Krioma.net

If this is posted then I guess it worked!

Visit my home page at: http://www.krioma.net

Today I wrote a php script to grab the latest image taken by MDI (The Michelson Doppler Imager) the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. This a wonderful space craft and is responsible for many of the best pictures seen of solar flares and also finds the odd comet. You can now see this feed on the top right hand corner of my homepage and now I know it works I will integrate this into the rest of my site.

More:
+ PHP - http://www.php.net
+ SOHO - http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
+ MDI - http://soi.stanford.edu/

I finally got around to adding some more content on my manta force man section of my site. So if you want to see any of it mosey on over to http://www.krioma.net/mantaforce.php

Well my 500th post in just over a year. I do wonder what I have wasted space with. Seem like lots of astronomy related stuff. I wonder how many people actually read this? For anyone who does, thanks. Oh and glad you have put up with the dodgy and sometimes awful grammar. I guess it can make life interesting (trying to decode it!). I have had more and more hits each month I am pushing 200,000 a month now. I guess that means someone comes here? Or it is me pressing refresh more than I thought. Well I am going to keep posting. Sorry I don't have a commenting system enabled. I had too many problems with bull shit advertising and was causing me too much hassle to delete each one. If you do have any comments though please pass them on to me. My contact details can be found on the about page. Or you can use my gmail account: krioma@gmail.com. Again thanks for reading!

I have finally got around to putting a new image gallery online. I have meant to do this since i changed my site design since the previous gallery was not compatible with the features in xhmtl that I am using. Shame as I like that. It is currently still accessible at: http://gallery.krioma.net but I don't know how long I will leave this version online. It was powered by My Photo Gallery from fuzzymonkey. I am now using SPGM (Simple Picture Gallery Manager), http://spgm.sourceforge.net/, which is a decent bit of code and the beauty is that it does not need any database support. This would have been damn useful if I had found it when I was running the astrosoc website! I might even use it on the PPS website. To see my new gallery go to: http://www.krioma.net/spgm/index.php

You may or may not (why not!) be aware that the 3rd film in the Star Wars saga gets released this year. In fact on 19th May. So since both me and my house mate (Geordie) are eager to see this I thought it would be apt to write a php countdown script. So I did and the result can now be seen on my home page... currently there are 98 days to go!

You might have noticed a white band across the top right of most of my pages (haven't integrated this fully into my blog yet). This is in support of the Make Poverty History campaign, http://www.makepovertyhistory.org. I strongly agree with their aim of reducing debt in less fortunate countries. So lets support them.

According to The Sect of Homokaasu my website is 55% good and 45% evil. Excellent.



Oh and don't ask me how they calculated this I wasn't paying attention on the page that described how they find out. Oh one thing.. it depends on the info on the page so my rating will change. [Addition: when I viewed the link after the post on this page I was 79% good! ]

I just signed up to http://bloginspace.com. My website is now, supposedly, being transmitted into outer space, groovy. :-) I'm not sure if I should be pleased with this or not. As an astronomer I should be against "junk" E/M signals but as a human being I want the Alien's to read my mind as I write it - it sound much better than being probed for the information.

Today I was working on the new Astrophysics and Space Reaserch Group's website and I thought "why don't I add a lunar phase script onto the page". Excellent idea as I was never happy about just taking the image off the [USNO website]. I then decided to add it hear as I made some lunar images and it all looks nice a pretty. I'm pleased with my effort. The actual guts of the script was not written by me, more info: [phpclasses.org]. I did have to do some altering for it to work like I wanted and so it did the image display correctly. So enjoy - you can now find most of what you need as stargazer on this page.

Today I set myself up a research page on the ASR server. Take a look at it [Research Pages]. On this section of the site I intend to write about my research and it will be used as point of call for my academic matters.

Well according to [bloginspace.com] it is. If it is being transmitted then cool. They even produced a certificate for me:

You probably haven't noticed, hopefully you will now(!), that I have added a new feature to the site home page. It is a sunrise / sunset calculator. This is based on Birmingham UK (yeah, ok its aimed as a tool for myself!). Hopefully it will be useful for someone. I guess if anyone really wanted it I could put up a script that allowed you to enter your own coordinates (lat, long) and timezone. Sounds like too much effort at the moment. If you want it email me at: webmaster-[at]-krioma.net (you know what to do to make this into an actual email, I hope). Actually any comments can go to the above address. Nothing too rude I hope! The code for the script comes mostly from [external page] - so thanks to the dude who wrote it!

