Pretty stoked that I found this park today; I realised after my last trip here that we were staying just around the corner!

I have not been doing particularly much recently – the only other exercise in the last month has been a mountain bike up Makara Peak in Wellington. The hill climb on a comfortable overcast day in Hong Kong took 30min and kept my heart rate above 180!

Many people were walking the tar sealed road that as several picnic areas, only a few ran/jogged. I stopped at a picnic area that also had exercise stations. Visibility was very poor. I am planning to walk to the reservoir at some stage and take a few photos. Perhaps also a picnic.

I am quite dissappointed that I haven’t got my online fitness log book running – these little sessions would look good in there.

You can find me involved with lots of stuff online, here are some of my favourites:

Flickr is my favourite photo sharing service. I’m also quite a fan of their photo map that allows you to position photos of your travels anywhere in the world.

YouTube is on of the video content services that don’t pay for your content – that isn’t google way. But they still dominate online video and you can find most music videos and funny snippets here.

Facebook is the “now” social network, I’m also on Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, MySpace, ShareMyNZ, OldFriends and several others; but most people I know are on Facebook. If you would like to connect please include a message explaining why, it’s usually advisable to only conenct with people you know.

Linkedin is a more professional social network, if you would like to be connected please offer me a job.

Last.fm is a really cool music library that you can use to find hot new stuff or cool old stuff – and to see what your friends, colleagues and random people are listening to; and what you listened to yesterday, this can be used to focus you to new music that fits your tastes, like google search tailors searching to match your clicks.

Twitter was one of the first micro-blogging applications. It doesn’t allow you to use more than 140 characters and it does allow you to SMS updates. Handy for people covering events and has been used in conjuction with Google maps to provide live updates on natural disasters.

Stumbleupon is my favoured bookmarking application, I’ve used others like Digg, Delicious, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0; but Stumbleupon has the quickest tagging mechanism – someone else has already done it. And Stumbleupon has the stumble feature. Unfortunately stumbleupon is unaware that some content isn’t english (though you can select other languages) and everything gets garbled as Latin1.

Create web service to return personal weather station or airport weather station data from wunderground.com.

The web service will return JSON or XML data. wunderground.com API returns XML data.

When a user request weather information for a location, the web service will return the closest weather information for that location that is available. If nothing is available, or the closest is deemed to be too far away, the user will be asked if this is good enuogh and a message will be added to our logs informing the application administrator that closer weather data is required.

If the user, or an administrator adds a new weather station, the longitude and latitude will be added to the database, as with the name of the station, a link, and an ID that will map to a file system location, when it was added and if the last update was successful. Weather stations once added will be updated every 3 hours, 8 times in a 24 hour period. These will be translated into JSON files when requested.

The directory system will be based on weather station ID and the date in the form YYYYMMDD. Each directory will only contain up to 8 XML files, relating to a single weather station and day. Each directory may also contain JSON files. Perhaps a PHP XSLT engine, or C XSLT engine could be used to generate the desired JSON and JSONP files. We may utilise a library such as Xalan-C to generate JSON files. I’ve investigated XSLT solutions and it appears that PHP has suitable XSLT functions. I will modify this procedure, but it shows that the functionality is suitable.

$proc = new XSLTProcessor();

if (!$proc->hasExsltSupport())
{
   die('EXSLT support not available');
}
// Load the XML source
$xml = new DOMDocument;
$xml->load('test.xml');

$xsl = new DOMDocument;
$xsl->load('test.xsl');

// Configure the transformer
$proc->importStyleSheet($xsl); // attach the xsl rules

if(isset($_GET["callback"])) echo $_GET["callback"]."(";
echo $proc->transformToDoc($xml)->firstChild->wholeText;
if(isset($_GET["callback"])) echo ")";

We will be able to resolve the closest weather station or stations to a particular point and (in our user interface) allow a user to select the favoured weather station.

