Starting To Work On New run4charity Site

We planned to redevelop the run4charity.net website a few times before the charity event takes place in 2013. I've now started to work on the new site and I plan to publish it in the second half of October. Keep visiting the site in the meantime!

Beat That British Rail

On the plane in Schiphol airport, at the end of the runway and ready to fly out...pilot announces, flight delayed due to rabbit on the runway! I don't think British Rail ever used that as an excuse!

Threat Alert

From yesterday, there is a heightened threat alert (Green to Orange) to all American and western nationals here in Iraq due to a combination of 'that' movie and the cartoons published in the French magazine. Those people who produced the movie [I find it difficult to call it a 'movie'...since I am led to believe that it is an amateurishly put together trailer] and published the cartoons should exercise better judgement and more respect to different cultures and religions...and be aware that their actions may result in death or injury to others. I suspect that the paper would not have published the cartoons if the editor and owners were living in the Middle East!

I believe in free speech and the rights of an individual to hold any opinion that they want, but I also believe in exercising religious and cultural understanding. Irrespective of the fact that I disagree with the cartoons being published, I would like to thank the French publication for the exceptionally bad timing and wonder if they will take responsibility for any deaths or injuries that may occur as a result?

I would also like to point out that these sort of actions undermine a lot of the good work being undertaken by western countries for humanitarian reasons in various Islamic nations. It also makes our job so much more difficult [and dangerous].

Flash Builder 4.6

Back into Flash Builder tonight to knock up some prototype screens and Navicat to put together around 15 database tables. These two tools are brilliant at allowing QAD development. I'm actually glad I put aside my dislike for Flash to buy the development environment for situations just like this! Both integrate well with Dreamweaver as well. Highly recommended.

MySQL to PHP to Javascript

I've spent the day re-writing a connector to pass data from a MySQL database into a website. The data for the site is stored in a MySQL database and accessed using PHP. But then I needed to pass it into Javascript to be able to display some graphs and a map using Leaflet and Dojo...it is all done now.

To be honest, this is the second re-write of this code in a few weeks and I am still not happy! There must be a better way of doing this...surely? If anyone knows of any modules or pre-written libraries that they can point me in the direction of...I would love to have a clean and simple way of doing this.

September? Wow!

It is already September? Can't believe that the year has gone by so fast! My contract has exactly one month to run and then it is back to the UK/Ireland to re-adjust to the real/normal world and work on different projects. It will bring to an end nearly three years of working in Iraq...

But will there be time for another contract after that? Well the end of the world is due on the 21st December 2012...so I might sneak one or two short term contracts in before then! All things considered, the weather hasn't been too bad in the run up to the apocalypse! <vbg>