Steve's Space

Spring Weather

Steve — Tue, 06 May 2008 06:33:07 +0000

Finally, - we’ve had some proper Spring weather, so it was a chance to go to Mottistone and look at the Bluebells. (And also to see if my N95’s GPS linked camera would play nicely - which it did!).

Also discovered that Gorse bushes appear to smell of Coconut!

Widgets and other such niceities

Steve — Sun, 04 May 2008 15:20:00 +0000

I’ve updated The Wight One to be Widget capable, - surprisingly easy thing to do. The main reason for doing it was so that I could make use of the ReadySetFlickr plugin in order to display images from my Flickr account. Once I’m happy that the theme’s working (and when I’ve finally added the CSS for comments) I’ll package it up nicely and make it available for download.

After having tweaked the layout and CSS a little more, Porgy (on the right) no longer breaks things.

Decent food in West Wight

Steve — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:15:15 +0000

If anyone’s after a meal in the West Wight, I can recommend the re-vamped Three Bishops in Brighstone - I’m just off there now.

New Look Site

Steve — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:38:19 +0000

As you might have noticed the site’s now sporting a new theme. It’s not quite complete yet, but the main design is pretty much sorted. I’m calling it ‘The Wight One’, for fairly self-explanatory reasons. A number of the tweaks and features are inspired by Matt Mullenweg’s new site but I’m not anywhere near as stylish as Nicolò Volpato (the designer of his new theme).

I’ve also taken the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, 2.5.1 which apparently fixes a number of minor issues, and a couple of security vulnerabilities from the original 2.5 release.

Things I’ve yet to include in the design:

Photo gallery handling (I’ve got a design roughed out in HTML, but it’s not been converted to Wordpress templates yet)
Comment styles
An alternative theme for mobile devices (which will be handy for my Nokia N95)
Probably a bunch of other stuff, but I’ll discover that later

The header image is a view of the cliffs toward the Needles on the Isle of Wight, and is from ThisParticularGreg’s Flickr collection. The image at the foot of the theme is a view along Tennyson Down, and is from klbw’s Flickr stream. Both are used under Creative Commons licences.

Concerts and colds

Steve — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:36:05 +0000

The IWSO concert at the weekend went pretty well in the end, - despite the fact that we were unable to perform Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 that we’d prepared (we’re still trying to work out exactly what happened with that one). Chiao-Ying Chang, the pianist instead performed a Liszt piano sonata, which was very well played, even if it wasn’t my favourite piece in the world.

I’m actually slightly relieved that we didn’t do the Concerto, since I wasn’t feeling too well anyway, and the triangle part’s a bit of a pain (I know it sounds daft, but it’s true). I’m blaming Luke for the latest round of illness at work, since he started it…

Work continues on the new theme for this site, but with the IW Cantata Choir concert on Saturday, and rehearsals of one sort or another most evenings this week it’ll be a while before anything much happens.

WordPress 2.5

Steve — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 16:34:27 +0000

Typical, just when I’ve gone round various sites, checking that they’re all up-to-date with WordPress, they go and officially release version 2.5! I’ll hang back a while before upgrading though, since I’m intending to change my theme anyway, and also that used on the DataSwift website.

Xara Xtreme Pro 4

Steve — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:02:45 +0000

Xara (now owned by German developer Magix) have just released a preview of the new version of their flagship Xtreme Pro. Version 4 (available in both Pro and non-Pro variants) has a bunch of new stuff, but the best things I’ve found so far are:

Automatically flows text around shapes
Integrated 3D extrusion tool (essentially offers most of what Xara 3D does)
Much improved photo editing tools
A very handy webpage export tool - ideal for quickly creating static pages, or for proto-typing designs
A new, “Very High Quality” display setting, handy for getting even cleaner bitmap exports
Multi-core processor support, - not that my current machine can take advantage of this, but it should speed things up on all those newer boxes out there

The upgrade from the previous version of Xtreme Pro (3.2) is currently a very reasonable $49, which, after delivery and other bits, comes to around $69 in total. In my opinion it’s the best update to Xara in since Pro was released.

Roundcube reaches 0.1

Steve — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:57:01 +0000

I’ve been following the Roundcube Webmail Project for a while now, and yesterday evening it reached 0.1-stable - the first officially stable release. It’s an AJAX-based webmail system, running on PHP, with preferably MySQL for a backend database (although others are available). It’s pretty cool, looking much nicer than Squirrelmail (although it’s not as feature-rich - yet), and it runs quite speedily too. I’m wondering if it might be a good option for an internal-only email system for a school.

Fixed

Steve — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:47:12 +0000

I’ve just noticed that the SEGfL link for the Island Schools’ Internet connections is now back up and running again. Let’s hope it stays fixed!

Still no Internet for Isle of Wight Schools

Steve — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:21:43 +0000

It looks like the schools on the Island are going to be without Internet for a third day - unless BT fix things overnight. Apparently there’s an power-related issue at County Hall - schools are able to reach as far as there, but no further.

I imagine that there’s a lot of email building up - 69 schools, and although staff were on-site on Monday I doubt everyone checked their email before the connections went down mid-morning. Let’s hope RM’s servers hold it for a sensible amount of time! (Actually, anyone using RM’s Easymail service is unaffected, since they can carry on accessing it via either their schools specific address, or the more general http://www.learningalive.co.uk/EasymailForm.html )