• flickrRSS for WordPress allows a feed of flickr images to appear with very little effort.
• Brian’s Latest Comments
• Related Posts Plugin

This is just a quick post to outline my new years resolutions… which are my first ever new years resolutions in my current 30 years. The following list will continue to be updated as I decide what it should contain:

1. Focus on getting back into shape; I’ve been a little lazy and I’d like to improve. Goal: Build over the first month up to at least 3.5 hours per week of low aerobic exercise.
2. Finish building my fitness diary website. Goal: Prior to April, then I will be able to promote it to an international audience.
3. Give up drinking V energy drinks. They are now ridiculously expensive and I could spend the money elsewhere… at almost $3 a day, it adds up! Goal: Don’t buy V.
4. Promote one of my favourite small local businesses every week on this blog.
5. Provide more positive support and reactions, or more simply: say yes more. Though not necessarily to everything! As in the “Yes Man” movie. Goal: Say yes more often.
6. Spend more time outside! Goal: Difficult to measure. Target the majority of one evening (after work) and one weekend day outside.

Application localisation has caught my interest recently, for many years it was satisfactory to create applications that only understood (or expected) simplified character sets. Even though there were often cases where such an application would fail, where words or names are borrowed from other languages.

The question for me now is “How can I publish in multiple languages?” I have chosen WordPress as my content management engine. Can it succeed internationally?

When you start searching for multi-lingual or bilingual wordpress, you are likely to end up on the WordPress codex pages. You may also be wondering what it means. These pages will show you how to get WordPress specifically in your languages, i.e. German WordPress, French WordPress. They also tell you how you can help and they link to places to go.

The WordPress pages: Translating WordPress and WordPress in Your Language. If your language is not listed in WordPress in Your Language, you can also try the WordPress Language File Repository. I found the WordPress Language File Repository to be the easiest location for retrieving *.po and *.mo files.

*.mo files can be used by WordPress to render your blog in the correct language if a visitor arrives that is not as familiar to your language. They don’t really help you display your blog in a different language, unless you have lots of registered users that use the admin facilities of your blog.

You can create your own *.mo files for plugins and templates, these will be more useful to attract foreign visitors. A useful tool for managing your localisation capabilities is the Codestyling Localization, wordpress plugin.

It is very good at visualising localisation and you can turn it on and off as you please. The process of using the plugin to create *.po files is to painful, unless you have a very small plugin or template.

So how would you create translation *.po files? Go to the WordPress Language File Repository and download the *.po and *.mo files for your version of WordPress and your desired language locales.

I also wanted something for the actual content.
Polyglot2
can be used to work out the users preferential locale and if that is available, display content in that locale. Unfortunately this plugin will only pick up the user locale if it matches a set of prepared locales. The plugin only uses two letter locales, so there are some limitations. You are also forced to write the translations directly into the same post, limiting the number of translations and the size of the possible articles.

A better WordPress plugin for multilingual blogging called Gengo. This tool allows you to manage multiple languages, creating relationships of translation groups. This allows you to produce multiple streams of content from the same blog in multiple languages. If you want to assign translations it is simply a matter of selecting the post that you have a new translation for.

I have created content in the following languages to demonstrate:

• English
• French
• German
• Hindi
• Chinese
• Japanese
• Arabic

I’m really impressed with the design of this bilingual spanish/english magazine http://www.kprensa.com/. I don’t know what plugins they have used. But they have done a good looking job.

Update (2008-12-17): I’ve dropped multilingual support on this blog. I can’t communicate in multiple languages anyway. It was purely a very time consuming experiment, which I will continue to be interested in.

Google has delivered Friend Connect, named very similar to Facebook connect. However the latter appears to be a more useful approach, Facebook allows quick activation of user website accounts using limited Facebook account information. Google Friend connect only seems to allow users to play with widgets attached to the website.

There may be power in that, allowing your website to build its own OpenSocial network, but I don’t see how it enriches any self-respecting website. The google article “A friend connected web” talks up the features, which are cool but specifically targeted at a non-technical audience.