file transfers, remote access, and more. It looks quite nice, although it doesn't have much fancy graphics stuff like some applications (I prefer functionality over funky!).

You can download it here and install it (it uses Java). Once it has installed let it start and it will probably want to update its messages, so let it do that then click the restart button to start it again. Now you will be able to pick a username and password. I didn't bother entering any information in the three optional screens as I just wanted to try the program, but I might go back and fill them in at a later time. Once that is done the program will start properly and log you in. In the top left corner of the screen is your UID number, and a connection icon to the right of it. Hopefully this will be green, but if not then you need to open some ports in your router or firewall (it does support uPnP though, so if you have a proper working uPnP firewall or router then it will automatically open the ports that it needs; yay). You just need to open ports 5235 to 5237 (which is funny, as my router shows 5238 being open!).

After it has started you can get to use the program. You can add other QNext users, or you can connect to various IM networks (Yahoo, AIM, MSN and ICQ) and chat on them. The main things like file sharing and video and audio conferencing seem to only work with QNext users, but I could be wrong (it's logical though that they'd only do it with their own users). You can also browse for things, but I haven't used that yet to see what it does.

That's all the information I can give you so far! I don't have any friends added on there (I don't know anyway else who uses it) so I can't do some of the funky things like the file sharing, photo sharing, music streaming (jukebox style), or video/audio conferencing. If anyone wants to get it and try it out with me then that would be great! My UID is 221971.

London Weather

I was about to go to the shops earlier when it started hailstoning so I took a video of it.



There was also a tornado in North London! Several people were hurt but there were no deaths.

Design limbo

I got tired of the design for my health website so I decided to give it a proper overhaul. I started with a background image to go in the top right corner and knew that I wanted some kind of gym picture. I took a stroll through a bunch of "stock" photos but I couldn't find anything that I really liked. I ended up doing a google image search and going page after page until I found one (on about the 18th page). So I saved the image, opened up photoshop, and set about trying to make it fit.

I'm not that great at editing images, mainly because I don't really know how photoshop works and how to do different effects. I took a stab at it anyway and ended up searching on google for fading effects, as the picture cuts off on the left and bottom and I wanted it to blend in with my sites white background. I tried doing a mask layer and drawing a gradiant, but that only worked for one edge, and I couldn't find a way to have two mask layers on two duplicate layers of the treadmill picture. I eventually found an easy way to do what I wanted: make the background layer editable, fill it with white, then select an outline on the treadmill layer, feather it, inverse the selection (so you select the left and bottom bits), then just hit delete. It automatically fades out and looks ok.

That's all I've done with it so far. I'm not sure if I like the fading though as it still stops a bit abruptly. I might have a play and see if I can come up with something a little better. I still have a main logo to create (using the existing apple logo though) and then it's just twiddling with the style of the page to get things looking nice. I won't take a screenshot of it just yet though, as I have borders turned on for a few bits of the page so that I can see where they're going, and it doesn't exactly look nice. Plus I've started on a top navigational bar which isn't finished yet, plus I'll be moving a few bits around and re-thinking some other bits.

Christmas Decorations

I put the christmas decorations up for this year. Started late afternoon, had nearly finished the living room by dinner time, did the kitchen after dinner, then finished the living room off and did the passage. I took some pictures of the decoorations on the floor (both kitchen and living room, but not the passage) and then when the decorations were actually on the ceiling and walls. I created a photo set of the pictures, which is fun as it's the first time I've got a photo set working with zooomr!. There are 13 photos in total and some of the "after" photos are a bit dark as I took them in the dark with only the flash. You can still see the picture perfectly though.

Big Kahuna Reef 2: Chain Reaction

I've been a big fan of Big Kahuna Reef since I first played it a few years ago. I recently found out that there is a Big Kahuna Reef 2! I downloaded the trial, started playing it and I was instantly hooked. You can now make powerups when you clear blocks and these powerups make it a lot more fun to clear the board. Powerups I've seen so far are single sticks of dynomite, bombs, groups of dynomite sticks, and nukes. I'm not sure if there are any others in there, but these are pretty fun to start with if there are more! There are over 750 levels in the standard game plus you can download more level addons from the website, making this one enjoyable game to while away the time!

