This will be a good break as I will be doing some of my favourite activities. Powerkiting along the front at Cleethorpes enjoying a few beers and relaxing.

hopefully in the sun. I am going to Sherwood Pines on Sunday with Benjamin to tackle the Pro course and have a mess about on the whoops (Old habits die hard) we went on a twenty mile ride the week before round Lincoln and Woodhall Spa, I have had to get a padded seat. Getting older is taking its toll.

Another year at University has ended and I have the summer off to finish off another house I have bought!! Just a quick glimpse into my hectic life and I wanted to get back into blogging and thought this would be a good start. Putting finger to keyboard will be a good start.

Coming up will be Ruby on Rails as that is an Assignment I have to do. I will show you how to install RVM on a Mac and why you should use it, as well as a sample app on Rails.

“I dont think twitter is for me.”

The way I have come to use twitter is for finding all the information for me instead of trawling the web trying different search results and sites that interest me. The Adobe air applications that are used to control my twittering life are my favourite as they run on the desktop and you can set the application you use to update as frequently as you like which will bring back any new search results.

Lets do something about it

The first thing you need to do is, head on over to Twitter and create an account which is very easy and remember all your details, we are going to use them to log in to tweetdeck which is a program you download that will be used for tweeting and controlling all of your twittering activity. Tweetdeck can also be used to link to your Facebook, myspace, and linkedin. Which is quite handy as most people do a little facebooking!

Once you have done the above and got the adobe air installed on your system as well which will automatically start when you try and install tweedeck you will be asked to put your twitter details in so it can take over your twitter, put your details in for your other social networking sites, but you can always do this later through the preferences.

Smashing Magazine has done a very good article on all the apps that go with the twitter world, just click on the picture to see how Twitter can change your life for the better and help with social networking.

When creating your web design themes for your mock up site you will need to add the copyright symbol © to your theme so you can make it your own as i’m sure you will not want anybody copying the master piece that you will produce.

On the PC

Where ever you want to add your symbol you will need to hold down the ALT key and press zero, one, six, nine. If you open up notepad and try it. When you want to put the copyright symbol in your HTML code you will need to use the amphansand symbol, type copy and end it with a semi colon &.copy; just remove the full stop and it will work.

On the Mac

To get the symbol just hold down the ALT key and press the letter G. Things are so much easier on a Mac!

There is a link to all the character entities that are used in the creation of web pages and must be used if you want your page to display properly in the many different browsers that people use.

The day had come to do some web dev and I was looking forward to this, after doing the multimedia with flash I thought it would be good. The lesson started out with the teacher explaining about the Tags involved in HTML and what they did and how the browser reade tags. The next bit shocked me as the teacher was using inline styling and not closing of the end tags ! we questioned the style of HTML teaching and asked why was HTML being taught in such an out of date way? To be honest the teacher hasn’t moved on from when they did the courses from way back when…HTML was the standard and the tags didn’t have to be closed as well as inline styling was the norm.

Lesson two: started of with the begining of the HTML opening and closing start and end tags that make up a page. the started to teach the class about tables, which is ok becasue you have to use tables in HTML… but not to set the page out!! More and more dissapointed I decided to look at some sites on how to build web pages in the hope the teacher might take notice and ask me what I was looking at..

We have know broke up from college as we are always on holiday us students… which has its advantages. The post is just to have a moan and I am dissapointed at the the way in that the college is teaching students in the web design world. I have been busy playing with cinema 4d its so amazing I have lost days and days on it……

The second semester has started and already you will be given enough assignments to sink the Titanic. The group has halved in size as the students do not realize what a hard struggle it will be trying to work, look after children and manage to do the college work at the same time. At the moment there are 5/6 assignments on the go all at once with not very long to the hand in date.

After you have finished your assignment and then want to do the TOC (table of contents) you will be pleased to see this little time saver, as it is not very hard to do.

What you will see is a mock up assignment just with the headings and sub headings. The main headings will have a Heading 1 and the sub headings will have a heading 2 with a few sub headings as well.

Once you have created you own styles, with which font and font sizes you use for your headings it all becomes very easy, we have to use New Times Roman with a font size of 18pt for page headings.

At college we have to use 2003 version of Word, if you need help just ask. The TOC is in the insert menu and when you highlight the chapter heading ready for turning into a (TOC), in the font style menu(which will be on normal font style) click the drop down arrow and select which heading size you want (this is for 2003). Once you have selected all your headings then do you press the Table of Contents button not before as you haven’t defined any headings. If you decide to add more title or chapters to your document you can still add then as headings as word knows there is a TOC on the page and it will ask you if you want to update the page numbers blah blah..

It’s been along time since I made a post so I thought I would make a good one for everybody to have a look at what the computer components assignment looked like.

The second computer assignment has been handed out, which is a bit of a carry on from the first one, basically you will have to look a different kinds of data processing and their different uses.

The file has had the front cover removed and the Acknowledgements changed as it names the tutors but the final mark was in the distinction bracket. so enjoy and have a good look, the layout has altered because of the front pages being deleted (it’s all moved up and split the pages)

The file is here you will be able to D/L as a free user.

it is snowing and growing the Hub has shut down college and the buses have stopped running at 11am everybody has been building snowmen and doing crazy stuff in the snow and half the street is building snowmen.

