This, that and the other

More Curry

2012-01-14T12:10:00.000Z

Cracking evening last night with a lovely couple of pints after work with cracking people and then out for a curry at the Bengal Diner, again with cracking old friends and perhaps a little too much wine. The food was brilliant and they don't have a licence so you get to take your own plonk, this effectively means that the wine is brilliant and the bill is small. Eventually got to bed a little after midnight. Up at silly o'clock for pee, paracetamol and lots of water then back to bed where my sleep got disturbed every single time I farted by 'er indoors complaining in some volume about the gaseous eruption transferring its way from my shapely arse onto her belly (Hey, you sleep in a small bed when you're as big as we are and you have to spoon, besides, it was that cold last night that if we hadn't we'd have frozen).

Thing is I woke about 09:45 hrs and thought I'd try something:

"It's cold out there, I'd like you to get up and put the fire on and tell me when it's warm enough for me to get out of bed. Perhaps while you're up you could put the kettle on and get breakfast started?"

Strange thing is that she did... and I've still got my testicles where they should be as well... and now she's tidying the boat - I wonder what she's setting me up for?

King Prawn Curry, Egg-Fried Rice And A Portion Of Chips, Please.

2012-01-11T19:27:00.002Z

So the first time I ever had a Chinese takeaway, I'm pretty sure it was in Birkenhead, I had the above. Pretty much every time I've had one since I've had the same. Generally speaking if I have an Indian takeaway I'll have King Prawn Korma, Egg-Fried Rice and a Garlic Narn. I'll start with putting the Narn bread on the plate and then put the rice and curry on the Narn. That way the Narn soaks up everything and I'm left with a clean plate after eating the Narn after the curry. The Chinese just gets mixed all up in a big bowl and eaten as quick as.

What's this got to do with anything, I hear you ask in between shaking your head in wonderment, not a great deal except to illustrate that I, like a true Yorkshireman, know what I like and like what I know.

This is except when other people are involved: The Chinese was on a recommendation from the lass I was then courting as I didn't know what to order (I'm sure that there were Chinese takeaways in Huddersfield but there weren't any in the villages where I grew up - and even if there were there'd be no chance of having one, not when there was food to be cooked at home!). I'm not sure where the Indian came from but I'm nigh on positive it was either down to a lass or something I'd read or heard on the wireless.

You'll perhaps be shocked to hear that I have no firm favourites in restaurants or takeaways of other nationalities, except that I do have a penchant for anchovies on my pizzas.

I guess the reason I'm thinking about this just now is that within the 30 seconds prior to putting finger to screen I caught sight of a jar of silver-skin pickled onions that 'er indoors bought for #3 son and a packet of Marmite chocolate.

The onions were bought because #3 really likes pickled onions but really, really likes silver-skin pickled onions - preferably the cheaper the better. I'm pretty sure that that's down to him having eczema, I'm not sure what it is about kids in my family with eczema and pickled onions but there seems to be a distinct correlation between the diagnosis of one and the almost pathological desire for the other... The thing is that the jar is a fancy one, with onions pickled in balsamic vinegar bought in a sale, the thing also is the #3 is not in the least bit keen. Not cheap enough I guess?

I love Marmite and I love chocolate and when 'er indoors said that she'd heard of chocolate with Marmite I was more than keen to try some. Now I wish I hadn't as, while the idea is pretty good, the reality is not so much, not to my mind anyway!

Rummaging and Pilfering

2011-12-07T18:34:00.000Z

I've written about Travelodge before, in the previous context I was doing some training for work in London and didn't want to cost them too much money so chose Travelodge. This time I was also conscious of money - not because we're cheap but because I'm almost a stereotypical Yorkshireman - again I'm doing some training for work so Travelodge it was. After all, not all Travelodges can be as utterly crap as the one in London I stayed in last time can they?

You know where this is going don't you?