Update: I meant to say this earlier, but the tiki now actually does something! In BKR1 when you filled the tiki bar it wouldn't really do anything, other than it counting as a bonus on the win screen. In BKR2, when the tiki bar fills it spews out a couple of sticks of dynomite to places that need it (where you have unbroken blocks). This also happens if you're keeping the tiki bar full as the combo goes up (it's full at 100, then it's "full" again at 200, and 300, etc.), so it comes in handy for when you're getting a bit stuck with locks and covered blocks. It's also great fun when you get the tiki bonus, use some of the dynomite to clear some paths, make a 6 combo, get a bunch of dynomite, use that, then you've filled the tiki bar again and you get more dynomite. You can probably guess that I like this game ;)

Update 2: I just finished the quest game (100 levels) which unlocks the tiki bonus pack (not sure how many levels; it was 50 in the first game). Here's the win screen for the quest mode (note this is just my first go at the game. will probably get sub 6 hours in a few games time).

Types of weight loss

We all think that any weight loss is a "good thing", but sometimes it actually isn't. There are several kinds of weight loss but there's really only one kind that actually works. Three kinds of weight loss are:

• Water loss
• Muscle loss
• Fat loss

Water loss

Water loss is what makes your weight fluctuate the most. Your body is made up of, on average, 50% to 60% water with the rest being taken up by muscle and fat. You can probably guess that water plays a major role in your weight. Two cups of water is roughly equal to one pound of weight, so if you don't drink your needed eight glasses minimum a day then you can lose a fair amount of weight.

Muscle loss

Your muscles don't stay, no matter how hard you wish them to stay. Your muscles deteriorate over time so your body needs to rebuild them. Exercise helps build up new muscles, but if your body can't rebuild your existing muscles then you're going to lose them. Protein is what your body needs to rebuild muscles (as well as for your brain, red blood cells and your central nervous system), so if you're not getting enough protein then your body is less efficient at rebuilding muscles, so they will deteriorate and you lose weight. This can also happen if you don't eat enough carbohydrates, as your body will then convert the protein you eat into the fuel it needs, meaning that you don't have the proteins your body needs each day.

Fat loss

This is the best weight loss to have. It's very easy to gain weight and it's very hard to lose weight. Your body needs to consume food, convert it to energy and burn it during the day. If you eat too much food each day, or the wrong kind of food, then your body won't be able to burn it all and it will get stored as fat so it can be burned at a later time. Unfortunately, this new fat generally isn't burnt off as your body will continue to receive too much so fat will continue to be stored, making you fatter and heavier. If you count calories (generally 2500 a day for women and 3500 a day for men) then you can still gain weight even if you're well under. How? Well, you could be eating full fat foods, or foods that are just unhealthy, and your body won't be able to burn it all so it gets stored as fat.

Conclusions

I'm far from an expert on this, but I've found that if you eat to within the last 500 calories of your limit, while doing a fair amount of exercise, then you can slowly lose weight. The best weight loss is fat loss and it takes time to burn off far. On average you should be able to lose two pounds a week, anything more than this is unhealthy and you're likely to just put it back on again. You should also try to weigh yourself under the same conditions so as to rule out other factors. Pick a time and day to weigh yourself each week and try to do it at that time. It could be in the morning just after waking and just after your morning trip to the toilet, but before you have anything to drink or eat. You could also do it every monday evening just after getting home from work.

Whatever time you pick you should try to make it the same each week. Always try to do it after going to the toilet and before you eat or drink anything, this way you'll get a more true reading as liquid and food will add to your weight (I can lose two pound just by emptying a full bladder before weighing myself, or I can gain a pound just by drinking two glasses of water before I weigh myself).

I can get rich on this

It has been a while since I added the Google ads to this blog so I thought I'd take a look to see how much I've "earned". It is such a huge number that I'll soon be able to buy a mansion, or even a whole country!. My "Total Earnings" comes in as a whooping USD 1.05! That's one dollar and 5 cents. Wow.

Food Cravings

Here is a good page on food cravings and what you really need. Example: if you crave chocolate then you really need magnesium, and you can get it from things like raw nuts and seeds, legumes and fruits. I don't know how correct the list is but it seems interesting anyway.

Helsinki Complaints Choir

A bit old, but funny nonetheless.

I've Got Wind!

That's what England will be saying tonight! There will be, supposidly, 60-70 MPH winds with a 40% chance of damage. This should be a fun night! If I notice anything interesting outside my window then I'll take pictures or a video, just to share it with all the people who read this blog (all 3 of you!).

