Nothing to report

It's been a busy few weeks. Kids broken up from school, house to tidy, and another week coming up where I have to completely box up and remove everything in the attic in order that the floor can be sorted out. I've already moved out a lot of stuff in there, but there's a heck of a pile remaining - mostly the stuff which wasn't already in conveniently sized stackable storage crates!  I've also had no end of other things to sort out that has been taking up an inordinate amount of time, plus all the trivial stuff that doesn't take long but seems to keep building up.  So lots of late nights and early mornings and which only makes me tired and slows me down further.

Throw in the odd random day out and this means, of course, that I've done virtually nothing on the retrochallenge entry - I keep promising myself a day on it, reworking the BBS side anyway, but it's not happened yet.  Maybe today ... there are still a couple of days of July left!  And then it can all go into boxes too...   On the plus side, when all the work is done, I'll be able to unbox it and set everything up much neater - but that won't be for another month or so at the very least, so outside the time limit.

Watch this space ...

Live Launch

I wrote the other day about Tiddler's website.  Well, I decided I'd done enough to let it loose on the world and made the changes live the other day. You may now visit it, dear reader, and see that I didn't even bother to move things from the development location... Well, the robots.txt means it's not supposed to be included in any search engines yet, so I might yet move the content about ..

It's a little bit of a personal site, a only slightly larger bit of a professional site (anybody reading need a child actor?) and a link to her blog. I guess I need to work on more content, now I have a working structure, but as anybody who knows me will know, that's not my strong point.  Maybe I'll start posting up her drawings...

Updates? What are those?

It's been a while since I wrote something on here, but never fear, I've been busy. Most news about Tiddler is now appearing on her own blog now, which has had several updates since I last wrote on here. If anybody following this one is interested in her, best head over there.

Latest project is trying to get her actual website up to scratch. The simple holding page written in basic HTML was starting to feel insufficient, especially if she's going to be getting any more work. A brief sorté through the free web templates for some ideas came up with this which I thought looked good for a front page; slideshow of photos and a nice theme.

It's a pretty simple HTML page, a somewhat larger CSS file, four javascript libraries (one of which doesn't seem to be used) and a selection of images.

The images were simple enough to replace, no problem there, and running the files from the local disc worked fine. But uploading it to the website, it all fell apart, with the slide show not sliding, and all the images stacking on top of each other. Refreshing the page didn't change anything, but just selecting the URL and hitting enter worked fine. So it's something to do with not having the images available quickly ehough? The first access, or a reload, it's not got them, but re-accessing the page has them in browser cache. (And accessing locally is fine as it's got them immediately available.) It behaves the same in Opera, Chrome and Firefox.

Much messing about with pre-loading images gets me nowhere; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so I call up the "slidertron" script homepage for help. Nothing there but a download link, but I download the latest version anyway. This actually makes it worse, but it does comes with demo files, which do work, so I delve into the source code to find out why. Looking at the css, it's got the image sizes specified. The template files I downloaded don't have this. So I add them, and bingo, everything works. Do these people not check their templates in a live environment first?

Now the task is on to turn a flat html file into something that can actually be used as a template!! I'm not going to copy it and edit it individually for every page I want to create on the website. The code has parts that look like it's a snapshot of some dynamically created content (e.g. the menus have a style of "current" on one entry to highlight the current page) but it's going to take some work to turn it back into a dynamic site.

For the moment, the flat page is available on her website but I hope to get the dynamic version working shortly. Then I can start working on actual content. Work-in-progress is happening here if anybody fancies being nosey...

At the moment I'm trying to decide on the visible page structure - should I go for a simple /index.php?page=foo or a /pages/foo/ or a /p_foo layout... Good Practice and SEO recommendations seems to indicate not using the first version; second is prettier, but needs some playing with mod_rewrite to translate it into php calls, which them upsets relative links.. so I'm torn.

Anyway, as the saying goes, watch this space.

Pirates Ahoy!

Yesterday was the annual pirates sports day for the nursery and reception classes at school.

Great fun was had by all, and we are the now proud owners of a lovely multicoloured beach ball as a prize!

Avast ye varmints!

Another Brick in the Wall

Wednesday was a big day for Tiddler - she was awarded a brick at the school assembly "for brilliant phonics work". They have an interesting rewards system - if you do really well at something, and it can be for something as minor as paying attention if you don't usually, you may be in line for a rectangle of paper with your name and the reason on it. This gets pasted up on the wall as you enter the main school building, for all to see. Arranged in a brick-wall pattern, of course, hence the name. She was very very giddy about this, and we were so pleased for her!


The phonics is letter sounds, incidentally. She knows more than they are currently teaching, and can give examples of words starting with the letters that they were amazed at! "Not the usual words we get"! We've got all the sheets pinned up on the doors, not that she seems to need them in order to identify the sounds.


In other news, I've finally got around to starting to get my head around php classes, and might even get the rewrite of Viewdata Viewer done. Not bad since I promised it nearly a year ago... I need that in order to do the database work for the Viewdata Website that is in turn needed in order to progress that to a much more interactive system.

