I had an idea a while ago for a bit of fun, and finally got around to making it:
The UK’s current threat level, portrayed by Doomguy.
For those that don’t know, in the classic and mighty first person shooter Doom your health is represented pictorially by an image of the main characters face, as you take damage his face makes it clear. So i wrote some code that scrapes the UK’s current threat level page, takes the current level, and displays the relevant image from one of the following:
Low
An attack is unlikely
Moderate
An attack is possible but not likely
Substantial
An attack is a strong possibility
Severe
An attack is highly likely
Critical
An attack is expected imminently
The Home Office page that displays the threat level is fairly weighty and the scraping code isn’t all that efficient, so it’s fairly slow to load (though does cache the result for 10 mins or so), but considering this is just for fun i doubt i’ll re-write the backend. Sadly considering our current state of affairs it’s fair to say our threat level won’t be changing all that often either.
What i may do, however, is make a nice new frontend for doomguy, in flash, with mouseovers for the other statuses – and animations. I also intend to write one for the American threat level.
Threat level
Content Management Systems
So i’m working on a Content Management System for a small business startup. I’m not really going to go into any detail about who and what because it’s none of your business. I am however going to tell you about some of my thoughts on the subject.
I love administration systems, always have. For some reason i’m wired to really appreciate running systems and services. Providing resources from a technical perspective has always appealed to me. I’ve run servers, worked on games, developed websites and set up infrastructures.
To me it’s all about providing technical solutions to real-world problems. Digital solving analogue, cyberspace providing for meatspace. I enjoy a lot of things for similar reasons. I like firearms because they’re a technical solution to a very valid real world problem (people may want to kill me, i need to kill them first, you may not agree with the rationale, but it’s still a valid problem). I like engines because, again, they’re an example of humans using technological advances to conquer a pressing problem (this horse is nowhere near fast enough!). I read a very appropriate quote somewhere about flamethrowers being awesome because someone once sat and thought:
I want to set someone on fire, but without being close to them.
Awesome.
Anyway. I think i got a bit distracted there, you’ll notice i do that a lot.
Technology, ooh, Content Management Systems, that’s it. Yeah. So i’m working on this new CMS, and because the company it’s for work in an area that’s very close to my heart i’ve decided to do a good job on it. Not to say i don’t always do a good job.. Just that this time i’m doing a good job. I’ve changed my methodology a bit, and deployed some techniques that i’ve been meaning to get going for a long time.
I’ve been working on a form to add team members. It would’ve been very simple to make one big ugly plain HTML form with a load of fields and next to no descriptions.. But i didn’t do that. I spent considerable time and effort turning it into a multi-page form with validation. Good validation too, with appropriate notification and everything.
I even devoted a bunch of time to getting the simple progress indicator buttons the way i wanted them. It’s not often i’m inspired enough to let the user know how much more they have to do ;).
I’m happy with the way it’s been going. Really happy.
Which is kind of good considering i have like two days to finish it.
Tags: administration, analogue, cms, coding, content management system, cyberspace, digital, firearms