UPDATE: Well, the forecasters lie. The strongest wind last night was maybe 30 MPH at most with only short bursts of rain. There has been more rain during the day today (I was out in some) but it hasn't been that windy. They said it was going to hit here but we've just had winter showers. Sometimes I don't know why I listen to the forecasters!

Lights, Camera, Action!

I'm now a director on YouTube. It's a shame I didn't set it up before posting the fireworks video as I can now upload videos longer than 10 minutes. Oh well, no harm done. I can at least upload videos longer than that now. I'm planning on doing a few videos, which could hit over 10 minutes, so I'll now have a place to put them.

Christmas Presents

Other people might think of me as being cheap, but I went shopping for christmas presents today and got half of them from a pound shop! I'll be going back tomorrow to look for the rest as I didn't have the arm room to hold more presents. The ones I got are nice presents, not some cheap nasty things. They might not be expensive flashy presents that look good when you open them but then you find you never use them, these are real presents that are likely to get a lot of use out of them! I prefer those kinds of presents over the other kind.

UPDATE: I now have £3 left with which to get a last present for my mum. I started off with £20 and have bought 10 presents and the material to make my own christmas cards. Pretty good going to have got all that in only £17!

Health Machine - It now does weights!

I worked on the health website a bit this evening and got the weight displaying working properly on the users page. I had to make a few other changes so that it pulled the right measurements out and, also in the right order, but it's all good now. I even added in the target weight bit and the difference. I was thinking of maybe having it display a happy picture, like balloons, if you're under your target, and a picture of dumbbells, or something similar, if you're over your target. Just to make it look a bit less boring (there's too much text). Anyway, here's a picture for you:

Opera Developer Tools

Nice! Opera have released the developer tools that have been in the works for a while now, and they're great! There's the DOM Console (DOM is Document Object Model - Basically how the page is made up using HTML), the DOM Snapshot which is like a source viewer, and the CSS Editor which you can use to mess with the layout from within a loaded page.

I was using Firefox before to do things like live CSS editing and checking out the DOM, but now I can just use Opera! Opera is my default browser, and I don't really like using Firefox, so being able to do all this from the browser that I love is excellent. The only thing that I'll have to use Firefox for now is debugging javascript and checking out AJAX calls (Web 2.0 stuff) if I ever have to do that again.

Galaxy Doughnut

I quite like this picture. Not sure what it is exactly. The original title was "the galaxy on its side".

Health Website Update

I've made quite a few changes to my health website since I last talked about it, so I thought it was time for an update! Well, it's slowly coming along, which is good. I've spent a while getting it looking right as it was bugging me, that's why I haven't progressed as far as I had hoped by now. Anyway, it's now in a state where I can start adding the useful things back in, and I've started on that with weight entry. It doesn't display the entered weights yet as I wasn't sure how I wanted it to look, plus I didn't have any way of adding the weights in at the time!

Pictures are better than text, so here are a few:

This is the home page of the website. Pretty boring really. I might spruce it up later with some images or something.

This is the signup page. I find it quite funny that the note areas are much longer than the sections the note is for!

This is the signup page again, but this time showing errors. All I did was tried to signup without entering any details. It also gives errors if something is the wrong length, or contains invalid characters, or if the password and password confirmation don't match.

This is what is currently displayed once you've signed up and logged in. It's not show any of my latest weight measurements as I haven't actually got that far (just adding weights). I might change the look of this later on, it all depends on what it looks like once it's display weights and measurements.

Finally, this is how you add weights. It's showing stone and lbs as that's what I selected when I signed up. You can also select kg's if you want. It automatically selects "todays" date as you would probably be entering the weight just after taking it, but it can be changed if you're adding in previous weights.

Zooomr

Zooomr is a photo hosting site, much like Flickr, although much faster. The free account lets you upload 100 MB of photos a month, which is a lot more than the 10 MB a month that Flickr gives you! I also took advantage of a special offer they have for upgrading to a pro account if you have a blog (and you upload an image to zooomr and make a blog post using it). I can now upload 4 GB of photos a month! I doubt I'll even use the original 100 MB a month, let alone 4 GB! Still, it's nice to have it if I ever decide to do a mass upload (like holiday pictures).

