Good news! Dave Winer tells of the soon to be release of the Frontier kernel. This runs Manila and Radio. Before the days of these two applications I wrote several applications that also ran in Frontier.

Now, I could release these apps, along with the kernel that'd power them. I'll have to look at them again as they're very old. Over four years, and gathering dust in some obscure part of my hard disk.

Whether it'd be worth it? They're primarily concerned with creating and FTP'ing websites. Sure there's content management in there too.

But a business? I don't know. I'll have to think of a niche, a big niche ;-) Perhaps as a vehicle for off line working for MoveableType? As a method of marrying Joe Sixpack's digital images on local disks with galleries on a server, whacked through Photoshop on the way? Or perhaps there are more business end users, certainly they'd be more prepared to cough up some payment.

I may have gone too far. But, I love it. The flow, the dance, the mantra. The colours too, are gorgeous, bright and vivid.

I'll await the feedback.

Of course they're all mainly going to look the same. But, I've left safe searching off, so at least I can get naked ladies ;-) Trouble, is the results aren't predictable at all. Since the script merely takes the first one it comes to, and it don't look.

A new macro thing I'm playing with, gets an image from images.google, pastes it into an existing Photoshop template and converts itself to the img src.

I'm going to use it for illustrations for news items. The macro's fairly simple, I call it with a menu item, which asks me for the parameters.

Yesterday I had a burp in my ability to blog. The "Radio Userland" tool I use relies on a connection To their server From *my* server (their Tool running), and theirs was refusing a connection. The link goes to a Discussion Group thread I started asking for help. This chap Steve Hooker is a sensational helper, a real programming guru with a heart. But it turns out there was nothing wrong with their server or my local 'server' tool at all. Boiling it down, what fixed it was restoring my C drive from a drive image I'd made back on August 2nd with Powerquest DriveImage 7, which anyone on Windows really should have.

Turns out not everything is fixed. Long story, but I've ended up with fonts and various other elements from months ago.

Nice things. I've been helping on the Radio Userland dicussion group for, I guess for several years. One thing I've noticed, is that either people dive into the object orientated database that is Radio and start deleting or modifying things without knowing what they're doing, thus screwing something fairly small, which cascades into total screw up. Or, they suspect Radio, because it don't work like it did yesterday, even if there's nothing wrong with Radio - the cause is usually outside Radio's environment, a newly erected firewall, a moved Radio file, or as in David's case, a back up 'issue.'

I gotta say it, the image research for one of my current clients is just wonderful and so, so colourful.

I'm still a bit lost with all the names, and stories but I'm in draw dropping awe at the richness and brilliance of colour. I've only seen these sort of paintings in prints, where they lose their dazzle. On computer screens they really do jump out.

If you've got some time take a look at two galleries.

I'll repost this to my cyberSaps category, as there's much here to do with Radio
OK, so I've made it easy for me to video blog. One thing I need, OK two more things I need, is some sort of queuing system in Radio, and more upstream bandwidth. I'm 3Mb down on cable but I'm only getting 30Kb/s up which when I'm trying to get up 10 avi files ranging from 17Mb to 1Mb plus their first JPEG image, that's 20 extra threads, on top of my existing 13... 33 threads in Frontier means she runs slowly. But with a nice orderly queue, things will go much nicer.

I'll probably not do so many vids in one go anyway. Still have to figure a way so that search engines don't go mad for my bandwidth.

How easy is it Steve? I simply drop the avis into a folder, the name of which can be 100, 150, 200, 300, 400 etc. This determines the size of the thumbnail you click through with. 200's best for these sized avis. And that's it. Radio picks them up, ImageMagick takes the first frame, jpgs it to the right size. Then, Radio upstreams them. And that's my only problem. Normally, my script works well for JPEGs, but with large avis...

I'm then presented with a list of shortcuts for the thumbnails, which I add to my post...

There's two main ways into the valley that is Ironbridge. This is the more westerly.

Esme and Bradley throwing rocks in the River Severn. But, it gets a little too exciting and she needs to go pee, "I'm desperate!"

Some bad background noise. Maybe I had my finger over the mic... Maybe it's too windy. This place used to be a warehouse. Now, it's the Telford Gorge's museum. One of many in the area.

Some more shots of the museum, and the kids throwing stones.

Pan down the river. And Esme wants to go paddling to get a leaf. Madness, she'd be swept away by the current.

As we walk up a tree lined path along the bank, Esme recounts a story about monsters, finds a leaf, then Bradley finds one too.

Ducks in the background. Esme asks a good question about English ducks and Chinese ducks.

Dead soldiers. Esme thinks they're in the big flower bed.

Pan of the Ironbridge itself. Birth place of the industrial revolution.

Time to go home, says Esme, after I pan from the church at the side of the valley back onto the bridge.

I've been busy, last few days, with Photoshop CS. Knocking up some sketches to get the thoughts flowing for a design for the Manila colony that will be the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in Australia.

It's not often I play with graphic design, but this project has been terrific. The imagery is, literally, glorious. I could go on knocking sketches up for ever. Alas, I have to stop, and await the feedback for the next, final stage, where I produce three, more finished visuals. Then, we'll start chopping them up into completed Manila themes.

I may as well switch off my Manila referer feature. Damned porn referer spam, and now I see so many are blogspot.com.

There's got to be something I can do about this.

Feckin' google, sharn't be buying any of their cowing stock (I'm the UK so can't anyway). I've clicked through to one of these links, i-group-sex.blogspot.com just to see if there was anything there, if our lazy pal at blogger had deleted such sites PDQ... No! There was porn there, but worse I had an attack of the killer pop ups. Every bloody where! Tits and arses and sucking nobs all over my screen, 50 or 60 clicks later they're gone. So much for google's be no evil policy. Pah!

As I'm in Firefox I thought this wouldn't ever happen to me again. Damn. (I hadn't checked the block pop ups option in this newer version, hope it works.)

Easily add the data within an outline, save it to a manila site (command save;-)

Nicely presented time sheets, a must for independent developers.

"Taken Simon Clarke's geographically accurate map and overlaid it onto a NASA satellite image of London."

This is a dead handy map for me. I've been travelling to London (The Smoke) for 20 years, by train, hitch hiking, bus, and car. I've never had a mind's eye map of the tube system. And this is it. Just need to figure out where the M4 is and the Northern Circular and I'msorted for the next trip, next week.

Currently there's an open air exhibition of this man's aerial photography work in Birmingham city centre. As they said on metaFilter, "appears to have the best life around: travel, meet exciting people, lean out of open helicopters."

Spent the past two weeks on the beach in St Ives, Cornwall, South West England. Wonderful time, relaxing away from any computers, and only a few support calls to deal with.

Will catch up with the pictures over this next week.