Website Archives

... and now you can! Comments have been added to the videos - yay!

I've decided to stop posting blogs about bike rides and then posting the video of the bike ride and essentially duplicating the post. What I've done is added the track map to the video player so all the information is there and you can just go look at the video if you really want to. Given that Owen's the only person who looks at the video's it might have been easier to just message him on Whatsapp rather than posting a blog about not posting blogs, but where would the fun have been in that?

A new Formula 1 season is upon us and the race game is setup for all to play. There are very few changes this year, but will the cars perform the same? Let's see how good you are at predicting the top ten each race. The game is really simple, you need to pick 10 drivers that you think will finish in the top 10 positions of each race. In order to play, you must be registered with EastBayRag. You then need to logon (when you try to access the page or any other page that requires logon, you will be taken to the logon screen).

There are literally only two steps to play the game:

1. Go to 2024 F1 Game registration and register.

2. Go to selections for the first race to make your initial selections.

You can leave it there. Your selections will copy over to all the races so you will score points each week. You can update your selections for any race up until the race is locked (set to be two hours prior to the official race start time). You will be able to see practice and qualifying before you make changes to allow you to make any updates for drivers performing above or below what you expect for any given race.

The points system is pretty simple - you start with 150 points. You lose a point for each position each of your predictions finishes away from where you predicted them to finish (e.g. if you predict Lewis Hamilton to finish third and he wins, you lose two points. If he finished seventh, you would lose 4 points). You gain 10 bonus points for every correct prediction making 250 points the maximum that can be scored each week if you guess all 10 positions correctly.

Any updates can be made from your race game account by selecting the appropriate competition.

Good luck!

Well, congratulations to me, but only just. I didn't realize there was a race this weekend, so I didn't update my selections. I ended up losing 50 points to William in the final face, but I'd managed to get that far in front from the previous races, mostly because of the good luck I had with the Vegas selections.

Here's the final leaderboard

Well, not necessarily hidden, more missing from the weekly emails. Due to a glitch in The Matrix and nothing to do with poor programming or anything like that, the weekly email has been missing any general “Stuff” blogs if there were AI blogs in the same week. I did contemplate resending the weekly mail, but given that I didn't write anything interesting in the blogs from, what is now, last week, I didn't bother. Instead, I figured I'd write this to let you know you may have missed something that was completely unimportant. Anyone wanting to know if they missed something can use this link to the recent stuff blogs.

Slightly delayed, but the update is here and we're introducing the Race Game smack talk, a place to go to comment on the game, the season, the other competitors or anything you want, really. And it's all mobile friendly. (That link is for the 2023 F1 season).

Now, why have we done this? Well .... imagine this .... let's say Mr O is out getting a bit of daily exercise, playing Pokémon. There he is, catching one over here and another over there. Perhaps stopping to take a gym. Then, in the middle of his daily Pokémoning he thinks about something I wrote on about the last race and comes to the conclusion that I'm a knob. Instead of having to send me an email on the matter, he can just pop to a different window on his browser and post to the smack talk.

You might be fooled into thinking this is a very specific use case, but I like to look at this as service. Where else can you go to get pre-emptive problem solving like that?

But there's more. Oh yes, indeedy! Hold your horses and batten down the hatches. Get ready for this one. We are now emoji friendly 😎😍😋. Not going to lie, this change has been a bitch and will be the subject of another blog, but for now, just know that emoji's can be used anywhere on the site.

Why did we do this? You might ask. Well .... today's teenager is incapable of using words to express their feelings. Instead they rely on these symbols to communicate. Given that William is participating in the competition, I figured it would allow him the opportunity to join the conversation. Although I'm not entirely sure we'll understand what he's trying to say. I got confused the other day when I saw him message his girlfriend about coming over to make a very strange vegetarian dish that mixed vegetables and fruit. Something about him coming over to put his 🍆 in her 🍑. I can't think that would taste very nice.

Alrighty everyone, the moment you've all been waiting for. The Race Game returns, this time with 2023 Formula 1 season. The game is really simple, you need to pick 10 drivers that you think will finish in the top 10 positions of each race. In order to play, you must be registered with EastBayRag. You then need to logon (when you try to access the page or any other page that requires logon, you will be taken to the logon screen).

There are literally only two steps to play the game:

1. Go to 2023 F1 Game registration and register.

2. Go to selections for the first race to make your initial selections.

You can leave it there. Your selections will copy over to all the races so you will score points each week. You can update your selections for any race up until the race is locked (set to be two hours prior to the official race start time). You will be able to see practice and qualifying before you make changes to allow you to make any updates for drivers performing above or below what you expect for any given race.

