The day has been exactly one month in the planning. Corporate hounding, public sponsorship, borrowing and petty theft have got us to the point where now, we must perform. A team expects…..a nation expects.

11 Men walk gingerly down a gravel track towards a scene of excitement, bright lights and the smell of race preparation. This is it, its Dragon Boat time.

The sun is beating the backs of these toned, muscle bound men (we might have written this ourselves….) Each of us handpicked, international heroes…..(ok, we definitely wrote this ourselves) Teachers, web designers, IT professionals and Beaver (AKA Martin) make up this fraternity.

Making Camp!

Dragon Boat racing is an ancient Chinese tradition and the fastest growing water activity in Britain today - a sport for the lean and the brave. Not for the faint hearted. Up to 10 people paddle each 30’ boat with a drummer at the front beating time and a helm at the tail steering a straight and true course.

We face a minimum of 3 races against the clock. Against our fiercest rivals. Our two best times will be added together and the judges will decide who will qualify for the semi finals. With a starting line up of 21, we have some way to go, but the scent of victory hangs heavy in the air.

We settle into camp and await our call for the first race. It comes. We are ready.

Race 1
We climb aboard our trusty Dragon, steady and straight we set off for the start line. Our drummer (Tom) beats a steady pace, 1, 2, 1, 2 we fly towards our destination and prepare for the horn. We sit, patiently, our eyes focused ahead. Random shouts of encouragement are blocked out by the intense concentration of a team ready to do battle.

The horn fires!

We’re off, this is it! 10 men fire into gear and its chaos! Splashing, clashing of paddles people shouting 2 when we are still on 1 and a drummer who thinks he is on stage with Guns and Roses.

Race 1 Time: A Dismal 64.19

We are quiet and dismayed, our sponsors expected more. We expected more. Work to be done.

Race 2
Back in camp we lick our wounds. We know it wasn’t good enough. We didn’t come to splash around.

A quiet meeting takes place, steady paddles are needed and we agree to follow the pace set by our drummer. There is much back slapping and “hell yeahs”. We are ready for race 2.

Our names are called. It’s time to make amends.

This time our helm (always provided by the event company) is an older chap. The old guard, a different class of Dragon Boat coach. Experienced. Unassuming. The Dragon Boat Don. He calms us, rallies the team and guides us to the start line. Once again we hover, awaiting the blast of the horn.

It sounds, we’re off!

This time three mighty paddles launch the boat physically out of the water, 1, 2, 1, 2 the team is in perfect harmony. We steam past the boat in the next lane, we fire our stead to 100 metres and push the Dragon to its limits. We cross the 200m finish line in a scene of jubilation, an effort like no other.

The Team in full flow!

Race 2 time: A second round of 58.58 – The second fastest of the day so far. Oh yeah.

This is it, now we can qualify. A third race of 61 seconds or less and a place in the semi final will be ours.

Race 3
We have an agonising 45 minute break. The team are ready to push on and make the semis. Time ticks by slowly…tick tock tick tock. We recharge our batteries, refuel our systems. Share fruit shoots.

It’s here, race control calls our name. This is it, its make or break. We do it or we go home. Simple.

Once again we set off for the start line. It feels smooth; a quiet confidence presides over the boat.

We hover on the start line for what could be the final race. Someone shouts “we have raised so much money for Cancer Care, let’s show them why”. A team shout takes place, moral is high.

The horn blows, once again our boat bursts into life. 3 huge paddles followed by the 1, 2, 1, 2 rhythm of the previous race. Its going well, our finely honed muscles are tired but a place in the semis fires us across the half way point. The end is approaching; final strong strokes push us over the line in first place. Have we done it? We know we were strong and in perfect time…..

We climb out of the boat, times not yet announced.

The announcer is receiving the times from the marshal. We stand silently.We wait for what feels like an eternity. The announcer puts the microphone to his mouth. He speaks.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the final heat of the day has been a very close race. Three teams have already secured semi final spots and only one more can join them.  Two teams are separated by 0.5 seconds.”

We gasp. The crowd gasps.  Silence. Have we done enough!? The announcer returns

“the team, taking the fourth semi final spot is…….. NuBlue!”

We did it, we made it! Cheers and jubilation! We dance the jig of joy. The team return to camp to find the supporters clapping and cheering. We are legends. The semi final is on!

Once again there is a break, the sun is beating down harder and we are tired after a monumental race. The BBQ is fired up and the team eat in preparation for the semi.

