A nice post on Lighthouses Forever publicises that one of the lighthouse cottages is for sale – has been for some time.

It’s tricky selling property in Happisburgh right now – there are some real bargains to be had before common sense prevails and Happisburgh stops being treated as a pariah village.

When the waters rise, Happisburgh will fare a lot better than many of the surrounding villages.

Nice plug for the Happisburgh Lighthouse website.

I’ve been slowly building a Flickr group for Happisburgh, and it’s coming along very nicely.

It was originally as a bit of R&D for work as a client wanted to use a group for some promotional work, so I needed to check how groups work. Initially I put a load of my pictures up, but thought I’d give it a go to run it properly so I searched for likely members and sent them FlickrMail invites – and most responded positively. Currently the group has 25 members and 215 pictures.

So I do a bit of administration, improve the group description a bit, do a bit of promotion on other groups and invite some new people to join. Also I make a couple of discussion postings.

Do I dare start another? Why not – I’ll not push it too hard yet but if I set it up right it might take off by itself – it will certainly be an interesting experiment. So I start Happisburgh Lighthouse group, put some of my pictures up, and link to it from the Lighthouse website.

That starts another line of enquiry going though – it would be cool to have a Flickr badge on there with a random selection of images, but it’s powered by Joomla! and the way TinyMCE is set up it doesn’t like Flickr’s badge code. So I’m now playing with flickr4j Joomla! extension.

Of course I’ll report back how I get on.

www.flickr.com More photos in Happisburgh Lighthouse

I’m a geek. So I should love playing with toys?

I’ve been maintaining a webcam for over a year now, and it probably took me that long to put it together in the first place. Why? because I’m trying to do something slightly out of the ordinary – my vantage point is up a lighthouse which is probably half a mile away from what I want to view, and the lighthouse has no Internet connectivity – hell it’s not even got a phone line. So I thought of using my Internet connection at home, where I have a wifi aerial on the roof so I can connect on a Sunday morning.

So I’m after an external camera, with slightly less than a wide angle lens, that can connect wirelessly, and can use an external antenna (and I mean external)

And since it’s for the community / charity I’m paying for it myself, so I’m doing it on a shoestring, which means trying to buy just what I need. For reference the current solution is a DLink DCS-2100 wireless IP camera I got on eBay, a cheap 12mm lens, mounted in a cheap external housing, and an external 12dB directional antenna. All in about £200 so far.

It works, but only just, and I’ve since spent hours and hours (and hours) researching something I’d risk hard earned cash on to improve things because I’m a bit disappointed with results, I think my current best option is an Axis 211 IP camera with an external housing, but I’m not sure. I need to be comfortable about the field of view that I can get with the standard lens or one that I can add, and that’ I’ll get a better picture. And this camera isn’t wireless, so I’ll need a wireless bridge but will this fit in the housing? And it’s like £600 before you start fiddling!

Why do product pages talk about what the product does, rather that what it can do for you?

Acceptance criteria

We’re working on a rebuild for a big client’s site at the moment and it’s a conversation we’ve been having – don’t talk about the product specs, talk about what it means. It’s a bit radical for us die-hards, but I’ve just proposed the idea?

I’ve been reading up on Project Management methodologies, and one of the first things to do is to identify how you’ll identify that the project is finished and achieved its goals – also known as Acceptance Criteria. Same thing here. How do I know if the thing I’m about to shell out on will do what I want it to?

And it’s Sunday, right? Clarkson still rocks!