So, it turns out that I’m getting into this blogging thing!

I know I’ve have my moments where I haven’t blogged anything for a while and then suddenly there’s a whole rush on things, but, as the title suggests, I’ve started another blog!

Why? Well, basically, because I can.  The very first post on the new blog explains in detail as to why I wanted to have another blogging area, in addition to this Baby Blog, but the short version is that I wanted to be able to blog about things other than specifically baby-stuff, and have tried that in the past on here before and felt it wasn’t the right place. An example of this, is the posts about backing up photos, or using online services to host pictures, etc. These were all related to Jack, as they are photos of him, but were a bit… techie.

It’s over at http://brettrigby.blogspot.com and there’s a few posts there already, with a whole load more in the pipeline.

But, for the record, I do intend on writing more blog posts for the Baby Blog.  It’s just now, I’ll be able to separate out the geek from the baby and have them both out there, but if a post happens to cover both areas, I’ll either post it on both blogs, or will heavily link to it, so it’s easy for you to get at.

If you’ve got nothing else better to do, please have a look. Despite it’s ‘geeky’ sub-title, it’s not aimed at blowing people’s mind with techie info (too much!) and if it does, simply skim over that blog-post and there’ll be another one on there one day that you might like.

Let me know if you start reading it, as I’m curious to hear your thoughts on it.

Ok, this post might be a little geeky for some, but it’s all in the cause of the baby. Honest.

I’ve been re-working a photo album for Jack that I made earlier in the year, using a Microsoft tool called Deep Zoom Composer. 

Basically, the result is a wall of photos that you, as a visitor to the site, can zoom right into any of the pictures, and move the wall about by simply dragging it with the mouse.  It’s really clever and the results are fantastic.

You need to have Microsoft’s Silverlight installed in order to be able to view it, but this is a quick and very easy thing to get installed, and once installed, it stays there for the next time you need it, very much like the Adobe Flash Player does.

The Hard Rock Cafe chain used it a year or two ago to show-off more of the memorabilia that they’ve collected over the years – have a look at their site to see exactly what I’m re-creating here, but with photos of Jack instead of electric guitars and leather jackets. When you visit their site, just double-click and drag the main section of the page.

What I’ve done, is created a blank project and then simply gone through our millions of photos of Jack and dragged several from each collection into the library inside Deep Zoom and then started to arranged them however I liked.

I’ve gone for a time-based approach, meaning that the older photos are nearer the bottom, with the latest being right at the top.  It works quite well, as by dragging the wall up/down, you can really see how much he’s changed over the past months, etc.

I haven’t added all of the photos that we have of Jack, as that might be silly, seeing as we do have literally… lots.  But so far, I’ve added 327 high resolution images. The higher the resolution, the better the result, but the bigger the output; last time I did this, I added about 85 photos and that resulted in two thousand output images, as the program generates different ‘layers’ of each image, making the total number quite high.  I dread to think how many I’ll generate with this one.

The other problem, is that ideally, for you to be able to see it, I’ll have to upload the output webpage and all of the output images to my webspace… So depending upon how many images are produced and what the total size is, will depend on

     a) how long it’ll take to upload

     b) if i choose to upload them or not.  If not, I’ll try to reduce the output quality to get a manageable size, in terms of disk space on the webserver.

But, for the record, the whole program is done in a point-and-click-style, or WYSIWYG if you please.  Either way, it’s very easy to use and it’s also free to use.

One thing I have noticed, is how much difference the number of megapixels on a camera can make to the photographs;  The smaller camera we have is what we’ve had for a little while now, which I think it’s a 3 or 4 Megapixel Canon camera, and takes some great photos, but also has the benefit of being pocket sized, which is brilliant.  The newer one that we’ve had since March this year, is a 10 Megapixel Sony DSLR camera and is a much bigger and bulkier camera, but the file size of each photo is much bigger, because the quality of the photo is higher, which means that the amount you can zoom into those pictures through Deep Zoom is certainly noticeable.

Already this photo album is out of date, as Claire’s been taking yet more photos on both cameras during the day, but I’ll try and keep this all up-to-date.  It’ll be available on Jack’s website in the next week or so, depending upon how long it takes to finish. 

One thing is worth noting though, this many images in one place can be a little worrying… My PC is at present only processing a preview of the output, and just to do that, both cores of my processor are maxed out at 100% usage and have been for a while… This, in layman's terms, means that the computer is working *very* hard to do whatever it’s doing, so if you’re going to try this, the better your PC, the quicker it does things like this.  I have an Intel Core2-duo 2.66Ghz Dell PC with [only] 4GB of memory and it’s doing ok. The newer PCs out on the market now are being sold with quad-core i7 processors, which must love stuff like this, but I think they’re only available for the uber-geeks at the moment… (naming no names!)

