On advice of a friend – Tracey and I headed towards warmer climates to break a hole in the English winter before it could completely smother us!

Morocco was an awesome experience and it was warm enough to hang out on the beach for almost the entire time we were staying in Agadir. We flew over on one of the first flights and were met with silly orange hats at 8am in Gatwick Airport, then singing a song about Agadir, followed by a very unexciting flight – though I was trying to see if there was snow in Andorra and we were both excited when started flying over Africa. Our arrival in Agadir was also musical – with local drummers and dancers performing some very enthusiastic moves accompanied with a lot of noise. We were then provided with Mint tea, local sweets and a rose for the ladies. Unfortunately an ATM then told us we could have 1000 Dirhim but then decided not to give it to us.

The rest of the trip was really very similar, most people in Morocco were particularly friendly; but this seems to just provide them without obstacle in asking for a tip, a little extra, more than you expected, or to invite you in for a tea to show you their products and try and make a sale.

We were taken for a few rides, one to Taroudant, which is also known as ‘Little Marrakesh’. The walls around Taroudant are spectacular… very similar to the walls around Marrakesh. But really Taroudant is no substitute for Marrakesh. As part of the trip we also went to a Berber village for lunch. It was on this trip that we realised that everything was negotiable in Morroco. Apparently restaurant meals are also negotiable, but probably less so in the tourist sector, when you are obviously a tourist.

Tracey and I have just returned from Brest, or more accurately Loperhet; staying in a lovely French house courtesy of Jean René and Pascal.

Thanks to Nathalie and Vincent, we managed to fit rather a lot into our 48 hour visit:

• Crêperie An Ty Coz; on route de la Pointe d’Armorique, Bretagne
• Point du Raz, Bretagne
• Douarnenez, Bretagne
• Le Cronquet and Pointe de Saint Mathieu, Bretagne
• Locronan, Bretagne

Crêpes originated in Brittany and Brittany is saturated in Crêperies! There is also plenty of places to get cold beer with Seize Cent Soixante Quatre (1664) sold almost everywhere. Another gastro highlight is seafood.

At least most of China. It was quite disappointing, initially I thought that my site was down. I was able to view it from my mobile and others informed me it was still good. So it appears that China didn’t want me to write about my trip… I was also disheartened to discover I couldn’t watch YouTube in China.

These issues didn’t factor that much as internet cafes were difficult to find. Using Google we discovered several in Guangzhou after 3 days there. In Beijing we used “free” internet in Pacific coffee cafes (you had to buy a coffee or snack) and in Shanghai we used the free shared facilities in our backpackers (Mingtown hiker youth hostel near the Bund).

I was also able to post some updates using twitter and my facebook status. I’ll have to write a longer description of my travels through China later. Today I will be attending a Chinese christian wedding in Hong Kong.

Using the MTR, we headed off to Admiralty station and then tried to find the peak tram station. We found Hong kong park, which had some water features containing fish and turtles; the park had lots of stuff to see, even a wedding reception and an avairy – which was amazing – over 600 species of birds? Lots to see.

The tram to the peak was not very busy when we got on. And there wasn’t really much to see at the peak. We ate at a little place on the peak, can’t remember the name. I had some yuanyang and a baked pork chop and rice dish and Tracey had noodle soup. We shared some toast with condensed milk! There were many tourist places at the peak.

When we got to the bottom again the queue for the tram was enormous – we jumped on an open roofed bus to go to hong kong station – no change is given on hong kong buses. We were taken to a central pier bus terminal, where we were hoping to find bus 70 or 75, which would take us to Aberdeen to see the Jumbo floating restaurant. Instead we found bus 7, which took a scenic route around Hong Kong to Aberdeen.

By the time we got there we decided not to take a free ferry to the restaurant and many ladies tried to sell a ferry ride to my girlfriend. One of my favourite things about Hong Kong is that I can buy a beer at the diary, not a 6 pack of beer, just a can of beer. I’m not sure if I am allowed to drink it ouside on the street, but a can of beer looks about the same as a can of anything else and it only costs about HK$7. Fantastic! Comparitively, going to a bar the same beer will cost HK$50, which is about the same as NZ$11!

We got the 70 bus back to town, which was much faster. Then watched a little of the Kung fu performance, by this stage I was completely exhausted, very tired feet and just wanted to sit down. At Kowloon park there were a lot of people just sitting around; there is a Mosque and Islamic cultural centre beside the park and I think many of the people sitting around are Malaysian maids on their day off. It looks like fun, some of the girls were dancing together; they are all in little groups, so it seems that it would be a little like lunch break at high school.

We met with Tracey’s dad and went across to a lane of bars, that was near Kowloon park, but Tracey’s dad led the way and then we had a few beers. The crazy thing is that a couple rounds of beer in Hong kong will usually set you back more than a large meal for 3! Coffee is also a budget killer here.

After some drinks we went to the New World centre for dinner; trying black pepper duck, sweat and sour pork, tofu and fish stomach with XO sauce, and a tofu, mushroom and fungus dish – quite interesting! Finishing just in time for the symphony of lights display – which is amazing.

They light up several of the buildings on both sides of the harbour and put on a display for about 15 minutes in time to music. We watched from the avenue of stars.

Pretty stoked that I found this park today; I realised after my last trip here that we were staying just around the corner!

I have not been doing particularly much recently – the only other exercise in the last month has been a mountain bike up Makara Peak in Wellington. The hill climb on a comfortable overcast day in Hong Kong took 30min and kept my heart rate above 180!

Many people were walking the tar sealed road that as several picnic areas, only a few ran/jogged. I stopped at a picnic area that also had exercise stations. Visibility was very poor. I am planning to walk to the reservoir at some stage and take a few photos. Perhaps also a picnic.

