Orange Juice & Keyboards

Things here took a turn for the bad yesterday dinnertime when Donna (wife) had an accident with a glass of orange juice and found out that the following are true facts keyboards, weather stations wireless routers and cable modems do not like orange juice, they may like other kinds of juice but definitely not orange.

It goes without say that she was just a bit upset in fact very up set. The good news that hairdryers are great I mean there are really great and following the use of such a great invention we soon found ourselves in the good position of having only lost the wireless keyboard.

A trip to PC-world resulted in a nice new wireless keyboard, mouse and a set of headphones all for 39 pounds instead of 89 pounds as PC World were or are having a sale. The new keyboard is better than the old old so is the mouse(But don't tell Donna that)

It goes without saying that all of this took for ever and by the time things had been sorted out it was 10 pm and so now work was done on wiki's or anything else, and that will also be the case for the next week or so as it's time to jump in the car dive for 12 hours to look at what Scottish rain looks like, and weather or not it is any different to English rain, yep you got it its Holiday time.

As I have never been to Scotland I just don't know what to expect, apart from the rain that is, as that's what the weather man, women are saying we shall be getting. We are going to within 20 miles of John O'Grotes so it's a long way form home about 12 hours travel time.

Eye

, originally uploaded by criza.

Just love they way in this picture the eye draws you into the picture.

James Follett Wiki (JFW) part 6

Yes part six just how much longer can I talk about this project, I suppose it depends on just how much I do on it, or I loose interest and finally if I just plain run out of time.

So to up date progress the item count got to 142 yep 142 a massive jump in the item number not, the reason being that one of the page that I was doing took nearly 2 hours to do, I still am not that happy with it, but for a first go its not that bad.

The page in question is part of the help system that I am putting on to the wiki so that later on when I forget what I have or can do with the wiki I do have some where to look. One of the problems with doing a help system is that I don't know it all so doing the help system is a way of learning how to use the wiki.

As I have my hols soon all this wiki stuff and this blogging will stop and going by past experience I might move on to other projects and come back to this much later( so if that happens it will be a good test of the help system)

As it is still early days I was surprised to get one question about the wiki, but when I told the guy just how new the wiki was and that progress was going to be slow he wished me good luck. The other problem with his request is that I still have not yet worked out how to give all registered users read rights and only some users read/write rights if you see what I mean.

James Follett Wiki (JFW) Part 5

Things have been slow mainly due to the fact that I have not had a lot of free time, things like building a chest of drawers for daughter have taken time. The other job which also took more than 2 hours was the erection of a digital Ariel, and all the fun that was, do you know it took longer to work out how to switch the TV into DTT mode than anything else?

I mean how could such an operation be so difficult?, the actual finding the stations and stuff was pain free and all fully automatic.

So apart from the above how has the Wiki moved on?

Well the item count is now 139, not much of an increase but then I have also been working on some of the help pages, mainly for my benefit as I now that I will never remember how to do some of the stuff, so it makes sense to have on the site the info on just how to use the wiki.

James Follett Wiki part 4

Well just a small update this time with the item count as I found some free time and added excatly one radio play of Jim Follett's called Jumbo.

Before adding it the count was 114 it now stands at 122.

I think at this rate the item count will still only top out at 1200 to 1500 only time will tell.

Wikis & Books

Wikis & Books

As you may or may not know I have more than one wiki that I am playing with. One is the new James Follett Wiki (JFW) the other far older wiki is called DMP and has over the years been restarted on more than one occasion, mainly due to errors on my part that resulted in me destroying the database and all the backups! (don't ask)

At one stage the DMP had been about 1000 pages in size at this time its around 600, but then I have not worked on it for some time, in fact it is one of those projects that I only seem to work on when I remember that I have got such a project!

The size that I think DMP will get to is at this time 2000 to 2500 pages as the subject of the DMP is Dirk Maggs the radio director that I have spoken about many times here before. In fact I have also spoken about the DMP here many times normally when all was going well and not so well.

Now DMP is a project that for the reasons I have given above will not be updated on its software or the database that drivers it, as I have lost too much too often.

The DMP is again like the JFA a closed wiki very closed in fact I have at this time no intention of allowing anyone access to it even Dirk Maggs, not because there is anything in it that is libeler's but because I used it to create the main Dirk Maggs site, and also because it is the main data-bank for Dirk Maggs. I have used once so far to write a book on all of Dirk's works form 1988 to 2006 it cam e to a 300 page A4 book!

Yes I can tell you I was surprised at how long it was. I reckon that Dirk will be active in radio for at least another 5 to 7 years before he decides to go and do something else, so at the rate of productions that he does a year I think the book could end up at a 1000 pages! how mad is that.

The book is not for sale as it break every copyright law there is, eg there are photo's that I just don't know who owns the copyright to, there are articles that I do not have permission to use. But and this is the big but as this book is based on the website and the DMP from early 2006 the idea was to have a paper record just in case the website or the DMP vanish, which if my passed experience is anything to go by could happen at any moment. So I have a paper copy and the file that made it is stored else where in more than one location.

I also think that the book would not sell very many copies as it is too specialist, just how many folks want to know which actor started in a radio show that has never been heard since it was first broadcast back in 1989?

James Follett Wiki (JFW) Part 3

Things have gone very slow on the wiki, in fact not one more item has been added since the last blog, the reason being that I have found when looking at other larger blogs that they doing things that I just can not see how with the same software as me they can do.

I did after a lot of looking and searching find that they had added extensions to the wiki, how cool is that I had no idea that you could do such a thing.

So I have spent ages looking at lots of extensions, but so far have yet to download and add one to the JFW. But and this is a dig but when I find the extensions that I think will make the JFW easier either to work on or use I will let you know here.