All the fellow class mates have been recieving E-mails from the tutors telling us to look on blackboard and on there is a list of all the assignments we are going to have through out the year…. Having not checked the website to see what has been happening there is two assignment looming and got to be finished by the end of next week!!!

So its straight back in to it with the Pascal assignment first on the list. We have got three choices to create and write a program:

1. 1: Create a program that allows the user to enter a name, age and town of birth.
2. 2: Create a program which allows the user to enter their name, favourite film and how many times they have seen it.
3. 3: Create your own program where the user enters three variables from the keyboard which are then output to the screen.

The creator has to use variables, then print out the code and annotate, and ensure you use the appropiate documentation to support your program. I have already done one of the programs in my last Pascal posting. Which was to create your own program. What we will do is create the other two so they are all covered.

Create the whole program as a tutorial which will cover the annotate part, and as for the appropiate documentation ?? I’m not sure yet..

But for all you budding Pascal programmers here’s a little gift.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22

PROGRAM town;
 
USES CRT;
 
VAR name:string;
        age:integer;
townOfBirth:string;
 
BEGIN
       CLRSCR; {-- CLEARS THE SCREEN --}
  WRITELN('What is your name ?'); {-- asks the user their name --}
  READLN(name); {-- The program reads the variable name  --}
  CLRSCR;
  WRITELN(name,' how old are you ?');{-- prints the variable stored in name and asks your age --}
  READLN(age); {-- stores the variable age --}
  CLRSCR;
  WRITELN(name,' what town was you born in ?');
  READLN(townOfBirth);{-- stores the variable town of birth --}
  CLRSCR;{-- clears the screen --} 
  WRITELN(name,' you are ',age ,' and was born in ',townOfBirth);
  READLN;
END.

This being the first assignment in Pascal is very basic but the progamming language is quite easy to learn compared with the c# and php which I keep trying.

The first thing I am going to do is create a plan of the basic program so I don’t have to guess how it is going to work, I will create the program on a note pad.

The program is going to enter the persons name, height and there shoe size. the last line of the program should say Richard you are 1.8m tall and wear size ten shoes.

The first thing is to declare what the program is called.

PROGRAM task3;
 
USES CRT;
 
VAR name:string;
      height:string;
        shoe:integer;

We have given the program a name of height, told the compiler that we are using a cathode ray tube to display the program and named are variables for the program, we are going to use. I would of liked to have used integer for height but because we are using the letter M we have to use string. Integer will be good for the shoe size because we are only entering a number.

BEGIN
       CLRSCR;
       WRITELN('What is your name ?');
       READLN(name);
       CLRSCR;

What I have said: BEGIN the program, clear the screen, write the line what is your name?. The program is going to read the text that the user inputs for there name and store that name, then clear the screen ready for the next question, how tall are you.

     WRITELN(name,' how tall are you in meters ? ');
     READLN(height);
     CLRSCR;

By putting the variable name before the question the program is already calling the person by their name. then CLRSCR ready for the next question.

  WRITELN(name, ' what size feet do you take ?');
  WRITELN('Please answer using numbers.');
  READLN(shoe);
  CLRSCR;
  WRITELN(name,' you are ', height ,' and take size ', shoe ,' shoes.');
  READLN;
END.

What the last line is doing is taking all the stored variables and displaying them in the sentence for you to read. Variables are surrounded by commas and text to be displayed are in single quote marks. (don’t forget to leave spaces after the first quote mark or your text will all be joined together) ‘ text ‘ ,variable, ‘ text ‘,variable,’ and so on !!!!!!’. It should be displayed correctly if this pattern is followed.

Edit after trying the program,, I have changed the name of the PROGRAM (it was called height) you cannot have the same named program and variable in the same program.

While concentrating of my flash assignment everything else has slipped by the way side, as well as creating the project you have to prove you have done every step by taking screen shots of your work and annotating all the pictures (In english, just describe what your are doing and how) do a health and safety quiz about working with computers and how it can effect your health. While doing this assignment you still have to finish of a major piece of work on components of a PC, fill in your UCAS application get that all sent off and attend the lessons while doing the main assignment as well, which is the 10,000 epic encyclopedia all about the use of information systems in a buisness that will allow total strangers to poke their nose in to their life.!!!!

Ow and another thing, you will be expected in your flash project to produce a detailed plan of all the scenes and how the navigation will work , which is a good thing because the one I created worked perfectly. The next part of the project is to create story boards to explain what everything is going to do and how and why!!, how your buttons are going to work, what each scene is supposed to do and the over all goal of the project.

I am going to up load my first flash project to youtube to get some feed back as the feed back from my lad was it’s sh**.

The way round it is to use a free file converter available online :ZamZar

Pretty straight forward you select the file you want to convert or just copy a link from Youtube and paste in step 1, then select the type of file you want to covert too. I am after converting FLV to avi or Mpeg so I can manipulate the files in Movie Maker. When you have finished adding your Email Address so that ZamZar will convert and send you a link to get your coverted file. This can be handy for converting Music to MP3 so you can put it on your Ipod or your new mobile ring tone. This is a very handy converter as it will convert most files available on the PC.