I'm in the process of giving up smoking but in the meantime I'm reducing my consumption by the use of e-fags from Totally Wicked and as a result the paraphernalia involved gets quite bulky, what with charging equipment for USB, mains and 12V, spare-parts and various e-liquids. So I keep it all in a lovely hessian bag, which I guess is a re-purposed hand-bag curtesy of 'er-indoors.

Thing is that each and every evening I've come back to rest my head after it being crammed full of SalesForce Developer Stuff and the bags been interfered with.

The first time I guessed it might have been knocked over but this evening a zip was left open and the nice needle I use to fill up the e-liquid container was missing... I can only guess why they want a blunt hyperdermic needle!

Needless to say I'll definitely not be going for the cheapest option next time, a little bit of privacy isn't too much to ask for is it? Thankfully I'm with Jeff Jarvis in regards to privacy these days and so live my life in the full expectation that it's lived fully in public... bloody boring too!

Humph!

No wikipedia allowed!

2011-11-23T08:11:00.002Z

Got this wrong and it cost us the wipe out round last night in the pub quiz at The Green Dragon.

If you know without checking wikipedia then I'll be blown!

Who counts the journalist Sheena McDonald and Princess Margarita of Romania amongst his ex-girlfriends?

Hint: It's not Russell Brand (which is who I thought it was, sorry chaps!).

Walter Zorn's ToolTip

2011-11-10T13:25:00.000Z

Well blow me!

Walter Zorn's tooltip is and was the bees knees in terms of tool tips and I used it extensively when I was doing my dissertation to provide context sensitive help to users. I tried to use it again recently but couldn't find his site despite it coming near the top of searches for tooltips. Then this morning I was looking for a similar thing to use at work but hopefully based on jQuery and I cam across this site (Walter Zorn’s ToolTip with a JQuery Twist).

I found a reference to him being dead on and then found this on his site:

Walter Zorn, the author of this homepage, died in 2009.
We, his familiy and friends decided to make this page available as a static page again for the friends of his homepages.
Please, be aware, that we didn’t create this homepage or any of its content, and therefore we are not able to give technical support.
Walter made the source codes publicly available under the LGPL license, so we expect that any usage of his programs will be in accordance to this license. Walter Zorns copyright notice must be untouched at all times, and must not be removed.

What a bugger! I had a brief emial conversation with him about his tooltip and he struck me as a really nice bloke, R.I.P. Mr Zorn!

ACTA

2011-11-01T09:08:00.000Z

Just don't ask...

2011-10-24T14:24:00.000+01:00

0 @M1@ INDI 1 NAME Josef /Fritzl/ 1 SEX M 1 FAMS @U1@ 0 @F1@ INDI 1 NAME Rosemarie /Fritzl/ 1 SEX F 1 FAMS @U1@ 0 @F2@ INDI 1 NAME Elizabeth /Fritzl/ 1 SEX F 1 FAMC @U1@ 1 FAMS @U2@ 0 @F4@ INDI 1 NAME Paula /Fritzl/ 1 SEX F 1 FAMC @U1@ 0 @F5@ INDI 1 NAME Doris /Fritzl/ 1 SEX F 1 FAMC @U1@ 0 @M2@ INDI 1 NAME Gabriele /Fritzl/ 1 SEX M 1 FAMC @U1@ 0 @M3@ INDI 1 NAME Joseph /Fritzl/ 1 SEX M 1 FAMC @U1@ 0 @M4@ INDI 1 NAME Harald /Fritzl/ 1 SEX M 1 FAMC @U1@ 0 @M5@ INDI 1 NAME Sepp /Fritzl/ 1 SEX M 1 FAMC @U1@ 0 @F3@ INDI 1 NAME Kerstin /Fritzl/ 1 SEX F 1 FAMC @U2@ 0 @M6@ INDI 1 NAME Stephan /Fritzl/ 1 SEX M 1 FAMC @U2@ 0 @M7@ INDI 1 NAME Felix /Fritzl/ 1 SEX M 1 FAMC @U2@ 0 @F6@ INDI 1 NAME Lisa /Fritzl/ 1 SEX F 1 FAMC @U2@ 0 @F7@ INDI 1 NAME Monica /Fritzl/ 1 SEX F 1 FAMC @U2@ 0 @M8@ INDI 1 NAME Alexander /Fritzl/ 1 SEX M 1 FAMC @U2@ 0 @M9@ INDI 1 NAME Kind /Fritzl/ 1 SEX M 1 FAMC @U2@ 0 @U1@ FAM 1 HUSB @M1@ 1 WIFE @F1@ 1 MARR 1 CHIL @F2@ 1 CHIL @F4@ 1 CHIL @F5@ 1 CHIL @M2@ 1 CHIL @M3@ 1 CHIL @M4@ 1 CHIL @M5@ 0 @U2@ FAM 1 HUSB @M1@ 1 WIFE @F2@ 1 MARR 1 CHIL @F3@ 1 CHIL @M6@ 1 CHIL @M7@ 1 CHIL @F6@ 1 CHIL @F7@ 1 CHIL @M8@ 1 CHIL @M9@

