I ended up getting a hold of the Sams publication "Teach Yourself Flash 5 in 24 Hours" the other day at the library. I was going to run through it there with my laptop but after about an hour of using the mains power one of the library staff came and told me that I couldn't use the mains due to health and safety policy. Pfff! Do you hear me! Pfff ... so I only had another hour as <skite>the battery only lasts for about an hour because the specs of the laptop are so high</skite>. It seems to be a good book but it's pitched way too low for me so the first few hours have been skim reading.

I brought an Odometer for my bike - which led to all sorts of fun with maths (and probably wildly inaccurate fun, but the numbers seemed to stack up). The topic was how long would it take to ride from here (Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, UK) to Wellington in New Zealand (ie, back home - or at least somewhere where you can get a good latte!).

The diameter of the my front wheel (the one measuring the distance) is 0.652m (circumfrence at the height of the tread is 2.05m - I didn't bother to factor in the flatter bit at the bottom that appears during riding).

So, given that:

1 mile = 780 revolutions.

1.8 miles (from here to my work) = 1404 revolutions.

1404 revolutions x diameter x pi = distance to work ...

1404 x 0.652 x 3.1415926 = 2.882km = 1.797mi (approx).

Squirrels/mile (between home/work) = 3.3333 on a good day (what's this got to do with the price of fish?)

There are 0.867415 nautical miles in a mile, 60 nautical miles in a minute (earth surface measurement, not time) and so therefore 360 x 60 nautical miles around the earth (21,600n.mi or 24,901mi or 39,866km - these numbers are a little bit off the official value of 40,075km but my precision isn't that high)

Hertfordshire Latitude = 51.806N (52 deg 48' 21.6"N)

Hertfordshire Longitude = -0.180

Wellington's Latitude = 41.30S (41 deg 18'S)

Wellington's Longitude = 174.783

Difference in latitude = 93.106
Difference in longitude = 174.603
Ask Mr. Pythagoras the answer = 197.876 (I'm making a big ignorant assumption here that we can do this on the surface of a sphere ... are nautical miles the same at all latitudes?)

197.876 is greater than 180 - so we'll take the excess of and go the other way around the planet (I hope). My new value is 162.124 which is 9727.44 nautical miles which is 11,214.2mi.

Multiply that by 780 wheel revolutions per mile equals 8,747,143 revolutions. Going at an average of 8.9 miles per hour (average speed of six 1.8mi trips to or from work) it would take me 1,260 hours to ride home (or 52 days non-stop).

Mail your corrections to

I use Gallery 1.3x to drive my photo gallery. There's about 284MB of stuff in there at the moment and I need to go through and resize it all sometime. I just came across this great script by Beckett Madden-Woods which will resize photos in your gallery. I haven't tried it yet but the README looks like just what I'll be needing.

>> http://www.beckettmw.com/downloads/myresize-TEST-SITE/

Right, that's it! You've all gone by long enough in blissful ignorance. I've started a gallery for my POVRAY images. Check them out here if you give a monkeys...

Right - that's it! I'm going to the library today with "laptop in hand" (players of C&C Generals, Chinese Campaign will get that reference) and I'm going to learn Flash. I know that you can use the tutorials in Flash itself but I dunno, there's something about them (and quite possibly me) that makes them hard to use. I don't understand it. But anyway, we'll see how we go ... don't expect miracles.

It's not the easiest form to fill in but it's detailed! You can find the official sunset and sunrise time for anywhere in the world at any time you like at http://www.mindspring.com/~cavu/sunset.html.

http://www.rain-street.org/fightcrime.htm

The only way a Guru is supposed to be up at 7:15am on a Sunday morning is if he has had an excellent coding session. Rising at 7:15 is not the way of the Guru ...

[edit] Ok, well it turns out that it's really 8:15 because Britain has just changed from BST to GMT (ie, we're heading into Winter), but even so .... [/edit]

You think you're a MS Office gunslinger? Try the MS Office Quizzes - then we'll see how quick on the draw you are.

Linda downloaded Maguma Studio (www.maguma.com) the other day. It's an editor for PHP that has integrated debugging and code completion. The price is right too - it's only 59 euro for the "Pro" version which has heaps of features. Oh, and wait it gets better ... the free version is uhh ... free! It's well worth checking out if you're a POTE (plain old text editor) developer.

Your favourite search engine is also your favourite calculator. That's right, Google has got a calculator feature! (see http://www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator). You can type in "2*4+50" or even "36 nautical miles in centimetres" and it will convert it for you.

The Concorde Supersonic Passenger Jet flew it's last trans-atlantic trip today. I found this good site with full size photos on it. Mmm, slurp the goodness...