supersonic feet

Bora Bora!!

This looks a bit familiar, non?

In time for my road trip around Europe, I should be getting some HID lights for my Alfa shortly. Thanks to a group buy on an Alfa Romeo forum, my name’s down for a set at £110 including postage.

A few members have already installed test units with success, so it should be cool and I’ll finally be back to the excellent light produced by Xenons that I got used to with my Accord Type-R. I’m not looking forward to having to fit them (and then adjust them for driving in Europe) though.
The road trip is also now all sorted, with ferry and hotels booked across Europe and the following route planned out:

1. Ferry from Newcastle to Amsterdam (overnight)
2. Spend a morning in Amsterdam then drive the 300 miles to Lampertheim in West Germany, where there appears to be nothing of interest, but it gets us close to Mulhouse.
3. Next day, drive to Mulhouse and check out the Schlumpf Collection car museum. Spend the night in Mulhouse.
4. Drive from Mulhouse, through Switzerland, to Cadenabbia on the shores of Lake Como in Italy. We get two nights by the lake which should be great for some scenic photos and chilling out after our blitz through Europe to get there.
5. After a couple of days at Lake Como, we head down to Modena for a couple of days, including a day spent with The Maserati Club visiting the Maserati factory and Panini museum (the old Maserati factory collection) among other things. Can’t wait for this.
6. After our stay in Modena, we head along the Italian Riviera and into the French Riviera (just) for a couple of days in Menton. Menton itself should be cool, but its position also allows us to easily visit near-by places of interest like Monte Carlo.
7. From Menton, we head along to Nîmes, with the world’s most complete Roman amphitheatre and a rather large Roman aqueduct, among other Roman stuff.
8. After a night in Nîmes, we move onto our next major reason for going on the trip - the Millau Viaduct. This is the tallest vehicle-carrying bridge in the world and looks stunning. We’re staying the night in Millau itself, which sits in the gorge below the bridge and should get us some great views.
9. From Millau, we go further West and North a bit, to Limoges where we hope to visit the Gouffre de Padirac - a huge underground river/cave system. This should be another great photo opportunity
10. The next day, we head up to Le Mans, where we’ll be able to check out the old town as well as (of course) the racing circuit of the famous 24 Heures du Mans race (Le Mans 24-hours).
11. From Le Mans, we cross back to the East of France and Reims. This is more just a stop-point, but there are the Champagne houses to check out while we’re there.
12. From Reims, we move up to Brussels as the last stop before our ferry home. I definitely want to check out the Atomium while we’re there as it looks mad, though my brother Leo reckons it’s boring inside.
13. After a night in Brussels, we finally make our way back to Amsterdam and the overnight ferry back to Newcastle.

It should be a great trip as long as we handle the driving OK.

I’ve never been taken by the whole online bookmarking thing (sites like del.icio.us), or indeed online RSS readers for consolidating your regular blog reads into a single location, but it’s funny what a nice interface can do to change that.

This post is actually about the bookmarking part, but as a quick aside I’ve started using Google Reader and I think I may stop again. The interface, while simple and nice enough, doesn’t quite do it for me and frankly when it comes down to it, I’d rather read the posts in their natural location on the websites they came from. Which vaguely leads onto the core of this post in that I then bookmark blogs I like…

Anyway, in a round-about way I found the blog of a French developer who, like me and many others, is just getting into Ruby on Rails. The first cool thing he’s done (though not quite a Rails-specific thing) is a cool AJAX ‘pop-up’ window class. It basically creates a floating div for AJAX content that gets styled like a window, but the cool bit is the resizing just like an actual window. As has been pointed out though, this has the potential for horrible use in advertising.

Moving on from that, he’s made himself (and made available to us) an online bookmarking app in Rails called my.xilinus. There’s a nice Flash video demo of how it works and it does seem to work well. The interface is appealing while not being too complicated and with a little more work could be highly nifty.

I’m not sure I’ll use it in the medium-long run, just because it’s an extra place I have to keep a copy of the data, but it’d be extremely handy when travelling where you’re using ‘net cafes to get online. Eventually, browsers will be able to connect straight into services like this though, at which point it’ll be great. Get on any computer anywhere, enter a username/password (as much as people like to hate Microsoft, something like the .NET Passport would be handy for this) and get all your bookmarks from a hosted location elsewhere. This way your bookmarks can truly follow you.

Until that happens though (maybe it has - I did say I haven’t been following this area), check out my.xilinus if for nothing else than a nice demo of AJAX working well.

Yeah, so I did buy a Canon Digital IXUS 50 (known as the Powershot SD400 outside Europe, and with an extra ‘ELPH’ tag after that in America).

The camera is indeed tiny. Somehow its size hadn’t quite registered with me when trying one in a shop, but when it arrived and I started opening the many-layered boxes to get at it I wasn’t sure there would be room left for a camera. And yet, there it was, no larger than a credit card in width and height (though I think it’ll be a while before we get a camera of this quality that’s actually as thing as a credit card).

So anyway, here it is sitting on my new laptop:

The picture quality is pretty damn good for such a small camera (it’s obviously not going to match the EOS 350D I took the above picture with, but that doesn’t mean it’s anything other than great still). It starts up fast; focuses fast and takes pictures fast. It’s fast.

I didn’t expect such a small camera to perform so well, especially with the continuous shot. I’d post some example photos if I had any that were worth it, but so far I’ve just been taking random pictures at home. As soon as I have some decent ones they’ll go on Flickr though.

For the past year or so I’ve been hosting all my websites on a dedicated server from Beachcomber. They’ve been very good and I’d be more than happy to stay with them, but I took a look at what I was actually using and what I’m paying and the two just didn’t match.

