Chris Riley's blog

Moustache

2008-11-09T19:13:00.003Z

I'm not taking part in Movember (the month formerly known as November, renamed to support men growing a moustache to help raise money and awareness about male health issues) as Dawn doesn't like facial hair, at all. However that doesn't mean I have to miss out on the moustache fun - I have grown a stealth moustache! The stealth part being I just didn't shave, and didn't tell Dawn, and waited to see how long I could get away with it before Dawn commented on my hairy face. The answer, a better than expected 5 days!

However, on Saturday the game was up, and so I did some shaving, but not before taking some photos! First I trimmed it into a Goatee (of sorts), and then into a moustache. Based on these photos I think Dawn was right, I look shocking!

If you'd like to sponsor Tony, or any of the guys taking part in Movember from work, follow the links below.

Donate to Tony – Your donation will be registered against Tony [View Tony's Mo Space]
Donate to Team SDL – Your donation will be divided equally between everyone in the SDL team.

Charlotte's first crawl

2008-11-03T20:49:00.002Z

Not wishing to be out done by the Briddons, Charlotte decided it was time she could crawl too. It has been coming for the past couple of weeks, with her being more confident on her front and pushing herself up onto all fours, but finally today it has all clicked into place, and she is now a little crawler!

I wouldn't be much of a dad if I didn't grab the camera to record this event, and so via the magic of the Internets you can watch Charlotte crawling on the very same day! Apologies for the camera work not being that great, but you get the idea. Also apologies for my voice, I hate my voice on video, it is truly awful.

Grub in my apple!

2008-10-16T20:31:00.003+01:00

I've gone off apples a bit. I was eating my apple for lunch, as I've done pretty much every day, and as I was about to take my next bite I saw something crawling into a little hole. I've had holes from grubs in apples before, which is bad enough, but to see the grub disappearing into that hole is a bit off. So, needless to say I stopped eating my apple, and broke it open to find the grub. And then this fella appeared, the big brother of the first grub! So, I had two grubs, alive and kicking, in the apple I had been eating, nice. The only saving grace is that I didn't find half a wriggling grub! Anyway, as you do, I grabbed my mobile and filmed the grub crawling around my apple (sorry the quality isn't great, but you get the idea).

What is money?

2008-10-15T21:02:00.002+01:00

Now this is interesting - everything you needed to know about money!

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-9050474362583451279&hl=en&fs=true

Charlotte's first tooth

2008-09-30T20:31:00.004+01:00

Again, apologies for the ongoing blog drought. What with Charlotte, work, Google Reader, Track Playing, Recipe Binder, and the Web Riddle, writing a blog post comes low down on the list. Anyway I bring Charlotte news.

For those we haven't seen for a while, I've been updating Flickr with a fair few pictures of Charlotte! Just some of our recent favourites are below, but she is certainly growing up fast.

Charlotte is already 9 months old, heading on for 10, and has her first tooth coming through (well spotted / felt Suzy!) It is just a white strip on her pink gum at the moment, but is slowly pushing through. She can also sit up and is starting to figure out how to move a little bit to grab things just outside of her reach, but she can't yet sit up from lying down, or crawl. However, stick her in her walker and she is away. Open any cupboard door in the kitchen, and she is there, looking over your shoulder!

Charlotte is also quite the keen swimmer, and has been going swimming with Dawn every week for a while now - so long in fact she already has her first “Little Fish“ certificate, so I'm a proud Dad! We've also got our first finger paint master piece, produced at the playgroup she goes to, and by all accounts she enjoys getting messy!

So there you have it, the latest Charlotte news. Next blog post in a months time....

Track Playing and Radio Pop

2008-09-11T20:58:00.002+01:00

I know I know, it has been quiet on here again. And again it is down to my new project Track Playing. I've been busy working on various updates. The most important one is I'm the first developer to do an integration with Radio Pop, the BBC Radio Labs prototype. Track Playing tells them what programmes you're listening to, and allows you to “Pop”

Other new features include:

interfaces for iPhone, mobile, Wii and iGoogle
a link to listen to the radio live on iPlayer
updates to how albums are displayed
links to buy from iTunes and 7digital
now and next information pulled from bbc.co.uk/programmes
when the track playing was last updated

Coming next are integrations with imified.com for an IM client, allowing you to track any Last.FM user, showing the previous artist information, and maybe, just maybe scrobbling to Last.FM

Enjoy all of the updates!

Track Playing

2008-08-22T13:33:00.000+01:00

If you were wondering why it has been quiet on this blog for a while, the reason, as always, is that I've been working on another website!

This one is called http://www.trackplaying.com - it displays information about the track currently playing on the radio.

It takes data from BBC Music (beta), Last.fm and Amazon, and is hosted on Google App Engine. Mashup heaven!

