The new picture arrived yesterday, and now has pride of place above the fireplace...
Before:
After:
There is of course more to the new look than just the wall shown... new curtains, light fittings, display units, lamp along with a *very* different colour on the other three walls, make for a completely different feel in the room now.
Love It!
I have been playing with Dreamweaver CS3 recently, and have completed a couple of training courses on Lynda.com on AJAX and SPRY
My test sites are at
http://ajax-test.rockbox-themes.org/ and
http://spry-test.rockbox-themes.org/
The Ajax one is quite simple to look at, but was a real pain in the but to build - lots of Javascript and PHP code, all to get a page that does exactly the same of the pure HTML version it replaced!
The actual difference is that the AJAX layer makes the web page work more like an application. When you search on a traditional site, the query is passed in the URL and the results displayed on a separate 'results.html' type page. With AJAX, the results are posted back to the same page as the query was performed on, making multiple searches much easier.
SPRY is adobes AJAX implementation framework, it is far easier to use than hand coding everything, but at the expense of some flexibility.
One thing I was quite pleased with is the tabbed panels example:
http://spry-test.rockbox-themes.org/Tabbed_Panels.php
But what is particularly interesting on that page is the two RSS feed tabs. They were built using yet another cool technology: XLST... You create an XLS file, which is linked to an XML based file. This XLS is then merged with the HTML file on the server side. This allows you to embed XML data into your own page.
Well sort of.
1) New Painting. As mentioned previously I have just ordered a new Mark Spain artwork for the lounge. I now have a delivery date of 21st of April, so I have two weeks to ensure that the decoration etc. is complete.
Today we went to the Halcyon gallery in Birmingham, where they were opening their "Figurative Collection" show, and we had chance to meet non other than Mark Spain himself. A really nice guy, and the free champagne was rather nice too.
2) New HDD for the PC. Lofty is in the process of reconfiguring his Media Centre PC, and as a result has a couple of 500 GB HDD's going spare. I have taken one of them off his hands for the princely sum of £40.
I intend to put this new drive (well 12 month old actually) in this PC, and take the opportunity to completely reload Windows Vista. I currently have C: on a 75 GB drive, and D:, P: and M: on a 240 GB drive. The plan is to go to a single large C: on the 500 GB, with data, pictures and music in the My Documents, My Pictures and My Music, and use the 240 GB drive as a backup device for those three locations.
... since I last posted here? Good grief, time flies when you are having fun!
'What's been going on?' I hear you cry, well not a lot actually. Currently decorating the lounge, in advance of a new painting - 'A Moment of tranquility' by Mark Spain
Ceiling and woodwork has been painted, walls have been re-papered with textured paper, and one wall has actually been emulsion'd to finished colour. Still not 100% sure on other wall's or curtain colour, so some work left to do yet.
Apart from that, not a lot... Tidied out my CD collection for a recent 'Car Boot' sale, sold about 100 CD's - still *way* too many left really.
Not too much time off from work, but work itself has been pretty quiet. That's the 'end of financial year' effect - it's either completely mad, or deadly quiet, depending on wether there is any telecom's budget left to be spent before April!
Took a day trip to see Lofty one day, he is now separated from his wife, and filling for divorce. It's the happiest we have seen him in years!
Have been spending quite a lot of time on Photoshop, working my way thro' the tutorials in Matt Kloskowski's "Layers - The complete guide to Photoshop's most powerful feature', and a couple of online training courses ay Lynda.com. I have been really interested in the area of 'retouching' and now need to get the camera out and take some good pic's on Amy and Alex so I have some material to work on!
The Beta version of Lightroom 2.0 is now out, and I have taken the opportunity to start from scratch again withLR. I started importing pictures into LR before I really understood what was going on, and as such - it was always a bit of a mess. Lets see if I can do better this time!
Golf has been a bit thin on the ground in March, every time I had a day off, the weather was terrible. Never mind, with the clocks going forwards, evenings are fair game again now ;-) - at least they will be once the decorating is finished...