Accessing RDS using HeidiSQL

2011-10-20T09:21:00.001+01:00

Whilst looking at family-tree type things yesterday at work (it was for a work-based project, honest!) I remembered that my boss was looking at a way to administer our database on RDS. After reading shed loads of documentation, which said that it couldn't be done or that you needed to jump through loads of hoops I managed it.

Basically what I had to do it connect to it via one of the instances we already have running on AWS.

When we log into RDS we use this command on one of the instances running in order to get access to the mysql commandline:

mysql -u [username] -p[password] --database=[database name] --host=[location of RDS instance]

So for instance when we use puTTY to log into our Development instance we issue the above command to get into the RDS instance - there doesn't seem to be a direct way of accessing it.

HeidiSQL can understand that work-flow so in the Session manager of HeidiSQL create a new Session and call it "RDS" for example.

On the Settings tab select SSH tunnel as the Network Type, enter the host variable from the command detailed above into the Hostname / IP field (i.e. [location of RDS instance]). In our case User is [username] and Password is [password]. We'll keep Port as 3306, keep the Compressed client/server protocol tickbox ticked and enter [database name] in the Databases field.

Next click the SSH tunnel tab. Locate plink.exe on your hard drive or download it (handy link on the tab itself). The SSH host + port is the instance you just copied the command from. So for us it's [some subdomain].[some domain].com, port 22. Username is [not necessarily the same username as above] (the username you use to access the AWS instance). Leave the Password field blank and locate your ppk file (which you converted from your initial pem file using PuTTYgen.exe a while ago). Leave the Local port as 3307.

Click Save and then Open and Bob's your Uncle and Fanny's your Aunt!

Happy browsing of the DB!

Of demented cats and rapid mice

2011-10-15T17:42:00.001+01:00

So her indoors is nigh on always late home from work, which drives me up the wall TBH, she's canny though and keeps track of all the time she's late and takes a day off here and there when the time owing accrues to allow it.

She took yesterday off and did a grand job of servicing the engine on the boat.
Now the cat thinks we're just too stupid to be able to breath let alone hunt so every-so-often he decides to take pity on us and deliver us a mouse (if we're lucky) or a rat (if we're unlucky). Yesterday he decided her indoors needed some exercise while she was knee deep in the engine and covered in oil and goodness knows what (I'm not the most mechanically minded person, as you can tell), so he manages to find an old mouse outside, drops it by her, and saunters off so he can sit in the warm by the fire.

Her indoors looks aghast at the mouse and the cat. The cat takes no notice as he's fallen asleep already but the mouse decides that humans aren't his favourite mammal so buggers off under the fridge.

I get home and feed the cat and after her indoors gets back from visiting a friend we discuss the impending dementia of the daft bloody cat, deciding that we'll leave him be until he starts pissing all over the place.

The evening progresses and off to bed we go but the cat decides that he'll pee where he normally pees, i.e. the engine room, and ends up falling between the boards looking for his litter tray. Once we extricate the daft bugger from between the planks I throw him out and try to settle to sleep.