The points system is pretty simple - you start with 150 points. You lose a point for each position each of your predictions finishes away from where you predicted them to finish (e.g. if you predict Lewis Hamilton to finish third and he wins, you lose two points. If he finished seventh, you would lose 4 points). You gain 10 bonus points for every correct prediction making 250 points the maximum that can be scored each week if you guess all 10 positions correctly.

Any updates can be made from your race game account by selecting the appropriate competition.

Good luck!

The subs are here! One of the things I've done as part of the website cleanup is implemented sub domains. This now means that you can reach parts of the site quicker and easier by using the following sub domains:

vote.eastbayrag.com
blog.eastbayrag.com or blogs.eastbayrag.com
forum.eastbayrag.com or forums.eastbayrag.com
photo.eastbayrag.com or photos.eastbayrag.com
video.eastbayrag.com or videos.eastbayrag.com
funstuff.eastbayrag.com
racegame.eastbayrag.com

You won't though, but if you did want to, you could. Now, the one that you will probably click on is the one I use to write a shopping list for William and given the nosy nature of people, I'm sure you're going to want to see what I'm asking him to get:

shoppinglist.eastbayrag.com

Not really sure why I'm writing this up as I doubt I'll remember I wrote it up if the same thing ever happens again. Anyway, for those observant among you, you will have noticed that last week's mail message was late going out (~12 hours). It didn't send automatically, so need to investigate.

First thing, did the job run - yes it ran and completed successfully. Hmmm, how can that be? Well, it did run and everything ran right except the actual emails never got sent. OK, try to recreate. I've created a bunch of tools to troubleshoot the background jobs. In this instance I can send a test weekly message with a front end view to each process and it only goes to me. Ran that and it failed to create the message because it couldn't connect to host eastbayrag.com. Hey, what? It can't connect to itself, don't be silly ....

... open web browser and connect to eastbayrag.com .... times out and can't connect. Try on work computer and it works fine, the website is there and up and running fine. Which it has to be, otherwise I couldn't connect to run the tools. Connect to site on ipad - fine. Connect to site on phone - fine. Connect on home laptop - fails. Weird ... ok, what's changed. Well, I've been setting up a linux machine, maybe I've buggered something up. Start linux machine and connect on that - fine. What's the pattern? Well, it's connecting from IOS, Android and Linux, but not from either of the windows machines on my home network. It does connect from the windows machine that is VPN'd through work. OK, try gaming machine which is on windows - yup, failed. OK, definitely a windows thing it would seem.

Technical bit - when you connect to the website, you connect to the IP address of the website. When connecting to my own website, it's sending me back to myself. So, figured windows may have updated some firewall rules or something to prevent the system from accessing itself.

Ping eastbayrag.com and tracert eastbayrag.com both work fine, so I know the machine knows where to route the traffic. It literally just won't load in a browser.

Let's hit Google for the answer. Obviously this scenario is very specific and quite hard to search, but getting lots of hits for machines loosing connection to some sites, so I start flushing the DNS and resetting the ipconfig and trying a whole bunch of stuff - nothing works.

Moved laptop into other room as cleaner was here and suddenly it worked. What the fuck? Plug it back in and it doesn't work again. Wait, what? Now I realize that all the machines that don't work are hard wired into the router and the machines that do work are wirelessly connected to the router. Put one of the other machines on wireless and it works fine.

OK, now we're getting somewhere - it's clearly a router problem and something to do with the hard wired part of the router which makes no sense as the hard wired computers are working fine with the exception of the fact that they can't connect to my own website either by using the domain or the external IP address. Using the internal IP address works (I checked that somewhere along the line).

I spent ages searching for the answer, plugging and unplugging computers, switches, routers etc. Re-mapping IP addresses and going mad as it doesn't make sense. I had the router config open and was looking through things in that and I randomly noticed that the router name had gone back to a default of Linksysxxxxx where xxxxx are some random numbers. I looked at my computer and it said it's connected to RagNet which is what the router was named. I renamed the router back to RagNet and everything works.

I still don't totally understand why it didn't work in that everything worked fine except being able to browse my own site. Best I can come up with is that the computer goes "I want to connect to eastbayrag.com", it sends that to the DNS and the DNS says "that's you mate". Computer then goes "oh right, yeah, let me look at my network, RagNet are you there?" And the router doesn't respond, because it's forgotten its name.

Roll up, roll up! It's time to create your team for the 2015 NASCAR Race Game. When most people are looking for to a valentines day with their sweetheart, I'm going to be watching the Sprint Unlimited race which is the precursor to the 2015 Season.

Register for the 2015 NASCAR Race Game.

The 2014 NASCAR season is almost upon us. It's time to start thinking about who your favorite drivers are and get ready to position them in order of where you'll think they finish in each race. Registration for the 2014 NASCAR Race Game is now open. You can register your team name and get ready for the season to begin. Emails will be sent when the drivers are ready to be selected each week.