Semi Final time arrives, the 1st race takes place. Big times come in from both teams, a worrying site to our tired heroes. We put this to the back of our minds. It’s our time now.

We enter the boat, knowing what we have to do. We have done it before; it’s time to dig deep.
We sit on the start line, awaiting the starter’s orders. Paddles ready, drummer ready. We’re ready.

The horn blasts, we’re off! Once again the 3 starting strokes are massive. The Dragon lurches his head out of the water and we are ahead then the 100 metre line arrives and boy its close. Both boats are Dragon head to Dragon head. Both teams giving everything they have!

The team in the Semi!

150m and its close but we are tiring. A couple of strokes are missed and we are slowing. Too many burgers from the BBQ.

Giving everything we have, the other Dragon inches ahead, one final push and we simply can’t match them. They burst over the line and it’s over. We are battle worn, beaten, crispy with sun burn. But proud.

Our final race time is 60.81 compared to the other teams 59.40. It was tight, ours to win but the team had given everything to reach this point and had nothing left in the tank. What an effort.

From 21 teams the NuBlue Dragons came in 4th. We are happy; next year 1st place is ours!!!
Big thanks to everyone who sponsored us and came down to help the team on the day.

Race Team

Drum: Tom Obeirne

Many thanks to our corporate and personal sponsors.

You helped us to raise £900 for Cancer Care!!!

Personal Sponsors
http://www.justgiving.com/nubluedragons

It’s a really accessible form of skilled art because anyone with a basic paint program can have a go at it. You can make pixel art as basic or as detailed as you like, it’s all about practice and refinement.

In my tutorial i transform a work colleague into a “sprite” (this is term used for a stand-alone two-dimensional character or object). My tutorial explains how to draw a very simple sprite so i have placed the pixels directly into the design, however if you are creating a more intricate sprite for an animation or a game you may want to draw the character freehand then trace over the outline on screen

Step 1.
Observe….
As i have said i am going for a very basic style so i am limited with how much detail i can use to make the sprite an accurate representation of the person in question. Look out for the attributes that are easy to convey i.e Physical size and stance, eye/hair/skin colour, props like glasses, particular clothing items.

Step 2.
Create…
Open photoshop and create a new canvas for your character 150 x 300 pixels is a good size. Select the pencil tool and adjust the brush diameter to 1 pixel in size.

Step 3.
Zoom in to a point where your pencil draws single pixels and create the outline for the head. Tip: To make a symmetrical face shape i draw a guide through the centre and make sure my pixels match each half.

Step 4.
Next, give the face some character. To make the whites of the eyes visible you will need to give your face some colour.
Tip: Save time with these shortcuts:
• the eyedropper tool - shift+’i’
• the pencil tool - shift+’b’
• the marquee tool - shift+’m’

Start with the mouth then line the eyes up near the top of the ears. Give your character any expression you wish. You can colour the hair at this point also.

Step 5.
Now lets work on the body. Start with the outline for the neck and shoulders and gradually work your way down.
(Tip: To create a gentle curvature draw two pixels across then one down and repeat until you have a curve you are happy with. Another tip to make sure the decline or incline consistent is to start with 6 pixels across 1 down, then 3 across 1 down, then 2 across 1 down, finally 1 across 1 down you should now reach the end of your curve.)

Step 6.
Lastly give your sprite some colour to really bring him to life!

Thanks for reading my tutorial i hope you found it useful… Do look out for more pixel art tutorials from me as Im hooked!!

The developments and insights into the pending releases of Magento were exciting to say the least.  The new offering from Zend - Zend Server - promises to take Magento to another level with high speeds and incredibly detailed trouble shooting options; we’re just waiting for some options and compatibilites to be resolved (it is a very new product) and then we’re eager to start looking into the options available for using it as a hosting platform for PHP applications that require premium hosting.

Roy Rubin, Varien (left) - Ewan MacLeod, NuBlue (right)

We also found ourselves getting a bit giddy over the upcoming release of eeCommerce from PHP (UK).  Anyone who is familiar with the CMS, Expression Engine, will no doubt be very interested by the prospect of Magento being fully integrated into Expression Engine.  The new API that comes with this release, Mammoth, also allows the Magento Web Services to   be opened up and made avaialable for integration into other applications such as Joomla!, Drupal, and SugarCRM.  The possibilities for using the power of Magento through the CMS of your choice is a tantalising prospect.

And it was a great opportunity to meet and greet some of our clients - a big thank you to Grant Winter, Karen Baker, Leon LeBlanc and David Warren for your company (a massive relief from the frenzy of the exhibition stands!) - and another big thank you to Roy Rubin (CEO of Varien) for taking the time out of a busy day to chat about all things Magento!