2010 Q4 Roundup

It's 1/1/11 today. Whee...

I've not really posted much lately, either here or on the various websites I'm trying to look after. I've definitely got to apologise to Koco for not keeping up with hers lately, even my forum postings have been minimal, and as for keeping on top of email, I'm way behind on some conversations..

Anyway, in a bit of a catch-up, here's a rough synopsis, in reverse chronological order ...

Thanks to Ant for supplying a virtually complete copy of the ITV Oracle teletext service from their final day, 31st December 1992. I'll get that up on the relevant site ASAP, and hopefully try and find the time to put a proper "type the page number" browser together!

Otherwise, there's not a lot been happening on the website front. I need to get the scanner earning its keep again, and get some promotion going. I really need to get some media interest in the Hunt for Prestel. There must be something remaining, somewhere ..

So, on the family front -

Waking up Christmas Morning with no water made things a challenge! We only had enough water to make morning drinks by using glasses of water that had been poured out the night before to take tablets with! I wish I'd though to call it in at 4am when I'd taken Tiddler to the loo, and it was already off, but I was half asleep and didn't know if it was just us. Turns out it was most of the estate, due to a burst pipe out on one of the main roads. Well done to the poor workmen called out to fix it, though - we had water by lunchtime, just as we were collecting bottles up to go visit a relative with, after getting fed up drinking milk and hot chocolate..

It was my 44th Birthday just before Christmas - blimey. The question is, of course, how do I get 44 candles on a tiny little cake (Thanks for the cake, sis!) ... easy, if you're a geek.Of course I had to explain to everybody else why there were only three candles lit, which rather spoiled it somewhat. I think Dad would have got it, but he wasn't able to come.

Tiddler was an angel in the Nursery Nativity Play. She was beautiful, and very well behaved. I videoed the whole thing, but got in trouble for being in a position where I couldn't actually see her for most of the time. Bit of a blunder there. I should have moved once I realised, but I'd found a good spot to sit where I could see the whole stage, before they came in. Afterwards it was somewhat more crowded..

Prior to that, she performed in the Christmas Concerts at Salford University, playing the violin! She was a little star, and at just 3 years old, definitely the youngest that mounted that stage. I have no idea if she got the notes right, playing as part of a group, but she plainly concentrated, put the effort in, and looked wonderful!

End of November saw the family all gathered in church for Tiddler's baptism. A little late, we know, but at least she understood what was going on, and was exceptionally well behaved. Apparently, some kids scream the place down!

September was when she started school - mornings in Nursery initially, but she pretty quickly went to full-time, after brief hiatus due to a week off with a cold! Throw 25 kids whom have for the most part never met before together, and I guess they are going to spend that first week swapping germs... She spent the next two months coming home with "I learned a new name" .. I think she knows them all now, and there are some definite friendships forming. And at least one kid whom rubs her up the entire time, which is a pity as they have adjoining coat pegs and the exact same coat! Or maybe that's why...

Originally posted at http://blog.irrelevant.com/2011/01/2010-q4-roundup.html.

Snow, snow and more snow

OK. I need to get back into posting stuff ...

Here are some pictures of the "unprecedented" snow today!



And somebody special enjoying it!

Wool/Copper

Ttomorrow is our seventh wedding aniversary. So I look up what the proper gifts should be ...

Traditional 7th wedding anniversary gifts have a theme
of Wool and Copper.  

A Contemporary or Modern 7th anniversary gift has a theme
of Desk Set.

The Flowers associated with the 7th anniversary are Jack-
in-the-pulpit

The Gemstone list shows Onyx and Lapis Lazuli associated
with this Wedding Anniversary.

A desk set ?!?!

And I've never heard of Jack-in-the-pulpit. But Wikipedia tells me it's also known by various other names, including "Bog Onion" and "Brown dragon". I bet the florists never use the first of those..

So, wool and copper ... Hmm...

Console Combat 2009

This weekend was the weekend of Console Combat. A chance to get together and play lots of old games in a City Centre Manchester Pub! Games aren't really my thing, but it was around the corner, and there were to be some Beeb people there, so I thought it would be best to show my face!

It was a fairly quick visit, I'm afraid to say. I had my youngest with me, and whilst she enjoyed a 3D Pacman on the A3010, squeeling with delight when we caught a ghost, most of the games were still a little complicated for a toddler to have a go at herself. We did enjoy a bowl of chips and a drink, though, and she was quite attracted to some cocktail arcade machines!

Apparently we missed most of the Beeb people, but I got a quick chat with the Beebmaster Ian, and a longer one with Dave Moore. He's got ambitious plans for the Acorn World show later in the year, but more on that at a later date.

Hope to see you all in September!

Edit: 30th Jul 2009
Thanks to Arcadian at STH for posting some more pictures here.

Guilty Looks...

If anybody hasn't seen our little one yet, here's a photo we put into the Huggies SnapStars competition - we'd appreciate it if you give her a nice high rating! :-)