www.lewiz.org

Lately I’ve been working with Vlad on designing a proper website for use on an upcoming project.

In the past I’ve used PHP for various different things, including hacking together a simple blog site of my own.  This blog included the classic blog pages, as well as static pages and (theoretically) interchangeable themes.  I built this on top of PEAR and Smarty for PHP.

Never before have I been faced with designing a website that really /matters/.  By this I mean a site that, I hope, lots of people will be visiting.  The website will be an integral part of a greater project.

This website must have a number of different content types: static pages, a ‘blog’ (or similar), a Wiki-style section for easy Wiki-linking, a photo gallery and a rather specialist/custom mapping section.  There’s no big deal here… until you start actually trying to design how these fundamentally different blocks fit together in a seamless and logical way.

We’re coming close to a draft specification and there are a few key points we’ve identified:

• Once implemented, the site has to be low maintenance.  We really can’t afford something full of security holes, or even something that requires any but the most basic maintenance.  We don’t want to have to deal with spam of any form, maintaining links, categories, etc.


• The project as a whole involves travel and so physical locations are interesting to us.  We want/need the ability to provide a geo-reference for every item of content (and potentially categories too) on the site.  This means at the very least a latitude and longitude, but also an altitude where at all possible.


• Latitude and longitude is all very well and good… but what does it really mean?  The website needs to have a fundamental understanding of ‘reverse geocoding’.  Geocoding is the term given to translating a “man-made” location into a latitude/longitudinal value… for example a post code, city name, etc.  Reverse geocoding is a slightly more specialist application of geocoding, and involves (surprisingly) geocoding in reverse.  i.e. converting a latitude/longitude into a readable location.


• Access to the data must be trivial for any visitor.  This largely boils down to search, and manipulation of a structure.  For example a user might want to view all content related to a given physical location… this should be straightforward.

Having identified these problems we’ve come up with a few ideas that we hope to implement:

• We will provide a basic rigid content structure.  This will be at a country name level, e.g. England, Scotland, Wales, etc.


• Further categorisation of data will be done on a ‘free tagging’ basis.  i.e. we will not extend the rigid structure in a hierarchical manner to include, for example, England->Manchester.  In some ways this is desirable but maintenance is non-trivial and the rewards don’t fully match the effort to maintain such a structure.  In terms of the end user, if an entry has been tagged correctly it should be trivial to locate it by tag-based search.


• We will provide two different views on data: ordered by time and ordered by location.  By default the user will see both but more specific views will be available.  These will be as natural as possible.

The things that have really got me stumped are what format we will use for the URLs.  There are many different ways of expressing useful information in URLs but ultimately we will pick just one way.  In the meantime I’m enjoying* writing out URL schemes and considering their various benefits/drawbacks.

Saturday was largely spent catching up on sleep (i.e. in bed).  But I had a really super idea towards the end of the day (i.e. too late to actually carry out said good idea)... I could walk to work.

Right now I live in a town/village called Yately, which is the other side of the A30.  Each day my drive takes me along Cricket Hill Lane and Minley Road to work—in total the drive is almost four miles.

I had a go at sketching a route with Google Earth, Google Maps, etc. before finally asking my Dad to have a look for me (as the shops were shut and I couldn’t pick up a decent OS map).

He plotted roughly the same as I’d come up with in Google Earth, but of course the OS maps have much more information—public footpaths, bridleways and other useful details.

Here’s a very quick estimate of the route using Google Maps… it’s largely inaccurate, but it gives a good idea of the route.  Up top is where I live and Guillemont Park is down at the bottom right.

With the map sorted I drove to work at 4PM yesterday and proceeded to walk home.  There’s a really handy pass-operated gate to get out of the carpark and into the area surrounding Hawley Lake.

