Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

jQuery plugins I have known and loved

Posted on September 19^th 2009 at 9:50am in Work, WWW.

One of my goals over the last year has been to convert most of the JavaScript I use on visitlondon.com to use the jQuery library. One of the big advantages of jQuery is a library of pre-existing and thoroughly tested plugins for simplifying a lot of common tasks.

Here’s what I’ve been using; if you use jQuery, what plugins do you think are essential?

Obviously, jQuery itself, the latest version (which is 1.3.2 at the time of writing).
jQuery UI, the latest version (1.7.2) customised to contain just the core, draggable (see it action on the tube map^[1]) and datepicker functionality. I have a project on the horizon where I’ll probably be using the full range of widgets and interactions.
Lightbox plugin, (see it action on our Peter Pan site)
Validation plugin, just starting to use this (see a simple example) but very pleased with it so far.
Mouse Wheel Extension, to enable mouse wheel based zooming of maps (see it in action)
jCarousel plugin, (see it action at the bottom of the page on our London Restaurant Festival site)
Flashembed plugin, I’m actually using an old version of this as I had to modify it to avoid clashes with some of our CSS but most of the modifications have now been done better in the new versions so I’ll probably be upgrading soon

There’s a problem with Webkit powered browsers – if the item to be dragged is an image map then the mousedown action never reaches the drag code. Hence Chrome and Safari users will see a box with scrollbars instead on that page.

Tags: javascript, jquery, visitlondon

London Restaurant Festival

Posted on August 4^th 2009 at 10:25pm in Work.

Launched a new site today for the first ever London Restaurant Festival. There’s also a blog and twitter. If you’re in or near London in October and like to eat then check it out.

Very True Mood: (hungry)

hungry

Tags: London, shameless pimping

Nightmare Scenario

Posted on August 3^rd 2009 at 7:05pm in My Life, Work, WWW.

Last night I had a dream in which someone had hacked our servers and replaced all the images with, correct pixel sizes and file names, “glamour” photos. Which was a rather odd thing for a hacker to do. We were debating whether to shut the site down whilst we fixed it, or leave it up and try to repair things on the fly. Could we restore the images directories from a backup or could we make the CMS republish everything?

Rather relieved to get into work to find everything working as normal; on the servers. All the desktops had been upgraded to MS Office 2007…

Very True Mood: (tired)

tired

Tags: dreams, microsoft

Gotcha

Posted on July 30^th 2009 at 3:04pm in Computers, My Life, Work, WWW.

I think I’ve found the root cause of why some date pickers are behaving oddly.

<c:if test="${criteria.startDate eq date and criteria.startDate eq null}">

criteria.startDate is a date object, however date is a calendar object representing the current date and should never be null. Hence, it’s impossible for the above test to return true.

The code is total garbage and I wrote it. I wish I had an excuse – I was still learning JSP, we were in a rush, it didn’t crash anything, but frankly I should have spotted the dumbness of it before now. Oh well, on with the fixing.

Very True Mood: (aggravated)

aggravated

Desert Island Discs

Posted on June 12^th 2009 at 12:00pm in Dinosaurs, Music, My Life, Work.

At work, we’ve been doing Desert Island Discs and this week is my turn. I’ll be buggered if I’m writing all this lot up and not turning it into a blog post.

I win. No seriously, I win this game because I have had a theme tune written for me. Well, technically it was written for my blog, oh okay, it was inspired by the name of my blog. What? This isn’t a contest and I can’t win? Oh. Sorry.

According to my mother my first musical experience was dancing (or being danced, as I was baby at the time) round the room to T Rex. Was I too young to be influenced by this? Or did it somehow generate an interest in dinosaurs rather than glam rock? Lucky escape.

Adam and the Ants – Stand and Deliver

I was torn between a classic Ants track or something from his later albums. In the end memories of Saturday morning’s spent watching this video on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop won the day (but if you’ve only heard his old material check out the 1995 album “Wonderful”).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPgHbt0ODr4

Drill Queen – Born Depressed

Justin is an information architect with whom I worked on several projects; he also played guitar for Drill Queen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRrq6zp2_M8

Traveling Wilburys – Tweeter and the Monkey Man

Just about the only bits of vinyl from my dad’s music collection that I copied to tape, and one of the few bands that Lettice and I both love. It looks like the record label have been at YouTube so we’re lucky to find this animation:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cb4t_tweeter-and-the-monkey-man_creation

Moxy Früvous - My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors

Moxy Früvous were a cool, funny, somewhat cheesey Canadian band who I was introduced to via two friends at university. If you saw the groaning bookshelves in our flat you’d know why this song always makes me smile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9F_XHb81N0

