Entries Tagged 'Misc.' ↓

Accessible UK Train Timetable - National Rail Enquiries

bq. This is an accessible version of the National Rail Enquiries train timetable site; it doesn’t require JavaScript all over the place, it doesn’t use cookies, it doesn’t have an iframe for latest news, it doesn’t have “Please Wait” pages, it uses much cleaner HTML, sessions don’t “time out” when you just wanted to enter a new query… in other words, it’s generally miles better and doesn’t contravene the DDA.

Shame it’s still as slow as the thetrainline.com and qjump, but it’s so much nicer to use. Excellent service, long may it continue!

Nothing posted here for a long time.

Too much revision to do at the last minute.

Too many exams.

Normal service will be resumed when I retire at the age of 85 (as it will be by then due to the pension crisis).

A new year, a new list of resolutions. This is just my computer section of the todo list:

# Move this weblog from “MovableType”:http://www.movabletype.org to “Wordpress”:http://www.wordpress.org. Then I can hack the code and get it to behave how *I* want.
# Work on “sendcard”:http://www.sendcard.org/ 4 - I have plenty of ideas and now that FormProcessor works I can start work on it.
# Finish the blogmarks script and release the source code.
# Finish the RSS Aggregator - it’s starting to come together, just needs a few days of solid work on it.
# Write documentation for FormProcessor and Image_Transform. And don’t put this off for another year!
# Learn Flash. “Jacquie Lawson’s cards”http://www.jacquielawson.com/ have convinced me that I want to do this. Not that I can ever hope to draw like that # Learn Python. The two books a kind user of sendcard bought me off my “wishlist”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/registry/3V0UY1QFGC97J will help greatly.
# Learn Javascript/ECMAScript. I want to be able to do the cool things I’ve seen done (like Sitepoint’s “collapsing menu”:http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1259 - which is useful, “Simon’s”:http://simon.incutio.com always “useful stuff”:http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1259, or “mooter’s”:http://www.mooter.com clusters), plus it would be fun to experiment with XUL and write Thunderbird extensions.
# Enjoy what I program; stop getting so hung up over whether the architecture’s right or not - it’s better to have a working program than nothing at all.

At last. I can surf again from the comfort of my room. Well, in 5 minute snatches when the connection’s actually working… anytime I try and download a large file it dies and the modem has to be reset. I think we may have a problem with the line as I can hear other people’s calls, so a “BT”:http://www.bt.com engineer’s coming out on Monday morning. Let’s hope he can do something.

Hopefully within the next 72 hours broadband should be activated for our house. I went with “Zen”:http://www.zen.co.uk in the end, as despite being more expensive than the rest they offered faster set-up, which is what really matters at the moment. Let’s hope they deliver what they promised.

I’m currently without Internet access at home, so any blogging I do has to be done via the University computers.

Result: slow updates to the weblog.

Not to mention there’s been far too much else on…

I just want to test that my trackbacks are working
Thanks!

Well, at last we’ve networked the two computers here, using a “Netgear DG814″:http://broadbandzone.co.uk/shop/Home_Routers2024.htm combined router/ADSL modem. Very easy to set up, and now there’s no need to keep on unplugging the ADSL modem and stuffing it in the other computer.

And after a couple of hours work (mainly because I didn’t realise XP doesn’t have NetBeui installed by default) I got file sharing to work. It’s much slower than I thought it would be - Windows said it would take ~160min to copy 1.6GB+ of data between the two computers, but appeared to be taking longer (however I had to cancel the transfer). But then, as I don’t know the difference between a Megabit and a Megabyte I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a 100Mbit card doesn’t allow copying at 100Mbytes/second!

I’ve no idea how secure our setup is (not very I guess) but testing it properly will have to wait until September when I’ve got some free time. So until then the file sharing could be public if we’re unlucky…

Well, not quite launched, but I’ve got it up on the site now. It looks much better in Mozilla than Internet Explorer, partly due to the use of PNG alpha transparency, and partly because IE’s CSS support isn’t so good.

I’m still trying to work out how to get the side menu on the archive template pages, as it’s not there by default - I assume there must be a reason for this?

There are a couple of bugs in the design:

# In Mozilla, the navigation bar is affected by the generated content (the posts in between the links.
# The faded bottom of the side menu doesn’t show in Internet Explorer
# Font sizes need adjusting.
# Link colours are… well let’s just say that visited links are nearly unreadable
# Currently the design’s only applied to the front page of the site

Comments appreciated!

Prepare for a rant…

Yesterday I needed to publish some photos from a University Society on their website. Being lazy, I decided to use Dreamweaver and create the photo gallery using the supplied extension.

I didn’t like the results the default extension gave, so headed off to the Exchange, as I remembered finding one that opened each picture in a pop-up window (forget accessibility options for the time being…).

First attempt: the exchange was down.
Second attempt: the exchange was still down.
…wait until the next day…
Now the exchange is available, but none of the downloads will work. I’m not the only one having problems with the downloads either - it seems that Macromedia are having some kind of problems.

Moral of the story? It’s quicker to create the gallery by hand than use a tool - if I’d done so I’d have finished it by now!