Two hours and fifteen minutes later, I arrived home.  I must have covered five or six miles on Sunday, thanks to my utter inability to follow a map.  This isn’t entirely true, as in the woods around Guillemont Park it is very easy to get lost—if you’re on a bike it’s no big deal as the area isn’t that large, you just backtrack and set yourself right.

But on foot you can spend quite a while… but the bigger problem is that you come out at the wrong area, and your whole route is now buggered up.  On Sunday I ended up at the Blackwater A30 roundabout and had to walk back up the A30 to make the crossing over the road into the carpark.  Here I got lost again and ended up taking a slightly different (longer) route home.

With all of this in mind, I set off to work this morning at 6:50AM, thinking it would take me at least an hour and a half to two hours.

In reverse (and with a little knowledge of) the route is much more straightforward.  As I do the suburbia sections first, I’m guaranteed to hit the entrance to the wooded area at the right spot, which makes getting through it much more straightforward.

All in all it took me one hour and ten minutes to get to work—an improvement of well over an hour.

I’ve known about this since just before I went to China/Cambodia/Thailand last.  My Uncle Quentin has signed up for an around-the-world yacht race.  He’s done the initial training/evaluation and is getting ready to take part in the race.

The Hull Daily Mail have an article about it at tinyurl.com/23hjdm

Subway is an awesome place to eat… they make sandwiches that are edible thanks to the fact that they actually bother to ask you what you want to put on it.  In addition to this the BBQ sauce is really nice.

I grabbed my usual footlong BMT on Italian bread with green peppers, cucumber, jalapeno peppers and BBQ sauce, sat down to enjoy my breakfast/lunch and was suddenly reminded of the last time I ate Subway.

Quentin, Xiaoxiao, my mum and I were all wandering around Shanghai on our last day in China.  I was hungry and we somehow managed to convince a taxi driver to take us to a Subway.  I have no idea how we did this as we didn’t know the Chinese name for Subway, or even where it was.

But, anyway, we got there, wandered in and began to order.  The guy that worked there also appeared to live there.  No doubt behind the curtain he had a bed, TV, computer, etc.  This guy was totally weird and found the whole situation very amusing.

As soon as we got sat down and started to eat a bunch of four or five Japanese girls came in.  I can only imagine they found the same taxi driver that we did.

Anyway, these Japanese girls clearly spoke less Chinese than I did, but managed to ask for the toilet (finding the toilet was an experience in itself) and spend a good fifteen minutes deciding what they wanted.  In the end they laughed a lot (classic Japanese schoolgirl) and left… without ordering anything.

To make the whole situation more amusing they all decided that they would take a photo of the Subway once they’d gotten outside.

I can see their photo album now: “Subuwayu… didn’t eat here.”

I’ve been playing with Google Earth for the past two days and I have to say that I’m very impressed.

Thanks to the KML/KMZ overlays it can provide much more useful information than one might initially think.

Some of the high resolution imagery for interesting points, such as the Nepal-Tibet border crossing, is just outstanding.

However, so far one of the most useful overlays I’ve found (actually Vlad found it for me) is a political overlay that shows different countries in different colour.  This may sound basic, but when you’re interested in borders and lots of different countries it is absolutely essential.  If you’re interested follow this link and use the “View in Google Earth” link (Google Earth is obviously required).

Now if only there were an overlay which told me which page of my World Atlas to turn to for some hard-copy cartography!

Note: this is a post I wrote on the plane a while ago… just found it lying around on my laptop and decided to post it.

I’m on the plane now from Shanghai to Schiphol airport in Amsterdam.  Right now we’re about four or five hours in, which means we’re getting close to half-way.  From Schiphol we then have a connection to Manchester and a train to catch to Doncaster.

I’ve arranged for my Dad to drive my car to Doncaster train station to save me an hour on the way back down to London.  Even then I’ll probably not get back home until pretty late.

The last few days have been spent in Shanghai at a nice four-star hotel with a view of the Bund.  It’s all been very relaxed and we’ve spent the time shopping for gifts, doing a little sightseeing and browsing around camera shops.

