As mentioned, Thursday saw the handing in of the 4th year solo projects and the 3rd year group projects, after this was the compsoc end of term event at Café West followed by the GU.

My project was finished and ready for handing in at 3:30 (30 minutes early!), after handing it in it was off to Jim’s Bar via the food factory to grab some lunch.

Then after a few drinks it was Café West time, whilst there we were kept entertained by Stevie, Neil, Steve and Derek all having a pop at DJing for the night. After a lot more drink there it was off to the GU and to The Hive.

Finishing the project is strange, it has been coming for so long, yet now that it’s done I’m kind of missing not having to do it. On Friday, after my project demo, I was feeling really charged and ready to do some more work on the project even though I had nothing more to do. I’m sure I’ll be able to channel all this drive into my revision, or perhaps playing some computer games!

My photos from the night out are available on flickr. There is a set containing all the photos from the night, or you can view the photos as a slideshow.

I encourage everyone to join flickr and also to join the Glasgow DCS group, here you can add any photos you have of nights out or other things relating to the department, as well as post to the group only forums.

Hope everyone had a fun night and your easter holidays are relaxed and fun.
- Chris

The one on the left is called Rocky and the one on the right is called Scarface.
- Chris

A man apparently robbed the Sainsburry Local (which is about 100m away from my flat) with a gun, just 3 days ago – this was the first I had heard of it.

Around 2055 hours Thursday 11 March 2005, a man entered the service station in Woodlands Road, Glasgow and threatened a member of staff with what appeared to be a firearm. He then made off on foot with a three-figure sum.

No firearm was discharged and no persons were injured.

The suspect is described as white, 6’0” in height, unshaven and wearing a green hooded waterproof jacket, blue jeans and a light coloured woollen beanie hat.

That however, is not the worst of the news:

Detective Constable Scott Bruce of Anderson CID said:

“This is the second time in a few weeks that these premises have been the subject of an armed robbery and we believe that both incidents are linked.”

So, someone robbed it once and didn’t get caught. Then they thought that it would be a good idea to rob it again.

Maybe the police will get him next time, third time lucky they say!
- Chris

The guy who is on is an IT consultant and around 25 years old. Chris Tarrent is sitting talking to him after he has reached £1,000 and was saying about how much the guy was wanting to win. He says:

Well you’re young, and single I presume.

Chris Tarrent just assumes that this guy is single, it’s true of course but it doesn’t hold much hope for any of us!
- Chris

The list mainly hindges on the fact that I want a Nintendo DS, in fact the whole shopping list is in dedication to getting a DS.

Here goes:

• Nintendo DS Handheld Console (Includes Metroid Prime: Hunters Demo)
• Carry Case (Nintendo DS)
• Super Mario 64 DS (Nintendo DS)
• Wario Ware: Touched! (Nintendo DS)
• Rayman (Nintendo DS)

The grand total comes to just under £200, just about as much as I think my travel expences should come through at!
- Chris

I thought it was high time to start looking for some funky plugins for my new WordPress install. After a few minutes of looking through the WP site I had found a list of likley candidates for install:

• Smart Archives
• Weighted Categories
• FancyTooltips
• Flickr Gallery 0.4

Smart Archives

This plugin allows you to generate a full archive page which is not available in WP by default. It lists all the archives by year and month, then lists all the posts in each month. The output of the plugin can be seen here.

Weighted Categories

This is a plugin which allows you to have weighted category links much in the same way which flickr does the weighting of tags. The output of this plugin can be seen at the bottom of the archives page.

Fancy Tooltips

This plugin makes the tooltips which appear whilst hovering a link, abbr tag etc., nicer looking. You will be able to see it if you hover a link on this page or in the image below.

Flickr Gallery 0.4

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to install this properly and get errors when trying to run it. I will have to try a few other things to get it working – more news when (or if) I get it working.

There’s a lot of cool plugins available for WordPress,
- Chris

Since updating to WordPress 1.5, I’ve been meaning to recreate the style of the site as a WordPress theme. I decided that rather than doing so (and due to the large differences between WP 1.4 and 1.5) I decided to create a new structure for the blog and the site and also to update the style at the same time.

From this the Simply Blue theme was born.

Because WP 1.5 does things in a different way to 1.4, I decided that rather trying to recreate the same style in 1.5 it would be easier to create a new theme based upon the WP default. Using this new theme I changed the rest of the site to match it.

Hope you all like the new look,
- Chris

A picture of one of the phones in the Boyd Orr building.

They were both out of order!
- Chris

Most of you will have heard of flickr as it seems to be booming with new members and loads of bloggers seem to be using flickr to host pictures for their blog.

I signed up for a free account a few weeks ago and had been browsing through the content and trying to assess the usefulness of having an account (having 3Gb of server space and another Gb backup has meant my space needs have always been more than satisfied) and how it differed from the PHP Gallery I had been using.

After just a few hours playing around with flickr I had decided that it was much better than the Gallery I had, so I thought I would use it to upload pics from now on. The only problem with this is you can only upload 10Mb of pictures per month, although this is a fair enough figure, and most of the time I wouldn’t ever generate 10Mb of pictures. However there are some times when I manage to rack up an obscene number of pictures at one (parties, ends of term – which is ever nearing, and so forth) and 10Mb (hell 50Mb) wouldn’t cut it.

So I had a look around the site to see how much a full account was, currently due to flickr still being in its beta stage the sign up fee is only $41.77 (which works out just over £20 at this time) for a year, what the hell, it’s only £20.

So I signed up to flickr pro which offers:

• 1Gb monthly upload (10Mb in free version)
• Unlimited storage capacity (only last 100 photos are user accessible in the free version)
• Unlimited bandwidth (dunno what this is for the free version)
• Unlimited photosets (limited to 3 in the free version)
• Full size images archived (smaller ones are archived in the free version)

I am sitting at the moment uploading aall my photos to flickr and am nearly finished. So far I have been able to use around 20% of the monthly limit. I fully intend to start taking more photos and try to at least put a dent in the limit each month. There has been many times this year when walking around I have thought that something would make a great picture, but have never had my camera with me, hopefully I’ll start carrying it around and taking some oportunist shots to post.

Another thing about flickr is that it seems to tie in quite nicely with both my PowerBook and PC. On my PB I can export photos to flickr using an iPhoto plugin, on WindowsXP I have a desktop uploader. flickr also allows you to post photo blog posts to many types of blog (including WordPress blogs).

Anyway, you should try it out!
- Chris