Quantum of Solace

The trailer for the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace is out now. Looks like it’s going to be a good film.

GPS Tracker and Ruby on Rails

I’ve finally managed to get Ruby on Rails working in a development environment under Windows using FastCGI. It seems quite responsive with no problems yet. The first task I’ve put it to, is a new section of the site for GPS Tracking.

Insipired by Igloo in #slack and the work-in-progress tracker by Foxdie – trackmygps.co.uk, I have made my own version for this website. It’s just for a single user and only displays the current position and the previous 12 hours of data, but it appears to work quite well on a test trip I made to Uttoxeter and back.

It’s currently a bit clunky, using a laptop, 3G USB adapter and a Bluetooth GPS receiver; but hopefully next month when I get a 3G iPhone I’ll find some software that will work on it!

In the meantime, you can check out the tracker here: http://rails.spaff.co.uk

Downtime and reliability

Well it seems that Prometheus, the colocated server I share with WiseWashu is on it’s last legs. I think the IDE controller is beginning to die in it, which is somewhat of a problem, as it has IDE hard drives. Anyhow, I’ve reformatted it, which is the reason the downtime recently and it seems to have restored some life to the server.

We are planning to get a replacement called ‘Aurora’. It will be a quad-core Xeon with 4GB RAM. A slight upgrade from Prometheus! More updates on this as it comes!

i33 – Day 1

So I’m finally here at Multiplay’s i33 event in Newbury, Berkshire. Possibly the last event here! After arriving at 2PM and checking in (although not allowed to go into the building), I set up a pro sleeping space in the red room and finally at 6PM managed to get into the Box o Win. It’s not bad, quite a decent size, good mix of games.

Not much else happening tonight, so off to bed. Quite glad I’m not staffing this event as a number of things have made it trickier for staff. Anyhow, I’m off, but the first lot of photos are up on my gallery now.

Wembley

Hi from Wembley Stadium! I’m here with the CentralanUK team and some great guys from EnemyDown running the £50,000 Unreal Tournament 3 National Championships.

A 5AM start for setup, and we’re finally kicking off with only an hour delay. We’ve had fun with power connectors, delivery, wireless keyboards and all manner of venue difficulties, but it’s all working and we’re ready to go!

I’ll try and get some photos up along with some coverage throughout the event.

A new look

So it’s about 5 years since my original site was created, and in that time it hasn’t changed much. Social networking has come about, the MyFaceTube generation have arrived and it’s all blogging, tagging and sharing.

I’ve finally given in and switched to WordPress for my website (It is STILL a website) and I’m just in the process of transferring all the old content across. The gallery has also been updated and is now running on zenphoto with LensPic integration. I’ll be adding album titles soon. The theme is modified from the publically available Techmania theme.

The old site is still available at http://dev.murray-mint.co.uk so if you do want to check out the old articles, etc. then they are still there.

Cameras and Weather

Here’s some free and simple advice for everyone. If you have a digital camera that isn’t waterproof, don’t get caught in a rainstorm with it. After a couple of days of trying to get it to dry out, I’ve had no luck.

Photos from Seaworld on Day 2 are on a normal camera which I’ll get developed at some point. Meanwhile, my photos from Day 5 are of the Electric Water Parade. This happens every night at all the hotels around Seven Seas Lagoon.

The plan for the next few days is:

Thursday: Islands of Adventure/Universal
Friday: Behind the scenes tour of Epcot, Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom

As for Saturday and Sunday, well I have no idea! We’ve literally done everything else, the parks are just empty!

Kissimmee

Well I’m checked in now to the Best Western Lakeside in Kissimmee after a flight that turned up an hour and a half late. Quite uneventful, nothing much happened. The flight was actually empty though! 200 spare seats in Economy, To the extent where some people (Mum included) were led across the 4 seats in the middle, sleeping!

Security at Orlando was fairly quick. Queue at immigration was short but took a long time, and the offsite car rental place was great! Now it’s just getting used to driving on the wrong side of the road! Very unnerving having to be close to the white lines on the left side of the car.

Anyhow, off to Wal-Mart to stock up on supplies! I’ll upload photos in a bit.

Delayed

Well it’s fun and entertaining in the departures lounge at Gatwick. The flight has been inexplicably delayed until 11:30, despite this it’s still not boarding yet and the monitors just show it as delayed.

Once I’m on-board it’s free drinks courtesy of Virgin, so I can’t wait! The next post will probably be from the US in about 10-11 hours!

Nearly gone

taking off and landing. So close to leaving for a lovely 10 day holiday in Florida!

My plans for checking in online earlier today were thwarted when the Virgin Atlantic website refused to let me check-in. Anyhow, after a 3 hour drive to Gatwick, I decided to take advantage of Twilight Checkin. An entirely empty checkin area at Gatwick, and we were able to get checked in and get our boarding passes within 10 minutes.

All that’s left tomorrow is to go to the terminal and get through security.

Murray-Mint.co.uk

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