Learning, coding, exploring, living.
Here’s a useful bit of Javascript that will redirect your old Blogger blog account to your new, self hosted WordPress blog account once you’ve imported all your old blogs.
It uses the search function in your new account to list the possible matches (usually just the correct one!). It works this way because the blog names on blogger are rarely the same as in wordpress, but it encourages people to update their links by showing them it’s different. It also displays a helpful message.
You may have seen the program Zoomify, or similar programs like, OpenZoom and DeepZoom, which quickly display large resolution images on websites without large amounts of data being downloaded – only the part which is needed is downloaded. Most of these applications use some kind of plugin to work (e.g. Flash or Silverlight), so I wanted to see if we could create one without any plugin, using only the HTML5 standards.
Continue reading “CanvasZoom – HTML5 Canvas and code”
Just back from a very interesting seminar at the University of Oxford entitled: “Copying the Means of Production to the Proletariat” – yes, that meant little to me too – basically it’s about RepRap – the Replicating Rapid-prototyper (more commonly known as a 3D printer!)
The talk was by Dr Adrian Bowyer from Bath University, who’s been instrumental in building this type of 3D printer. His specific work has been in creating a 3D printer that can effectively print another copy of itself – so one printer can build the next printer. It’s not designed to be 100% printable however as that would mean much of it would have to be glued together rather than bolted as in the photo, which would effectively rule out experiments, improvements and tweaks of the printer. The current design, the “RepRap II: Mendel”, has about 50% printed parts. (I’m not sure I agree with this though, I think many people would be very happy to have a fully, 100% printable (well 99%), 3D printer, they’d be so handy to have. You could print spare parts once it’s running, and if a better one comes along, print the new one and recycle the old one back through)
This is the conclusion to my previous blog on the “Advances in Astronomy”. The lectures are run by the Department for Continuing Education at Oxford University every year, it is now in it’s 32nd year. More information can be found on their website here. They run various courses throughout the year, across many different subjects.
The first four lectures where covered in the previous blog, this one wil cover the last three lectures:
Continue reading “Advances in Astronomy – Continuing Education Oxford : Second half”
Just back from a weekend long group of lectures about some of the latest advancements in astronomy. The lectures are run by the Department for Continuing Education at Oxford University every year, it is now in it’s 32nd year. More information can be found on their website here. They run various courses throughout the year, across many different subjects.
The loose theme of these lectures was “Exoplanets” but cover a ride range of themes too. The course starts on Friday evening with a meal and the first lecture – usually an introduction covering some of the basic themes that you’ll meet over the weekend. Saturday is the busiest with a further four lectures, and includes Two, three course meals with Tea/Coffee breaks in the morning and afternoon, there’s also some time in the afternoon to yourself or go along on an organised tour. Sunday includes another two lectures and lunch. You can opt out of the meals if you wish, or opt into accommodation also, which includes breakfast.
Continue reading “Advances in Astronomy – Continuing Education Oxford”
So that I could test some of the new HTML5 features I put together a new clock design, called the world clock.
HTML 5 is an upcoming standard for the internet, and it has some rather nice features such as the canvas tag. The new standard is currently only in draft but has already been implemented on many browsers such as Opera and Firefox.
This morning I was caught up in Money Transfer scam involving a friends hacked account.
It works like this: First a cybercriminal hacks someones facebook account – unfortunately this can happen in many ways so I’m not going into details about this. Secondly they hang around on facebook chat until a friend connects then they make up some sob story. Quite quickly this will lead to some reason why you need to immediately wire over 150 (pounds, dollars, camels, whatever…).
What follows is the chat I had with someone pretending to be a friend of mine.
Continue reading “Facebook and the Money Transfer Scam (and deactiviation)”
I’m not a fan of CSS hacks, they are totally unstable and unpredictable pieces of code, usually built on top of another bug… but… unfortunately the way of the web has made it almost impossible to avoid them – I find myself facing a problem I can’t get around without one.
The problem here is CSS media queries and our old fiend Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer only understands the very basic media types such as: media=”screen” but fails to understand media queries like media=”screen and (min-device-width: 450px)”. When it doesn’t recognise this it simply ignores it – that means whole sections of styles are just ignored, and your pages will look completely different to how they are supposed to.
The magazine Popular Science holds a remarkable piece of history spanning 137 years covering science progress and future predictions back till 1873.
To celebrate this years birthday they have partnered with google to bring you their complete back catalogue, something like 1500 individual magazines. Each has been scanned to digital and appears as it was published – original artworks, adverts and text. To easily find what you are intersted in the entire collection has been fully text search enabled.
The Stardust project, four years since the probe landed (or more accurately since the probe crashed slowly), the Stardust@home project has, no, might have, actually found some interstellar material – ancient material older than the Solar System.
I say maybe as it’s not been confirmed yet. Of course, it’s also possible it’s a publicity stunt to get interest back in the old project…
I joined the project back just before I first blogged about it back in Jan 2006, still I hope it is genuine, and maybe I’ll dig out my old login details too!