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.
... 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 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.
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 |
 |  |
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
