I am really looking forward to going on a little Holiday with Claire, Alli, Lisa, Katrina, Ben, Julie and Sam. We are leaving tomorrow morning to go to all stay in a little cottage in Port Scatho, Cornwall for a week. I am so excited I have written a little song:

We’re all going on a Cornwall holiday,
no more DSL links for a week near Looe,
fun and laughter on a Cornwall holiday,
lots of pasties for me and you,
for a week near Looe.

We’re going where the sauna glows brightly,
We’re going where the pool is blue,
We’ve seen it on the t’internet,
now lets see if it’s tru-ooo-oo-e.

JCALKBJS are havin a Cornwall holiday,
Doing things they always wanted to,
So we’re going on a Cornwall holiday,
Nice tea with creams will do,
For me and you.

Just pray the car gets fixed, it is currently in the garage getting the power steering fixed and we need it to drive there!

“The true Cornish way to eat a pasty is to hold it in the hand, and begin to bite it from the opposite end to the initial, so that should any of it be uneaten it may be consumed later by its rightful owner.” –Cornish Recipes Ancient and Modern 23rd edition with supplement by the Cornwall Federation of Women’s Institutes

Just for a bit of fun… using Google (other search engines are available) search for your name, followed by ‘likes to’ surrounding both by double quotes. For example “James likes to”, write down the first 10 search results. This is what mine came back with:

1. James likes to think of himself as a really splendid engine.
2. James likes to write about a child’s interaction with nature and animals.
3. James likes to travel.
4. James likes to watch fat porn.
5. James likes to bike, hike, and bird watch.
6. James likes to relax by swimming, walking the coastal footpath with Jane.
7. James likes to bring his own style of depression and gloom to Saturday mornings.
8. James likes to call his favorite Bible.
9. James likes to pass.
10. James likes to say, it’s about “impacting minds and hearts”.

Some are very funny especially about me being a really splended engine, although I must point out that I really do not like to watch fat porn!

Go on, give it a go, I would love to hear your results in my comments…

“This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green; Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes” –The enkindled spring by D H Lawrence

I am currently traveling in a mini bus, along with my work team to Nottingham to play in the Virgin Media Touch Rugby tournament, we were all up at crazy early time this morning, it is now 7:56 (according to Chris Moyles, Radio 1) and we are half way up the M1 (You can work out what time we had to leave Basingstoke this morning!).

For the past few weeks we have all been training after work on Wednesdays, now each with finely tuned bodies we (the ‘Data Dawgs’) are ready to win the Touch Rugby trophy!

Touch Rugby is basically a softer breed of rugby, each game is 7 mins long, to tackle you just have to touch the opponent with two hands, it is mixed gender and the pitch is half the size. Never the less it is still a very energetic and fast game, and, after a day of playing we will all really enjoy the relief of a cool pint of beer at the award ceremony tonight in the pub courtesy of the company .

I am a little apprehensive at what is in store in only a few hours, all I need to do is wake up and simply enjoy the sun, remembering to drink lots of water and pace myself. Should be a great day, the team spirit is already high singing rugby songs in the bus.

“If you get there before I do; Comin’ for to carry me home; Tell all my friends I’m comin’ too; Comin’ for to carry me home.” –Song: Sweet Chariot

In my last couple of blog entries I have been bashing MySpace, ranting on about how cluttered and unusable the site is, however MySpace is currently the worlds 5th post popular website, and I can therefore not argue against its technical success keeping up with growth.

Doing a little research into the technical workings behind MySpace I came across a very interesting article in which it discusses how MySpace has had to re-engineer its website software, databases and storage systems to keep up with the huge demands being placed on its computer infrastructure.

MySpace was founded by Tom Anderson in 2003, a year later, in 2004, MySpace had near ½ million accounts which was already proving to test the limits of the single SQL 2003 database server.

The database was split into a master and slave setup, which lasted MySpace through to almost 2 million accounts, although by this point the huge amount of traffic was causing I/O problems, as users read/write to the 2 database servers. Staff re-engineered the MySpace databases once again, they switched the database data over to to a SAN (Storage Area Network) farming out different functions (login, profiles, blog etc.) to different database servers.

Going through various database re-jiggs supporting MySpace up to 9 million accounts, MySpace moved from the previous website software programming system called Cold Fusion to Microsoft’s ASP.NET, this made greater use of server processor power and worked more efficiently.

At 17 million accounts the Myspace staff started investigating database caching servers, put in place to handle frequently occurring queries. In mid 2005 at 26 million accounts MySpace upgraded their database software to SQL Server 2005, although at the time still in Beta, MySpace desperately needed to take advantage of their servers 64-bit processors.

The story continues as the site grew further, today MySpace boasts over 106 million accounts, a number which many corporate websites today never have to bear.

It is very impressive that behind the scenes at MySpace there seems to be a great deal of activity as the servers and databases are being re-engineered to keep up with growth. Although I can not praise MySpace as a teenager would, just this once, I will take my hat off to the way in which MySpace technically kept up with its astonishing growth.

“Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor.” –The Listeners, Walter De la Mare. 1873

Following on from my recent little ‘project’ to try understand MySpace, I am going to look into a handful of web design techniques to try make MySpace profiles look a little less cluttered.

By injecting CSS into the MySpace profile editor it is possible to manipulate the appearance of the page. For the less geeky CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to web pages. It is probably possible to write a whole book on this subject but I am only going to cover a couple of basics in this blog entry.

The background image can be changed by modifying the CSS ‘body’ element. The background image file has to be stored on another webserver and the following code placed in the MySpace profile in the ‘About Me’ section:

body {
   background-image: url(http://www.jlsnet.co.uk/image.jpg);
}

The next task is to tame the MySpace text, headings and fonts. Unlike a webpage which had been designed with good web design practices, the MySpace pages are a mish-mash of tables, random DIV’s and text classes. Each of the headings… Blog, Extended Network, Details, Friends is given a random bunch of class names ‘whitetext12′, ‘blacktext12′, ‘btext’, ‘orangetext15′, ‘redtext’. In order to modify each of these use the following CSS code in your profile:

.whitetext12 {
   color: 000000;
   font-size: 18px;
   font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif;
   display: block;
}

At this point I want to sidetrack to one of my biggest bug-bears of some of the profiles you come across on MySpace… Crazy colour combinations and twinkley things! It is not rocket science that having certain colour text on a background of similar colour will make the text hard to read. I have even come across MySpace pages where in order for you to even read the profile you are forced to highlight the text, this goes against all the rules of Jakob Nielsen (a famous webpage usability expert)!

Finally it is really frustrating when friends deliberately add large images to the MySpace comments box which totally throw out layout and make the page look nasty, the following bit of CSS code will help limit the width of such images:

table tr td table tr td.text table tr td.text table tr td table tr td img {
   width: 75px;
}

Personally I would simply delete these comments for being so annoying, but some people may want to keep them.

I could go on forever trying to “polish a turd” but in my view MySpace is fundamentally flawed from the start and in order for it to look good Tom (the MySpace founder) really needs to read up on HTML standards and start over again.

“I’s kicks my’s brother owt’s of’s da house I’s do’s” –Portsmouth Youth