But for a free piece of software that has truly remarkable results that pretty much anyone with a [decent-ish] PC can do, I think it’s absolutely brilliant.  But that’s just me.

Update: I’ve just finished exporting the project, and it’s produced a staggering amount of images… 59,800 to be precise, and weighing in at 885 MB in size! I don’t know how long it’s going to take to upload the best part of a gigabyte of information to a remote webserver..! Blimey.

It’s fair to say that we have taken a number of photos of Jack already. If anyone has been around to visit since he’s been born, we have tried to get a few snaps of them with him, as there’s no cost to the photographs themselves, and they’re an instant memory for many many years down the line, providing that the photo files are still around!

I have recently got a Digital SLR camera and have been taking some fantastic photos of Jack, whilst at the same time feeling a member of the paparazzi, which is good fun for me, not-so-good-fun the person in front of the camera! Either way, the quality of the photos are immense, as it’s a 10.2 megapixel camera, compared to the 3.2 megapixel point-and-click camera that we’ve been using for the past couple of years. When we had that, the photos that it was creating was fantastic, so it shows that when you think things can’t get much better, they do!

We still use the point-and-click camera, as the size of it means that it is pocket size and much easier to carry around.

The photos from either camera are constantly uploaded for family and friends to my Skydrive account, mentioned a while ago here. 

I have just checked our photos folder, and we have currently 869 photos of Jack and he's only 9 weeks old! Blimey!

Not long after starting this blog, I also created a website for Jack – not for him to use (as that is just silly), but more for our friends and family to be able to see how he’s getting on. I thought I’d write something here about it, explaining a little about it and some of the online services that I have used to make it work.

There are websites that are designed for new parents to do a very similar thing to what I have done, such as those at mytinybaby.com, but even though they are free to have and to use, I can’t help but be a little cynical about why they’re giving away such a service for free – are they selling on your personal details to third party companies, for the purpose of marketing more baby products? Who knows. Who cares? But me having a personal interest and the ability in doing this stuff, I thought I’d give it a go.

Windows Skydrive
The ever growing collection of photos of Jack are being stored and managed on the Windows Live Skydrive website – this is an online storage area owned by Microsoft, that is available to the general public. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you now get 25GB of free online storage space (it used to be just 5GB) to use for photos, files, documents or whatever and you can also specify whether you want these files private or publically accessible. The idea is then that you can take a photo album (or whatever) and make it available to the people you designate, whether that is the whole world or selected individuals. I chose to make the images I put up online available to the public providing that they came from a particular hyperlink which contains an encrypted key, meaning if you don’t have the password to the website, you won’t have access to the page that contains the link to the images on my Skydrive account.

Originally, I did set out to make myself a online photo storage area directly as part of the website, but why reinvent the wheel just for the sake of it? Skydrive does a great job of holding the photos, and even allows Claire and I to grant other people the access-rights needed to upload their images to our storage area, if need be.

Uploading photos to Skydrive is really easy, i.e. 'drag and drop' easy. The images are uploaded quite quickly and then the various thumbnails, etc are made automatically and without delay, they are available online.

YouTube
The videos available on the website are held by those nice people at YouTube. Basically, I have created an account and uploaded the videos and simply dropped links back into the website that kicks off the video. As YouTube records the number of times each video is played, by periodically visiting the YouTube site and signing onto my account, I can see the hit-count for each clip.

Uploading video clips to YouTube takes a lot longer to do, but that is simply down to the fact that video files are significantly larger in size than photos, and depending upon the length, quality and file format, the file size can vary quite a lot. But I do have to say that despite YouTube being an extremely popular website, I couldn't find the link to begin with that uploads the files... maybe it's just me, but if I couldn't find it, being a geek n' all, I'm sure other people might have backed out by then.

The videos on YouTube are actually meant to be public and shared from the start, which is a little bit against what I have been trying to do with the photos and other content about Jack, but I’m using YouTube in a slightly different way. I have created an account but in a random name that does not link back to anyone particular and have uploaded the videos under this name. The videos are not tagged with anyone’s names or details, and so the videos are just of ‘a baby’ and possibly ‘someone else’ in the footage too, so if someone was unlucky enough to stumble upon them whilst surfing the wide range of videos on YouTube, they wouldn’t necessarily know this was us and our baby, etc.

On Jack’s site, there’s a little slick animation that goes on when you click on one of the videos, which makes the video ‘appear’, but this is just little Javascript ‘lightboxing’ that goes on for effect.

