From Slide Rule to Calculator
ExpiredWhen I were a lad...
By the time of 'O' level Maths we were using the old Four Figure Tables for looking up Sines, Tans, Logs etc. One thing it did teach you was an awareness of quantity and sanity checking of your answers - does it sound about the right size or have you slipped a decimal place or two.
For 'A' level in Maths and Physics something a bit more sophisticated was needed so for my 15th birthday my pride and joy was a Thornton slide rule, the double sided model with precision cursor in plastic. I also had an old one of my Dad's dating from when he was at college (Engineering at RNEC Manadon), also a Thornton but made of wood with engraved ivory (I think - might be fake) scales.
I still have them both - and they both still work (no batteries in these babies).
Facebook Events on a Joomla Site
ExpiredI spent yesterday evening grappling with getting events from a Facebook group to display and automatically update on a Joomla website. Sounds simple, and it ought to be, but there are the usual load of gotchas and quirks lurking in there.
What the client needed was two things - a module on the home page giving a list of forthcoming events, and a calendar as the main component on a dedicated page. No requirement to edit events on the website, just simply reflect events that are created in a Facebook group.
Rainy Sunday Timezones
ExpiredThe visitors went home this morning and it rained - perfect opportunity to pick up on a long overdue task and update my SunUpDown Joomla module to work with Joomla v3 and incidentally extend it so that it can work outside Europe. No urgency, but I know that sooner or later the only one of my sites I use it on will need to go J3, and I had a few requests for it to work elsewhere - in the end I simply took it off JED in the hope that someone else would fill the gap.
Displaying 3D Stereo Images
ExpiredThis week at (paid) work I have been mostly grappling with what sounded like a simple task - displaying a 3d image and recording the reaction time for a keypress - that turned out to be both more complex and simpler than at first it seemed.