Life and Goals

I'm still alive! I've been busy working on a project and haven't wanted to say anything about it until it was ready, which I finally feel it is. I've been working on it for around the past month and although it's a simple project I have been using it to try out some new things, so not all my time was spent adding the features to the project. I also redesigned it a few times until I got something that I liked.

The project is called Your Goals. It's a simple website that allows you to track goals. I've currently got goals added for exercising (a good way to kick me into shape!) and various TV programmes that I sometimes miss. It can be used for anything though, as long as the goal happens at least once a week. You can get a better feel for the website by looking at the tour page. The login is done via OpenID which is a different way of managing a single login over multiple websites. More details are given on the signup page.

That's about it for now. I already have a few ideas about how I can make the goals website better, plus I'll now be going back to the health website I was originally working on. I put that on ice for a while as I needed to rethink how I was approaching the whole thing, and I've since realised that I was going about it the wrong way, so I'm going to have a nice long thinking/designing session which I hope will allow me to do it easier.

More photos

I just uploaded some snow photos that I took this morning and it reminded me that I forgot to do a post about the Tower of London pictures I uploaded a while ago. You can find the snow pictures here and the Tower of London pictures here. The Tower of London pictures were taken in June 2006 but I forgot to upload them until the beginning of this month. I still have some photos from Kew Gardens that I took in July 2006 to upload, but I'll get around to doing them eventually!

Dates and whiteboards

I hate dates. The "16-01-2007" kind, not any other kind. For something I've been working on recently I've had to do a lot of date manipulations as the date needs to be correct based on a given time zone. This would be easy if the date support in Ruby on Rails made any sense, but unfortunately it doesn't. They're a real pain to work with and have frustrated me for a few days now. Luckily I seem to have finished messing with the date part now; or at least I hope I've finished!

I love whiteboards. I bought a whiteboard from ebay last week and it arrived on Saturday. It's only a small one (600mmx400mm) as all the larger ones are pretty expensive, but it does the job that I wanted it for. I've already taken up a corner with a to-do area where I can jot a few things down so I don't forget them, which leaves the rest free for scribbling down ideas. It currently has a design on it, but that will be changing tomorrow as I've already done that design. It would be nice to have a larger one but I don't really need a larger one at the moment.

Short quick grammar quiz

Found this linked from another blog: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/cgi-shl/quiz.pl/its_there_quiz.htm

It tests whether you know how to use "its", "it's", "there", "their" and "they're" correctly. I managed to score 10/10 which is great :)

Webserver Updates

The last time I talked about my new webserver machine I said that I was hoping to get it sorted so that I can host more than one website on it. Well, now it is hosting two websites just fine, so I've got that sorted out. It was actually easy to do as the instructions I followed to get it working with one website also let it work with more than one website as you just have to create a link to a file in the right place and it works correctly.

I've also got Subversion running on it as well, but I had to install an older version of the webserver software to get it to work. This isn't a problem as I was actually expecting that, but it's all working fine so I'm going to leave it at that.

On another topic (and a technical topic), when editing the file that make up the website I was first editing them on my main computer, checking them into subversion, then updating the website on the webserver computer from subversion (via a ssh shell), then finally checking it out in my browser on my main computer. Then I switched to just using the ssh shell to edit the files I wanted using nano, saving, then just checking them in my browser. Today I went looking to see if there was a ssh/sftp plugin for Eclipse (the IDE I was using to edit the website files when they were on my main computer) that would allow me to remotely edit the files in an environment I was comfortable with. I finally found one, so now I just have to get Eclipse to connect to the webserver machine then I can start changing the files and they're updated on the webserver machine whenever I hit save. All I have to do now is save and then refresh in my browser to see the changes. It's the same number of steps as the ssh shell and nano route, but with that route I had to have a few ssh shells open to be able to easily switch between files. With Eclipse all the files are in a single window which makes it all a lot easier.

45th

My name ranked 45th in the top 100 boys names of 2006. The top three were Aiden, Jacob and Ethan, in that order. The top three girls name are Emma, Madison and Ava. Strangely enough, I don't personally know anyone who is called one of those names!

Torchwood Finale

The first season of Torchwood concluded tonight with a double-bill. I can't write anything about it at the moment as my mum and sister haven't seen it yet and I don't want to spoil anything. I'll write up my thoughts and ideas after they've watched it on Wednesday. A second season was confirmed in December 2006 and the filming starts in spring 2007 to be shown later on in the year.

UPDATE: I forgot that I was going to update this after my mum and sister had watched it. The last two episodes of Torchwood were two of the best ones I think. Owen was damn annoying as he'd only known Diane (Diana?) for a few days before she went back through the rift but he was acting like he had known her his whole life. Gwen is always annoying anyway, so she wasn't any different :) I did think that the special effects for Adabbon were a bit poor as it didn't really look like it belonged in the picture. Other than that, the episodes were good. It was also good that The Doctor arrived at the very end to take Jack off somewhere, but hopefully he'll be back for the second series as it would be pretty bad without him!

Songs of 2006

Here are the top 10 artists and tracks that I've listened to during 2006, according to last.fm. The numbers aren't exactly correct as they differ from my top artists/tracks and the years artists/tracks (one song that I only listened to this year has around 500 plays less in the yearly chart to the overall chart, so roughly add 500 to most of the numbers and they're about right).

Top Artists:

1    Ruslana                      4,165
2    Alizée                       3,196
3    Linkin Park                  2,865
4    Fort Minor                   1,328
5    Hilary Duff                  1,237
6    BassHunter                   1,070
7    Groove Coverage              1,058
8    Bubba Sparxxx                1,008
9    Doctor Who                   819
10   Ben Moody Feat. Anastacia    604

Top Tracks:

1    Alizée – J'ai pas vingt ans!                  2,554
2    Ruslana – WILD ENERGY                         2,240
3    Bubba Sparxxx – Back In The Mud               1,008
4    Doctor Who – 2006 Full version                607
5    Ben Moody Feat. Anastacia – Everything Burns  604
6    Kivimiehet – Elämä Raiteillaan                585
7    Daz Sampson – Teenage Life                    444
8    BassHunter – Boten Anna                       376
9    Linkin Park – In the End                      339
10   Linkin Park – Faint                           294