Jack’s website
I made the website itself in classic ASP (Active Server Page for you non-geeks), which basically means the web-server builds each page before sending to you as a visitor to the site (potentially allowing each visitor to see a totally different page, based upon data, the date and time, etc., if need be). The fact that is was an ASP site meant I could implement the password-protected element of the site, which stops people who are just surfing the ‘net the find the photos etc.
The mechanism for the passwording was already in place, as I made it all years ago for the same purpose but for our wedding photos. So, this time around, I wiggled a few wires, pulled a few plugs and was able to reuse it for this.

This website is actually a first for me in a geeky way, as this is my first (proper) CSS website! – The website uses clean and compliant CSS to display itself and *should* be able to be displayed on a multitude of devices, such as mobile phones, notebooks, etc., in a much clearer and accessible way compared to the good ol’ days of making a website with a million nested tables to get image exactly where you needed them to make the website look correct. One false move or a dodgy sized screen to view it on, and the whole thing goes to pot...

I'm not really one to blow my own trumpet, but the result is not a bad effort. The website needed to come together fairly quickly, as I started making it all literally a week or so before the due date back in January! I’ve been back in and modified a few things around a little here and there when I've had a chance, but all in all, I’m quite pleased with it.

When we were in hospital, the midwives instructed us to keep an eye on the quantity of milk that Jack has and to take note of them, as at this point, he wasn’t breast-feeding properly. Well, take note, we did. I say ‘we’ in the lightest of sense, where I clearly mean ‘Claire’, as she ought to take the credit for doing it. Either way, we have a notebook that is located near the fridge where the milk is kept, and, after Jack has finished with the bottle at the time, we note down the time and quantity under a heading for that day.

Well. This was fine by itself for a little while, this notepad. Innocently collecting data about the child’s feeds... until the other day when I had to type it up into Excel.

I thought about getting this all typed up whilst driving home one day from work, with the wonder in my head as to the running total that Jack had consumed, but also that Claire had produced, as only on Jack’s first day did he have formula milk.

The typing took about half an hour and I can confirm that as of Jack’s four complete weeks outside the womb, he has drunk over 16 litres of milk. 16 whole litres, or 16,000 millilitres, fed initially at 40 millilitres, going up to the 125 millilitres that he’s having at present. Now – it’s easy to play this quantity down, saying it’s only 16 litres of milk, but it’s actually 16 litres of booby-juice that Claire has produced and has only produced it because of Jack... what I mean, is that this milk has come from Claire and is, I believe, the best stuff that Jack could have, compared to formula milk or anything else that you can buy at the supermarket.

That’s almost half a tank of petrol in my car...! If that was 16 litres of petrol instead of milk, I could get to work and back on that for over a week, and yet this white 'milk' stuff is coming in quantity from my wife, to be lapped up by our baby. Madness.

Now – what computer geek would I be unless I had drawn a few graphs? Not really being a whizz with Microsoft Excel, I have tried to draw a couple of graphs showing the times vs. quantity that he’s had and it’s fair to say I’ve fluffed it a little, but it’s there in essence.

Incidentally, we are able to know how much milk that Jack is having because of Claire has expressed it and we’re able to measure it in handy feed-sized bottles with markers on the side. How people who breastfeed directly are able to know how much milk a baby has had at any given time, is beyond me. How can they draw fancy Excel graphs!?!

If you're able to do something a little more constructive in Excel and you fancy drawing me a better graph with the data, drop me an email and I'll send over the Excel file - if your graph is better or more colourful than mine, I might just come back here and retro-fit it into this post!

Since little Jack has arrived, our digital camera literally has not stopped work. From day one, we have been trying to take lots of photos of him whilst he is young, as we know that he will grow up very fast and will have wished that we had more memories of him before he gets old enough to talk and spend money.

Because of the mass of photos and the worry that they’ll be lost or damaged, I have been going a little OTT with trying to make backups of them recently.

Several years ago, Claire and I went for a holiday of a lifetime to see Niagara Falls and as much of Canada that we could cram in during our visit. The photos were fantastic – some taken in a helicopter over the Falls and everything. The only problem was, that after we had been home a little while, I hadn’t made a backup of them onto DVD or anywhere else for that matter, and the hard disk-drive on my PC instantly died after a spike in the electric hit my PC and everything on it was fried. At the time, I looked into having a professional company look at retrieving the data, but the cost was going to be phenomenal, so decided against it in the end, which is a shame. My uncle in Wales even tried to recover data from it for me, but it was pretty much a write off as far as I was concerned.

