Ian Luckraft - Software Engineer

Fore Street Deli launched

March 13, 2010
My work, Web Development

Newquay based Fore Street Deli provides home-cooked deli food using the best Cornish ingredient, and selling a wide range of quality Cornish produce. Working with designer Random Badger the site aims to give a feel for being in the deli with it’s wood background and colour theme based on the shop exterior.

Drupal 6 num_rows

March 7, 2010
Uncategorized
Database, Drupal, Web Development

I’ve been working on a site powered by Drupal and needed to find the number of rows a database query returned. Simple enough and quite common procedure. But, the Drupal database API no longer offers the db_num_rows() function. I had a quick Google around and the answered seemed to be to run the query twice but the second time using a count query. Two calls to the database when only one is necessary? ...

Destroying CodeIgniter Sessions when closing the browser

January 22, 2010
Web Development
CodeIgniter, PHP Frameworks, Web Development

I’m really enjoying using CodeIgniter, it’s an excellent framework and has a side benefit of helping to structure your files neatly. I’ve been working on my first login form using it, and whilst there are lots of tutorials going through this common process I encountered a “problem” with the CodeIgniter sessions persisting when the user closed their browser. A bit of searching around and I came up with a few recommendations. ...

CodeIgniter PHP Framework

January 19, 2010
Web Development
CodeIgniter, PHP Frameworks

I’ve been playing around with PHP frameworks latley and have just started coding my first major project using CodeIgniter. I’ll post updates as I progress but roughly this project interacts with data from different organisations and acts as a central point for approval of records and the sharing of data.

Google Maps

January 8, 2010
Web Development
Google Maps, Web Development

A lot of the sites we do in work involve using a Google map, some are simple and just allow the user to choose a spot which populates input fields for latitude and longitude. Others contain large data sets and information about the point, which is normally displayed in one of the Google map bubbles. Using our standard library code for implementing a map and allowing the user to pick a latitude / longitude point IE6 was only displaying a grey background with the Google copyright. ...

Android Development

January 8, 2010
Mobile Development
Android Development, Mobile Phones

With the release of the Nexus One phone I decided to look into Android phones and development a little more last night. After reading a quick couple of tutorials I had a simple app that would allow you to update your Twitter status. At first glance it seems to be simpler to construct Android apps over iPhone apps. I’ve also done a bit of work on iPhone apps and the entry to these seems a lot higher. ...

New Year New Blog

January 7, 2010
Personal

I’ve been meaning to set up a new blog for a while now and after a few friends had gone to the bother I decided it was time for me to get on board. This is along with other things like updating the design and content of my portfolio website, learning new technologies and improving on old ones. This blog will be a mixture of things from personal to professional and anything else I feel will benefit it. ...

About

January 7, 2010

I currently work as a Senior Software Engineer for Surfline implementing new features and improving on existing one. I have previously worked for: Sponge Flowmoco Headscape The Marine Biological Association Outside of work I still enjoy trying out different web technologies as well as hardware projects using Arduino. These two can be the perfect match for Internet of Things developments. I also enjoy keeping active which not only keeps me physically healthy but often gives my mind chance to think over some of problems I’m currently solving in my work. ...

Dr Nova Mieszkowska pages launched

August 18, 2009
My work, Web Development
jQuery

Dr Nova Mieszkowska is a Fellow at the Marine Biological Association who specialises in Climate Change and Marine Biodiversity. Her pages were created to reflect her studies based on a colour palette that was derived from Dr Mieszkowska’s own photography. The site includes a jQuery lightbox plugin for images on information pages as well as the Galleria plugin for the gallery pages.