We love Magento. It’s powerful and it’s free and you can use it to take over the world (this may be a lie). However it’s a steep learning curve, and the first stumbling block is often installing it in your web space. So we have been working on our own One Click installer for Magento, and after a few versions of Magento, a couple of tweaks and a month of Beta, it’s now available for free for all our Shared Hosting customers (and by request for everyone else on our Hosting!).

There are a number of Magento One Click Install options out there, but after testing these we decided to start from scratch and build a custom script for our customers. There were a few reasons for this - the main reason being that the current scripts were out of date, and only an older version of Magento was available for installation. Not only did we want to make sure that we had the latest version available, but we also wanted to know that we could change the script to allow for any changes to the installation process.

And even though it’s easy to use, we also thought we’d provide you with a guide to using it!

I want to install Magento!

Once you’re at the point where you want to install Magento, you will need to make sure that you already have your domain name setup with hosting in your plesk control panel. Once you have selected the domain you want to install Magento on, you should see your domain home page.

Domain Home Page

Notice the two new buttons at the bottom of the page. One is the Magento Install button, and the other is used to clear the cache (more on this later). The first thing we need for the Magento installation is to create a database and user for the software to store its data in. You can do this from the same menu.

Select Databases -> Add New Database -> Enter a database name and click o.k. -> Add New Database User. Once at the Add New Database User screen, create a username and password for your database and take note of it; then click the OK button. Go back to the domain screen by clicking the domain name at the very top of the page. Now we are ready to start- click Magento Installation button to proceed.

This next screen is where we input all the information about our Magento Installation. If you are not sure what a certain field is used for, hover over the tool tips at the end of each line for further information.

Once you have filled out the form, click Begin Magento Installation. If there were no errors with your setup, you should see a small animation telling you the installation is in progress (this can take some time).

One Click Install

If the installation was successful you should see a green Install Information box with all your details of the Magento installation included. It will also email a copy of the information to the admin email address you specified, so make sure it’s a working email address!

So there you have it - the One Click Magento Installation from NuBlue.

But wait there’s more!

We have also provided a Clear Magento Cache button. This clears all the Magento cache files from the installation - this is sometimes required when making changes to the store. For example, design changes will sometimes require a clear of the cache before displaying. We’ve also found that the clear cache facility doesn’t clear anything from the Downloader (a.k.a. Magento Connect) area, so the button just helps keep your store nice and clear.

To use the Clear Cache button, simply click the button. If you have installed Magento in a subdirectory, tick the box and enter the details before clicking the Clear Magento Cache button, and you’re good to go.

While the old tweening methods were simple they lacked customisation, additional steps like introducing guide layers were required to really take advantage of Flash’s animation capabilities. The new methods give you the ability to work with the stage rather than the time line. The new tween automatically creates an invisible guide line which can be manipulated in a number of ways, the motion editor also allows you to really tweak the effect of the tween in addition to the standard easing.

For animators this is a real step forward in Flash’s capabilities and for the developers that just want to good old fashioned tween, you can still create a standard classic tween! I expect to see much more fancy animation coming from the web developers on the NuBlue Hosting Packages =)

Check out this link for a video showing off the new tweening methods:

http://www.kirupa.com/developer/flashcs4/video/motiontweens_cs4.htm

January has been an exciting month for me, I was due to start with NuBlue on January 5th, but this wasn’t to be as my first born child decided to make a 5 week early entrance (Dexter, 5lb, cute as buttons). The guys at NuBlue allowed me to bump my start date up a week so I could concentrate on dirty nappies.

My first two weeks have been great fun, everyone on the team has been welcoming and they all make a good cup of tea. Thankfully I’m not the only new blood on the team, Paul joined the ranks of the hosting department just one week ago, so at least I won’t be the only one sent to the corner shop for some elbow grease or headlamp fluid.

So far things are looking great and I’m looking forward to a long career with NuBlue.

Follow my easy tutorial to create your own newspaper clippings.

Firstly find an image of a newspaper cutting

TIP - iStockphoto.com have clippings costing just $1

Discard the colour information of the clipping by choosing image > adjustments > desaturate.

Next apply the following adjustments to the clipping by choosing image > adjustments > Brightness/Contrast.

Type in the headline of the article, the author and the body copy on seperate layers.

TIP - Use authentic newspaper fonts such as Franklin Gothic, Times, Century and Helvetica Neue

When you are happy with your article group your layers and name it ‘article’.

