Author Archives: Joseph Southan

About Joseph Southan

Full stack software engineer. Follow me on Twitter @JoeSouthan.

Oh the weather outside is frightful

SouthanUK General No Comments

Hello all again, sorry for the blip in the old posts, many things have been happening in my life.

Had a nice big pileup of work to do at University that I’m slowly getting through so I haven’t been able to post.

A little status update;

All of my hate

All of my hate

  • Considering what to get this Christmas. Any thoughts on the Amazon Kindle anyone?
  • Still watching my considerable amount of anime that I usually do. Some of my current ones are;
    • Star Driver – Full of various amounts of ~fabulous~
    • Shinryaku! Ika Musume [Invade! Squid Girl!] – A very cute anime about a small squid invader, full of cute.
  • At this very moment I’m stuck in the LRC in my Uni trying to finish a bucket of work that has suddenly piled up.

So there you have it, a small snippet into my life.

More… eventually…


Its a Google life

SouthanUK General No Comments

When I got my HTC Desire a few months back, it truly revolutionised the way I ran my life and how I interacted on the move.

 

ispi012369 Back on my old Nokia N95, the limitations of the Symbian operating system and the lack of any proper push email service really stifled what I could do with my phone. Sure I could view Youtube [When it decided I could,] and surf the web [with it crashing every now and again], but there was no proper integration with social networking services. The Facebook “application” was just a link to the mobile version of the site and Twitter was nowhere to be found.  Here ends my Nokia rant.

 

google-android-logo The HTC Desire, from the box, was such a refreshing experience. Things just worked, everything flows, applications talk to each other and Android’s eyecandy really helped to set it apart from my old Nokia.

 

Now to the main point of this post, Google’s integration in this phone. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad thing at all! It just works. I have all of Google’s services at my beck and call at any time. Push GMail to my phone, Google’s Calendar service in the phone’s calendar, Contacts synced with the other services Google offers and my Youtube with its favourites. Well. Google Docs is missing at the moment, but I suspect it will appear very soon.

 

I write this post because I was imputing in my timetable into Google Calendar and totally forgot that I had my calendar on my phone synced with it, 10 seconds later I look at my phone, bam, there it all is, ready to go.

 

It makes me wonder how much Google does run my life…

This is becoming a habit.

SouthanUK General No Comments

Hello all. Yes I seem to have, once again, neglected my site.

 

However, now its September, I once again feel the need to blog something.

 

Sitting here on my lunch break typing on my HTC Desire at this very moment, so I will keep this short. Plans for Sept? Doing a fair bit of cover at work. Ooh I’ve nearly been here 2 years now, pleased. What else? Got a party on Sat with my good friend Loz. Looking forward to that. And finally going back to university later this month.

 

Must get back to work. Ta ra.

GEF #20: British Grand Prix

Google Earth Friday No Comments

This week, although its a… week… late, is the British Grand Prix, held at the Silverstone Race Circuit in Silverstone, Northamptonshire, England.

 

Held at the prestigious race track for the best part of 23 years, the track has seen many redesigns over the years leading for a more challenging race track and a better race experience for all.

 

Although the winner last weekend wasn’t a Brit, it was still a great race to watch nevertheless. Lets just hope one of the two can do it next time.

 

Would you look at that, its a Wikipedia Quote:

Silverstone Circuit is an English motor racing circuit next to the Northamptonshire villages  of Silverstone and Whittlebury. Nearly half of the circuit is across the Northamptonshire boundary in Buckinghamshire. […] It is best known as the home of the British Grand Prix, which it first hosted in 1948 and which has been held on the circuit every year since 1987.

[Wikipedia]

Download the file – (Only once! It will update every Friday)

Make sure you have Google Earth

Well that was weird – WordPress encoding

SouthanUK General No Comments

Seems the site decided it was time that it shouldn’t encode the site properly.

utf8-whatisthat

Since Southanuk is a relatively old WordPress installation [Around 2006] it was using an old character set, namely latin_1. Converted it to UTF8 and all is now good and properly displaying. Have a few celebratory ‘ , – s.

 

For others having the same problem with WordPress not encoding pages properly, I recommend the bbWP2UTF8 plugin. Its very simple to use and is a lot easier than this method, although saying that, it may work if the plugin doesn’t.

[edit]

Well something went wrong very shortly after I had posted this, post numbers weren’t auto-incrementing. Should be all fixed. Also discovered a very nice MySQL command to help convert those troublesome characters to UTF8:

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME = replace(ROWNAME,'’','\'');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'…','...');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'–','-');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'“','"');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'â€Â','"');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'‘','\'');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'•','-');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'‡','c');

[Source]

GEF follows shortly and possibly something on Monday if I can get it to work.