Month: March 2010

Halo Reach is coming

Halo Reach and its “All-Encompassing Player Investment System”

So Halo Reach the Beta multi-player is just over a month away.

And this caught my eye on the twitter feed as retweeted by @Bungietweets from @TheFeed

http://bit.ly/ciThuW

Halo Reach and its “All-Encompassing Player Investment System” looks quite good, but will be interested to see it in use when the times comes

EASTER, and Shutter Island

Easter is and and Shutter Island was watched.

So its Easter, #SRAcon is next week, and I have coursework to do!

Which means I need to finailize my story board for Motion Graphics (read as start), and work on 360gaming [dot] net which indirectly means work on CarlyonCMS.

Makes me think I should port my site to C’Cms…….

Anyway in recent news, I bought tickets to the wrong cinema so paid to see Shutter Island Twice. What a Monday that was! I was having a bad day, most of it I can’t/should not go into here…..

My brother was up for his 21st Birthday so off we went!

Was an off film, with an interesting story line, and now that I have had time to think about it the Shooting and continuity errors (in many places) make sense.
And interesting and difficult film to understand in places, but that is the nature of the film, since it does deal with delusions, I won’t spoil the story line but the twist can be quite revealing.

Leonardo DiCaprio acted well, a nice down to earth film in terms of special effects, it need a lot of thinking to understand. Tho the acting and dialogue at the end was a bit dodge or so the GF thought.

I enjoyed it, have you seen it? What do you think?

Google Summer of Code 2010

Google Summer of Code 2010 is on!


So, Google Summer of Code 2010 is nearly upon us, the mentoring organisation application period is now open!

Initially been looking at projects I have been involved with before, work on now, or do at the moment, or similar parent orgs.

I’m sad to say that AptitudeCMS, my project last year, is now no more. But its parent org Geeklog is still with us, (AptitudeCMS was supposed to be GeekLog 2).

Geeklog is a PHP CMS, and my main thoughts for going for Geeklog this year is, due to being involved with Aptitude last year, and some of the possible project ideas look interesting and I have some knowledge and expertise on, given that it is a PHP CMS, and they tend to run in to similar problems.

So, just waiting to see which organisations get accepted this year, to fully decide on a project to go for this year. As well as work around my finals for my degree.

So time to break out the Green Tea!

See you in #gsoc on Freenode

#SRAcon 2010

SRAcon 2010

So Its SRAcon again, this year in Nottingham, hosted by FlyFM.

End of March is the time 29th thru 31st, with a nice little trade fair on the 29th, which I shall be exhibiting at as the Chart Show Co-ordinator.

Just been looking thru the schedule, for the two and a half days.

Looks like some interesting stuff… tho techie drinks does still sound like a good plan.

Interesting News, the Administrative Officers are now Appointed, not voted for…

Like last year, I’m currently considering applying for Web and Chart again.

We shall see.

Anyway, see those of you in Nott’s when the time comes….

jQuery Coverflow, my First Plugin

My first jQuery Plugin: Coverflow

So I’ve been working on this for a while, based on a few googles searches (see this post for details.

Thru other posts on this subject I’ve chronicled my work, and youtubed a few videos, I’ve now deployed it and re factored it to a jQuery plugin. And fixed a bug so it works in IE as well as other browsers, was throwing a odd childelement error in IE8 of all things.

So, my jQuery Coverflow is live at the LSRfm.com Podcasts Page, I’ll probably be fiddling with the code locally to tidy it and make it better, but it works quite happily as a jQuery plugin now.

Heres how to use it on your site, if you are so inclined, stay tuned for updates :-).

The Plugin requires jQuery UI for the Slider, and jCarousel for the Flowy-ness, it relies on the jQuery stock animation suite as well.

In the head

<script src="/path_to_js/jquery.coverflow.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

In the Body

<ul id="coverflow">
        <li><a href="/some_link/"><img src="/someimage.png" alt="A Title" /></a></li>
</ul>

<script type="text/javascript">
        jQuery.coverflow();
</script>

Like with any jQuery Plugin you can pass it some options/settings.

  • total_items – total items in the carousel/flow, if 0 auto determines
  • sider_start – the start point, leave null for middle, or number for that number or rnd for random
  • targetflow – id of the ul with the items in
  • sliderflow – id of the div to hold the slider
  • titleflow – id to hold the title elements
  • largesize – size as a int, so 200 for 200px, of the image currently in the middle of the flow
  • smallsize – smaller size
  • speed – speed in microseconds so 3s is 3000
  • scroll – leave this as one
  • visible – how many items to be in the viewing pane at once default 3
  • animation – animation speed, if 0 takes it from speed

Essentially all the needs to be set is the names for targetflow, sliderflow, and titleflow, tho if you use the default names (coverflow, slider, coverflow_title) you don’t even need that.

Things I need to add to the plugin.

Auto generate the slider div if not present and add the relevant css to it.
Do a check to see if the item about to be highlight contains an image or not, and animate accordingly.

In theory this can support any type of content but an item of:

<li><a><img /></a></li>

works best.

You can grab a tar of the file at Coverflow_001 (2781 downloads )

Questsions? Feedback? Suggestions?

Comments below 🙂

Update:

Currently there is a small bug where in some browsers (so far Chrome and Safari), post load and setup, its not sliding to the desired element, the slider is moved, but the carousel does not.