One of the oldest elements of EastBayRag has just been given a face lift. The Graffiti Wall has been cleaned and is waiting for you to spray some new slogans or quotes. Actually, it hasn't been cleaned - if you were one of the few who actually entered something there, it still exists for all to see. All I've done is taken advantage of some of the new features in HTML 5 to have the wall look more like a wall with lots of graffiti scrunched together as opposed to having to scroll down to see the next bit of writing.

If you have an old browser, it won't display and you'll be taken to the old wall. Well, sort of. If you have an old IE browser you'll be taken to the old wall. I've sort of made the assumption that anyone using a different browser will have updated to the latest version and will be able to view HTML 5. If not ... tough!

Anyway, enjoy the new Graffiti Wall. Take a look and have a go.

Oh! It updates every time you load the page, so if it's showing something in a bad color and you can't read it, hit F5 and it'll be displayed differently.

It's that time of year again when the NASCAR season starts. This weekend marks the start of the NASCAR season with the Budweiser Shoot Out and then the race competition starts with the Daytona 500 the following week. If you want to participate, you must be a member of this website.

To register for this competition click here. You can then logon to enter your picks for the first race of the competition (the Daytona 500).

To find out more details about the competition click here.

If you are not a member of this site and need to register first click here.

So, I'm like a kid in the proverbial candy store. I have all the toys I need and they are well and truly inside the pram and I'm not about to toss them out. I've discovered HTML 5. “What is that?” I hear you say. Well, I'm not really sure and it's pretty difficult to explain. HTML 5 is really just the latest standards for hypertext markup language which is really not that exciting until you combine it with the latest standards for cascading style sheets (CSS) and JavaScript. None the wiser are you really? Just felt I needed to add some kind of description, but if you really want to know, you should probably read the details on another site.

Well, why am I so excited? I'm not really sure about that either, but I am. Basically, it allows you to develop and design stuff much easier and faster. You can also make things do things with less code, for example the rotating div that you can see. What a div is is pretty irrelevant to the readers of this blog, it's simply an object that you can apply attributes to and change those attributes dynamically through the use of some simple scripting. You can apply these same attributes to more or less any object on a web page, I just started pratting about with divs because they tend to be the most convenient to prat about with.

So what's going to change with this site? Actually, it's already done! I converted the entire site from XHTML to HTML 5 last night. Now, I know what you're thinking. If I did it in a night, it can't be that big of a deal. For the most part I would agree, but it does mean updating code in over a 1,000 documents. Ordinarily a big task, but I built my own tool to do this kind of stuff a while back and given that I've kept fairly strict patterns (not really standards) in my coding, it wasn't that difficult. I have added some of the new tags throughout, but these are mostly invisible to the users. One change where you may notice something is in the video section if you try to play a video online. The site was embedding Microsoft's Media Player which, I found last night was not actually working in Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (worked fine in 6, 7 & 8, but seemed to not work in the latest version). Anyway, the site now uses the new <video> tag which works in all new browsers including mobile.

This means we're making a statement. We've gone for cross platform compatibility at the expense of legacy support. I can't be bothered to code in support for anyone on an older browser. Upgrade or ... well, fuck off really. It might be nostalgic of you to have some obscure version of an obsolete Netscape browser and more power to you. There's a place for everyone, but the place for you ain't here.



The thing is, the initial excitement I got when I started reading about HTML 5 (and yes, I know I'm over a year behind, but I do have a day job you know) was all the wonderful things it could do more easily. The problem, I find as I start doing my little examples is that the specific coding and support is different for each browser, so you have to write something different for Mozilla's Firefox to Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Apple's Safari to Google's Chrome to Opera. This is painful enough without then having to figure out what version of said browser you're using and adding code for that. If I can do my bit and code for each of these, you can do your bit and upgrade to the latest version.

Not a div. Fooled Ya!

Rather odd that it's called a “standard” when there are so many interpretations of it.

I will take the time to add my bragging rights in that I have my video working under this new model ... in one night .... and Google's still working on getting YouTube up to date. They're beta testing an HTML 5 site to get the same level of functionality I have. Which just goes to show one thing ... they have a hell of a lot more videos to convert than I do. As I mentioned above, although you can use the same tag to invoke a video player, each browser requires the file to be provided in a different format. Not each browser, but you have to provide a version of the video in .mp4, .webm and .ogg. a quick plug to Miro Video Converter that I found very handy for the job. The thing that makes me laugh in that sad thing that passes as my mind is that I sat there and converted about 20 videos one at a time, three times each, watching a green progress bar go up and then a couple of clicks and onto the next. (I was actually working working whilst I was doing this ... such a multi-tasker!). The one at a time is on the basis that the free software I'm using doesn't have a multi-file selection option. I just have this image that somewhere in the YouTube offices there was a meeting to figure out the best way to decide how to convert a gazillion videos. And you just know someone wrote on a flip chart the options of getting someone to develop a script versus hiring a bunch of interns to do the job one at a time.