The fact is, I don’t need a server all to myself. It’s been great being able to install whatever software I need, especially getting Ruby/Rails installed (and indeed Java for an online league system), but there are a few hosts nowadays that offer things like Ruby on Rails as part of their shared hosting packages.

As a result, I’ve signed up with Site5. They’re very big on Ruby and Rails - they now write just about all their systems in it - and they’ve been around a long time with a good reputation. They also offered a good shared package with a decent amount of disk space and plenty of bandwidth (as long as no more of my sites get chosen as UK mirror for a computer game demo!).

This site should be moved over now (if you’re reading this post then it is) and my others will be moved in the next week or two.

Probably nothing new to many developers and indeed I’m pretty sure I’ve seen sites with the little icon on before, but today I got pointed at Silktide’s Sitescore properly. It’s pretty cool.

The site allows you to enter the URL of your website and it’ll then give you back a report and score to let you know how ‘good’ your website is. The tests cover marketing, design, accessibility, experience and a visitor rating system. I put this site through the tests and it came out with an overall rating of 7.8 to start with as I had a couple of HTML validation errors (mostly to do with the Amazon/flickr links), but after a couple of minutes tracking down un-encoded ampersands and erroneous border attributes my Accessibility rating went from 6.2 to 10.0.

With my Sitescore now up to 8.5 it’s obviously worth sticking the little icon on my site (bit of ego-stroking for me and the free linkage for Silktide). The only thing really keeping me under a 9+ rating seems to be that not enough people link to this site, but I knew that without Sitescore telling me.

This tool is an excellent example of a company gaining some good PR by providing a free service to not only potential clients but to potential competitors too. The tool is extremely useful to other web developers. Yes, it’s mainly just reading in data from other tools such as the W3C Validator, but we all love a good tool that consolidates a number of other related tools into one. People are lazy like that.

By having the rating icon for sites that get above a 7.0 to display their skills to the world, it also gets other developers (and therefore competitors) to give Silktide some free advertising, as the buttons link back to the Sitescore (Silktide) website. This is fine by me and a rather sensible way of doing things. They could have charged for the tool, but by making it free and encouraging the use of the buttons on rated websites, they get free advertising and kudos from the community (I’m writing this aren’t I?).

My only niggle is that my button still seems to be showing 7.8 - I just made changes and got an 8.5 damnit! I’m sure it’ll update eventually though…

How ironic can you get? Adding the code for the Sitescore button invalidated the code and dropped the score back down. Should be fixed now.

As I should be due a mobile phone upgrade in a couple of months, I started having a look around at what’s out there as a cheap phone I could probably get for free as a spare (not intending to actually replace my O2 XDA mini).

Anyway, as you do, I started browsing a mobile phone review site and came across the stunning-looking Sony Ericsson W950i:

This phone runs on Symbian 9.1 with UIQ 3.0 interface (if that means anything to you). When I first started reading the review I just thought it looked like quite a nice-looking phone that should have decent storage (being a Walkman model), but it turned out to be much, much more.

The phone is basically a PDA combined with mp3 player, with 4GB flash storage straight out of the box and a host of PDA-style apps. The screen is also a touch-screen, with stylus. Aside from lacking WiFi, this phone seems to add all the things that were missing from the XDA II mini. It’s a 3G phone too, so browsing the ‘net on it should be reasonably quick (the only other 3G phone I’ve had was a Motorola one on the 3 network that wouldn’t let you actually just browse the Internet, so I never really saw the speed of 3G).

The W950i is supposedly to be released in July, so here’s to hoping Vodafone will give me a good upgrade deal and that I have a bit of cash to splash by then!

The postman arrived at the ungodly time of 6:55am this morning, but that was OK as he was delivering my nice new laptop (part of my Spending Spree).

The laptop itself seems to be in great nick (no obvious scratches or dents), so all is good so far (I’m even writing this post on it - oooohh :P).

I’ve just been looking at compact digital cameras with a friend who’s after one and I’m well impressed with the Canon IXUS 50/60 range. The picture quality looks good (on the screen of the camera at least) and the speed at which it takes the photos is great for a small camera. The continuous shot is particularly impressive.

If I ever recover financially from my new laptop and forthcoming road trip around Europe, I may have to look at buying one as a ’snappy’ camera for when the 350D is too much hassle to lug around.

For the past week or two I’ve been pondering on how best to handle all the photos I’ll be taking on my road trip around Europe in May (note to self: references like this work better when you’ve mentioned the road trip before now).

I was settling on the idea of buying a PMP (Portable Media Player or something along those lines), until Ken (my former university flatmate who’s coming on the trip with me) pointed out that for £100 more I could probably have myself a cheap laptop.

As Viliv were taking their time launching their new website for US/European sales, I started having a look at how cheap laptops come these days and it turns out that although they’ve got cheaper, cheap still ain’t gonna buy you much of a laptop. So I started looking on ebay (as you do) and it seemed there might be some decent bargains to be had by buying a used/refurbished laptop.

After a couple of failed bids for a Dell and a Sony Vaio (would have loved a Vaio!), this morning I managed to snag a Dell Lattitude D410 ultra-portable laptop. This was actually one of the first laptops I found on ebay, but I then went off trying to find a better deal, of which there eventually wasn’t.

So anyway, I’ve paid my money and am now waiting to hear from the seller in the hope it’s not a scam (there always is that worry with ebay). I’m sure it’ll be fine though hehe

Aside from the laptop, I’ve ordered a 4GB micro-drive for my camera along with USB card-reader to connect to the laptop. Savastore (Watford Electronics) have one on a great deal at the moment for £46.99.