Missing Patrick O'Brian Data

While working on some new data for the Surgeon's Mate I discovered, to my horror, that when I had moved my data model from the old pathalogical per-ship approach to a more sensible per-book version, I lost some data. I thought I had been pretty methodical about moving each of the 4835 map data points from the old system to the new one.

I have all the old data backed up, so when I noticed one of my favorite quotes from HMS Surprise was missing, I was able to write a script (thanks Python) to do an exhaustive compare between the new data and the old. I found my missing quote and a few others besides:

'What were you saying about the Hellespont?' he asked.
'How wide is it?'
'Why, not above a mile or so - point-blank range from either side.'
'The next time we go up the Mediterranean,' said Stephen, 'I shall swim it.'

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Cantabile 2.0

A colleague of mine just released Cantabile 2.0. If you are interested in Virtual Studio Technology Instruments (VST) you should check it out.

VST aside, this thing is a kick ass example of a custom built, high performance, Ribbon based UI

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Patrick O'Brian Mapping Project GUI Changes

I have become slightly stalled on the Surgeon's Mate. The course across the Atlantic is not completely obvious and I struggling to get past some contradictory evidence. I will get there eventually.

So as a distraction I have spent a bit of time improving some things that have annoyed me.

• Moved all the map data into a MySQL database. I should have done this a long time ago.
• Exposing my map data as json objects rather than XML (thanks to my new DB) means faster page load times.
• I have added a Toggle button to the toolbar which hides/shows the header for the map page. More map and less superfluous GUI is good.
• Previously when clicking on thumbnail images in infoWindows opened a separate page, this has been changed to a javascript lightbox to highlight the larger image (and no page reloads)
• I have created a series of static pages based on each map note. This exposes all the content on the site to search engines and also provides a low bandwidth/no javascript experience for users.

Hope you like the changes, I should really get back to Surgeon's Mate (and play less Broken Picture Telephone)

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Internet Explorer 8 Homepage needs some work.

I felt like the IE8 Homepage was a bit incoherent and not exactly selling me on the product.

In the super competitive browser market I was expecting a short, high impact set of convincing arguments for IE8. This PDF download message when I clicked "Why you should download Internet Explorer 8", made me laugh out loud.

Compare this with the Chrome Homepage. It's all about the browser.

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Broken Picture Telephone

For unknown reasons the Earth's oceans are losing water

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