Seriously Cool

This guy makes art from a sheet of A4 paper by “materialization of a flat piece of paper into a 3D form”

You really should check this site out: A4 PAPER CUT

Carbonite update

In 23 hours since starting the backup, I have uploaded 3.5GB of data, consisting of 8,225 files.  At this rate initial backup ( =user profile minus video and music or 20GB) will be complete by Thursday.

In addition, I just found out that I can have 12 months free subscription to Carbonite by registering by LaCie network Store device!  Waiting on a reply from carbonite support how to transfer that free subscription to my existing account.

If anyone is interested in taking a carbonite account, let me know, if I refer you, we both get an extra free month ;-)

Katherine Piccys

I was quite surprised by how well some of the pictures from my little canon iXUS 85 turned out.

Set to 'Night Snap' mode, and flash turned off.  Only a little re-touching (levels, vibrancy and cropping) in Photoshop and they are now available for all to see here:

http://photoalbums.redbreva.co.uk/KJ-12122008/index.html

Been having a play

With my CCS based website redesign.

Not too much of the new design working yet, just http://startfromhere.redbreva.co.uk/ and My Page (via the ‘My Family’ link).

The rest of the pages are there, either looking really rubbish, or just as place-holders.

Not sure yet though’ why Firefox shows a dark space under the pictures in the Family menu table, it look OK in IE 7.  Hmm bit more digging required into the CSS attributes there I think!

Cool Technologies

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.

This is Funny!

Amanda's Pics online

Unlike me, Amanda does not take many pictures when away, but the few she took can be viewed online at

http://photoalbum.rockbox-themes.org/Fuerteventura2008/index.html

Increasing Popularity

A Total of 2,008,870 Page Views for 2007, with a month on month growth.  It slowed a little in December as I had to remove the iPod 5G themes from the site to reduce my bandwidth consumption (They are the most popular themes)

Podcasting 2007

2007, for me, has been the year of the Podcast.  I knew *of* it some time ago, but didn't really *get it*, but these days - podcasting accounts for about 70% of my DAP usage (Digital Audio Player).

Current fave's include:
Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott
  What's happening in the Windows/Microsoft world
Webbalert with Morgan Webb
  All the latest Tech News
Play:Digital with Katharine Fletcher
  Game Reviews for PC & Console
Unwired with Will Harris
  All the latest and greatest from the world of 'Gadgets'
Discus with Justin Gayner
  DVD reviews
PixelPerfect with Bert Monroy
  Just how good is the Adobe suite of applications!
Security Now with Steve Gibson
  A fascinating look at windows security

Each of the links above will allow you to trackdown the shows I am reffering to, but they are all also available viw the iTunes store (for free) if you have an iPod.

Wow!!

Just checked the site stats for www.rockbox-themes.org, Visitors to date this year:  1.3 Million

The data volumes downloaded from the site this month amounts to almost 170GB!

The above graph shows the number of visitor per month for this year, Octobers figure being over 267,000.

It just keeps growing...

The number of visitors to www.rockbox-themes.org per month...

Jan  43,000 (1397 per day)
Feb  58,000 (2084 per day)
Mar  85,000 (2765 per day)
Apr  91,000 (3062 per day)
May 107,000 (3463 per day)
Jun 128,000 (4282 per day)
Jul 137,664 (4440 per day)
Aug 167,847 (5414 per day)

New Blogging Tool

Windows Live Writer: Works fine with Vista, seem to be easy enough to set up, and will upload images to my FTP folder when I attach them to a blog...  Have a look at it, it's free

Yet Another Record Month

Beating the record set last month by about 9,000 visitors, I have had 94,544 hits on the Rockbox-Themes web site in April. Now topping 3000 visitor per day on average.

Video Podcast worth watching...

If you have an interest in getting the best out of Photoshop check out the Video Podcast by Bert Monroy called Pixel Perfect, you can subscribe in iTunes, but I would suggest the Large Format version, and watch it on the PC, not the small version on the iPod.

Check out his *MASSIVE* original artwork called Damen:

This is my latest and most ambitious digital painting of a Chicago scene unveiled at Photoshop World in Miami on March 22, 2006.
It is a panorama of the Damen Station on the Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority.
Adobe Illustrator was used for generating the majority of the basic shapes as well as all the buildings in the Chicago skyline.
The rest was created in Photoshop.
• The image size is 40 inches by 120 inches.
• The flattened file weighs in at 1.7 Gigabytes.
• It took eleven months (close to 2,000 hours) to create.
• The painting is comprised of close to fifty individual Photoshop files.
• Taking a cumulative total of all the files, the overall image contains over 15,000 layers.
• Over 500 alpha channels were used for various effects.
• Over 250,000 paths make up the multitude of shapes throughout the scene.

Another Record Month

Beating the record set last month by about 19,000 visitors, I have had 85,737 hits on the Rockbox-Themes web site in March. Almost 3000 visitor per day on average.

New Record

The months stats for www.rockbox-themes.org are now in, and show a grand total of 58,252 hits :-0

Wow! This is amazing, the average hits per day is now between 2000 and 2500, next month has more days so lets see if we can;t beat that figure again next month ;-)

Well Pleased

It's only just 1/2 way thro' the month, and the www.rockbox-themes.org site has already had over 28,000 site so far.

In fact it's almost up to the count for the whole of last year already! - OK, so the site was not published till about July, but even so :-)

Last Xmas Present

Today I went to the Jessops store in Leicester to take a 'starting with studio/portrait photography' course. This was a christmas present from Amanda...

We left the house at 09:00, arrived at the store for 10:15, and started bang on 10:30. There were two girls (Liz & Lisa from WPS Studio) there to act as our models for the day , and the instructor made a good job of explaining how (and why) everything worked. The morning was mostly lecture, with demo's of different lighting effects from on camera flash units, 1, 2 or ever 3 studio light units and the use of reflectors.

After lunch the classrom was converted into two separate studio sets, and the girls posed happily while we all worked out how to use our cameras!

The results from my exploits can be see here on my photo-albums site, not quite as 'interesting' as their web pages on WPS, but easier to show the wife what you were up to all afternoon!

We finished at about 16:30, and had a nice steady drive back home - arriving just in time for the 2nd half of the Man United FA Cup tie against Portsmouth (United won 2-1 )

All in all - a good day

A Good Days Work

Today was the last day of my leave - Back to work on Monday - and I decided it was about time I actually sat down and worked out how to improve on my initial - rather simple - PHP scripting.

On the Rockbox-Themes site, there is a facility to upload new themes to a temp location on the server. This sends me an e-mail and I upload to the correct page after verification. The code to do this was quite limited in it's functionality and did not enforce any of the rules that were stated in the text of the page.

As a result I have got somewhat fed up of renaming files, converting RAR to ZIP, JPG and BMP to PNG etc., hence the effort today.

Some two hours later and I think I now have an upload script that should eliminate both the Spam attemps and people failing to follow a few simple guidelines. If you want to see the finished (for now!) code point your browser at http://www.rockbox-themes.org/uploader.txt

Overall, I am really very pleased with the success of the website, in December it reached over 22,000 hits, after stalling at around 16,000 per month since August, but so far this year the average is in the region of 1,100 hits per day!

How common is your name

Check out NameBrain and see just how original were your parents being when they named you?