Strangely enough, all future pictures that I take and want to put online will be done using zooomr. Zooomr is much like flickr when viewing a photo, but zooomr does a few extra things like GeoTagging (you can select the location where the photo was taken using Google Maps), and adding hotspots to pictures (I think anyway, I haven't actually tried it).

Sunset over London

Sunset over London - Hosted on Zooomr

My window faces West, so I get to see some excellent sunsets over London. Here is one of the better ones I've taken.

Seven Monitor Heaven

I've fallen in love with this: Zenview Arena Elite. It would be like have a space shuttle in your office! I'd still probably end up running out of space though. I think the best thing is that they list a bunch of graphics cards that are compatible with it and also tell you how many you would need. I've seen some multi-monitor displays before that don't even tell you what inputs the monitors take.

Last episode of Not Going Out

Sad night tonight as it's the last episode in the series of Not Going Out. It's depressing as it has been a fantastic comedy that has me laughing for nearly the entire show. I hope that they come back for a second series; plus I hope that Kate and Lee realise that they like each other!

5th of November Fireworks

Went to a fireworks display yesterday (as it's now Monday!) and I took my camera along with me and recorded the whole thing. It lasted for 22 minutes and was pretty good. I was hoping that my batteries would hold out to the end and thankfully they did! I uploaded it to youtube in three parts as I'm limited to 10 minute clips (I split it 8, 8, 4), but that doesn't really matter. Here are the three parts:

Duck Parade

Duck Parade

Here are my lovely ducks. I had planned to put up two shelves, one for books and dvds and the other for my ducks. I did the first shelf several weeks ago but didn't get around to doing the second shelf (for my ducks) until now. I managed to cut the shelf to the right length this time so I didn't need to cut more off.

Time flies...

... when you're having fun.

Had a good week this week, although I don't have much productive stuff to show off. At the beginning of the week I decided that the weight machine website wasn't going the way that I actually wanted it, so I started to change it. It's now a login website where each users data is kept seperate, plus it will be storing more than just weights. It has now been renamed the Health Machine and it will also have a brand new look. I'm guessing that I've done about 5% of everything that I'm planning to do for it, so there's still quite a lot to do. However, on Wednesday I really didn't feel like doing much on the website (as I had been doing it solid for the previous two days), so since Wednesday I've been doing various other things while I get back in the mood to continue with the website. It gave me a chance to read some papers on some stuff that I'll be doing in the future, plus it allowed me to think up some designs for the website (so I did a little website stuff at least!).

I also watched a few movies that I had been putting off while I was working on the website, plus I've nearly finished the last season of Futurama. After that's finished I should get back to watching Farscape as I'm only six episodes into the first season! For those of you who don't know, there are four seasons, plus The Peacekeeper Wars. I wish they had made more as it's a great series, but unfortunately they didn't as the tv companies didn't want to give them anymore money. I can remember back in 2003 when the last season was on and my Mondays weren't complete until I had watched Farscape in the evening!

Torchwood

Torchwood starts tomorrow with a double-episode special. It looks to be quite good so hopefully it actually will be! I checked out the 10-minute teaser/behind-the-scenes video and that looks good too. It will make a change for there to be something decent to watch on TV on Sundays!

UPDATE 1: I thought that the first episode was a bit poor. I know it has to do all the character introductions, which is fine, but the story line wasn't that great. The trailer for the next one (which I'm currently watching) looks good, so hopefully it will be.

UPDATE 2: The second episode was better, thankfully. Next weeks one looks to be good too.

Changing the desktop icon text colour in Windows XP

For a while now I've made an effort to pick dark coloured desktop pictures so the text on the desktop shortcuts could be seen (or at least dark on the left where my shortcuts live), as the text colour is white. I've recently found a new desktop picture that I want to have but unfortunately it's quite light on the left and it made reading the shortcut text pretty hard. So I set out trying to change the text colour. I thought I would be able to change it with the rest of the appearance options, which is pretty logical, but for the Desktop entry you can only change the desktop colour and the font (name, size, bold/italics); not the colour.

I then though that maybe it was set in the theme that I'm using (which isn't the default Windows XP one), so I downloaded the StyleBuilder for StyleXP and installed that. The StyleBuilder is damn confusing so it's no surprise that I soon gave up on that. After some more searching all I came up with was turning the drop shadows off in the performance settings, which gave me a dark colour but it also gave a horrid background colour, which isn't what I wanted (I want a dark text colour and a transparent background colour). I did find some links to a few programs that said they did it, but they were programs that ran all the time and I didn't want to have it running like that.

