My father-in-law, Norman is an experience yachtsman and editor of the Irish Cruising Club’s Sailing Directions for the coasts of Ireland. To promote the books, he decided to produce an online extract for the leisure craft to use who are turning up to enjoy the Galway leg of the Volvo Ocean Race, it would also serve as a prototype for an e-book distribution of the entire book.  As my family’s IT support department, naturally, he asked my advice on producing such an edition.  Having discussed the options we decided a web application wrapped up as an Adobe AIR application.

So to allow Norman to edit and re-arrange the content, I decided to use WordPress to produce the site. As a dynamic web platform, I had to find a way to take the dynamic, PHP, database driven site into a static site which could be packaged up into an AIR application. Actually, this happen to be much easier than I anticipated. A cunning wget script and I had a nice static site to produced the offline application, suitable for yachtsman to use on their boats without an Internet connection.

Full disclosure: I love this show, in my opinion, it is easily the best show on TV. It’s safe to say that I cannot wait for season 6 to start sometime in October.

I’ve just re-watched seasons 1 through 5, and I’m in the process of trying to convince my wife that she likes it too. That way it will be easy to make time to watch it, between feeding twins. Let’s just say she likes her TV a little lighter than this. I should give her her dues, she did watch the first season of The Walking Dead with me, although I think it was just because Andrew Lincoln from This Life was in it.

Yes, it’s critics will say it’s all a bit repetitive, but it’s so well written that it doesn’t matter, I can’t wait to see a rejuvenated Dexter doing what he does best…taking out the trash. Check out the video above to get a feel for the direction of season 6.

The ALAEU represents breeders of Australian Labradoodles all over Europe.  Their brief was to build a site for their members, allowing them to apply for membership, register litters of puppies and transfer ownership of dogs etc.  It also serves as a portal for people looking for a reputable breeder to by a Labradoodle. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed building a site with such an active user base.

As a newly landed blow in to the small village of Pettinain in South Lanarkshire, I though I’d try and make a positive contribution to my community.  So when I read in the community newsletter that the Community Council was looking to put a web site together, I jumped at the chance.

Tora Labradoodles is a small family-run kennel set in the middle of the Scottish countryside, near Loch Lomond, prdoducing UK and Australian Labradoodles and rehoming them with customers all over the world.

I stayed in the luxurious Diamond Court serviced apartments some 5 miles from CTC.  It was an interesting experience getting to work using the Shanghai taxis.  I never thought of it before, but how do you tell someone where you want to go, when you can’t even show them the name of the place written down?

I ended up becoming good friends with one of my colleagues in CTC, named Conan, with whom I still keep in regular contact. While I was there, he took myself and another visiting colleague to on a visit to the nearby city of Hangzhou. Completely different from Shanghai, but still amazing in its own way.