Next, raid the iStockphoto dollar bin to add a little authenticity to the clipping!

To create the effect firstly add your text to your document in the typeface and colour of your choice.

TIP - for this effect to appear at its best I recommend using heavy fonts styles, I used Tahoma Bold although Franklyn Gothic Heavy is a good alternative.

Right click on the text layer in the layer window and select ‘blending options’.

Apply the following styles:

When applying the gradient overlay, click on the gradient colour bar to display the gradient editor. Now you can change the colour stops to colours of your choice.

TIP - use a darker hue for stop 1 and a lighter hue for stop 2.

Complete the style by adding a stroke.

You should have something that looks like this…

Next, select the pen tool and draw a zig-zag shape across your text joining the ends up at the end.

Right click on the shape and choose ‘make selection’ from the box that appears.

Create and select a new layer and name it ‘overlay’. Drag the shape layer into the bin.

Set your foreground to your lightest hue and the background to white then select the gradient tool and choose the to foreground to background option.
Drag the cursor from the top of the selection to the bottom.

Right click on the text layer to select the text pixels.

Select the ‘overlay’ layer then choose select > inverse from the menu and press delete.

Finally right click on the layer and make the following opacity change to the blending options.

That’s it!… you should now have some nice glossy coloured text.

Interestingly, in the last downturn the Internet was still just a baby, but in the Web 2.0 era how can the Internet help us get through the recession?

Well there are two main groups of people that can use the Internet to their advantage:

• · Individuals

• · Businesses

Helping Yourself

The most important measures are preventative. Tighten you belt and prepare for the worst; you never know - when the recession’s over, you might be pleasantly surprised! The easiest way to save money is to make sure you don’t buy anything you don’t really need, but the day will come when you really do need something (you have to eat, after all). So make sure you do your research, check out as many stores as possible online, and be sure to compare prices. Online stores often offer much better prices than the High Street, and some High Street stores offer a discount for buying online. There are some amazing websites out there like Money Saving Expert, which are designed exactly for times like these.

The price of oil is coming down, but chances are that your energy bills are only going up. It’s estimated that 20% of people in the UK have never switched suppliers. This means that many people will be paying over the odds for their gas and electricity simply because they haven’t looked for a better deal. Try out some of the energy comparisons sites to check out deals from the major suppliers. Another quick tip is that a few energy suppliers will offer discounted rates in return for not having to send you paper bills. Instead you will be able to check your bills online (which you can probably do already anyway) and you’ll receive an email when your bill is due.

Energy is not the only thing you can save money on by using comparison sites; the adverts may be irritating but if you car or home insurance is coming up for renewal, don’t be complacent and simply renew with the same company. They more often than not don’t give existing customers the same deals they offer new customers. I saved £100 when I changed my car insurance this year - it wasn’t that I wasn’t happy with the company I was with, it was simply that they would offer me the deals they offered to new customers online - so I switched so I could take advantage of similar offers myself.

Mortgages are the trickiest of the money problems at the moment, as essentially they are what caused all these problems! If you are looking to get a mortgage or switching mortgage, make sure that you don’t sign in to a mortgage that is unrealistic - no matter how tempting the offer. Comparison sites offer you a good idea of what you should expect to be paying, but with something as important as mortgages, check out tools like the BBC’s Mortgage Calculator to help you work out what you can afford. Remember changing mortgage providers won’t always save you money, but don’t stay because you feel some sort of loyalty to them - chances are they won’t reward you for it!

If you feel like you’re getting into financial trouble, catch it early and get help. If you’re unsure whether or not you are in trouble or don’t know what to do next, try the Debt Calculator and this Financial Health Checker for size.

And finally, if the worst comes to the worst and you have been made redundant; make sure you don’t give up! Believe it or not, people are still employing, and websites like Jobsite and Monster.co.uk are a cheap way for them to advertise – which makes them a great place for you to look. Anyway, uploading your CV can’t do any harm!

Helping Your Business

With a bit of work, a website can be a powerful and cost effective advertising tool in a tough market. Make sure you keep your website up to date. Out of date content can immediately put off customers (they might think you’ve already gone bust!).

Search engine optimisation is a tough nut to crack, but Google can be your marketing best friend if you can crack it. Here are a few tips to help you get to the top in Google.