And the next day, someone was tasked with renting premises to house a thousand interns whist they sit there day after day watching green progress bars.

Back by popular demand. Well, popular in the sense that at least two people want to play. The race game is here again. We're set to run for the 2011 NASCAR season. You need to register for the event first (this is a one time thing) and then you need to logon to make your picks and play the game.

Remember, you only need to make picks in the first week as they copy forward each week. You can make changes to your selections up to two hours prior to the start of each race.

Quick word of warning, I have noticed that the up and down arrows on the selection page are not necessarily doing what they're supposed to. I'm out of town for about 3 weeks, and I'll fix that when I get back. For now, just select from the drop down box.

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.

Those nutty bumpkins have been at it again. And this time it was the turn of someone different to set the quiz - my dad. I have to be honest, I was expecting something completely obscure particularly as promises were made that the picture round would follow a theme of “identify the livestock”, however this round was not include (shame as my knowledge of cattle and sheep is second to none - if these wellies could tell stories ....) Anyway, take a trip to the Bumpkin Quiz and filter for “Dad Quiz 1” to view the latest offering.

It wasn't long before I got asked (told) to make a couple of enhancements to the RabBox. Told being the operative word as her indoors said that she needed the ability to save a playlist if it was to be of use. So, we've added the ability to create and edit your own playlists. You need to be registered with the site to do this as it checks your name and password before you can create a playlist.

In addition to that, we fixed a few bugs, although you may still experience some problems - if you do, let me know. I seem to get different results depending on the browser - MSIE seems to be more stable than FireFox. MSIE seems to wait until a song has loaded before playing whereas FireFox is using the streaming. More things for me to play with to figure out what's going on.

Back to the more user friendly stuff - I've added a timer so you can see how much of a song has played. So you know whether it's still working or crashed or if you're in that blank bit that some artists put at the end of a CD before adding a “hidden/bonus” track.

Also created a search button. Not sure if this will be of any use to anyone as you won't really know what you're searching for. That's why I've not linked it to the select screens as I think what's already there - the abilty to search by artist and/or album is probably enough for everyone.

Finally, the whizz bang - I created RagBoxLight for use on mobiles. One snag - you need Adobe Flash Player and there aren't too many devices that have this capability yet including mine (Blackberry Curve). Thing is I created it before I realized I couldn't use it. Never Mind.

No, not a reference to something of Karen's. I was playing with a bit of software, SoundManager2, to get a little bit of music to play on the home page and I got to thinking maybe I could make a music player to stream my music on the web so I can listen to it remotely. So I did.

RagBox is the result of this effort which is linked from the Fun Stuff Home Page. I've built out quite a lot of functionality with it - you can shuffle the entire catalog by clicking the play button, but you can also create shuffle lists either by genre, format or artist. You can also build out your own playlists by album or song (although you can't save them - I'm thinking about adding this functionality, but am not sure yet). Or you can pick from one of my playlists (albeit there's only one at the minute that I created for this purpose).

This probably needs a bit of work as I don't have any error trapping in place yet and it has bugged out on me a few times during development. Generally, it locks up when changing song, particularly if you use the advance button just after a song has started playing. If you do play with the RagBox and find bugs, feel free to email me so I can try and fix them. Also, I have no idea whether it's going to load fast enough with my connection so it may get jumpy if you are in the UK for example.

Last, yes, anyone who looks in detail may wonder why I've got the media and format as selections when there's only CD and album. Well, that's because that's all I've got loaded. Once I move and get my collection sent over this will expand to include vinyl with single and EP.

Now you can comment on the current vote. Many thanks to ED for the suggestion - we've listened and updated to add the functionality. There is now a place to comment when you make a vote - you can either do this from the Vote Home Page or when your vote is registered (e.g. through the email link). Get into a discussion on why you voted the way you did. Let others know your thoughts.

Also, per the suggestion have started a page for links to sites that I find interesting or that have been helpful to me when I've been researching stuff.

Great to get suggestions - if you want to make suggestions, either use the contact page to get a message to me or if you're feeling bold, post to the forum on website design

Slowly catching up with my backlog of things to post. One of which is the latest Bumpkin Quiz that Mr O set a few weeks ago (Mr O currently being in Vegas at the Motor Speedway watching the NASCAR without me unfortunately, but hoping for a good race and good luck in the gambling).

Try the quiz (filter on quiz 6 if you just want to see the latest questions).

Alas the "stupid things to try" blogs are no more. Initially I thought there would be a lot of material here, but not enough has come to pass, so I've merged the entries into the "Open Forum" blogs. Makes more sense to keep the major categories to a minimum.