Eventually I modified my search text slightly and came across a program called ClearIcon. It's a small command line program and you pass the colour you want to it and it makes the text that colour and makes the background transparent. Bingo, this is what I want. So I downloaded the program, created a desktop shortcut to it so I can easily reset the colours if they get messed up (don't know how likely that might be), and tried it. Didn't work. Then I realised that I still had the drop shadows turned on, so I quickly turned them off and tried the shortcut again. WOOHOO! It worked, and I now have a nice black colour with a transparent background. I can once again read my shortcuts!

Here are the before and after pictures:

Before	After

Instructions

To have this yourself follow these simple steps.

1. Download ClearIcon from here (Softpedia link - Click "External Mirror 1")
2. Open the zip file and extract the ClearIcon.exe file to somewhere safe (where you're not likely to delete it by accident)
3. Right-click and drag ClearIcon.exe to the desktop and click "Create shortcuts here", or you can right-click ClearIcon.exe and go to the "Send To" item and click "Desktop (create shortcut)"
4. Once you have your shortcut you need to modify it, so right-click the shortcut and click "Properties"
5. In the "Target:" box stick "0x000000" at the end, being careful to leave the text already there (the 0's are zero's). For me the entire text is: "I:\Installed Programs\ClearIcon\ClearIcon.exe" 0x000000
6. Click OK to make the changes
7. To remove the drop shadow you need to get to the system properties. If you have a "My Computer" link on your desktop then right-click it and select "Properties", otherwise you can press the windows and pause/break keys at the same time
8. Click the "Advanced" tab, then click the top "Settings" button (in the "Performance" box)
9. Scroll the list down to the bottom and un-tick "Use drop shadows for icons labels on the desktop" (second from bottom), then click OK and OK again
10. Now you should have ugly looking shortcuts, so just double click the ClearIcon shortcut you created and the shortcuts will change to something nicer

UPDATE

I said that I wasn't sure how often I'd need to re-run ClearIcon but now I know that I at least need to run it after I've played any fullscreen game (I haven't had to reboot my computer yet, so I don't know what it's like when just started). After a game the shortcuts still have the black text but they have a background colour too:



At least it's not as bad as the background colour when you've only turned off the drop shadows!

I've also found a few other programs, since finding ClearIcon, that claim to do the same as ClearIcon, but I don't see any reason to change as ClearIcon is doing a wonderful job so far.

Amazon Wish List

I just created an Amazon wish list just for the fun of it. It'll be a handy place for me to keep track of things I want to get in the future. I added it to the Links section just to the right of this post.

Weight Machine Website

The other week I decided to do a quick website that can be used to track weight measurements. I never really started much then as I was doing a few other things. but the past two days I've been working on it. I thought I'd throw up a few pictures so people can see what it looks like so far.

Here's what is displayed when the database is empty of users:



Lets add a user.



It's currently entering the weight as lbs (pounds) but eventually it'll be smarter and will offer stone and lbs boxes when the units are lbs. The other selectable unit is kg's. Clicking add takes us back to the users list, but this time I'm in there.



Clicking my name takes me to my measurements view which is currently empty as I've only just been added.



It'd be nice to store some measurements.



The current date is automatically filled into the data boxes as you'll most likely be entering it on the same day that you took it. If you're doing it at a later date then it's easy to just select the correct date. Again, it's only showing a lbs box for entering the weight at the moment and will be the two boxes in the future. Clicking add takes me back to my view and displays the new measurement.



The weight is formatted properly for the selected weight units and would still be correct if the unit was kg's (would just show "80 kg", for example). The checkbox next to the measurement is for a graph feature that I'm currently working on. You'll be able to select which measurements you want on the graph (examples: you want to see the difference between the first week and the last week or you want to see the difference in a single month). The top checkbox allows you to toggle all the measurements checkboxes on and off. You'll also be able to generate different graphs, like the average weight during each month (that's the only one I can think of at the moment!).

I'm still working on it so expect an update within a few days.

UPDATE: I've now changed it so that you can enter weights properly, so if your units are "lbs" then it shows two boxes, stone and lbs. Once you've entered the two values it calculates the full lbs value and stores that as your weight. It should also work correctly when editing measurements but I haven't done that part of it yet so I'm not entirely sure.