James Follett Wiki (JFW) Part a 3 now with a part a

Yes, there is a part 3, just found out the reason why I can not upgrade the wiki from version 1.84 to 10.01 and it is something that I do not have any control over, and that is, that my ISP One&One.co.uk do not yet offer PHP 5.0 or MySQL 5.00 as standard.

Now to be fair to them, they allow for the money I pay for me to have just 2 100Meg MySQL databases which can be version 4 or 5. the snag is that I have both in use with the wiki on the version 4, to make matters worse I have other programmes using both the version 4 and 5.

I don't know if a database dump works from version 4 to 5 and knowing my luck the answer is no. ( With the luck that I have had in the past I just do not fancy taking the risk or all the work it would take)

So I am stuck with what I have at this time, maybe I will be lucky and my ISP will fall into line with other providers and give my more databases ( some hosting ISP's are allowing you as many as you want, not too sure how they can do that, but it may be that like most things most users do not use what is provided or they only use part of what is given) and more up to date versions of php and MySQL.

James Follett Wiki (JFW) Part 2

Well things are going well-ish, by that I mean I now have 103 pages on the site and I have only listed 5 of Jim's radio plays. No the problem is that I got the site set up so that it is closed so that you can't read it or edit it, which is good as it stops spam and all that sort of stuff that wiki's sometimes suffer from.

The problem that I have is that how do i allow or set up new users, and how do I set it up so that only some users are allowed to edit pages. You might say RTFM well I have and when my headache went away I soon realised that I just can't get me head around the group permissions etc.

So I have come up with a cunning plan, I will look to see other users of large wiki's have sorted this problem. As the wiki is so new it started on 10.07.2007 it will not matter too much if I don't fix this problem straight away.

As I said else where, I do not think that the wiki will get any bigger than 1200 to 1500 pages, and as Jim's output these days is not as it was I should think that the site will not grow much bigger.

I also think that the number of user's (due to it's specialist nature) will always be low, and no I am not sad about this as it is how things are.

More soon on this wiki.

Smithson Tennant

30th November , 1761 – 22nd February , 1815
Tennant is best known for his discovery of the elements iridium and osmium, which he found in the residues from the solution of platinum ores in 1804. He also contributed to the proof of the identity of diamond and charcoal. The mineral Tennantite is named after him.

Tennant was born in Selby in Yorkshire. He attended Beverley Grammar School (the oldest state school in Britain, founded AD700) and there is a plaque over one of the entrances to the present school commemorating his discovery of the two elements, Osmium and Iridium. He began to study medicine at Edinburgh in 1781, but in a few months moved to Cambridge, where he devoted himself to botany and chemistry. He graduated M.D. at Cambridge in 1790, and about the same time purchased an estate near Cheddar, where he carried out agricultural experiments. He was appointed professor of chemistry at Cambridge in 1813, but lived to deliver only one course of lectures, being killed near Boulogne-sur-Mer by the fall of a bridge over which he was riding.

James Follett Wiki (JFW) 13.07.2007

This page is just a place to leave notes to myself on the development of the James Follett Wiki. The (JFW) wiki has started on 10.07.2007 and at the time of writing this, it has an item count of 76 pages.

Looking at the number of radio plays novels that have yet to be added the final page count looks at this time to be in the 1200 to 1500 page area, I do not think that it will get much bigger than this as James has not been very productive over the last few years and on to of that he has not be very well either.

The wiki has been set up so that novels, television and radio productions or items each have there own section which is then broken down in to further sections. A way to illustrate this is to look at the novel section. The top menu item is novel, then it is broken down into decades then into years which finally leads to the individual novel published in that year.

With television the breakdown will be only by the year that it was broadcast, as there are so few television productions.

With radio, now radio is a special case, mainly because its where James first started his work, but that is not the main reason for the special treatment, the special treatment is because of the large number of plays that he wrote over a few years, and then stopped because the BBC stopped producing so many plays and besides having every play set in Ireland does tend to get well just a bit boring.

So as I was saying the the radio section is broken down by play series then by date in each series. Now because some of Jim's most famous work was in the radio play department the two items that are responsible for this have been treated as separate series even thought one series does follow the other.

In case you have not got your head around what I am talking about its Earthsearch, which as you know came in 2 number 10 part episodes, each episode will get a separate page( well that's the plan at this time that may change, one reason to keep them as separate pages is the large amount of content in the resultant pages)

As we are using a Wiki we do have to take advantage of its linking and the way we can add category's to things, and this is the whole reason for using a Wiki in the first place. One thing that I am keen to do is to link and have categories for all the actors that where in James Follett radio plays, who where they? how many plays did they appear in, who was the most used male and female actors? which year did Jim produce the most radio plays? these and other questions that I have not yet thought up yet could be answered by have the whole of the current James Follett website converted to a wiki.

If the wiki works then I can see a time when I will drop the existing website in favour of it as a wiki. Do not worry it can take pictures and all that sort of stuff and more even audio samples could be a possibility.

Now on to spam, its a sad fact that Wiki's can get very badly spammed, so to prevent that I have at this time made the wiki a closed one so that only requested users can add and remove content. When the wiki is a bit bigger, I intend to open it up so that anyone can read it but only those registered can alter it. It goes without saying that if Jim was so inclined he would be given rights to edit as he sees fit.

As this is a note to myself it will be interesting to see how much of this gets done.

I have not installed the very latest wiki software, which is Medaiwiki 1.10 as I write this, as it will not install on the one&one computers for some reason, the version that I am using is 1.83 so it is old. The other problem that I might have a bit later on is that currently one&one only allow 100 megs per MySQL database, I have no idea at all just how large the database will be.

Lewis

Lewis, originally uploaded by Tidy TTT.

Nice, wounder if this pic is rare in that it is not raining.