Home James and don't spare the horses. Whinney, Tally-Ho and all that. If anyone's taken the interest, I've spent my evenings last week re-designing the individual home pages to make the site look a little more interesting.

This is actually all part of the master plan. When I set out on the EastBayRag road, the first priority was to create content. No point having the best looking website in the world if there's no reason for anyone to look at. The next step was to make the site more attractive.

Well, failing to add any content of value whatsoever, I decided to move on to phase 2 anyway, so you should expect to see little improvements pop up in different parts of the site to make it more aesthetically pleasing.

Yet another change to the website. We've lightened the background color and gone with an icon theme for the menu across the top, then moved the detailed menu to the bottom whilst removing the big footer. There's also a wavy line graphic at the back of the menus to add a bit of artistic flare.

Just decided the old header and footer was a bit old school and took up too much space. So I changed it.

There's still a bit of work to be done here. I need to figure out what I want the logos to look like and add them in. The ones that are there now are only intended to be temporary. I will probably also do something so that when you mouse over the icons, they either change or the background changes.

Other changes in this batch include removing the “blog bar” at the side of the blogs as this was redundant except for the search box which I've now put on all of the blog pages instead. Everything else on the blog bar is repeated in the detailed menu, so there's not really a need for it.

Got round to doing a bit of tidying up. Rather than writing a blog article each time I post photos onto the site (so that a link is provided in the weekly email), I've edited the way the photos are posted so the weekly mail will automatically pick up a section and provide links to photos if a new category is added.

I'd had a few comments that there was too much on the ExPerryMental page so most people missed the most interesting thing being the ability to enter text and have it move round the screen. I've still kept the full page (on the link just provided), but have created an ExPerryMental Home Page that can be used to access either the full page or:

• Bounce that just has the logo floating round the screen and the ability to play music.
• Chequers that just allows you to have the background show different patterns and colors.
• Text Play (the most popular) that just has the text placement and rotation functions.

Finally, a few changes to the home page and the creation of a genesis page all of which is described in the EBR Business Plan Revealed blog article.

Well, this weekend's last frantic creativity has been to setup a web front end to my mail server. Rather than simply downloading one of the hundreds of free ones, I decided to write my own. Why? I have no idea at all! It just seemed like a good idea at the time so I did it.

After pulling a very frustrating all nighter to get this up and running, it's now there. It's a little bit more complicated than you think, especially when you want to deal with attachments. You need to build up a Mulit-purpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) message. So I've read many articles on yet another standard to abide by.

Interesting thing is that the php tools I'm using didn't seem to work out of the box as I thought. There's a function called imap_mail_compose that you use to build up your email (construct it right to conform to the standards), but it doesn't actually tell you how to send the bloody thing once you'd created it. Through trial and error, I managed to get it to work by deconstructing it and putting the header in one bit and the body in another bit of the imap_mail function that actually sends it.

During this endeavor I had problems with my "mulit." No, not a bad haircut spelled badly, but the word "mulit" spelled badly. I needed to set a header type to "TYPEMULTIPART" and screwed up. But that did allow me to find out that you can create your own header records, so I include a turtlehead status with all of mine rather than using something inane like "importance" or "sensitivity."

So why call it Turtlehead Mailer? Well, that's because it's not a technology break through, more of a technology poke through, and it allows me to spread more crap across the cyber world. So look out - if your screen turns brown, you may have been hit by a turtlehead mail.

As we get close to Christmas, I'm not going to be taking on any major development projects, but there is time to clean up some things. As an example, I've enhanced the main vote page so that the legend centers (which it has to for this week's vote as the options are rather lengthy) on the graph.

One of the main things I've been waiting to do, but needed more data is to make the archives a little better to view. There are now three ways to look at the blog archives:
Browse by titleBrowse 10 listings at a time

Browse the full list

Who can forget classics like Cheeseburger Murders or Mr O's Invasion of the Trevors? Well, most people probably which is why I've created this means of taking a look back at what was.

I've also provided the same archiving access to the historic votes. In addition here, you can view the vote as a single entry and it will display the graph of the vote results.

Wow! In my continuing effort to produce stuff that nobody will use, I've created some exceedingly useless pages in the Fun Stuff section. I've titled this new epic ASCII Fun as it kind of plays on the ASCII character set.

Basically, you get to type into a field and instead of entering letters, it enters the corresponding ASCII code of the letter you typed. And - it changes the color of the page to a color derived from the ASCII code.

You may well ask why? And as soon as you figure it out, let me know, because I haven't got a bloody clue. I was messing around with something else and needed to find the ASCII keys to use the left and right arrows to move through database records and I kind of ended up creating these pages.

The one positive thing is that I've used this new knowledge to create a manual slideshow, so, if you want to view a slideshow and determine the speed for each picture you can either by clicking on a “next” or “previous” button or by using the left and right arrows.