It is based on my previous attempt http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/ that some of you may recall - http://cgriley.com/2007/10/now-playing.aspx

As usual the best way to figure out what it is all about is to have a look, hope you all find it useful / of interest. Let me know what you think of it in the comments....

A conversation

2008-08-13T22:31:00.002+01:00

Last Saturday, Dawn and I had a conversation whilst watching Last Choir Standing:

Me: Why does Myleene Klass keep saying they are singing for their lives. It isn't like they'll actually kill them if they don't get through.

Dawn: It would be more interesting if they did.

Me: !

Living the life of Riley

2008-07-26T19:38:00.004+01:00

If you've ever read my blog thinking “this blog is all well and good, but you've never told us how to live the life of Riley”, well this post is for you!

Take a week off work and then follow these simple steps. On the Saturday journey to your Uncles static caravan in Addingham Moorside that you're using for a few days. If you haven't got a caravan there, then sorry, I can't help you!

Sunday - visit Malham Cove, it really is spectacular. If you have the energy (we didn't as we'd had little sleep due to Charlotte settling in) do the circular walk which takes in Janet's Foss (a waterfall), Goredale Scar (a boulder littered valley) and Malham Cove and the limestone pavement. We saw some guys climbing Malham Cove as well, which always help add scale.

Monday - visit Skipton Castle and Skipton. The castle is well worth it, fully roofed it is in great condition and really lets you imagine the rooms as usable spaces that people would have once lived in, rather than looking at a ruin. Skipton itself has an award winning fish and chip shop (they were rather nice) and a good selection of shops to potter around.

Tuesday - visit the Embsay and Bolton Abbey Steam Railway. Take the train from Embsay to Bolton Abbey, then walk from the station to Bolton Abbey itself (about 20 mins). Enjoy a great walk around the priory ruins, then walk back to the station and get the train back to the car. Charlotte enjoyed this, as you'll see in the video.

Wednesday travel home.

Thursday - Go snowboarding at Xscape, on a baking summers day who wants to be in the sun!

Friday - Go swimming with you baby daughter. If you haven't got a baby daughter then living the life of Riley will be tricky for you. We went to the Dearne Valley Leisure Centre which was much better than expected.

Saturday and Sunday chill out at home, do the odd chore, and don't think about work on Monday morning ;o)

Time lapse of Charlotte sleeping at 7 months

2008-07-25T20:14:00.004+01:00

Dawn and I have noticed recently that Charlotte wakes up rotated 180 degrees in her cot. We wondered how this happened, if it was quick or gradual, so got out our trusty night vision camera and created another time lapse video (just like the last one)!

This one is a bit longer, around 6:40, watch it here:

Charlotte sleeping time lapse at 7 months old from Chris Riley on Vimeo.

Vasco Lounge Bar and Restaurant

2008-07-10T20:16:00.003+01:00

It was our 3rd wedding anniversary yesterday, so to celebrate Dawn and I went to a Vasco Lounge Bar and Restaurant outside Rotherham, in Wickersley (it takes about 25mins to get there from ours).

It was a wonderfully pleasant evening. The restaurant is done out really well, the waitress was very plesant and attentive, and the food was very good, even better than our other haunt, Fahenheit Food!

After an appetiser of smoked mackerel pate and pickled cucumber Dawn had grilled asparagus with Parma ham and Parmesan cheese, and I had Chicken Liver Parfait, with a delicious orange marmalade. For main Dawn had the Coppice House Farm Beef Fillet with Lyonnais potatoes, creamed oyster mushrooms, french beans and mange tout with a red wine sauce and I had the Canon of Lamb roasted and served with ratatouille and thyme mash. Both were excellent! For dessert Dawn had and iced apple and honeycomb parfait, and I had the cheese board. We washed that all down with a glass of wine, and a coffee.

All in all it was a fantastic meal, the only downside was it was a little pricey. At just over £70 I think they could easily loose 1 or 2 pounds of each item on the menu, and they'd probably get more repeat business. But what do I know! Anyway, if you want to experience something outside of Sheffield, give it a go.

I couldn't agree more

2008-07-10T20:08:00.000+01:00

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001149.html

Sales Guy vs. Web Dude

2008-07-01T21:10:00.002+01:00

Techcrunch led me to this genius video - it is about 10 minutes long, but please, especially if you're a web developer, take the time to watch it - I was laughing out loud a bit too much! (You will need sound.)

Save yourself £100!

2008-06-12T19:53:00.005+01:00

Chris 1 - 0 Insurance Company

I've just phoned up to renew our home insurance, but instead of just accepting the yearly increase I said I wasn't happy, and consequently I've got £102 knocked off the premium for the year, and we'll end up paying £5 less a month this year than we were last year!! Get in - the moral of the story, challenge the price, you never know what they might say.