I am quite dissappointed that I haven’t got my online fitness log book running – these little sessions would look good in there.

I found the exam to be quite simple. But due to the duration that I took developing the assignment, my memory of some pieces was a little flimsy and I will have to wait and see whether that has much bearing on the outcome.

My advice: try and do the assignment in contiguous blocks, it will assist your memory and try and sit the exam within two weeks of preparing your assignment. The exam will test the pros and cons of your choices, but the exam will not be particularly tailored to your solution and you may be surprised by what you are asked 3 of the 4 questions I had to answer were related to the design of the UI, where I expected more questions would be more around locking, OO principals, etc.

I got the feeling that the questions were really just to ascertain whether you designed and built the assignment. I expect it will take about 2 weeks to get a result.

Yesterday I attended the first ever Dr. Sketchy in Wellington at Mighty Mighty! It was great fun with Rachel Rouge hosting the afternoon/evening event in an amazingly saucey outfit. Performances by the beautiful Eva Strangelove and stylish Rhubarb Rouge (no relation to Rachel Rouge).

I attended with all most everybody that I had managed to convince it was a good idea; My girlfriend Tracey and Paolo, who I had been drinking with the night before until Mighty Might door staff told us that Head like a hole was sold out and there was nothing we could do to get in. Rob was up for it, but had furniture malfunctions. Part of my interest was how many people would come to an event that was publicised to me using Facebook groups and Wellington events email. I was really surprised by the turnout and by the artistic ability of the other attendees!

My friends and I are not particularly artistic and I was impressed by how well Tracey could draw! We didn’t realise we were supposed to bring art supplies until the last minute and appeared with pens and a drawing pad. But some people had just come to enjoy the show and others were taking photos, which the performers were more than happy to accommodate.

Dr. Sketchy is a pretty easy sell; burlesque dancing is provocative enough to be interesting, but the performers are not (necessarily) so revealed that the show is offensive. The other essential ingredients: cool music to encourage the burlesque environment and friendly bar service compliments of Mighty Mighty. We had a great time and I left with an enthusiasm to draw again and try more interesting events! I was also quite rehydrated and in a very good mood.

You can find me involved with lots of stuff online, here are some of my favourites:

Flickr is my favourite photo sharing service. I’m also quite a fan of their photo map that allows you to position photos of your travels anywhere in the world.

YouTube is on of the video content services that don’t pay for your content – that isn’t google way. But they still dominate online video and you can find most music videos and funny snippets here.

Facebook is the “now” social network, I’m also on Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, MySpace, ShareMyNZ, OldFriends and several others; but most people I know are on Facebook. If you would like to connect please include a message explaining why, it’s usually advisable to only conenct with people you know.

Linkedin is a more professional social network, if you would like to be connected please offer me a job.

Last.fm is a really cool music library that you can use to find hot new stuff or cool old stuff – and to see what your friends, colleagues and random people are listening to; and what you listened to yesterday, this can be used to focus you to new music that fits your tastes, like google search tailors searching to match your clicks.

Twitter was one of the first micro-blogging applications. It doesn’t allow you to use more than 140 characters and it does allow you to SMS updates. Handy for people covering events and has been used in conjuction with Google maps to provide live updates on natural disasters.

Stumbleupon is my favoured bookmarking application, I’ve used others like Digg, Delicious, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0; but Stumbleupon has the quickest tagging mechanism – someone else has already done it. And Stumbleupon has the stumble feature. Unfortunately stumbleupon is unaware that some content isn’t english (though you can select other languages) and everything gets garbled as Latin1.

Create web service to return personal weather station or airport weather station data from wunderground.com.

The web service will return JSON or XML data. wunderground.com API returns XML data.

When a user request weather information for a location, the web service will return the closest weather information for that location that is available. If nothing is available, or the closest is deemed to be too far away, the user will be asked if this is good enuogh and a message will be added to our logs informing the application administrator that closer weather data is required.

If the user, or an administrator adds a new weather station, the longitude and latitude will be added to the database, as with the name of the station, a link, and an ID that will map to a file system location, when it was added and if the last update was successful. Weather stations once added will be updated every 3 hours, 8 times in a 24 hour period. These will be translated into JSON files when requested.

The directory system will be based on weather station ID and the date in the form YYYYMMDD. Each directory will only contain up to 8 XML files, relating to a single weather station and day. Each directory may also contain JSON files. Perhaps a PHP XSLT engine, or C XSLT engine could be used to generate the desired JSON and JSONP files. We may utilise a library such as Xalan-C to generate JSON files. I’ve investigated XSLT solutions and it appears that PHP has suitable XSLT functions. I will modify this procedure, but it shows that the functionality is suitable.

$proc = new XSLTProcessor();

if (!$proc->hasExsltSupport())
{
   die('EXSLT support not available');
}
// Load the XML source
$xml = new DOMDocument;
$xml->load('test.xml');

$xsl = new DOMDocument;
$xsl->load('test.xsl');

// Configure the transformer
$proc->importStyleSheet($xsl); // attach the xsl rules

if(isset($_GET["callback"])) echo $_GET["callback"]."(";
echo $proc->transformToDoc($xml)->firstChild->wholeText;
if(isset($_GET["callback"])) echo ")";

We will be able to resolve the closest weather station or stations to a particular point and (in our user interface) allow a user to select the favoured weather station.

Shenzhen (Shenzhen Wikitravel) We are flying from Shanghai to Shenzhen, booked on ctrip.com – an english language (and chinese language) chinese flight booking website. Then returning to Hong Kong via buses from Shenzhen airport.