Graham Robinson

I do love the new PG Tips advert

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPWwUm656iQ

Also, I’m fed up of mistyping mediaguy.co.uk nearly every time with medaiguy.co.uk (because my left hand and right hand hit the keys at the same time) so they both now work.

http://www.medaiguy.co.uk/2008/03/22/i-facebooked-your-mum/ 

My tummy hurts… but at least it’s better news than the last two blog posts.

Hotel Chocolat has come to Southampton and they do some fantastic chocolate. With that chocolate comes fantastic Easter Eggs. With Easter Eggs comes my hugh eyes and medium sized stomach. Yummy, but I really should pace myself more.

My Easter Egg on Flickr 

By the looks of the mail-return emails I’m getting this morning (about 40 so far) I’ve had a spammer send lots of email out @mediaguy.co.uk.

I promise it isn’t me!

I’m starting to get somewhere with C# now.

I started learning this language with learnvisualstudio.net, a video-on-demand type site that shows you how to do things.  It is good and gets you started very quickly but doesn’t really explain much. I’ve coupled this with with a For Dummies book and a Microsoft Base Class Library book to give me an idiots guide to why things work (dummies) and lots of example code (class library). These books have cost quite a bit, but altogether it has given me the help I need.

At the moment I’m trying to build a anything-in-anything-out style loans system. I’d written one in PHP already for someone at work so it helps me build a real-world project but without having to worry about requirements or design (as I’d done it already). At the moment it is looking like this

Plenty of work to do, but at least it actually looks like it could do something.

Thought it might be interesting to post some statistics from February.

AwStats reports:

• 1294 Unique visitors
• 11613 Visits (8.97 visits/visitor)
• 28449 Hits (2.44 Hits/Visit)
• 451.82 MB of bandwidth used (out of about 8,000 limit)
• Most popular day was the 5th
• Most popular time is 17:00-18:00
• 10,809 hits were made on the homepage
• 168 people visited http://www.mediaguy.co.uk/lacie-ethernet-disk-mini-home-edition via Google or another link
• 40% of people use Firefox
• 233 people found the site directly from Google
• Second most popular search engine was MSN Live with 31
• Top 5 searches were ‘mediaguy’ ‘graham robinson’ ‘hipserv 1.6′ ‘ lacie home edition’ and ‘lacie hipserv’
• Someone in Modern Languages has been reading, but I’m not going to use my powers to find out who, that would be naughty

Everyone in IT got an email today saying that ISS aren’t allowed to have personal websites on www.soton.ac.uk/~username. I used to use mine for silly little things like practising php, hosting funny (but fully legal) files and putting large files that are too big to email for other people to download. Apparently this is too unprofessional for our new www.southampton.ac.uk brand, so it’s been taken away.

It made me think about (staff) learning at the university. If I look at my bookshelf in my office I can see

1. Programming Flash Communication Server [Paperback] by Reinhardt, Robert; Yang -  £23 - Bought by me
2. VBScript Pocket Reference [Paperback] by Childs, Matt - £10 - Bought by me
3. PHP and MySQL for dummies - £20 - bought by me
4. SQL (don’t know the details) - £15 - bought by me
5. ASP.NET all in one reference for dummies - £35 - bought by me

And most of my programming is done on Macromedia Studio 8, which I bought for £100 ish

The director of IT said that they don’t ’spoon feed’ people to progress, but they don’t exactly give people opportunity either. Anyone looking to learn how to do HTML or PHP better go buy themselves a hosting package in the remaining 20 days of March. Or just don’t learn anything…

You find google doing some strange things when you search for as much as I do, but one of my flickr account statistics made me find out that a google search for

archos web browser

Doesn’t actually bring the Archos web browsing plugin as the number one result. The number one result is actually my Flickr photo of the web browser. Strange world.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=archos+web+browser 

* Obviously the result of the above link may change over time 

It’s been an interesting week for me and mostly about learning new things.

I had a talk with the IT depearment’s human resources person last week about progression through ISS. It wasn’t a job interview but a ‘what can you do’ talk. I think this is a great idea as people on the main campus never actually see us down here and it takes something like the Flash video before people realise you can do something clever.

In the meeting was a person from the web applications team and it was an oppotunity to see what they know, so that I would know what to learn. As it turns out that seems to be .net.

ASP.net is a programming language by Microsoft. People don’t use it because people use PHP. This website is written in PHP. It’s free. Microsoft stuff costs money. Businesses have money, businesses use Microsoft. You see where I’m going with this.

Fortunately Microsoft seem to have been kind. They have ‘express’ editons of their software that are free so that people can learn how how to write in their language before paying for the software. So I’m having a go at that.

Also below you might have seem that I’ve been playing with iFrames. The most interesting thing I’ve learnt about iFrames is that if you put something in the middle of it then the RSS readers and other readers pick it up.

<iframe src=”bbc.co.uk”>This is an iframe for the bbc.co.uk website</iframe>

On another note, I’m sorry Mum. I’ve written another blog post that you (and everyone else who actually reads this site) doesn’t understand.