Since losing the photos, I have always tried to make sure that our work and photos are backed up in at least one location. (I am not claiming that my backup routine is infallible, but I think that I sleep a little happier at night knowing our memories are backed up). I explained what happened to a man from Microsoft once, and he said that a little healthy paranoia with regards to data backup is a must, otherwise accidents will happen like that. Too true, but I've already been caught out by it.

Almost all of our important files and folders are now stored on a server in the house - this means that Claire and I can swap computers if need be, and still have access to our own files and folders, as well as share access to items that are common to the both of us, such as the photos and videos.

Inside the server, there are 2x hard disk drives in a RAID-1 fashion, which means that one hard drive constantly ‘mirrors’ the other, so that if one of the two drives fail, then the hope is that the other is still ok enough to get access to the data on it.

Incidentally, the space available on the server was getting quite low recently and so I have just invested in 2x 1 Terabyte drives (aka 1000 Gigabytes) to bump up the space on the machine. That should keep us going for a little while...

But that doesn’t actually make the backups safe; what if the server melts the drives in a burst of heat or electric spikes, or whatever? So, in addition to this, the entire server is backed up each night to a 500GB external drive - if anything should happen to the server, I would hope that I will be able to restore the entire machine using this external drive. (Periodically, the photos and other data is also dropped onto DVD media just in case, but this is a slow process as the space on a disc is limited.)

I also have a SCSI DDS-3 12/24 GB tape drive that I was trying to use to backup the data from the server onto, but it’s amazing how quick you store more data, especially when the space isn’t a worry. The ‘12/24 GB’ bit above means that you can store 12GB uncompressed and 24 GB compressed on each tape, but even getting the absolute maximum of 24GB on a tape just isn’t enough, so I’ve had to remove this from the server box, which is a shame, but at least it saves me from changing tapes each day – something that I left behind when I changed jobs at the beginning of last year!

One more step, was to get the photos of Jack off-site and onto the web. This is partly for the purposes of another backup, but it also serves as a means of sharing the photos with our friends and family members, regardless of where they are in the world. So, I set up an account with Windows SkyDrive, which is a Microsoft Live website, whereby you get a whopping 25GB free storage space, which is as secure and private or public and open as you’d like.

Is that it? For the moment, but I would like to take this backup thing a little further and get a machine set up at my parent’s house whereby I can automatically upload files to, in exchange for them automatically uploading to a space on my server for their files, but this is going to take a little work, as I'd like to make the software to do that myself.  But with a baby in the house, it may not be just yet..!

The moral of the story that I'm badly fluffing together here is that not backing up data in the past has really caught me out - Niagara Falls will still be there in many years to come; photos of children can't easily be replaced, but they can be restored in the event of another drive failure.  If my previous failings will make you stop and think about your photos and files that you don't want to lose, then great, do something about it!  Even if it's backing up your iTunes folder of all them mp3 files that you've spent a fortune on, back it up!

I have started to use Twitter, mainly to see what it's all about and how it can be useful, fun or interesting in normal life.

From what I have found out so far, Twitter is a free messaging facility online, which your 'followers' can be updated on what you're doing at that time. Sort of like a mini-blog, as each 'tweet' (a message) can be a maximum of 140 characters.

When you first create an account, you have no 'followers' and you follow no-one, so it's all a bit boring. So, the key to getting started is to find someone you find interesting and follow them - i.e. you find their account and click the follow button to add them to your Twitter account. This means that whenever that person 'tweets', you'll get that message either on your PC, mobile phone/iphone/etc. Just because you decide to follow another person on Twitter doesn't necessarily mean that they'll follow you back; they might not even know who you are!

According to Twitterholic.com, Barack Obama is the most followed Twitter user with over 304,000 followers. CNN Breaking News is second with over 237,000 followers and Stephen Fry is third with over 216,000 followers. Britney Spears comes in fifth, would you believe?

I have an HTC TyTN II mobile phone and have installed TinyTwitter on it, which is a Twitter client application. There are plenty of Twitter client applications to chose from, but I got on ok with this one, so will continue to use it until I find something better. On my desktop PC, I have downloaded and installed Blu, another Twitter client, but one that is visually stunning, as well as being an easy and intuitive application to use.

A few people at work had already been using Twitter and so we have all 'followed' each other, meaning I see their tweets and they see mine, etc. But knowing what to tweet about can be a bit strange at first, and why I have mentioned about this on my Baby Blog, is because my life at the moment is consumed with Jack and keeping him (and his mum) happy, and so the last few tweets appear to be based on that. That's not to say that I'm flogging everything out of this blog and using Twitter to keep harping on about it, but throughout the day, as different things happen, I have been trying to get into the swing of things with Twitter and you only do that by joining in and sending tweets out about something. So, I have been.