In the meantime, amuse yourself with the ASCII Fun

For anyone who's interested, the upgrade of all the server software has been completed. During the last three weeks I've been testing newer versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP on the development box. A couple of minor changes were required to some of the code. (I had a work around for how the post function dealt with quotes ["] when submitting from fields that seems to have been addressed so the work around has been partially removed).

For anyone who's not interested, why did you bother reading the previous paragraph?

Originally this article was going to be title “Ginormous” and lead in by saying that I've not played with anything this big since the week Karen left me on my own. But that left me with a couple of problems. First, you'd know I've been dreaming again. Second, it doesn't quite fit with the “bar humbug” misery I try to spread this time of year to counteract the mindless happiness that goes on.

So, what the hell am I even talking about? As may have been hinted at from the forum entries and a previous blog Quiet Week, I've been working on redesigning the way the photos section works. And it's now complete! And you shouldn't be able to notice! Hence the appropriate title of “what's the point of it all?”

All of the previous structure is still in place, so if you have old links they will still work for the time being. If you go to the main photos page you can still follow links to the same things as before (although on different pages) and there's the addition of a photo database link that will take you to a selection screen that enables you to customize your own selection criteria rather than being limited to the links that are provided. You can also broaden your search if you want as I've thrown over more photos than the ones on the standard links, so if, for example, you wanted to see more photos of leopards you could do so.

The thing is that absolutely nobody is going to want to do this. It's going to be a completely unused function even by the relatives as they're only going to be interested in the “published” photos at the end of each link.

More coding went into this than any other part of the website as it's fully integrated with Adobe Photoshop, so I can manage and publish photos from there. Even more coding than the home page (and yet the majority of the change is transparent to everyone as it should look and feel the same as before the change). Technically it's brilliant. But nobody is going to appreciate it or even care about it.

In all likelihood this could be one of the biggest wastes of time. And yet infinitely satisfying which I'm sure says something about me.

I've put some photos up under the San Francisco Bay Area section of a couple of walks that we've done:

The funniest thing that happened was a very strange comment by Karen. Part of this walking malarkey is intended to allow me to get to photograph some of the wildlife. Rather difficult when you're accompanied by a squeaky stroller and a noisy two year old. There was one point when I saw a dragonfly and thought it would be cool if I could get a picture of it when William came plowing through obviously scaring everything. I made the comment that the combined noise of the stroller and William were scaring everything away. To which Karen replied “What? Do you mean the animals or the grass?”

I didn't answer the question at the time as I don't think I would have come out with anything constructive. It did amuse me for the rest of the walk as I had visions of grass jumping out of the ground and running away.

This site now has forums! I've created a section for forums. Levels have been created to group the forums and make it easy to find what you're looking for (or at least give you a fighting chance). The logic behind it is simply:

Category -> Sub-Category -> Thread Title -> Thread Details

Each level is a one to many relationship, so, for example, each sub-category can have many thread titles. A simple example would be a category of “Sport” could have a sub-category of “Football” then a thread created on “England need a new Manager” (just to be topical) and then the thread would contain individual thoughts / comments related to that topic.

Full instructions on the use of the forum have been created or you can go directly to the forum home page.

I’ve changed the appearance of the website. There is now a blue background to all the pages instead of white – whoooo! What’s more interesting is the home page. I’ve jazzed this up to make it a little bit more intuitive and to get more content on there. Note that you can click on the boxes at the bottom (photo/video and vote/fun stuff) to change the view in the panel.

You’ll probably also note that I’ve changed the menus. The big buttons are gone in favor of a simple bar that brings up drop down menus when you mouse over. Again, this is designed to make it more intuitive as it allows for more detail (and more links) to be included without taking up a lot of space.

Forgive me if you come across any errors. I had to change quite a bit for some of this. If you do find any, please let me know.

Anyone who's taken a detailed look at the home page may have noticed that there was text under the photos section for something called “Gallery” but no link to anything. Well, it's something I've been meaning to do for a while and finally got round to a bit of it at the weekend. Basically, just taking photos that I've taken and turning them into something different. An expression of art I guess, but I'm not very arty so that may be a bit misleading.

Anyway, I've managed to get round to creating a staggering two pictures so it is with this impressive array that I open the photo gallery. Hopefully you will like what gets created here. If not, shame really as I'm not going to do anything to change it. Karen likes the “Warhol William” so there's probably going to be a sequel and maybe even a series of these. If you have any constructive comments or thoughts, let me know.

Foreseeing the need to create and distribute video content, particularly with William's birthday coming up, I purchased more hard disk capacity for the web server. Look forward to a forthcoming article "Too big for your own blog" to be posted on the BYOB site that describes how this process was achieved.

