Karen and I went to the Rosie this afternoon for a twenty eight week scan, this was due to a few very minor incidents earlier in the pregnancy. The mid-wifes were wondering why we'd been referred back, as did the consultant who saw us afterwards. We managed to get a few scans of the wee blighter, the one of the face isn't as good as what we saw at the twenty week scan, so we're both kicking ourselves that we didn't ask for a scan of that.
Last week at work I decided that I needed to learn something new, so I downloaded a few libraries from the Apache Jakarta Commons project to have a play. I was trying to figure out what sort of test application to write when I realised that some of the libraries would be perfect in the ImageBank software that I was going to write last year.
So I started to write a new application using a slightly modified Chain of Responsibility (CoR) pattern, where each of the items in the chain work together to produce a result, rather than just cone command in the chain. The result is a very flexible application that can have lots of commands that can be formed into chain to produce differing results. The Commons Chain package has all the necessary classes and interfaces and seems to work very well.
The idea being that you write a theme and then create a chain of commands that produce all the information you need to build the pages in the album. If you don’t want EXIF information then just leave the EXIF command out of the chain. So far I have two chains, one for the application to use and one for generating the album contents for a folder in the album hierarchy.
I was wondering how to produce the HTML pages and was going to use a template and tiles kind of affair. However, this would have required a load of string matching and inserting and I felt that it wouldn’t offer the flexibility that I was looking for. One of the downsides of Album, the software I’m using at the moment, is that the Perl script generates some of the HTML for you, even though you supply the template; I didn’t want that, I want the end user to have full control over the HTML that is generated.
So I started looking at the Commons Jelly package and decided to use it to generate the HTML; I could probably just use Jelly to generate the whole album, but that’s a different matter. So I have a command in my chain that create a JellyContext and executes the Jelly script to generate the necessary HTML. One of the benefits of using the CoR pattern is that I can add more Jelly template each with a command to process it, thus it is infinitely extendable.
The Jelly package comes with a load of tag libraries which are idea for iterating over the collections of images and breadcrumbs that are generated by some of the commands. All in all, it works quite well and I’ve even managed to link the set of chains and commands that get loaded to a particular set of templates, so you can have your Jelly templates as simple or as complicated as you like.
I’m nearing the functionality of Album that I personally use for generating my own online album, which I decided was a good starting point to get the software to. Once there I’ll then add more commands and templates to do the things that I’d like but that Album does do.
I’ve also decided to release it all under the GPL and have decided to make fatboab.org into my software repository. Hopefully sometime over the next couple of weeks AlbumMaker, as I’ve decided to call it, will make it to a redesigned fatboab.org.
Karen and I went to Bath for the weekend and a very nice time we had too. I've never been to Bath before so I was quite looking forward to going as I've wanted to see the Roman Baths for ages. The Baths were great, they would have been better without all the tourists; I hate to think how busy it gets in the summer.
We had a slight detour on the way to Bath as we stopped off at Stonehenge, another place I've always wanted to see. It's smaller than it looks, but it's still an amazing place, it must really have been something when it was complete.
We ate out each night in Bath and the food was pretty good. Bath has a much wider and healthier range of veggie restaurants than Cambridge, in fact Cambridge is totally shite compared to Bath on most levels. On the Saturday night we ate at Demuths a "positively vegetarian" restaurant and it was fantastic. Not only did I have a really smashing Vegan meal, they had decent beer as well; it's a definite must if you're ever in Bath.
On the Sunday we went to Cheddar gorge and visited the caves, which were supposedly an inspiration for part of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I've wanted to see the gorge for a while as it's supposed to have good rock climbing and there were a few hardy souls braving the cold conditions.
Over all we had a nice relaxing weekend away, which will probably be our last before the wee blighter is born in April. I'd definitely go back to Bath as it seemed like a really nice place.
I went swimming this morning before work, it's the first time I've been in nearly two months, I wasn't expecting a lot. The pool wasn't too busy, I only had to intimidate a couple of idiots fanny around in the fast lane for a couple of lengths before they got the hint and buggered off to the slower lanes. It really annoys me people who get in the fast lane and then proceed to swim slower than the people in the slow lane, but enough of the rant.
I was totally knackered after warning up for only 250 metres; I've really lost most of my fitness over the Christmas break. In all I only managed 1650 metre as they called time four minutes early for some reason, which I and a couple of others were a bit miffed at. So it wasn't really the best of starts, but at least it was a start.
So now I just need to get regular again with trips on Wednesday and Friday, although I'm away next Monday, so we'll just have to hope we're into the swing of it enough by then.
On another note the first Triathlon in the Bedford Sprint Series is on the same day as our first baby is due. Now I know that you may a well ignore the due date as the baby is unlikely to make an appearance on that specific day, but it's a bit close to when the baby should make an appearance, which is a bit worrying. So I'm going to try and train like I'm still doing it and then hope that I can take part closer to the time...
I finished reading Irvine Welsh's Porno last night, much to Karen's relief. It was a cracking read and I really enjoyed. Karen wasn't so enthused as I started slipping into a stronger Scottish accent and muttering words she didn't understand, so she's quite happy I've finished it as she reckons I'll be talking normally again...
Karen and I went to Kiddiecare in Peterborough today to check it out as we'd heard it was worth going to. We also thought that since they still have a sale on we might pick something up if they had anything we were specifically after. Now, I'm not the greatest fan of baby shops, but since I'm going to be a Dad, it's one of things that I'm just going to have to put up with.
I've already been dragged into Babies R Us in Cambridge a couple of times and it's not too bad, it's not been too busy and there has always been enough staff on hand to deal with any questions. It's also quite posh looking in that everything is very neat and new, because it hasn't been open that long. Kiddiecare couldn't be different...
As you pull into the Kiddiecare car park it looks enormous, but after wandering around inside it isn't as big as it looks. I think the reason for this is due to it being a big mail order place, so they have a lot of storage onsite so the size of the place is misleading. However, they do have very big selection of goods inside; I've never seen so many buggies in one place at one time.
The down side to having all this stuff is that it's quite cramped with not a large amount of room to manoeuvre about in, especially on a Saturday afternoon. When we got there the queues for the tills and the pick up point were massive and you could hardly your trolley without sideswiping a heavily pregnant woman; it was a complete nightmare.
It also meant that all the staff they had were busy dealing with customers, at least all the staff that we could see, which wasn't many as far as I could see. It did mean that there was no one to ask about the prices of things as half the stuff was badly labelled without a price or only with a price in a package with other stuff. It was all a bit of a nightmare...
So we bought a couple of things, a baby carrier as it was well cheaper than we'd seen else where. A bump pillow for Karen as she's finding the bump is disrupting her sleep. Karen also couldn't resist a bath robe wrap thing with glove, so we got that as well. Once we'd checked out, the queue had gone by this point, I noticed a couple of toys they were doing cheap, so we bought those as well.
It's quite wired having bought some stuff for our unborn child and neither of us really wanted to buy loads of stuff before as you never know. We're getting to the point now where if the shops don't have things in stock it's going to take four to eight weeks to get it, so we'll need to go and get a load of stuff soon, just to make sure we've got it all in time.
I can see that there will be a few weekends ahead that will be spent in baby shop hell and I'm not looking forward to it...
