Below is a collection of photos I’ve taken over the past year or so. I am by no means a professional photographer (as you can tell) but I do like to play around. So rather than just tell people that I like to take photos, I thought I would put a few of my favourites up here as proof 
All of these were taken with my Casio Exilim 4 mega-pixel digital camera, at varying resolutions.
So Google are now moving on into the spreadsheet business? This week Google released yet another product – Google Spreadsheets – an online spreadsheet application. Having just had a quick play around with it, it really is quite cool. Random, but cool. The functionality available is impressive – you can save spreadsheets, open ones already saved, download it as an .xls or .csv, and you can even share your spreadsheets with other users.
For the sheet itself, you can click in individual cells or highlight a group of them, type stuff into them, press F2 to edit existing text in a cell (just as you do in Excel), format the text (font, color and type of cell e.g. decimal, dollar, plain text…). You can even include formulas in the cells…
So how is all this done? Well, using a hell of a lot of javascript and some css. I can only assume that the speadsheet might use up a fair bit of RAM on the client-side (if my laptop didn’t have 1.5 gig RAM I might be able to notice…). I wonder well it works on different browsers. I might have to try it out on that mac at work tomorrow. Safari seems to be pretty good at breaking all sites that use css.
Anyway, I guess something like this new product might be used by those who don’t already own Excel and refuse to pay for it, or those who don’t have it installed but do have a nice connection to the internet and need to quickly whip up a spreadsheet… Hmm, who knows.
Below are a couple of screenshots for those who havn’t seen it yet.
Time seems to be flying. It’s certainly been an interesting year so far. Lets see, so far this year, I have…
1) been to South America and back,
2) been interviewed extensively for a SE job at Google (unfortunately unsuccessful – guess I really don’t know how to move mount fuji),
3) resurrected an old (1985) Honda Civic from almost ending up at the junk yard (with Pete’s help),
4) got my scooter back up and running after it was stolen and later found by the cops (again, with Pete’s help),
5) left my job at Critchlow,
and finally…
6) now joined Trade Me as a web developer! Woohooo!!
So I am no longer working at Critchlow, no more GIS for a little while at least. This week I started my new job as web developer at Trade Me, a New Zealand online auction site quite similar to Ebay. It seems to be a really neat, dynamic and fast-paced environment to work in and the people there are really friendly. Being as Trade Me accounts for about 60% of New Zealand’s internet usage, let’s hope I don’t break anything major…
That’s right, we have a new flat member!! She’s a cute, black and white, playful, sometimes naughty but mostly well behaved, tiny moggy kitten called Safi (short for Saffron).
After a long wait and much patience, Beth-Anne finally decided to ask the landlord whether it would be ok to get a pet. This wasn’t the first time this request had been made – Beth-Anne gave it a shot the day we saw the flat for the first time. But the landlord had said no, she did not want any pets, not even any cute little kittens. According to all the grumpy old men at the office, kittens are vicious little creatures that destroy curtains, carpets and furniture. So I guess that’s what the landlord was afraid of. Anyway, somehow, being the lovely tenants that we are, the landlord was far more easy going this time round and when Beth-Anne called her up, the landlord said yes to a pet! WOOOHOOOOOO for Beth-Anne!!!
So off to the pet shop. Then came the dramas of her not being able to actually purchase the cat due to her not being a New Zealand citizen. Doh. Yeah, the pet shop people don’t trust Americans… hahah she’ll kill me for saying that (she’s actually Canadian). Ahh well, thats what friends are for – the cat actually now belongs to me.
So its been a week and Safi hasn’t actually torn anything apart. She’s very playful and likes chasing things around the lounge. It makes watching anything on tv with Beth-Anne and Richard almost impossible as they’re constantly watching the cat instead of the tv. I’m sure that will pass though.
It’s been a while but I’m back, back into blogging mode. I’m back from my 5 week trip to Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile (5 weeks isn’t nearly long enough to see all that!) and settling back down into normal working days in Wellington.
Came across this awesome multi-input touch screen demo.
You could do so much with this type of technology, it really opens up to the floor to a whole new type of computing. If it is pressure, heat, moisture sensitive then it could even take into account how you’re feeling when you touch it. Imagine writing programs for that! Hmm… where can I get me one of those…
Well, better get back to work and stop dreaming…
So I have finally finished my TravelBlog . Well, as much as it will probably ever be finished anyway. There are probably a few ‘niceties’ that I could have added (such as an RSS feed or commenting… or a calendar that actually lets you navigate months and years… oh dear, this is sounding worse and worse…).
But anyway, it MUST be finished because I am going on holiday TOMORROW and I’m not doing anything else on it. Really. I’m not.
Its taken me a while to do but I have added most of the things that I said I still wanted to do. Now I can have named users on the site, a login section, adding, editting and deleting articles for logged-in users (with extracts even)! And the best part is the photo upload / management / viewing side of it. When writing an article, you can upload photos and they will be resized to fit the page and a little thumbnail will be created. They are displayed underneath the article. And of course there is the management of these photos… but I’m sure thats enough detail 
I’m not sure if writing it from scratch was the best idea but it sure did give me heaps of flexibility in terms of what functionality I wanted. The whole interaction with the Google Map is quite neat, and the photo management thing works like I want it. But as I’ve said, it took a fair bit of work to get it to this stage (many late nights) which can lead to some not-feeling-that-great-at-work type days…
So, I probably won’t be adding any articles to this blog for a while but I will hopefully be keeping my travelblog quite up to date
So I’ve had this great idea of making a travel blog with an interactive map on it for some time now… But I can’t seem to get around to actually doing much work on it. So I’m going to write a list of all the things I still need to do to get it up and going and maybe that will motivate me to do something about it. Maybe.
Here it goes…
Eeek, this list is getting far too long for my liking. I can see why I keep procrastinating… But all of this has to be done before I go to South America on the 23rd of December coz I want to use it!
A while ago I decided I would create some kind of a travel blog using Flash. Seeing as I don’t know Flash or Actionscript very well, this is as far as I got before I decided that using Google Maps and their extensive API would be a lot easier.
The mapping data I used in this app is a free set of basic world data converted into an svg using some free script I found online (can’t remember where or what it was called now, doh). The points are being read out of a MySQL database which is also being used for the “real” travel blog that I am working on. So this map should actually reflect the “real” travel blog when I finally finish it and it maybe even gets used.
Maybe I’ll continue to work on this one day when I don’t have a million other things I want to be doing.
I figured this was as good a place as any to post some more stuff about myself. I hope to upload some of my reports from university as I think they might come in handy for both myself and others doing similar courses.
So here it goes…
Miscellaneous:
Victoria University COMP473 – Formal Aspects of Concurrent Systems:
Good question!
Well, lets start with the basics. My name is Annie Luxton and I’m a developer. Programmer. Scripter. Geek? Whatever.
Anyway… This site / blog was meant to be a place for me to put down some of my ideas and try to actually go through with some of them. I really enjoy discovering new ways of coding cool new things and the web seems to be full of just that.
I currently work as a developer for a GIS company called Critchlow Associates based in Wellington, New Zealand. Although I don’t think I’d ever even heard of GIS before working for Critchlows, I’m actually quite fond of maps now (as you can probably tell by the flavour and probably most of the content of this site). Online mapping seems to have really taken off in the past couple of years and I’m finding it harder and harder to keep up with all the neat stuff people are doing out there. Oh well, who needs sleep anyway?
Please feel free to comment on anything in this site. I’m still in the process of getting it up and running so don’t expect too much just yet.
Right. Enough on me for now. So until another time…