Sometimes someone does something pretty amazing that you gotta just tell the world!  http://bloomenergy.com/ is a new-ish company that have taken technology that produces oxygen for NASA flights (so they ‘naughts can breathe more than a couple of hours in space) and reversed it.  This takes oxygen, plus another fuel source – which can be a green bio-fuel – and produces electricity!!

Read the site as it will explain it better than me, but hey if Google and eBay can use it, why can’t I?

Today, I found the “East Kilbride Promoter” on my floor when I was tidying this morning.  On it was an advert for “Free Kickboxing Lesson” and being a wimp I thought I’d look in to it.  There was a website address which should make it easier…NO CHANCE!

Joomla is a loaded gun

What we have is another website built in the pile of shit that is Joomla.  Ok I take that back.  I bet that Joomla is awesome in the right hands.  The way I see it, open source CMS engines are like guns – in the wrong hands they are dangerous and so far the few websites that I have taken over this year have been built in Joomla and been murderous.  Front end not working, back end not working, pages missing.  Just a mess!

Standard People, PLEASE!

I harp on about this time and time again.  In the web development and design industry, someone can pick up a book on a Friday and by the Monday set themselves up as a designer and developer.  Am no designer, definitely not, but I can take ideas from other places and build quite good looking websites.  And that’s quite easy.  But you get people that think they can do both, and make a business out of it.  What annoys me is, they do make a business out of it, and make money.  But would you go to a dentist that was working out a market stall?

So why is it, in this day and age, and in an industry that few people know and even less understand, do we allow people to build crap website?  Small companies now a days rely on business from the web, especially during the recession period.

If you buy something cheap, from someone that doesn’t actually have the creds to back it up, you can only expect shit.  Doesn’t matter the price tag.  Except the cheaper your site is, usually it looks cheap, feels cheap and works cheap.

I personally believe they should make professional exams compulsory for the programming world, especially now that people rely on their websites.

Rant over.  (for now)

Last year when starting my yoga practice, I decided to make sure that my back was good and healthy.  I had abused it for years drinking, dancing, and LOTS of slouching.  I decied to see a chiropractor and an osteopath.  Yes there is a difference.  A chiropractor works your spine while an osteopath works the muscles that hold your spine together.  Ok that’s probably an over simplification.

Well because of where my yoga teacher is based, The Natural Health Service in Glasgow, I was able to contact Asif and his crew of osteopaths.  Real nice people, all willing to help and offer advice.  So when I saw their website I had to offer my services. Read the rest of this entry

I have to admit, one of my New Year’s resolution was to push my home practice more and more and more.  I wanted to get to a point where I was doing 1hr of yoga every morning before work.  Am up anyways.  I have a what some call a perfect body clock, and others a fucked up body clock.  Its mine.  I fall asleep easily at 21:30 onwards and won’t wake up until 05:00 and most often never later than 06:00.  I basically get my full nights sleep and I always feel great…in the mornings, night times is something else. Read the rest of this entry

I have just put live a new website for a client in my day job.  What has happened in the past is I have just added a link to a growing list of websites but because most the sites I do are seasonal or short lived, by the time anyone looks its a dead link or the site is only 1 page.  So I have decided to add pics of the sites I do to my blog.

The creative, html and css was done by the talented Mark McMullen in my work, while I did the backend coding.  Its a real nice website and hopefully you read this in time to play with it…it’s an exclusive!

[update]

We ran out of the freebe whiskey well before lunchtime on the Saturday after it went live.  5000 hits to the website in less than a morning.  Overall we had over 22,000 hits on the site when I came in to work Monday morning.  And nothing went wrong!  Bonus!

Yesterday my first homer of the year went live – http://myoneonone.com. It is a rebuild of a friend’s yoga website, the old one was badly designed, badly built, and the client was left to do what she wanted.  Now most client’s should be left to do what they want, but within set guidelines.  This new one is clean and simple.  Never going to win design awards I grant you, but nice, clean and billion times better than it was!

The old site was built in Joomla, and the Joomla backend didn’t work at all, whatsoever! And my point is made again about open source. It breaks too easily! Ok not all open source is crap.  jQuery rocks.  And maybe I have never had a good experience with open source CMS engines – Umbreako anyone?  But what my friend had to deal with to manage her website was beyond bad.  But its dead, its gone, and long live http://myoneonone.com.

Well its an easy answer. Yes in 3D. It’s amazing in 3D but the question is really, would I go back to see it in 3D? That might be a no. It’s great in 3D and something you have to see. However once you get used to the 3D-ness, is there any real point? The movie still dictates where you are meant to be focusing and in 3D this is hard to get used to – something floats past your eyes, very closely, you are automatically going to try and focus on that, but as it is in the movie the focus is elsewhere in the scene, so you try to focus on a blurry object. And that got annoying.

I don’t want to shit on the movie, I actually really really liked it, but the small things of trying to get used to a 3D movie spoiled it slightly, in my opinion. Next time I watch it, it will be in standard 2D. Sky TV in 3D…hmmm bit far.

Timesheets Galore!

The next timesheet application I found was http://www.timesheets.com.  It is quite easy to sign up to  and you get a decent amount of time to evaluate for free.  Other than the fact you can sign up and rent webcams and finger print log ins – big brother is really watching you and I don’t mean Davina McCall (the host of Big Brother for non-brits) – this is quite a good solid piece of kit and keeps a good eye on your time. Read the rest of this entry

For years now I have developed timesheet systems.  From a desktop VB6 to a web based c# mvc app.  And each time I build it, it gets simpler and simpler.  It has to.  In this world you have 2 types of people.  One is the admin, the person that deals with spreadsheets and accounts on a daily basis, that loves to see columns of numbers adding up.  The second is the user.  They don’t care.  They don’t actually want to use timesheets because they see it as pointless!  So you have to build something where the user doesn’t need to think.

Read the rest of this entry

For a long long time I have been trying to find a simple to use text replacement script for website.  sifr did a real good job when I first played with it, but the problem being that it loaded a flash file for each block of text your were working with, so if you had a slow internet connection or your font was large, then things become slow.  And you had to have flash!  So that rules out my iPhone and probably most other mobiles.

Read the rest of this entry