CookandKaye News

bbCareers is a new business that aims to help people facing an uncertain career future. The new company offers 1:1 tailored support to help clients re-evaluate their life prospects, and get to grips with the nitty-gritty required to ensure they get the job and life prospects that we all want!

The project was built in WordPress, and employed the latest features available in the 3.1 templates. Many of the client’s own photographs are used in the site banners, and these can be switched or added to by the client. This allows the website to match the range of images shown on the client’s business cards (printed by Moo). The graphic bb logo (also developed by us) is superimposed on the main banner graphic, so the client does not need to worry about adding this to a new banner before it is uploaded.

There is a clear need for this type of careers help in these uncertain times, and we wish Bridget and bbCareers every successin the future!

bbCareers – careers advice for grown ups

We’ve just released the new Nanofolio feature on protein transduction (we spoke about some of the design issues in our last post). We developed four interactive Flash items for this feature. Two look at processes in the cell, and two follow development of the smart polymer agent that gets the protein based drug into the cell.
The interactive components of the Nanofolio features are highlighted by being inset in the screen – we are taking our audience behind the web page to view what is going on, at a microscopic, nanoscopic or molecular scale. In this instance we chose to go behind the web page through a view reminiscent of that through an optical microscope. This puts the action clearly in context.
To get the feel of an optical microscope we used some low contrast sketches of a cell and its internal structures, and overlaid these with a granular texture, created using Flash’s background tiling capabilities, to keep the file size small.
We retained the optical microscope view for following the activity of smart polymers, watching them change configuration with changing pH (clearly this is a conceit, but in context it is an effective means of visually indicating a degree of magnification). The chemical structure of the polymer, however, was a simple map, with appropriate portions lighting up when the visitor’s mouse tracks over them, along with the portion of the chemical name related to those portions.
There is a reduced scale image of the ‘cell under the microscope’ above right, along with the icon we developed for apoptin – the smart drug that is delivered by the smart polymer system.

Targeted drug release on the Nanofolio website

From our post on ‘Monopoles in magnetic ice‘ you might have worked out that we are currently developing research features for Nanofolio. The current project is targeted drug release, a technique which uses a smart polymer to unlock the cell’s endosomes, releasing a drug into the cytoplasm which would otherwise be destroyed by the cell’s defense mechanisms.

This is a development sketch from the last animation in the feature – it is the first design to be finalised, however, as we will need to re-use graphics from this animation earlier in the feature (which will probably have 3 animations in total, the others detailing how the endosome and the smart polymer work).

At the top we have a motif for the polymer – drug complex, this has to be recognisable at small scale, and we’re looking at a simple ‘dragon and ball’ sketch for this purpose. The ball in this is the drug – in this case Apoptin, and at large scale we need to make it clear that it is a functional moiety. We’ll do this with a manga-esque decal. We looked at two options – a skull and a daemon head. The skull is kind of appropriate, as Apoptin is a cell killer; but it is quite specific to tumour cells, so we though the simple death’s head didn’t really get over the fact that the drug itself is quite smart! So, we’re looking at a daemon’s head for the final production – this is a Classical Greek helmet affair – and we’ll probably go with electric blue clouration, to emphasise that it is (potentially) ‘one of the good guys’.

The drug-polymer complex is taken into the cell in an endosome, and it is pH changes in this that trigger the smart polymer to shatter the endosome membrane. As pH is not visible, we need to represent this easily to visitors. One option is ‘Universal Indicator Paper’ style colour change, but this might not mean much to a lot of people, as well as being rather too crude – the smart polymer switches on at only just below serum pH levels. To get round this we’re going to display the pH on a little meter attached to the endosome. The meter is likely to get in the way of the apoptin release when that occurs, so we’ve also got a little transition, switching sides for the meter if necessary, so the action is clear…

Now all we have to do is make it all work!

You can see other (completed) research features in nanotechnology on the Nanofolio website:

Nanotechnology research features on Nanofolio

We’re closing the comments section on CookandKaye.com, because of the volume of spam and phishing attempts we’re getting through it. As Google descends into the morass of social network link-counting, any half way decent blog is getting innundated with linked comments advertising this and that, without usually even a glance at the article to see if the comment is relevant…

Much of this stuff is filtered automatically by Akismet, but we realised last update that we were carrying over 2MB of trash comments in the database, rather outweighing the rest of the blog contents, images and all. It was simply taking too long to work through the comments to pick out the good stuff…

So, sorry to any genuine commenters, but if you really like what were doing, please let others know through the new Twitter link being rolled out on all of the project articles, or through a ping-back from your own blog. We’ll try to reciprocate any pingback that we can sensibly work into our output!

If you want to contactus for more information about anything we’re doing – you’ll find a new email link under each post as well.

We have a pretty solid scientific background, and for most of it magnetic monopoles have been on the edges of our understanding of scientific reality. Our physicist friends told us that there was no reason why the should not exist, but all of methods we understood for creating a magnetic field involved spinning a charge, and that entailed making both a North and South pole together. Well, I don’t mind being wrong, and the elegant way in which monopoles are created by scientists at Nanofolio is really quite fun, and very easily understood…

So, it was a great pleasure to be asked to develop an interactive feature on this work for them. To do this we’ve really just taken their Nature Physics paper, and illustrated some of the main points. The authors were, I think, more excited about the elementary excitations they were seeing than the magnetic monopoles, which are a bit old hat to the modern physicist, so we looked at those as well. But, magnetic monopoles, just how cool is that!*

You can view the interactive features on the Nanofolio website at: “Monopoles in magnetic ice” – this page has ongoing links to the original publication and review in Nature Physics.

