Great Christmas Dinner

This weekend we went for the company Christmas dinner at the Galgorm Hotel and Spa over Saturday night which was paid for by the company. It was fantastic the dinner was lovely and metaphors of i-Path as a bus were classic, secret Santa's were given out and much merriment was to be had. I also made good use of the Spa facilities were the best I have been to, though I may give the ice shower a miss next time. That will wake you up with a jolt. A very good weekend, great to see everyone together, and a great time to catch up with some of the more far flung members of the i-Path team. The best part of all though must have been that i-Path paid for everyone's partners to come as well so we were able to put faces to names of the wonderful people we had heard about.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2009-11-30 15:06:41

New Twitter Client Feature

I have recently added a new Twitter Client to my website which I can use to add quick updates. It can easily be viewed from the twitter icon on every page or the twitter link on the front page.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2009-11-06 23:33:58

Gift List added to website

As I keep getting asked and I don't know what to tell anyone as most of the things I would like are quite pricey i.e. a car, an Apple Macbook pro, PS3, XBox 360, etc. I have created a gift list page if you follow the Gift Ideas link at the bottom of the page. At the moment it only my amazon wish list but it should be a good start.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2009-11-06 16:22:55

Buying a House

We have now put down a deposit on a new house in Dundonald, it looks fantastic and it is a new build which is even better. Though as it is still under construction we will not be able to move in until next year, but yay us!

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2009-11-06 16:19:59

Wedding Date Set

Heather and I have decided on a date for the wedding. September 8th 2010, we have booked the church and the wedding venue. The venue will be the Tullylagan near Cookstown in Northern Ireland, this means the big things are all ready out of the way just a few more things and we will be set. YAY 323 days to go.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2009-10-20 14:52:35

Webdings

I have just received an email from the Princes Trust which we are working with to raise money for the people they help. At the bottom of the message was a series of unusual images in green. Curious as I am I wondered what these were, I guessed that they were a special type of font as I could select each one individually and they had spaces like words so plugged them into word and changed the format to reveal the text. It was a standard notice that any attachments belong to the Princes Trust, etc.

I was quite pleased this was a standard message which people do not usually take any notice of presented in a new and novel way so users who were not interested just see some funny characters, and those who are can easily read it by changing the font.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2009-10-08 15:55:13

Working on the Schools Pathology Challenge

A new project in conjunction with Princes Trust, Queens University, and National Pathology Week, the good people here at i-Path are arranging a two stage challenge for A and AS level students studying Biology in Northern Ireland. As Part of the Project we are motivating secondary and Grammar Schools to challenge each other's biology knowledge using our viewing software, the latest version of which should be being released next week after a comprehensive upgrade of functional and design components.

For more information visit the Schools Pathology Challenge website.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2009-09-30 13:49:57

Mobile accessibility

Having bought an iPhone I thought I would see what this website looks like with the inbuilt safari browser especially after the redesign and while the JavaScript to resize to the screen worked as it was meant to I did notice that I could only see the first blog entry as the rest were hidden below in this area with the scrollbar. Then I realised that the iPhone does not support scrolling of internal CSS overflow areas given that it is a touch screen. I had to have a rethink and came up with a new stylesheet for mobile browsers using

<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" href="small-device.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />

Then I realised that the resize script which is really for browsers where the screen size can change during use, a feature which the iPhone does not have, was still firing, as a result the background was being repositioned overriding the new stylesheet, this however was much easier to fix with a little JavaScript.

if(navigator.userAgent){
var agentstring = navigator.userAgent;
if (agentstring.indexOf("iPhone") != -1){
/* do something here as it is not the iphone */
}
}

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2009-09-04 08:52:25