ImageCarousel Mootools Plugin

An image carousel thats really easy to implement.

Demo

ImageCarousel was designed for those that might get a little intimidated with the Javascript side of web sites.

How to Use

1. Copy your carousel images into their own folder inside your project.
2. Copy ImageCarousel.php into the folder from step one.
3. Download and unzip the ImageCarousel files into your project folder. They should unzip into a folder called 'ImageCarousel'.
4. Copy the following code into the head tag of your website.

   <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/mootools/1.2.4/mootools-yui-compressed.js" language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" ></script>
   <link href="ImageCarousel/ImageCarousel.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
   <script src="ImageCarousel/ImageCarousel.js" language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"></script>

5. Copy the following code into your webpage. This will act as the carousel element.

   <div class="ImageCarousel auto" rel="Images/Carousel/" styles="width: 500px; height: 375px;"></div>

   You need to change/check:
   • The 'rel' attribute should point to the folder where you have stored your images. The url should end with '/'.
   • Your images should all have the same dimensions; Check the Carousel 'width' and 'height' match your image dimensions.

Get It

• Download from Mootools Forge
• Source @ GitHub
• Detailed Project Page with Demo

Information Overload

Information abundant: information pools, information pockets, information streams, information databases; Information sources of so many types delivered in so many formats. I have too much information to manage it properly. Well, when I say 'properly' I mean there's too much to remember all of it, digest all of it, to take full potential of all the data being delivered to me.

I am a child of the information age: When I wake up in the morning the first thing I do is get behind my computer to catch up with the world around me. I've got social networks, business networks, email accounts, and am a programmer so have a multitude of other internet services and jobs running on schedules. I need(read want) to know certain things at certain times. If a client has requested my attention via email I need to know as soon as possible. If it's my mothers birthday I need to know 7am in the morning. If my web server goes down, I need to know five minutes ago.

With so many online services and so many of them offering an RSS/Atom stream about nearly everything; An RSS reader does a good job on keeping me up to date with 66.67% of my knowledge source. But even reading my master RSS feed every morning doesnt provide all the information I need, but more importantly it doesnt invoke some simple actions that I find repetitive when I come across certain data.

• I have a facebook account; I want to be alerted of birthdays in the early morning.
  
• I follow some twitterers'; I only want to view tweets that are re-tweeted.
• I have family members on Flickr and Picasa; If they post photos then I want to see them, better yet funnel them straight to my wireless photo frame in one merged Media RSS stream.
• I've got an AreMySitesUp account: I need to urgently know when my servers are unavailable.
• I've got Gtalk, Skype and AIM acocunts...
• I have setup FTP locations that clients drop work in...
• I've got several email accounts...
• I follow several open source projects on forums, bug trackers, and version releases...
• I run several projects and each of those have several checks and balances in place to make sure all is in order.

I could go on, but the point is made. I've got so many sources of information of varying types and each hold a certain level of importance or urgency to me. Now I want a central way to organise all of this; A way to manage and schedule my information.

I am a programmer; I'm going to make something. An information engine. This engine will:

• Store data
• Consume data stream/trigger inputs
• Publish stream/alert outputs
• Provide a management console for all of the above

More on this to come...

The Non Fuzzy Face Cyclist

I'm often travelling around the world in Google Maps Street View. From the Eiffel Tower to the The London Eye. When Street View first hit the Maps product I was absolutely amazed.

Since first reading about all the legal and privacy ramifications of this technology I've had a personal quest to find a person that somehow missed the fuzzy face filter. Up until now it's been a very unsatisfying search - thank you Google; But today I'll be collecting my quest points and moving on. The following cyclists face was found after reading Google's post on their trikes and the new LegoLand footage. Even though its not a fully disclosed face, its the the most clear example of one I have come to finding.

Guess they missed this because of the glasses. Maybe on purpose as well, but if that's the case then I'm kind of surprised because it's surely safer (legally) just to blur faces with glasses or any other obstruction as well.

Some Server JS

Javscript on the serverside,.. it's happening; I'm drawn in by its beauty.

My workplace requires I base our web applications on a Microsoft product foundation. Not that I've got anything against Microsoft (I don't like vendor lock-in, but even so..), I just more prefer some of the non Microsoft founded languages ~ I'm a dynamic language fan. C# and friends are great, but they aren't as vendor neutral yet (I am looking forward to playing with more of the Iron** products they pushing out now; very interesting combo.)

What I love about Javsacript: It tends to be platform, vendor and pretty much all round - neutral. It's a dynamic, flexible and powerful syntax. I'm sold on it. Even better when it comes to web apps, now I'm playing with JS on the clientside and serverside; The consistency is awesome.

I've started building my take-over-the-world-its-so-powerful-framework; and it's in Javscript; On a Microsoft platform... [Awkward silence]

It's still all quite new to me, and I can't quite believe its working so well in our work context. I've basically setup a platform neutral interface of JS objects. I then create all application and framework objects above that. Below the interface sits a layer to allow all of the above to run on the MS JScript engine.



One thing (large thing) I haven't addressed is the ServerJS standard that's in formulation. Someday,.. but for now I'm just playing around. For example; I can now execute code on the server that looks something like this:

function getUsers(type) {
 return $(['getUsers', 'usertype=' + type], function() {
  var s = {
   title: 'Users of Type: ' + type,
   data: new Array()
  };
  db.query('select * from grv_user').each(function(o) {
   s.data.push(o);
  });
  return s;
 });
}

This example function prepares a response object (that will be JSON'ized), reads a list of data from the default database, and handles caching of this result in a tag based cache.

I'm personally quite happy with my new playground; I can squeeze a lot of functionality into a few lines. (Not that that's the point, but my RSI appreciates it). The serverside framework I've put in place includes a stripped version of the MooTools Framework. Fabulous!

Fedora 10 - Geforce 6800

Recently I installed Fedora 10 and ran into some difficulty trying to install the correct drivers for my graphics card - a GeForce 6800. After much searching, and re-installing a couple times, I found these simple steps to be my answer.

Firstly from http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?p=1114769&postcount=1:

su
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i386 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64
reboot

Then of course I wanted the CompizFusion desktop effects.
From http://www.fedoraguide.info/index.php?title=Main_Page#Applications

su -c 'yum -y install compiz-fusion-extras libcompizconfig ccsm compiz-manager libcompizconfig'
su -c 'yum -y install compiz-fusion-extras-gnome fusion-icon-gtk'
compiz-manager

This took my Fedora 10 out the box, from being pretty good to looking flippen great!