Update on the Logitech Harmony 555 universal remote control

2008-06-05T08:05:00.003+01:00

Just a quick update on the Logitech Harmony 555 universal remote control review I wrote back in February 2008. We had to replace the batteries yesterday, so if our usage is fairly typical that means you get 4 months out of your 4 AAA batteries.

Google Gadgets Galore

2008-06-03T18:51:00.001+01:00

If you think the alliteration in the title of this post is great, wait until you've read the content! Recently I've got into Google Gadgets, those little useful things you can put on your iGoogle homepage, use in Google Pages and Google Sites, add to Google Desktop, and that you can embed into any website using their syndication tool.

As I have two websites that could become very useful / fun Google Gadgets I set about writing them. The first was the Recipe Binder Google Gadget. This lets you search for recipes, explore recipes, and see the most recent and top rated recipes, and having this on the iGoogle homepage is really useful. I've embedded it below so that you can see how it looks and works. On this one all links go to www.recipebinder.co.uk, but on the iGoogle version you can change the setting to link to http://apps.facebook.com/recipebinder/ if you use that version.

Add the Recipe Binder Google Gadget to iGoogle now!
Add the Recipe Binder Google Gadget to your web page now!

The second gadget is for Judge A Book By Its Cover - the great website no one visits! Hopefully this gadget is a more appropriate use of the main concept behind the website, turning JABBIC into more of a quick game on iGoogle than a destination for people. Again I've embedded it below so you can have a play.

Add the Judge A Book By Its Cover Google Gadget to iGoogle now!
Add the Judge A Book By Its Cover Google Gadget to your web page now!

Writing a Google Gadget is fairly straight forward, as long as you have a good grasp of HTML and JavaScript. The CSS can be a bit temperamental, but you'll get there. The Google Gadget documentation is actually very good compared to some I've seen, so just get stuck in! I hope you like my gadgets, all questions and comments welcome.

Photos and Videos

2008-05-27T22:02:00.003+01:00

If you've not been to my site for a while you won't have noticed that the links to photos and videos no longer point to the pages on my website that used their API's, instead to make things easier they go direct to either Flickr or Vimeo.

Why? Well, for one it means I don't have to maintain these pages. But more importantly I'm going to start making more use of the privacy features of both Flickr and Vimeo. This will mean some photos, and the majority of videos, will only be visible to my contacts on both Flickr and Vimeo. Whilst the Daily Mail / Express would like you to think this is because of “the danger of paedophiles”, it isn't.

The main reason is planning, at some point in the future I'm quite sure Charlotte won't want all of her baby photos and videos to be visible by all, so if I put the relevant privacy controls in place now, I won't have to go through thousands of photos and videos later.

Secondly, particularly in the case of videos, I upload them primairly for backup, secondly for sharing. Most of the videos are only of things friends and family would want to watch, so only letting my contacts view them makes sense. No reason putting them out there when only a few people are actually interested in them.

The same will be true of the photos - whilst I'll leave more of those public than private for now, expect further uploads to start to be restricted, with only the best pictures remaining public. On the flip side for photos not directly related to Charlotte I'll probably leave them fully public more often than not.

So, if you want to keep up to date on our photos and videos you'll need to make sure you're one of my contacts on Flickr and Vimeo; signing up for either site is quick and easy, and once you're signed up just email me your username and I'll add you as a contact.

As always any problems or thoughts leave me a message. (P.S. Comment moderation is back on due to more WOW spam.)

How many 5 year olds could you take in a fight?

2008-05-22T07:46:00.003+01:00

16
[via plasticbag.org]

Brains vs Snap = ad genius

2008-05-13T21:40:00.002+01:00

Just seen this advert during the F Word. It has Brains from Thunderbirds in it, and it is only enhanced further by using Snap's classic Rhythm is a Dancer. One of the best ads I've seen for a while.

Estelle - American Boy - what she says before Kanye's rap

2008-05-09T13:10:00.002+01:00

If you've ever wondered what Estelle says right before Kanye West's rap, like I have, you'll be pleased to know I think I've found it.

According to the Internet, it is “wagwan blud”.

Now to me, who isn't very street, and most of the population, who I am also assuming aren't very street, this doesn't make much sense. However Urban Dictionary steps into the breech to help us out.

wagwan is apparently short for “What's going on?”
blud is short for (in this context) mate.

So, in summary, what she is actually saying to Kanye West is “What's going on mate?” Makes perfect sense now!

Lizard air conditioning

2008-04-30T20:29:00.002+01:00

I'm not sure how my mind works, but it does produce some cracking ideas. Let me guide you though this one.