If you're already on Twitter and you want to add me, my username is (cunningly) brettrigby. If not, and you want to get yourself and account, just go to the Twitter site and sign up for free.

Although this isn’t directly related to babies, poo or the like, it is do with money (something that I’m learning each day that this baby is going to consume by the bucket load!)

Someone at work told me about Quidco.co.uk, which is a money-back co-operative website, which means that you get back a percentage of the money that you spend with a particular online retailer.  Quidco is one of a handful of sites, which are becoming increasingly popular, and all do this by allowing you to sign up and use their site as a portal to click-through to another online shopping website.  Once the sale is complete, then you get a proportion of your spending back every time you shop, normally between 4-10%, depending upon the retailer’s arrangement with Quidco.

Online advertising has changed in the last several years and now many online shopping sites pay a percentage of the sale to the website that originally referred the customer to them in the first place, rather than to pay for online advertising in the first place.  Quidco.co.uk is one of a handful of websites that allow the public to sign up and use this method as a means of getting cash-back from their online purchases.

Once signed up and logged in, simply search for the name of the online retailer, e.g. Kiddicare, and Quidco tells you up-front what the cash-back rate is from Kiddicare (normally expressed as a percentage) and provides a link to their site. 

Kiddicare, at the time of writing this, pay 4% cashback on orders placed via Quidco, providing that you use the link Quidco give you and you do not close the web-browser before completing the transaction.

The list of other online shopping websites that are available through Quidco is amazing.  As this blog has a baby-orientated outlook, Mothercare are currently paying 5% and Early Learning Centre are currently paying 4%.  But don’t think that Quidco is limited to baby sites, as lots more big name companies are on there, such as Orange, ebay, HMV and so on.  Although 4 or 5% doesn’t seem much on a £20 online order, but it all adds up and the larger orders can be swayed from different websites/suppliers offering differing amounts on Quidco!

Since March 2008 (when we first started using Quidco) until now, Claire and I will have received £402.61 back from purchases that we were going to place anyway!  Whether this was buying cds or dvds online, ordering a new mobile phone contract or even a new cot for the baby, if we could use Quidco, we did.

What’s the catch? Well, Quidco doesn’t really have any bad catches to watch out for.  They do charge an annual administration fee of £5, yes five whole British pounds, but they take this as the first £5 that you earn each year.  i.e. If you start in January 2009 and get £50 cash back from your online purchases, then Quidco keep the first £5, meaning that there’s £45 left to transfer to your bank account.  If you then accumulate another £30, say, then you’ll get the whole £30 back, as you’ve already paid the fee for this year.  Then, come January 2010, they’ll take the first £5 of next year’s money. Simple.

The time that you can expect to receive your money back from the online website that you buy from can vary, so don’t expect it instantly.  Also, Quidco only pay the money owed to you once a month.  But then it's money that you're technically getting that you wouldn't have had before, so it shouldn't make a big difference if you get it a month or two later.

If you're a computer geek like me, you may know that when big companies like Microsoft develop computer software, they give them codenames.

If you're not, then basically, project codenames are the names by which the project is referred to by all concerned, until the the 'final release name' is announced shortly before the product appear on the shelves.

Such as..?
An example is that of Microsoft Windows XP - it's codename during it's development was 'Whistler', which was named after Whistler, British Columbia, where design retreats were held. So, when 'Whistler' was very nearly finished and ready for release to the world, it was announced that it would be called 'Windows XP'. (More here)

So, as I'm a software developer, and technically speaking this baby is a project of ours (albeit a life-long project!), I thought it would be a good idea to give the project a name. Hence, Juniper appeared.

Why Juniper?
Good question. Sadly, it's not named after a ski resort in British Columbia; It's actually one of the ingredients in the Carex foam soap wash in our bathroom, and it didn't sound gender specific, as at the time, we didn't know if the baby was a boy or a girl. T'is true. Daft, but true.

It turns out that, according to Wikipedia, Junipers are coniferous plants in the genus Juniperus of the cypress family Cupressaceae. Depending on taxonomic viewpoint, there are between 50-67 species of juniper, widely distributed throughout the northern hemisphere, from the Arctic, south to tropical Africa in the Old World, and to the mountains of Central America. (More here)

However, this codenaming of the 'project' needed a little explanation to those outside geeky-developer-world, as some people actually thought it was the name that we had chosen for the sprog, including family as well as friends. It probably didn't help that Claire and I didn't think twice about referring to the baby as 'Juniper' during mid-conversation, even up until very recently.

Claire and I have been thinking about a 'release name' for project Juniper for months and months, and have decided that we're going to call him Jack William Rigby.