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Yes! We want information .... information ....

Well, what normally takes a team of developers hundreds of hours, I've achieved in a lunchtime and evening. Yep, I've developed another dashboard. Not satisfied with the initial dashboard, it came to me over lunch that I could create another one that provides yet more irrelevant information. It's like when I was diagnosed with Crohn's - you just don't know when the crap's going to stop coming.

So this is to make amends for the initial country pie chart that was basically a colored circle for one country. Now, we've gone totally the other way and found an excessive amount of data so that it plots to the pie chart and makes it unreadable because there can be too many segments.

This dashboard is accessed from the places selection page that allows you to select a location and see what pictures were taken there. Noting that there can be multiple tracks per location as well as multiple pictures. The overkill is that it plots the number of pictures taken of each species of animal, so if you pick a location like Las Gallinas that has a lot of animals, the pie chart is very difficult to decipher. If you want a head start, the chart starts plotting at 3 O' clock and goes clockwise.

As with the initial dashboard, this one is also linked from the photos home page.

Billions of dollars are being spent in the corporate world creating dashboards for management reporting. The need to get real time online information on performance against key metrics and all that good stuff.

Well, keen to follow the rat race, I thought it was time I introduced this concept to East Bay Rag. Now, not only have I created a dashboard, but it's an interactive dashboard with drill-down. Only the best will do here.

Now, as with the management reports that the billions of dollars are chasing, the only minor setback is that the information is completely and utterly meaningless. My dashboard reports on animal photos I've taken. Go to the initial animal statistics selection page and select the animal of your choice. (Noting that you can sort the list by the number of photos taken of each animal - ooooooh!) This takes you to the dashboard that provides lots of irrelevant information about the number of photos taken of that animal and allows you to drill further and do all kinds of fun things.

My personal favorite is the pie chart that shows how many photos have been taken of the animal in different countries. For the most part, this is just a complete circle with one country representing 100% of the photos - as I said, completely meaningless ..... but very functional. If you want to test the pie chart, I know that deer, mallard, European starling and greylag goose have been photographed in more than one country.

If you need to find this from the main menus, the animal statistics can be found on the photos home page.

I've been messing around with geotagged images for a while (images that have their longitude and latitude associated with them). After much playing I've created my own interface with Google maps so that I can display these images on a map.

I got to thinking, wouldn't it be great if you could pick from selections and see where the photos have been taken? To that end, I set to work producing a few scripts that would parse the xml files where the geotag information is stored and display them on a map to see where they were taken. I've created a basic option that allows you to search by track and display each track on a map. In addition, you can search by animal and display where each animal photo was taken on a map.

These two options are also available on the photos home page.

Followers of the photographs on this site will have noticed that I added geotracking to the last set of photos and displayed them on a map at the foot of the page. If you missed this, it's these birding photos. (The photos themselves are not that good, it was really a test run for the geotagging to see if I could assign the geotags to the photos and then show them on the map. The idea being that this will allow people to follow us as we travel across the US on our road trip at the end of February. (More to come on this).

Anyway, in my ever increasing desire to create things of no use whatsoever, I decided that it may be useful to open the photo pages up for comment. Possibly if someone actually stumbles onto this site and knows what the birds in the photos really are or if someone just wants to comment on whether they think a particular set of photos is good or bad.

Completely pointless as I doubt that anyone will actually bother given this sites world-wide viewing audience of 3. But you never know ....

The bad news is that the weather's pretty bad at the minute so I'm not going to get out to take any photos this weekend. So, if you're really keen to make a comment, you'll have to wait until I get the chance to get back out or go back and comment on some historic pictures.

Given that the weather's bad I decided to have a quick fiddle with the site and have also added a quick tag photo search page that is found from the photos home page. This sort of provides a middle ground between the photo categories and the photo database. It doesn't give you the full search capability of the photo database, e.g. you can't search on a specific bird, but it is quicker to use if you want to search on a broader category like a NASCAR race or a family member.

What goes down must come up ..... Hmmm - perhaps not otherwise there wouldn't have been a need to invent Viagra. But that doesn't apply to this website as we're back and it's not a repeat cache.

As you will have no doubt read, I'm in the process of moving house. The website will therefore go down from the time at which I unplug the server. It will resume when the stars align and we get to our new house and find that the services have been turned back on.

I will send a broadcast mail to all those who've signed up as a member to let you know when the site is going down.

Don't know how many people out there look at the photos I've been taking at the weekend, but if you do, I've added the tags to the double click image and the slideshow. (You can select whether or not to view the tags on the slideshow - default is to show them).

The idea of this being that if you want to know what a particular bird is that you're looking at you can double click it to find out. Well, I say to find out - you'll find a tag with a bird name on it which will be my best effort based on research, but I have to admit that sometimes it's particularly difficult to identify some of the species. So if I get something wrong, I apologize and would welcome an email to let me know what needs correcting.

You may or may not be aware, but alongside the irrelevant ramblings of Mr O and myself, there is actually some useful stuff on this site - some bug fixes to applications and little bits of code here and there. From time to time I get hits on the site and someone will download something and this generally makes me happy as I get the sense that I've helped someone - the most recent of which was an Internet / Business Solution Service Provide based in Kazakhstan.

Most of these hits are around the fix to the upload progress in PHP that just brings up a pop up window with a bar that indicates the progress a file has made for upload (when a user submits a file to you). When a user downloads a file, the progress indicator is controlled on the user's machine. Anyway, you get the picture.

What's really confusing me is that I got a series of random emails submitted on the web-form with complete garbage as the content and random links to pages that don't exist. And I don't just mean pages that sound right, most of the links were to things like http://hdfafklad.com. Unless I'm missing something (which could always be the case, lets face it) these seem really odd. Only thing I can think is that somebody's looking for something in the wrong place. The email web-form does allow attachments, but it doesn't utilize the upload progress. If you want to see the upload progress, that is on the upload file form that you can get to from that link or from the contact page (click on the “submit file to EBR” link) or directly from the contact menu at the bottom of any page (again click “submit file to EBR”).

My only plea is that if you send something, try and make it interesting. Also, if you are just doing a test, please put something like test in the text so I know to ignore it and just delete it rather than getting me spending my time trying to decipher something. Last, if you have any problems or questions - you should just email me them directly (web-form is fine) - I will respond.

Anyone who noticed that the site was down on Wednesday may be interested in the fact that this was due to a corrupt driver. In all my years of having computers, I've never had this happen to me before. I'm sure there's people out there who will read this and think “well, you're lucky, it happens to me all the time.” I moved the computers a while back and they now wireless connect to my LAN. The driver for the wireless USB adapter had become corrupt and stopped working.

Simple fix - just uninstall and then re-install the driver. Everything working fine. Just seems odd to me that it happened. But I won't loose too much sleep over it.

Sadly, for many of you, these are videos of the family and not more of my creations for your amusement. On the other hand, these are probably more informative and of more interest to family and friends that want to see the progression of young master William and the things that he's getting up to. There are two new videos - William on his scooter and William at the Gym. These can be found on the Family Videos Home Page.