Last night we took a one hour boat along the Bund to take in the spectacular lights.  This wasn’t too expensive and was well worth the time and money.  A longer trip would be unnecessary.

On this holiday I’ve finished off The Life of Pi; Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami; and just yesterday I read the last page of The Great Gatsby.  All were very good books and kept me interested the full wa through.  I’ll have to start A Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami when I get back into the swing on things.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll get a few photos sorted over the coming weeks.  I’m hoping for a few fairly good ones, but overall I don’t think I’ve done quite as well as previous trips.  Anyway, I won’t really find out until I sit down and sort through them.

Time for a sleep now.  See everybody soon.

I’m back.  All sorts of horrible stuff happened with the return flight yesterday that meant we missed out Amsterdam connection, delaying us by at least three hours and causing us in turn to miss our train to Doncaster.  In the end my Dad and Angie drove to meet us at Manchester airport in two cars: mine so I could then make the drive down to Camberley and another for them to get back.  After all of the necessary shut-eye stops on the way down I believe the drive took me about five hours, leaving me just six hours to sleep off 36 hours of ‘awakeness’ before needing to be getting ready for work this morning.  I’m amazed to say that I managed it and am only now starting to feel very heavy eyed.

It was odd to be back at work, but not quite as much as I might have expected.  I guess the Christmas trip earlier this year helped settle things for me.

I’ve just been browsing through my collection of 1,883/11GB photos I took over the month trip and I’m quite happy with how well I’ve fared.  I had loads of trouble with my D70 this time… the shutter release button (which has been iffy since I dropped it within three weeks of buying it) is very much ready to give up the ghost.  I can more or less get it to focus and shoot in static scenes, but when it comes to capturing that ‘decisive moment’, I’m out in the cold.  Not much fun when you’re trying to capture people’s expressions.

After having seen just how well a Canon EOS 5D performs at high ISOs I’m ashamed to say that Nikon have a lot of catching up to do.  My D70 at ISO400-800 is practically outperformed by the 5D at 1600/3200!  Now I remember why I so very rarely increase the ISO beyond the standard 200.

No doubt it will take me some weeks to properly sort through the photos that I really like, to tweak and adjust them before finally showing them off.  I’m going to do my best to make an attempt at a series of photos for the three-day trip to Angkor Wat; I don’t have thousands of photos to work with, but hopefully with some serious cropping and tweaking I should be able to pull something together.

Some of my washing is in the machine now, after which I’ll have to hang it out to dry.  I’m about to go downstairs to throw some things into the oven for dinner.  Then I’ll likely get a shower and head to bed as early as I dare (I don’t want to find myself waking up at 5AM tomorrow morning!).

After a very impressive experience at the Huanghua section of the Great Wall near Beijing, we yesterday flew to Xi’an in Shaaxi province.

Xi’an is home to the Terracotta Warriors, Big and Little Goose Pagodas and one of the few remaining city walls. Yesterday we managed to nicely visit the Big and Little Goose Pagodas after arriving at Xi’an airport at around 9:30AM (another very early start at the airport in Beijing!)

The Big Goose Pagoda was made more interesting thanks to some impressive woodwork going on to construct a new temple building.

Last night we enjoyed the warmth and top service at the Xi’an Sheraton for a couple of drinks and a decent slap-up meal. Judging by the murmurs it seems likely we’ll be staying somewhere as upmarket when we arrive in Shanghai tonight/tomorrow.

We’re just waiting for our taxi driver to arrive now, after which we’ll be visiting the city walls, drum tower and bell tower before the Terracotta Warriors and the airport.

No massive group photos, but if you look hard enough you might spot two people in this shot of the Great Wall at Huanghua!

This will have to be a very quick entry as I’m wanting to get myself showered and in bed before a trip to the 10,000 Li Wall (The Great Wall) tomorrow morning.