So, we now have video content available online. So far there is just material for the family. There was some footage on the camera that Karen must have taken at some point that I turned into some small 30 second clips and then there's a couple of big ones from the little one's birthday.

Now, if I've got everything right, there will be two links for each clip. The first will take you to a page that will play a low resolution clip embedded on the page in Windows Media Viewer. The second link will take you to a download pop up. The only thing I haven't really had the chance to test properly is whether or not playing the clips online is any good given that I'm running this over a DSL connection. Hopefully it works OK, certainly if you actually want the full resolution video, downloading is fine. If you have any problems, let me know.

To see the videos click this link.

Yes Folks. That crazy Mr. O has been at it again taxing the locals at The Stag. Try your luck with quiz number 5 in the Bumpkin Quiz.

I know you've all been waiting with bated breath to find out what amazing feature I'm going to add to this site. Well, wait no more for it is here!

Tada!

Introducing the Caption Competition.

This page contains odd photos that I've either taken or come across that I think lend themselves to various captions. Partially inspired by the Miss Teen USA comments of Miss South Carolina, featured on this blog site, as that entry could have been titled almost anything.

So, take a look at the Caption Competition and see how creative you can be. If you do, you could win absolutely nothing as there really isn't much of a competition going on, but I couldn't really think of another title to call the page. I suppose I could have just called it caption or create a caption for the photo, but I'm hoping some sucker will see the link on the home page and end up there in the belief that they may win something.

Now that we've started to get a fair amount of content on the site, seemed like a good time to put some archiving in place. Actually, not really archiving, just figured that it would help load the blog pages quicker if they only loaded entries made in the last 60 days.

This filter is only being applied to the OBlogs, Stuff Blogs and Website Blogs. The other blog pages don't have too much content, or, in the case of the BYOB blogs, it made sense to leave the full list intact.

This just means that if you're hunting for an old article, you may need to click the archives link (under the search box on the Blog Bar to the left). Additionally, the search and weekly mail links will take you to a new page to view single blog entries. The simple reason for this is so you will always be able to get to an article from an old link (old being any link from here on in, not any before today as that would have required me to be psychic and know what it is I was going to build for the archiving). Otherwise, if you had a link from over 60 days ago, it would take you to the current page and the article wouldn't show up there as the page is only displaying articles less than 60 days old. Now it goes to the single blog entry view that has access to all articles, figures out where you are and puts a button under the title that will take you to the article in its category listing (OBlog, BYOB, Stuff etc.)

Hope this makes sense. To be honest, it was easier to set up than to explain.

It's time to scratch the old noodle again and figure out if you're smarter than a country bumpkin. Yep, quiz time again. Follow the link to the quiz page to test your knowledge.

Do you know what this is an aerial photo of?


Go to the quiz page to find out. If you just want to see this quiz, filter on “Quiz 4”.

Trip to Walnut Creek on Saturday provided two great opportunities:

• Take some photos of William
• Drink Beer

Given that we're looking to move to in this general direction, it seemed like a great opportunity to get out and wander round. Talked to a couple of guys I'm working with and figured we'd all meet up to let the kids run round, then go to the pub for some lunch and a couple of beers. Click to see the Photos from Walnut Creek



Great Saturday.

To those dedicated fans that tried to log on this past Sunday afternoon only to find the website was down, I apologize. The simple reason being that I moved the site. If you look carefully, you will notice it's down and to the left a bit.

Actually, what I did was move all my stuff downstairs. Something I've been contemplating doing as the room where the computer was gets really hot and isn't really condusive to housing computer equipment. It also meant that I could take a trip out to the local computer shop to buy stuff. Doesn't really matter what (in this case it was wireless stuff). It's just the opportunity to spend money on toys and then to come back and set them up. Puts a smile on my face.

But with every silver lining there's a big black cloud waiting to piss down on you. And in this case, it was the turn of the flat pack furniture. Worse than just assembling flat pack furniture is attempting to unassemble it, move it and then re-assemble it again. The initial assembly struggles with the fact that tab A will not fit into slot B and that you seem to have too many G screws but not enough H screws - but still you manage to figure it out. The unassemble, move and re-assemble process results in the fact that tab A easily fits into slot B, but it now flaps around as the hole is now somewhat bigger than the manufacturer intended it to be. Screw G has just fallen onto the floor and the cat is now chasing it across the living room. Still, the right amoung of shouting seems to have done the trick as we're all back up and running with tables that resemble tables. Nothing's collapsed yet anyway.

Friday afternoon saw an early finish to work and, with the sun shining, the need to exploit the situation and go out. Figured we'd go for a little trip to the beach.

Anyway, everything was going well. William loves water, so we took him for a paddle. And then came the big wave (relatively speaking anyway). I guess that's one of those lessons from the school of hard knocks. Not actually sure what the message is - “watch out for waves” or “the Pacific is bloody cold”.