Template Update

I finally updated the blog template to change the "about me" information. The default layout of it was pretty rubbish, so I've now put it into a proper list of sorts. I'll have to sort out a picture so I can put that on. Don't really have any proper headshots of me, so I'll probably have to take a new picture. Hopefully I won't have to make any more template updates, although if I do I might not make a post about them, otherwise I'll have mre template posts than normal posts!

Ruby on Rails editors

I've been trying out several editors for doing Ruby on Rails (RoR) websites. For a while now I've been using a standard editor, Crimson Editor, which has been mostly ok but it's pretty basic (it's just a text editor afterall). It does syntax highlighting, but that's about it really. As the editor is some two years old it doesn't include things like code templates (inserting snippets of code from a keyword).

The first editor I tried was Project RIDE-ME. It was mostly ok, with it being memory friendly and a clean layout, but the snippets were annoying. Instead of it replacing the snippet keyword with the snippet text it would put the snippet text at the beginning of the line. Generally I was three tabs deep when trying to add a snippet, but after hitting the tab key it'd put the snippet at the beginning of the line (including multiline snippets), forcing me to tab the lines back to where I wanted them to go in the first place. Some might say that it's only a minor problem, and will probably be fixed in a later version, but it's a very annoying problem when I was trying to use the snippets a lot. Also, the website doesn't show what the latest version is to download, so I wouldn't know if I was getting an updated version or the same as what I had until I actually installed it.

The next editor I tried was RoRED. This is a new editor, and it shows really. The options window only has two tabs; one for handling tab characters in the code, the other for code snippets. The code snippet handling is much better in RoRED than Project RIDE-ME, although you have to hit shift+space to expand the snippet keyword instead of the tab key like Project RIDE-ME. The only problem with the snippets, which I reported to the developer, is that the snippets use the pipe character "|" to show where the cursor should be placed when the snippet is inserted. In Ruby the pipe character is also used for things like blocks, so it messes up if the cursor should be placed after a block start, but the snippet manager will place the cursor at the opening pipe of the block. The developer replied back to me and said that the cursor indicator has now been changed so it shouldn't be a problem in the future. The only real problem I have with RoRED is that I am able to crash it pretty much every time I use it. The crash only happens when I close the program so I'm at least able to get all my work done!

I've now moved on to trying out RadRails. I had looked at it several months ago but I never really paid much attention to it. It's a pretty powerful editor, based on Eclipse, which has some nice snippet handling (much better than any other editor I've used). The only downside for me at the moment (after only a small amount of testing) is that it's based off of Eclipse and thus Java, which is a huge memory hog. I don't know if it can be passed some Java options for controlling things like memory and heap size, but right now it's pretty slow and takes a while redrawing the controls when something as simple as the start bar appears over the top of it.

I've imported my most recent RoR project into RadRails and I'll play with it some more to see how things go. I can probably put up with it being slow though (unless I can configure it, that is) as the snippet stuff, as well as the other features (not forgetting those!), mean that it's must better than the other editors. I'll still checkout RoRED every now and then as it was a decent enough editor, but nothing like RadRails.

Updated Template

I decided to go for a different template to modify instead of the original green one I picked. The new one is called "TicTac" and I only changed the header image (thanks blogger image upload!), centred the title (well, kinda), and made the blog post section a fraction wider so all the text fits in (parts of letters/words were cut off in the original template).

The "About Me" section is not quite how I want it, but I need to read up on the different template tags that you can use for it before I can start to edit it. Other than that, I think it looks quite nice!

PS. If anyone was wondering, the header image is from a picture I took myself. It's of some trees in Finland. All I've done is cut out the tree section, resized it to fit the header, and darkened it down a bit so that the blog title text can be read more easily.

Blog Template

Just a quick note. The current template (the green one) is going to be changed to something else that I actually like. I picked this one during sign-up as it was the only one that looked nice to start with. I'm not sure when I'll get around to updating it though, but it'll look totally different!

Welcome!

So, I decided to start a new blog after not having one for around a year (again!). Instead of hosting it on my own machine, like I've done in the past, I've decided to use blogger for it. I'll probably be using it to post interesting tidbits that I find, various observations of mine, and also information about various programming projects of mine. It'll be primarily a technical blog, as most of it will be about programming, but I'll try to keep it simple.

Enough of the welcome babble already. I'll post some more interesting things later, but right now I'm off to buy a new hair-dryer.