Sure enough I soon hear the pitter-patter of feet but I figure it can't be the cat as I've not heard the cat flap go. That's it, it must be a bloody great big rat! Lights go on and I look all over, find the cat asleep on his cushion by the fire (bugger knows how he got back in, he stomps about like a baby elephant most of the time).

I'm getting ready to go back to bed when her indoors says she's seen the rat/mouse in the bedroom and it's heading in my direction!

Righty-O, says I, no mouse'll get the better of me!

I stoop down and catch the poor little bugger in my hands, he looks into my eyes, ponders what I'm about to do, pisses himself (unbeknownst to me) and bites down with all the force his little jaws can muster on the bit of flesh between my fore-finger and thumb!

I let out a girly shriek and feel the warm liquid dripping down my arm and beg her indoors to open the front door so I can fling the rabid wild animal outside and try to get some relief before I bleed out (that there mice must have pissed it's own body volume as I'm not joking about the amount of liquid dripping all over).

Mouse thrown I inspect the damage, no blood except where it's welling out of two holes in my palm but I'll be buggered if I get Weil's disease so her indoors goes all nurse and swabs my wounds with antiseptic.

In the meantime all this fuss has upset the cat so he decides that the cushion is no longer good enough and nicks my place in the bed. His ire at being gently moved knows no bounds and he spends the remainder of the night dancing a polka on my head.

2011-10-03T17:04:00.000+01:00

Had the need to send a set of hex colour codes to a method which used them to create a chart using Google charts. The initial list was too short so that some of the colours ended up being repeated and the data became difficult to read. I pottered around the code base and "borrowed" some functionality from the boss. The following code is what I used to test it. By all means copy and paste it into a blank file and give it a try. Works a treat!

 <!DOCTYPE HTML>  
 <html>  
  <head>  
   <title>Palette Playing</title>  
   <script type="text/javascript">  
    var palette = "000000,0000FF,00FFFF,00FF00,FFFFFF,FF0000,FFFF00,FF00FF";  
    document.write(palette.split(',').splice(0, 4).join(','));  
   </script>  
  </head>  
  <body>  
  </body>  
 </html>

This will produce "000000,0000FF,00FFFF,00FF00".

Tooth sucking isn't helping

2011-08-01T10:25:00.000+01:00

(Cross posted at the Arcus Global Blog)

The IT Crowd premiered when I had no TV nor any interest in one, I still have no TV but I do get DVD box-sets every now and again to watch at home. After getting the The It Crowd I was really quite excited but the audience at home simply weren't as in to it so it's still there sitting on a shelf waiting…

The few episodes I watched though brought to the fore of my mind the idea that management hate IT — this was certainly the case in my previous job where I heard that the IT department objected to having to support OSX as the infrastructure they were supporting was generally Microsoft-based. But the manager in question had seen some colleagues at a conference using a shiny new MacBook and had simple had to keep up — but without appreciating that they'd have limited access to the infrastructure that they were used to without the IT department having to invest a significant amount of time and effort.

To an extent the infrastructure encouraged by Arcus is agnostic so such issues would be lessened but the principle remains.

To an extent that isn't really what I'm trying to discuss. Most reasonable managers would listen to the concerns of their IT department and act accordingly, assuming that the IT department made their concerns plain to management rather than adopt a bunker mentality and simple Keep Calm and Carry On. The BCS seem to have an approach where they encourage IT staff to become much more involved in the strategic side of business rather than simply being an amorphous mass where requests are met with utterances which are either arcane in nature or follow along the lines of the teeth-sucking my wife meets when she goes to the garage (why the mechanics don't do the same to me is a mystery, I only learnt to drive a couple of years ago where she's probably been driving for longer than they've been alive).

A recent IT World article highlights this discord with the headline “Why businesses move to the cloud: They hate IT”. Strong stuff ehh?.

A colleague, Louis, discussed this with me last week, and the article in IT World refreshed it in my mind. IT departments need to be ever-so-much more strategically and politically minded, something which isn't overly easy for people who're used to talking to computers rather than people. To an extent I'm lucky: I moved from talking to people to talking to computers — but then again I find computers to be just as outrageously frustrating and mind-blowingly lovely as people.

