The blog of Steve Root

  • Good Sailing opportunity!

    i-bc3c592c39309c57bdcbc791f0b48c7b-morningstar-sailingship.jpgI haven’t posted here for a long time as I’ve been busy on other projects, but this is a quick sharing of a very good sailing opportunity (which I’d take up myself if I wasn’t working). Too many words to include on facebook and twitter!

    Morning Star Trust (Sail training ship) Vacancies on board
    7 day or a 5 day sailing trip with us for just 99 ! This is a special price to fill the last few places on the boat

    (From the newsletter I get)…
    – action please: (from Ted) We have some great news, people can come on a
    7 day or a 5 day sailing trip with us for just 99 ! This is a special price to fill the last few places on the boat on the Normandy Wine Run (14th-20th May) and the the Channel Islands Adventure (23rd-27th May).

    The only problem is that people don’t know about it!
    You are by far the most effective way for them to find out. A recommendation from a friend carries more weight than any advert these days.

    Could you make your friend’s year by emailing them or putting out a Facebook message or Tweet, telling them about these discounts and giving them the link to the brochure, which is
    http://www.morningstar.org.uk/images/MSTBrochure2011.pdf
    The brochure still shows the trips at 330 and 240 respectively, so please let them know that about the last minute deal. Thank you. I know you are busy people, but this seems to be the best way to help Morning Star Trust serve people

    (Quick addition from me: I loved sailing on this ship as a teenager. It’s where I learnt about halyards, bowline knots, how to make pasta and cheese and so many other great things and memories – I recommend you all inundate them with bookings right now!)

  • Amazing Stories of Polio – in a shop window

    317-polio1-thumb-300x390-316.jpgOne reason I’ve posted less and less to my blog this year is because I’ve joined a Rotary club. Rotary has been a tremendous amount of fun and given me a real big buzz of feel good factor seeing the difference my effort, combined with others, can make as we ‘Do good things‘.

    The best thing for me this year has to be converting an empty shop window in Canterbury to an educational display about Polio, re-using enlarged images from a comic called “Amazing Stories of Polio”. I’m going to unashamedly claim credit for the idea of this window display, or at least, I joined ideas from other places to come up with this one. However it wouldn’t have happened without the help, both in time, effort and resources of friends who shared the vision.

    We’re not talking a small effort either. From getting permission to re-use the artwork, to finding the shop, to the managing agent agreeing, to the graphic design, the printing of the large panels (which in itself took many hours) and the hours spent hanging them carefully in the window of the empty shop.

    I’ve still a lot of things to write about the window project and I’ll probably never be satisfied with anything enough to put it here in full. So, without further ado, why not follow this link to the artist, Steve Buccellato’s blog to read all about it.

    Other ideas are in the pipeline. I expect I’ll be posting less and less to this blog as a result.

  • Backups for Google Calendar – a ruby application

    I admit I’ve not been so busy posting the to blog this year. One thing that’s kept me busy has been learning Ruby on Rails making my first opensource application.

    I’m a hobby programmer, so the idea of sharing my code is worrying. I’m sure there are lots of errors, bad practice and so on. On the other hand, I had a problem to solve at work and the application I wrote may help others. I use lots of open source applications for home and work so it seems only right to share my efforts with others.

    What have I created? An application that backs up google calendars for all of our office users.

    Why? Because occasionally we delete something we didn’t mean too. For example Mrs X phones up to cancel an appointment with Mr A. Mr A is out of the office but Mr B can edit Mr A’s calendar, so deletes the appointment. Except Mr A had all the Mrs X contact information on that appointment and hadn’t yet created our own internal computer record. We’ve no longer got any way of contacting Mrs X.

    How? The application I wrote reads the Private XML feed of a google calendar. That contains the most recent newly created or amended appointments. I check each entry in that feed to see if it’s new, or if it’s an existing appointment that’s been modified. If they are new or modified, I add them to a database. If they’re old and unchanged, I ignore them.

    One thing to note – it doesn’t restore appointments. As you’ve got all the content though, it shouldn’t be so difficult to add it again should you need to.

    Where to get it? I’ve shared it through github – http://github.com/steveroot/Google-Calendar-Backup

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