Cerys Matthews – Oxygen

I can’t sing. I really can’t sing. Neither can my brother, though as churchgoer he makes up with gusto for what he lacks in aptitude. Clearly we got our singing genes from the English or Swedish parts of our family not the Welsh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPqaPHTlhdg

Pulp – Mis-shapes

The end of the summer of 1995. On the news it’s Blur vs Oasis. But, before Blair, there was a much better third way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7rxAeF1wmQ

Aziza Mustafa Zadeh – Ay Dilber
Stiff Little Fingers – Tin Soldiers

Hands up who wanted (or even expected) to hear some Azerbaijani Jazz today? Well, you’re out of luck as I can’t find it anywhere on the web. So have some classic punk instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl5V26oXHUI

Tanita Tikaram – And I Think Of You

The reason I’m here. Sort of. I created my first home page in 1995 (personal home pages, remember them? Like Facebook profiles but you had to do all the work yourself) and wanted to do a bit more. So looking around the nascent web for the various artists I liked I spotted that Tanita didn’t have any fan pages dedicated to her. The resulting site helped to get me my first job at a web design agency.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9bphQpCLNA

Book

Assuming I’m going to be here for a while then I want something fairly long. An old favourite or something I’ve never gotten around to? I think I’ll go for the latter and take Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography to remind myself of home.

Luxury Item

A brewing kit. Let’s see which of the fruit on the island makes the best booze.

Very True Music: All of the above

Tags: adam ant, cerys matthews, desert island discs, drill queen, moxy fruvous, pulp, stiff little fingers, tanita tikaram, traveling wilburys

Personality Type Meme

Posted on March 12^th 2009 at 9:39pm in Memes, My Life, Work.

Via linniekin

You Are An ISTJ
The Duty Fulfiller

You are responsible, reliable, and hardworking – you get the job done.You prefer productive hobbies, like woodworking or knitting. Quiet and serious, you are well prepared for whatever life hands you. You are conservative and down-to-earth. You hardly ever do anything crazy.

In love, you are loyal and honest. If you commit yourself to someone, then you’re fully committed. For you, love is something that happens naturally. And you don’t need romantic gestures to feel loved.

At work, you remember details well and are happy to take on any responsibility. You would make a great business executive, accountant, or lawyer.

How you see yourself: Decisive, stable, and dependable

When other people don’t get you, they see you as: Boring, conservative, and egotistical

What’s Your Personality Type?

Last time I did a Myers-Briggs based personality test I came out as ISTP, so this is the same in 3 out of 4 aspects.

Interestingly I recently took part in a team building day at work based on yet another variation on Jung’s archetypes. Based on the slightly more in depth analysis (compared to an Internet meme) I came out as something that would be E*T* on the M-B system. So the only thing that everyone agrees on is that I’m Thinking rather than Feeling. Which ain’t that much of a surprise

Very True Mood: (mellow)

mellow

Very True Music: Last.FM Boffin set on

Conflicted

Posted on February 15^th 2009 at 11:40am in Media, The World, Work.

I’m in two minds about The Guardian’s proposal for a London equivalent to the Ebbsfleet Horse.

On the one hand I’m all in favour of new and exciting landmarks in London.

On the other hand, it will be bloody terrifying to see this every time I look up from my desk.

Very True Mood: (confused)

confused

Sauropod Stack

Posted on January 17^th 2009 at 1:34pm in Dinosaurs, Memes, Miniatures, Work.

Hey kids, the latest craze is to stack your (toy) animals. Well it keeps us off the streets…

Very True Mood: (silly)

silly

Tags: photography

As my dad used to say, “Je suis tres knackered”

Posted on November 13^th 2008 at 11:21pm in Computers, My Life, Work.

13 hour day at work. Bad servers. Not much with the brain. So as far as a NaBloPoMo post goes this is a token effort and made of fail.

Very True Mood: (tired)

tired

Tags: nablopomo

Baked beans are off

Posted on November 11^th 2008 at 8:50pm in Spam, Work.

The BBC ran a story today about how spammers make money. They estimated that with a click through rate of just 0.00001% it could be possible to make up to $2 million a year.

At work we deal on click through rates of double digit percentages and yet somehow don’t make $200 billion a year. The downside of being all ethical and using an opt-in list.

Meanwhile I got this spam in my akismet cesspool:

Hi there!
My first post at this great blog!
I wanna show u my dayly updated blog: [adjective adjective verb noun]
Have a nice day!
BB!

P.S. if you don’t want to see this message please write me to [email] with subject “NO ADS” and URL of your forum

Thank you for cooperation!

Allowing for the fact that 1 in 100,000 people are stupid enough to buy drugs from a spammer, how many webmasters are stupid enoiugh to send a forum URL to a spammer?