It therefore seemed appropriate to create a page with the pictures. To see the rest of the pictures from the outing click William at the beach.

I've had this page up for a week or so, but haven't linked to it as hadn't really got enough stuff on it. It actually serves no purpose whatsoever which is what makes it so good. It really started as a test page where I was practicing javascript (as I'm not very good at it) and then morphed into a kind of lets see if we can make things change color and move around the screen.

I guess it's the page designed to make you go oooh and aaah. Basically, load the page up, click to show the panel and then click around on the options and see what happens. The fun starts when you put text on the screen. If you get the text rotating and then set to follow the mouse with the style apart, you can create some amusing effects. Well worth 10 minutes of anybody's time. Probably not more than 10 minutes as that would make you really sad.

So, the link is to the Ex-Perry-Mental page.

I will admit to looking at the works of many others in order to create this page. They all seem to want some notation in the code, but given that this was created from so many different pages and then completely hacked to bits, that wouldn't really make sense, so, here's the list of sites that I found pretty helpful:

Code Lifter
Dynamic Drive
Hypergurl
Javascript Source

Thanks

There be another quiz there be! To anyone following along with the challenge to take on the local bumpkins, another quiz has been added on the Bumpkin Quiz page.

If you've done the earlier quizzes, just filter on Quiz 3. As an added target, this week's winner was my old man and his team with 43 out of 63 (60 questions + bonus points). Proving that we really do know a lot about nothing in this family.

Maybe a risk, we'll see. We've created an Open Forum for blogs. The idea being that anyone who wants to create an article because they have something to write about can do. Hopefully this won't get abused by a bunch of drunken college kids, but we'll see.

The Open Forum blogs can be found by clicking the link on the Blog Bar to the left.

So if you're a casual visitor to this site and happen to have come across something interesting, we invite you to share it. There's also the ability to upload pictures if you have something that will add to the article or if the picture itself is funny.

Many thanks to the Software Feedback Drinking Comrade for coming up with this concept and sharing it with me. Anybody have any other ideas to improve the site, let me know.

Well, maybe we can't help you with that or even any other problem that you may be having, but we can help you find your favorite blog articles. We've created a search function that allows you to search. I'm sure Google are going to be making a bid for this site soon to try and buy out the algorithm we've created to perform sophisticated searches. OK, maybe not that sophisticated, but I have got it to highlight your search text in yellow in the results. Except that the search returns the first 200 characters of the article matching your search term, so it you search term appears after the first 200 characters there will be no highlighting going on :(

Said search function is conveniently located on the Blog Bar to the left.

Shouted the cigarette to the Rizla.

So, the biggest milestone this fourth of July was the completion of the sign up component for the website. One of the many projects that's been on the cards since the site started, the sign up form allows you to become a member of EastBayRag. I mean, how can you refuse? A site with this depth of content, why wouldn't you?

The sign up is simple enough, just register your email address and you will be included on the weekly distribution. The weekly distribution list gets an email on Monday morning highlighting all the additions to the site in the week and the weekly vote.

As hard as I find it to believe that people aren't glued to this site on a daily basis, I figured that some people may have better things to do and that a weekly summary may be quite useful. So the weekly email has each entry (linked to the article itself if you want to read more) and the first few words of the entry so you can see if it's something you are interested in.

If nothing else, I guess the parents and in-laws might find it useful. But you never know, there may be someone else out there.

This weekend saw a frantic amount of activity on the website design and the completion of two additional components.

First, the Bumpkin Quiz. Fancy pitting your wits against a bunch of drunken bumpkins. This page has quiz questions from a local village pub, so see if you can beat the village idiot. Actually, that's not difficult. Since moving to the US, the post of village idiot has been vacant, but you can still see if you can answer the questions.

Second, the weekly vote. Another frivolous creation to obtain feedback from anyone bored enough to click a few buttons and offer their opinion on a specified topic - the first being Independence Day. The reward for this is watching a pie chart and bar graph dynamically update according to the votes that have been cast. Oooooh!!

It appears that the technology I have designed to update blog entries works from my PDA. What does this mean?

Well, if I'm stuck in a meeting that's boring I can sit at the back of the room and look busy whilst really posting articles to my website.

Let's say, for example, you get stuck in a vendor demo that you have no interest in.

The graffiti wall now allows you to preview your message before it is posted. You now have the option to accept it, regenerate it (recreate the message with a different font/color - these are assigned randomly) or delete it.

Note that once submitted, they still can't be deleted.

Over on the Fun Stuff side of this website a Graffiti Wall has been created. This allows you the ability to enter things (jokes, limericks, anything really) and have them displayed on a wall. Like .... well .... graffiti really, hence the name.

The next stage of construction is to add the ability to make comments on the blogs.

This is the first blog of this website so it's more of a test than anything else. Hello World.