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Hiking Rangitoto - The Volcanic Island

It been a while since I've been on a hiking trip. Hiking up the Rangitoto was my fathers day's gift.

You can reach Rangitoto by the Ferry from Auckland - it takes about 25mins to reach. (Its not that far from Auckland)

The trail in general is fairly rugged - its a volcanic island remember, some parts of the trail have wooden bridges

Members of Auckland Hiking Meetup Group - awesome group if anyone is interested. http://www.meetup.com/hiking-171/

Infographic what is most likely to succeed on Rangitoto Island:

Some pictures from the trail

Trail is fairly rugged.

At the crater..

The Crater

Trail towards the top of the crater:

Views from the top:


Civilization (Auckland I mean):

   
Click here to download:
Hiking_Rangitoto_-_The_Volcani.zip (453 KB)

     
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0Hiking_Rangitoto_-_The_Volcani.zip (683 KB)

       
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1Hiking_Rangitoto_-_The_Volcani.zip (907 KB)

http://funcnutrition.com now on 'Zen_of_a_CMS' #AppEngine #GWT

I've updated the http://FuncNutrition.com website to use the CMS we built a little while ago. 

The idea again is quite simple. Use StackPanels instead of Tabs - this will allow us to remove the need for using Headings and gives a look and feel of a single page. 

The name search is still on 'Zen_of_a_CMS' sounds a bit quirky, but a good name would be much appreciated - I am looking for a name which conveys simplicity. If you have any ideas for a name please ping me. 

This project will be OpenSourced as soon as I get a few things working. 

New Look http://FieldLinx.com Website. Build using #GWT hosted on #AppEngine


This project has been long time coming - 3 years 2 months to be exact, as mentioned in the earlier post we are moving all our server infrastructure to the Cloud. This forced us to get going quickly. 

The site itself has a look and feel of a single page - showcasing simplicity is what we were intending to achieve:


The whole site is built using Google Webtoolkit (GWT) and hosted on Google AppEngine - pages for now are coming from a JSON file. This will change once we finish building the cms backend using the datastore - more on that later. 

Before starting the project we did investigate number of other AppEngine Java based CMS projects - many are frankly bloated. We felt the clear need to keep things simple. 

One issue which we are aware of is that the site at this stage has the worst SEO (look at the source) - we intend to fix that by having a html page generated on fly, only when requested. 

We would love to hear your comments and feedback. 

Simplicity in Design - Rat Trap

via fastcodesign.com

Check out more designs at the link above

Migrated thinkbelievedo.com to posterous

I have set the date - 12th July, 2010 for migrating all my sites to the Cloud. I am moving away from my own server (about time), and this means changes are underway. 

First comes this blog. I have been using WordPress.org for a while now and love it to bits - its probably the most customisable blog _ever_.  I spent much of my time tweaking things to make it look awesome. As the saying goes... we got to let things go to bring in improvements. So here I am using Posterous as my default blog from now on.

Next, I am planning to host all my business websites onto Google AppEngine, will post my experience here once I am done.

My #Nokia E90 has finally started its downward trend. Here is what I think of it 2+ yrs later

To start with, I should say E90 has been one amazing phone - and I will miss it dearly. 

Its got a good camera (Bad in low light though) - I took baby pictures of my daughter with it & now my little girl loves taking pictures with it. Its been our official family camera - my Panasonic hasn't been touched in a while. 

It had great features such as dual-camera - I have used it to talking to my wife & daughter on the video call when I am away. Also used it once for a Skype call over fring.

Radio is good, but never got around to using it much. 

GPS is probably one of the best I have seen in the industry - my other job is developing custom Fleet Management solutions.

Built like a tank. Sustained on average 3+ knocks a week (including a hard one when it tossed out of the car-holder). It was immersed in the bath for almost 1+ min & once dry comes back to life like magic - still lives 1+ year on. 

Perfectly hacker friendly phone - I have controlled servers with it for a while - keyboard is sufficient for those urgent fixes on server & you are miles away from computer. Python comes in handy for those weekend hacks.

Developer friendly phone - you can write your apps in C, C++ (and Qt), Java & Python...  

Battery is sufficient. I had push email on all the time and that would give me 1-2 days on full charge. 

It has multi-tasking since day one :)

I got to acknowledge its got amazing flaws. 

  1. The browser is broken
  2. Why the hell do I need to be prompted if I am already connected to the internet via WLAN?
  3. All three mail clients - Mail, Mail for Exchange & Nokia Messaging suck
  4. No easy way to turn on the loud speaker if I receive a call - always had to fidget around with the menu - one hand on the wheel & one trying to select the damn Menu Item.
  5. Music Player - never allowed me to play using filenames.
  6. Amazingly heavy & bulky. Somebody said 'f*ck thats huge' not so long ago.
1-5 are in general more to do with Nokia's decision not to upgrade the software even though I paid $1,400 not so long ago. 6 just adds a bit of character

My business partner Neil's Presentation at V2B Spark 2010 - http://bit.ly/dodoing

(download)

I just found this today. So I thought I might as well share it here.