Category: ShipWatcher

Some of the ShipWatcher features weren’t working when you viewed the site using the latest version of Internet Explorer (IE8), so I’ve fixed those problems.

Basically if you held your mouse over a webcam image, you were supposed to then see information about the ship. This didn’t work in IE8. While I was testing this, I found out it wasn’t working properly when you used the Firefox brower either.

ShipWatcher should work fine with these browsers now. If it doesn’t, please let me know.

I’ve also applied these fixes to VQE2.COM – the Virtual QE2 webcam site.

I’ve added Carnival Cruise Line’s new ship, Carnival Splendor to ShipWatcher.

To see her webcam, just click on “Preferences” scroll to the bottom and look in the “Carnival Cruise Lines” section.

She has two webcams, although it appears that the “aft” cam is pointing at the swimming pool.

I apologise for the unavailability of ShipWatcher.com over the last few days.

Our server failed, so we bought a new server, which also failed.

Not being one to give up easily, I’ve been on this issue since Friday lunchtime, and am relieved to say that as of about 10pm last night, everything is now working fine.

What was most disappointing for me was missing the lovely shots of QE2 as QM2 sailed into Dubai.

On the bright side, we have a larger, faster server so things should run much better than before.

I’ve improved the accuracy of the location reports for the following ships:

• Queen Mary 2
• Queen Victoria
• Fram
• Arcadia
• Oriana

Over the last few days I’ve improved the response time of most ShipWatcher functions. It should be loading a lot faster now. If you notice delays, please let me know.

One other thing I’ve improved is estimating where a ship is. Some ships don’t broadcast their position. They only tell us where they came from and where they’re headed. I’ve given ShipWatcher a bit more intelligence so that it can guess the latitude and longitude of a ship, even if it doesn’t know its exact position. It does this by looking at journeys from other ships that may have travelled a similar route in the past.

If any of the information seems incorrect, please let me know. I can’t watch every single ship all the time, so sometimes I don’t see when the data is wrong.

I’ve added a new facility to Shipwatcher so that you can see a map that shows the locations of all the ships that are in the database.

When you click on the “Map” link on any of the Shipwatcher pages, you will see a Google Map that shows blue pins for each ship for which we have info.

If you click on that blue pin, you’ll see some recent data, and a recent photo from the ship’s webcam.

Why can’t all software projects be as much fun as this?

Please let me know what you think.

The Photos page was taking ages to load.

I’ve fixed this problem by improving the way the database is organized, so you won’t have to wait so long for the photos page to load, or to do any searches.

I have just completed the webcam photo database.

Instead of uploading photos to Flickr, ShipWatcher now stores photos in a database and lets you search it.

Click on the “Photos” link on the right hand side to see what it looks like.

You can search by ship name, company, port of call, etc, and see where the ship was at any point in time in the past.

At present the images only go back a few weeks, but I’ll be adding more webcam photos from my archives soon. Plus I’ll be giving you the ability to add your own photos.

I’ll be enhancing this over the next few weeks to add a lot more fun things.

Please try it out and let me know how I can improve it.

This move was forced upon me because the folks at Flickr deleted all my photos without warning, and have yet to give me a specific reason.

We’re having problems with Flickr at the moment.

For some reason the folks at Flickr deleted all of the photos we’ve uploaded from here. I’m in the process of getting them to restore them all.

Till that’s fixed, I’ll be recording all photos locally, and will make a searchable database available as soon as possible.