I meant to do this when I redesigned the pages but I did forget. I hope that you like the new site layout, I think it is far neater and cleaner than the old one. I will always ahve a soft spot for the old design but I do feel that over time my designs are getting better and better. I particularly like the graphics I came up with for the banners on this one. Not only have I redisgned the main site I have also redone the [St. Martin's pages] as these pages were in severe need of a do over. The main pages are meant to be compliant with all xhtml / css standards and they mostly are, though there a few a problems. This is nothing running with the actual pages, well it is, but it is with the old blog entries. This is something that will not go away and I do not intend to edit 750 or so pages! Any comments to the below address (see page footer).

I have made it to 900 posts, wow, I've become a complete and utter blogger over the last few years.... for those of you who read this and I know there are quite a few of you out there, thanks, knowing that someone out there reads this dribble is worth it. I hope the next 900 are as interesting, or even more so!

You can use the [The Dialectizer] to instantly creates parodies of websites... anyway my mate (thanks Geord) sent me the link and it instantly makes this website sound wack! Just take a look at: [this site in jive] (note you go to a holding page first...)

Woohoo! who would have thought that I would have managed to keep up my rantings on here to 1,000 entries. I am proud and shocked at the amount of time that I have sat in front of a computer boring people who read this! Anyway, yay! I am off to Canada tomorrow so expect a post whilst I am away.... but maybe I will just stay away from computers!

I have finally completed the rewrite (via an open source design) of the Poynting Physical Society's (PPS) website. I'm pretty proud of the images. Oh and it works best in Firefox, though there isn't much of a different in the display between it and IE. See [www.ppsbham.co.uk]

As the new webmaster of the UoB Astronomical Society I thought it was about time I got this thing finished, so I spent most of last night doing that (once I realised a slight oddity in connecting to the guild's ftp server). Anyway most of the page was wrote quite quickly, I took the original redesign of Steve's and modified it quite heavily, essentially writing most of it in a different way. I think it looks nice a easy to use. I still have bits to write for it, mostly backend php stuff that will make things look better. Oh and I need to put lots of content on there! If you want you can take a look at [astrosoc.org.uk].

Whilst designing the page I came across a few useful things and a few problems. The first is, as expected, IE. My hate affair with Internet Explorer continues and I even came across an issue I hadn't realised it had before (luckily I found the info I needed to fix it, [here] if you are interested). It was easy to fix but the site just doesn't look as good in IE, I'll have to write a mod to get it looking as good but I doubt it. I gave up on getting the drop down menu boxes to run in IE, they work fine in other browsers (if you dont have it, get Firefox it is so much better!).

I decided that I would use some breadcrumbs on the site, I still need to get this exactly how I'd like but its not too bad at the moment... thanks to [Breadcrumbs_for_PHP_Lovers] for a nice little script to do just (almost) what I wanted.

I have also implemented a couple of php navigation systems that I have come up with, they are rather basic at the moment and if I make them a bit fancier I might put the code up here.

I decided that we needed an image gallery so I have gone with [Hoverbox], which I have modified a bit to suit my multiple page / gallery needs... thank god for PHP! :-)

Again take a look, [astrosoc.org.uk]

I decided that the image gallery on my website was really not up to scratch... since I don't update it! I am a big user of Flickr and decided that it was about time I merged it into my main pages. I recently came across a great tool lumis Gallery (by David Rencher) so I decided I would embed this in my site. So from now on the image gallery will be based on my flickr images... take a look at it [gallery] - I think it looks quite cool.

I'm proud to say that we have launched a new astronomy outreach website, [talkandtelescope.org.uk]. This site is aimed at promoting the public talks that are run at the University of Birmingham by the UoB Astronomy Society and the School of Physics and Astronomy. Go on, take a look... you never know you might even fancy coming to hear one of the talks! Oh and refresh that page a few sides and see if you can spot something changing at the top...

I've been trying out Tumblr as a means of bloging and I like it - I think I might attempt to maintain an astronomy blog over on their system for a while and see what happens... if you want to take a look at my fledgling new blog see: starrydude.tumblr.com.