The figures are frightening though, over two thirds of business managers say they keep funds to one side so that they can provision IT without the input of IT departments. The article goes on to say that if IT departments aren't careful then they run the risk of being left maintaining hardware and legacy systems rather than playing with cool new Cloud stuff. Being left in the dust rather than flying in the clouds (Sorry, it's a Monday morning and the purple prose it just oozing out here).

It's an interesting shift though isn't it? I guess at one point the business decided that having all this IT stuff provisioned internally was just cheaper than relying on some outside agency which they had no control over, now it may well be that that isn't totally the case anymore - the control might not be there but the cost saving certainly seems to be (I'm about to start work on a tool that'll illustrate these savings in a very real way). There was also an interesting paragraph which I can only assume was directed at IT departments:

“If they wait so long researching cloud that their whole end-user constituency drains away from them to external IT providers, however, they lose the chance to maintain security and reliability at levels they prefer and justify their salaries for next year.”

I think we're living in interesting times, I guess your approach to change dictates whether this is a blessing or a curse.

PDO mysql_num_rows equivalent

2011-07-29T15:37:00.000+01:00

So I'm re-doing a web app using PDO rather than the built-in MySQL stuff as there seems to be a possibility that the MySQL extension will be gone before too long.

Thing is I do a lot, and I mean a hell of a lot, of checking to see how many rows are returned after a SELECT... and PDO doesn't support mysql_num_rows.

So after looking around I discovered that if I alter my SQL I can check on one line thus:

$dbconn->query("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `something` WHERE `condition` = 'something'")->fetchColumn()

Which'll give me the number of matching records. I can then check that against a condition and carry on... or not as the case may be.

Throwback

2011-07-25T13:04:00.000+01:00

My Aunt Joan has always said I was something of a throwback, she said I was like a Viking or some other sort of big, gruff warrior type of geezer - though she always said I was a gentle giant type-thing as well. Looks like all us non-africans are to some extent according to this article I found on disinformation which discusses this article on io9 by Alasdair Wilkins.

Except that I'm a throwback to a later period in history, which can only be good I guess... unless it means that everyone else has evolved further... ahh well, at least I'm not dragging my knucles along the ground!

Rule 34

2011-07-25T08:21:00.000+01:00

So I got my present job on the back of an interview. It was an interview that was more like a conversation and I found myself interrupting Lars and him interrupting me as we discussed various technologies or approaches to programming. I got off my bike at The Judge School after listening to WHOURKR (which I'd discovered via Transmission Zero) and I was hyped and sweating buckets thanks to cycling to the beat and being really quite excited. We got to talking and it was like I was entering a whole new world, a world where people didn't actively listen to me when I was rattling on about this IT stuff which got me so excited.

Reading Charles Stross is ever-so-much like this. I find myself having to put down my iPad (running Kindle) and just laughing aloud at the way he's inserted some techno-speak into my head, and inserted it without having to go through the loops of having to explain it to me as I already grok it.

My Ma loves his books too, particularly the Laundry series, and I guess he must do the same there as she's an avid reader of thriller and crime novels so I guess she gets the references to spy novels on an instinctive level as well - I too have read my fair share of John Le Carre and I get it too!

Rule 34 though, the follow up to Halting State, is superb! I guess I shouldn't really be reviewing it as I've not quite finished, but there was at least two moments last night where the iPad went down and I just had to sit back and appreciate how he'd got into my head.

Well done Sir!

PHP float to money and back again

2011-07-20T13:56:00.000+01:00

So I've a need of converting a float from a MySQL query into a currency value so it'll print nicely. THis works a treat:

$dosh = number_format($float, 2);

But bringing it back into the table means I searched and found this way:

$float = (float) str_replace(',', '', $dosh);

Seemed to work a treat TBH ;-)

Progress Bar written in PHP using GD and TTF fonts

2011-07-17T12:25:00.001+01:00

So I had a need of a progress bar to show the user their progress through a series of pages filling in data. I'm sure I'd seen something similar before but I wanted to do it myself - what's more I wanted to use the type-face that I'd used for the rest of the site.