All four of us are back in China, this time in Beijing.  The day we flew from Phnom Penh temperatures soared to 39C!  Landing in Beijing was quite a shock… snow was all over the place and the weather was beyond belief.  Temperatures of around -6C during the morning and evenings, I believe.

Yesterday (our first full day) we headed to Tiananmen Square in the morning for a quick visit.  My Mum and Uncle Quentin then went on to visit The Forbidden City.  Thanks to the shocking temperatures and wind-chill, Xiaoxiao and I decided to sit it out in a nearby cafe.  After all, this would have been my third visit in three years!

Our plan had been to visit the Lama temple (yonghegong) in the afternoon, but we were pretty late after the Forbidden City, money changing, three stops at KFC for warm-up tea and some fun on the subway.  In the afternoon we toured some of the hutong around Tiananmen before retiring to our hotel near Qianmen.  For dinner we feasted at The Raj, my favourite Indian in Guomao at the base of the China Trade Centre tower 1.

Here’s me yesterday.  That’s two hats and a crappy-looking scarf.  Totally unprepared for the weather Xiaoxiao, Quentin and I went out and bought thermal body suits in the evening.  I spent most of today wandering around feeling like Superted.  Still, at least only my face was cold.

Today we managed to hit the sights we’d planned, but unfortunately didn’t make up lost time yesterday.  We enjoyed the sights at the Summer Palace, made interesting by a near-solid lake and snow-topped roofs.  Afterwards we visited the Temple of Heaven.  Interestingly this is my third visit to Beijing but the first time I’ve actually been in to visit the Temple of Heaven—the last two times I got to the ticket office, but the roof was under construction, so I deliberately put it off.

Tomorrow at 9:30 we have a driver to take us to a section of the Great Wall.  This is more-or-less the last thing we’ll be doing in Beijing.  The following day we fly to Xi’an for the Terracotta Warriors at some unearthly hour in the morning (but fortunately not the 4:30AM start we had to fly to Beijing a few days ago).

It’s odd to think I’ll be back at work in about a week, but that’s how things go.  In many ways it’ll be nice to get back to normality, but of course nothing beats the free and easy time you have when travelling around the world!

A couple of days ago we caught the Mekong Express bus from Siem Reap bus station to Phnom Penh. The trip was about six hours long, with a 30-minute stop for lunch half-way. As the last to arrive, we ended up right at the back of the coach near the noisy air-con unit and toilet. This actually wasn’t as bad as it sounds… when the toilet door was opened the heavily talced smell was a nice breath of “fresh” air, and total control over the level of air-conditioning was also nifty.

When we arrived we travelled around a few hotels before settling on the Anise Guesthouse. Unfortunately they only had rooms for that one night, so the following two days have been spent two minutes down the road at the Goldiana Hotel. This doesn’t stop us spending all of our loafing, drinking and people-watching time in the Anise patio bar. Last night we stayed all night and racked up a $50+ drinking bill.

Yesterday we tuk-tukked around the Killing Fields and a couple of museums. My Mum didn’t have the necessary-length sleeves to allow us to get into the Royal Palace, but none of us were really all that concerned.

At the Anise they do some really nice calamari and chips. I’ve had this two days on the run now. By the sounds of the conversation right now, we’ll be going for a short stroll to a different restaurant nearby.

Earlier on today we had a boat trip down the Tonle Sap River, which joined with the Mekong. As far as boat trips go, this was probably the slowest and most dull. We were all glad when it was over and then headed to the central market to pick up some first class tat.

My prize item of tat was a brand new wristwatch to complement my current Chines-brand cheapy-cheap. The new one is pretty nice, if you ask me. Here’s a photo of it:

Just checked the weather for Beijing and it looks as though we’ll be enjoying some 6C weather with mist. Quite a change from the 39C bright sun we experienced today in Phnom Penh.

Anyway, time to do something else now.