Dave has had a couple of issues at work today, he's not been able to test because a test server has been switched off to minimise overheating of the production servers, and this is due to two air conditioning units failing. And that got me thinking, us humans would make matters worse if we were in the room, as we give off heat, because we are warm blooded. But what if you put cold blooded people in a hot room - they'd absorb the heat!

LIZARD AIR CONDITIONING!

Genius I know. It needs a little more thought, but here is the major unique selling point, it is environmentally friendly, and carbon negative*, just what THE WORLD has been waiting for. Open your minds, and embrace the future of lizards!

* I can't prove this.

4 things

2008-04-18T20:34:00.004+01:00

1. War on Terror, the boardgame is officially on my Christmas list!

2. The new Indian Cricket Premier league kicks off tonight apparently. I say apparently as I've formed my entire opinion on this from odd bits of news reports. That said I think it sounds like a good thing, it is about time Cricket gets dragged into the modern world and gets a fresh audience. We made a good start with the 20/20 tournaments, and India seem to have just taken it to the next level. Why the ECB won't release English players to play in the league I don't know. Surely the money, training and regular play over there will improve their game at the national level? Well that's my theory anyway (although it hasn't worked for football has it!)

3. Hooters want to open in Sheffield. Some campaigner with nothing to campaign about has decided to protest about this, going on about exploitation. Bobbins, if the women want to work there then let them. It is their choice, they can read their contract before starting work there, and if they don't like it they can quit. End of, no exploitation that I can see. And the only reason you think it is sexist is because a version for women hasn't been opened - tell you what, I'll open a bar called “Todgers”. Who's sexist now? The only thing I do object to is the proposed location, Leopold Sq is not the place for it, somewhere up West St probably is.

4. We Ski - I've only seen a bit about this game, but from what I have seen I think I want it! And if we do get a Wii Balance Board then it will just add to it.

So that is the 4 things I wanted to say, you'll probably have some comments, so go on, leave them...

Google App Engine - first impressions

2008-04-08T22:20:00.002+01:00

I saw the news of the Google App Engine this morning, and was wondering just exactly what it meant. It sounds promising, a full stack, fully scalable, incorporating Python scripting, Google's BigTable database and Google's file system.

The problem, I am an ASP / ASP.Net SQL Sever developer, and so python is completely alien to me. So, this evening I set out to give Google App Engine a go. As the 10000 signup places are gone all you can do is download the SDK - this is essentially the Google Apps Engine running on your own machine, so you don't actually need to sign up for the engine just yet. Make sure you've installed python before installing the SDK.

Once python and the SDK are installed, follow this tutorial. A couple of pointers to following this tutorial.

If you're doing this on Vista, you might get annoyed with security popups if you put your files in the Google Apps directory, so stick them somewhere else that isn't so secure, I put mine on my data drive, E:
When they say run this cmd line to start the web server, you need to open a cmd prompt, then enter dev_appserver.py and the path to your helloworld directory, so for me the final cmd looked like dev_appserver.py E:\appengine\helloworld
To stop the webserver they say to use Ctrl+C when the cmd prompt has focus, on Windows (or my laptop at least) you actually need to do Ctrl+Break
When talking about adding in static files to your application the tutorial is correct, but there is a bug in the SDK, so instead enter this in your app.yaml (see this thread)
- url: /stylesheets/main.css
static_files: stylesheets/main.css
upload: stylesheets/main.css

Other than that you should be able to follow the tutorial and see the results.

So, what do I think? Well, on the face of it it looks promising. Obviously learning python is a major barrier, as is the fact that Bigtable is not a relational database, so I need to get my head around how that works in this environment (I'm guessing the theory is to have some kind of data access layer doing joins etc.) But, the benefits are equally attractive; free, scalable, hosting, highly configurable web applications, good API access to Google user accounts and email services.

I need to play with the SDK a bit more before I commit to using it for any of my current sites, but if things go well there is no reason not to, it is far easier to get started with than Amazon's offerings have ever been, well done Google!

New coin designs

2008-04-07T20:17:00.003+01:00

I missed the news about this last week, but I've finally caught up. The Royal Mint released the new designs for UK coins and my my, they are stunning. I'm not sure what I was expecting from them, I think to be a bit shit to be honest, but these far surpass any expectations I had. The reason they're so good, well I think it is down to the fact there was an open competition and so the brilliance of Matthew Dent was able to shine through. The single best bit, all the coins form the Shield of the Royal Arms - check it out!

Dramatic Lemur

2008-04-07T20:09:00.002+01:00

Judging by the view count on You Tube (2,511,959) I'm a bit behind on this one, but just in case I'm not, check this out. You MUST have the volume on to watch this. And I'd like this to be at the start of a film by the end of the year!