The blog of Doug

Been playing around with the tech on the blog a bit. I've added a flickr feed of my pictures and an experimental thingy called meebo. It is a useful thingy which collects all your instant messaging accounts into one. So if i'm online you can chat to me direct through the thingy on the right, if not you can leave a message. So there we go a couple of toys before Christmas.

Posted by Doug at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At long last I have given my mums website www.bulbweb.co.uk/bulbweb.htm a face lift. Select 'Allium' from the Genus drop down for some nice pictures in a slideshow stylie.. I'm quite pleased with the results, it's using mums original photography of all her precious plants and the database she uses to keep track of them. Throw in to the mix some new technology in the form of Adobe Spry Framework and it all works quite nicely. I took the demo gallery Adobe use to show what spry can do and adapted it to be database driven via XML and deal with unknown image sizes and the like. It took a couple of days on and off to iron out the wrinkles but quite satisfying in the end. Especially when mum said "it's ok, but I think I liked the old one better". That's progress for you I guess.

Posted by Doug at 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This amased me so much I have had to post an entry about it. A couple of weeks ago I took the plunge and got a new printer (Canon ip6600D) to print pictures and that sort of thing. It does a good job on the old picture front but thats not the bit thats whipped me into a geeky frenzy. I noticed it had a duplex function (pring both sides of the page), so today after hgetting all excited ober even more geeky stuff by Joel Spolsky I printed out one of his articals on hiring people using duplex mode. You know what it just worked, it printed both sides of the page, last page first so I just picked it up off the printed and stapled it. Fantastic. You can tell technology doesn't just work for me very often. So there we have it, i'm a geek that gets excited about printing on both sides of the page (eco friendly as well if the printing is worth reading!)

Posted by Doug at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The pirate bay ( a file sharing site in Sweeden) has put out a video called oddly enough 'Steal this film' and thanks to google here it is:

Steal This Film

The priate bay simply collects bit streams of stuff which can be music, movies or any other file, they were raided this year after the US put pressure on Sweeden to stop them even though in Sweedish law they weren't doing anything wrong. Anyway it has kicked off an interesting debate about file sharing and copyright.

Posted by Doug at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Found another cool thing someone has done with google maps. It's a little flight simulator that lets you fly around the satellite images google maps provides. Quite cute, check it out here

Posted by Doug at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)