1. Make sure all your Meta data on your site is clean, up to date, and that none of it is duplicated Meta.
2. Make sure your website code is nice and clean. Google is better at reading websites when they are made to W3 Standards
3. Add new content as often as possible. The more relevant content your website has, the more searches you are likely to come up for in Google, and new content will bring customers back to your site again and again.
4. If you are really struggling in the Google rankings, why not try Google Adwords. Just remember don’t pay over the odds for a generic keyword - keep it specific and low cost.

It is always worth remembering that it’s not just you struggling, your customers are feeling the pinch too. Offer them incentives to buy your products. By putting special offers on your website home page, you can attract more customers, as well as letting your loyal customers know that you’re looking out for them too.

For bigger businesses travelling to meetings and conferences can put extra strain on the budget. Why not try telephone or web conferencing solutions to save money? Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro offers a real everyday business solution to video conferencing.

And finally, if your business is doing just fine you should still consider budgeting a little to make sure it stays that way. Why not try open source alternatives to your software? Microsoft Office can be swapped for the ever more popular OpenOffice. OpenOffice is free and it’ll open all Microsoft office documents and creates documents in the same way. Pushing the boat way out, why not swap your Microsoft Windows or Vista for a free operating system like Ubuntu? If your planning to sell products online Magento offers an open source alternative to those expensive e-commerce suites. There are thousands of open source alternatives out there, so if you need new software at least check out the free alternatives before you decide to buy.

So despite all you’ll hear in the media, recessions come and go and it’s not the end of the world. Your new friend the Internet can help you the tough times. Just keep you head up and keep surfing the net (pretty much what you were doing before!).

To be fair we could just crack open a window and admire the countryside but it’s been a bit too wet recently, so here are three NuBlue Steps (patent pending) to a better office space:

1 - We Bought Some Plants

When one member of staff brought a dishevelled potted plant in to work and refused to move it from his desk, a bout of what can only be called Yukka envy took hold in the office. Suffice to say the new Yukka is a lot bigger. As is the Dragon Tree. And the even bigger tree in the corner.

Plants aren’t just a way of making a Yukka with a chequered past feel small. They add a nice natural distraction to the room, looking after them is a welcome diversion and, so the story goes, they filter the air for you. If you’re going to say goodbye to your stuffy office courtesy of some greenery, we recommend that you go to a Garden Centre to order the plants - because then you can see if they look ill, and more importantly, you can ask if they will react well to intermittent watering and occasional dregs of coffee.

2 - We Bought Some Pictures

And why not? The best way to lighten up any room is to fill it up (well, that and draw the curtains, but we all know that makes it harder to see your monitor). So we’ve covered our walls with a few tasteful prints from Deviant Art and some web design posters that, like health and safety instructions, are only there to make it look like you will ever use them.

Many people (i.e. me) look around when they come across an obstacle in their work, and they look for something to break their train of thought, something to focus on while the problem sorts itself out in their head. Maybe you’re waiting for something to install, or the mountainous task you’re about to embark upon needs a deep breath and a bit of a sigh before you start. In this case, something interesting helps you wind down focusing on something else (resting your tired brain).

And, as we all know, you need to rest your eyes regularly in this job, because you don’t blink very often when you’re staring at a screen, and so your eyes dry out, which is why they feel tired, sore and strained. So all in all, having something worth staring at for a few moments of your day is a worthwhile investment.

3 - We Installed An Office Jukebox

A bit of background noise helps create a relaxed atmosphere and if you catch someone humming along to a tune the chances are they are happy (and happy people work quite well!). Rather than hide away in a corner with our headphones plugged in, or scowl at anyone daring to play music on their PC, we thought it would be a good idea to loop speakers around the office, and install a network Jukebox onto a spare mini-PC so everyone can queue, skip and enjoy music through the day.

We looked around a bit and settled for LANP3. It’s a freeware LAN jukebox. After installing it and it’s little MySQL Server, all we had to do was point it at our music collections and bookmark a web address. Through a browser page everyone has a set amount of credits (basically the number of tracks they can queue at any one time) and the ability to kick a track from the playlist at any time. On top of this there is a configurable auto-play function that will queue tracks if we haven’t and a built in indexer to help you search for the music you want.

After a few teething problems (largely based around the thrashing that indexing the music gave the poor little PC we installed it on) and working out who was going to have the remote connection to the PC for admin purposes we’ve had nothing but joy from the program. A volume control on the web interface would help but hey, why rain on their parade - the programmers have done a good job making something simple and effective.

If only they could write a program that could resolve the bitter disputes over whether Meatloaf should be allowed or not, and it would be perfect…

Do you think there’s something we’ve missed that we could have added to the office? (space limits do apply)