*They are in a magnetic ice after all – but you’ll have to look at the feature to find out more about that!

Redstone car sales, Ruthin, has  a new website. The design of the site draws on the history of Ruthin, with it’s sand stone castle providing a symbol of security in difficult times! We built the site in WordPress, to give Dave at Redstone a simple and cost effective means of adding vehicles to the world wide web.

Redstone is a part of Mobility Nationwide, a family-run business which has been a UK leader in provision of wheelchair accessible vehicles for nearly a decade.

It wasn’t how I’d intended to spend my afternoon, trying to fix my WordPress installation from quite an annoying hack. This is one that only appears in the Google RSS feed, which completely threw me for quite a while. It seems to rely on sticking its advertising cack into areas that only Google uses, you have been warned!

In the past hacks have been pretty easy to spot, simply look for a new file or a recently updated file, or failing that, search for the word(s) that are appearing in your feed that you didn’t write in your blog! Unfortunately the hackers are getting sneakier by the day, I still haven’t found the files that were inserted into my installation, so had to replace everything instead (still a little worried that there might be something I’ve missed – I guess I’ll see when this post goes up!). The text search didn’t work either, apparently they’ve started base-64 encoding the names of their pharmaceuticals. You could base-64 encode the name and search, but it is too easy to do something else to hide it – reverse the letters, whatever, there are a lot more places for them to hide than I’ve got time to look.

In fact it looks like this is a hack that focussed on my WordPress database. This is a nightmare, because your posts and site look clean (indeed, ARE clean), and I couldn’t even see the problem in Feedreader, just Google’s Reader!

Anyway, my sequence was:
1) to change the FTP password.
2) to replaced sections of the WordPress installation in sequence, (I didn’t find any bogus files doing this so there’s likely to be a follow up post when I get to repeat this joyous activity sifting for the sh#t).
3) to change the database user and password (maybe should have done this as #2? – Learn from my mistakes guys!)
4) panic to the wife (Archaeogeek), who being a l33t systems admin checks out with the following helpful links:

wordpress-pharma-hack from Pearsonified and
8-steps-to-clean-a-hacked-wordpress-blog from Knowit

I found the first helpful in looking for duff database entries (here I struck gold at least, and the blog hasn’t crumbled since removing the entries). There a lots of possible places where sh#t can get into your database weave though, so I guess we’re going to have to look through more tables for it next time (or even this time)…

Being online is like looking after a creche, I’d rather not have to clean these nappies again, but expect it to happen…

OK, I won’t say that all database companies are like this, but CA Technologies are suing people who make software that allow their users to migrate to different database solutions. So what will you do now it is illegal to take your data elsewhere? I might say that the people moving data were a bank, so I guess we shouldn’t expect too much foresight in the first instance, but the first rule of business guys is to ensure that there is a plan B (or never get cornered in the marketplace)!
Original article in IT News by Ry Crozier on Nov 26, 2010, via Slashdot (see this for more comment).

Full story in IT News

We have recently restored the Third International Congress on Underwater Archaeology (IKUWA3) website, to provide support for IKUWA4. The site has been re-built within the NAS domain (five minutes work, restoring straight from our archive!)

The new website for the Civic at Barnsley is yet another demonstration that a site in Joomla! (an open-source Content Management System) does not need to look bland. The site is based on the printed material designed for the Civic by Eleven Design, and follows the layout and colour schemes developed there pretty religiously.

This has resulted in a colour-coded site, with each major category of events in its own distinctive page background scheme. To do this we had to develop some pretty complex templates within Joomla! – which detect the type of page, and display it in the correct colour scheme.

We developed a Flash-based home page (screen-shot above), which rotates through the planned calendar of shows. This is a feature is sometimes seen on national theatre websites, which are working with very much larger budgets, and we had to sweat blood to build it within budget here. As ever, for Flash content, we have a text-and-image alternative for iPod users (if it wasn’t for the fact that this alternative content is also useful for non-visual browsers, I’d say it was a case of 3% of visitors wagging 97% of dog!).

We had a good hunt for a decent calendar to run within Joomla!, but without luck. So we were obliged to develop this component from scratch as well. To reduce development costs and stay within budget we integrated the development with that of the home page display, this had the additional advantage of eliminating the need to re-key data into the system for both items. The default view for the calendar is again a Flash application – which is pretty (click on a date to see what events are happening), but I’m not sure the non-Flash view isn’t more useful, as this provides a list of up-comming events and when they are due to happen, but I guess you get this latter view when you click on the calendar link anyway…

Next up for the Civic is to try and get the Ticketing system so it looks something like the rest of the site. The templating system for the commercial software that runs the ticketing system is bloody awful, unfortunately, so we’ll be struggling to get much out of it… (That will be the subject of another post, or possibly a rant, as so far working on it is has caused hair thinning and cardiac arrest. This is, however, a salutory tale for anyone who thinks that open source systems are inherently ‘worse’ than commerncial systems – believe me it aint the case, Joomla! is open source and well stuck together…).

Anyway, if you fancy a night out in the Barnsley area, why not visit the new Civic site to see what is happening?