The following script can be called whatever you want but does require a few parameters in it's calling. The parameters are width, height and percentage. The width and height are the dimension of the required image in px.

It does require that a typeface be discoverable - it might be best to have the typeface in the same directory as the script, at least that works for me. It's a little down and dirty and doesn't do any checking - which is should really, especially for the existance of the correct GD library and the correct parameters etc...

<?php
  $percentage = $_GET['percentage'];
  $width = $_GET['width'];
  $height = $_GET['height'];
  $progress = imagecreate($width, $height);
  imageantialias($my_img, true);
  $black = imagecolorallocate($progress, 0, 0, 0);
  $white = imagecolorallocate($progress, 255, 255, 255);
  $grey = imagecolorallocate($progress, 204, 204, 204);
  $lGrey = imagecolorallocate($progress, 221, 221, 221);
  imagefilledrectangle($progress, 0, 0, $width, $height, $black);
  imagefilledrectangle($progress, 1, 1, ($width - 2), ($height - 2), $white);
  imagefilledrectangle($progress, 1, 1, (($percentage/100) * ($width - 2)), ($height - 2), $grey);
  $text = $percentage." %";
  $font = 'Gothicb.TTF';
  $font_size = 12;
  $text_box = imagettfbbox($font_size, 0, $font, $text);
  $text_width = $text_box[2]-$text_box[0];
  $text_height = $text_box[7]-$text_box[1];
  $x = ($width/2) - ($text_width/2);
  $y = ($height/2) - ($text_height/2);
  imagettftext($progress, 12, 0, ($x + 1), ($y + 1), $lGrey, $font, $text);
  imagettftext($progress, 12, 0, $x, $y, $black, $font, $text);
  header("Content-type: image/png");
  imagepng($progress);
  imagecolordeallocate($black);
  imagecolordeallocate($white);
  imagecolordeallocate($grey);
  imagecolordeallocate($lGrey);
  imagedestroy($progress);
?>

Bacon Ipsum

2011-07-14T14:53:00.000+01:00

Just too cool!

R.I.P News of the Screws

2011-07-10T09:28:00.000+01:00

So this week the news has been full of the News of the Screws phone hacking thing. I'm not overly sure that such misuse of the term "hacking" is appropriate — from my somewhat limited understanding it was merely a question of investigators using the default passcode to listen to a mobile phone users voice mail…?

Whether that deserves the application of the term "hacking" rather than simply being "sneaky" I'm not too sure, neither am I sure that the victims of the alleged hacking aren't overly sensible — surely if everyone was given the same pin when issued a debit/credit card they would take the first opportunity to change that there pin wouldn't they? Not 100% analagous but I think it's similar enough to bear consideration.

Anyway… so News International decided to sweeten things by closing down the News of the Screws early (what's the betting that the Sun on Sunday was going to be launched soon anyway — and what's the betting that it'll have a similar roll to the News of the World as well?), not least because they're trying to take over BSkyB and want to avoid any hint of scandal as well as show proper contrition.

That does leave us with something of a quandary about privacy though… not too long ago the news was full of super-injunctions — the method by which the rich and/or famous were able to keep their actions out of the press — and the furore that that evoked when made public. Now we've got allegations of investigators using underhand/sneaky methods of obtaining information which anyone else could obtain if they had a total dis-regard for the privacy of others and a morality bypass.

We've also got the promise that the coalition will launch an enquiry — does anyone else see the link here?

Admittedly I'm something of a conspiracy-theory aficionado but wouldn't it be interesting if we threw the baby out with the bath-water when the enquiry returns suggestions that privacy be upped a notch, thus doing away with the requirement for super-injunctions?

What if, by our own carelessness, we ushered in stricter privacy laws in order to protect those of us who're too trusting or not technically savvy enough to change their pin?

I don't know about the legality of the phone "hacking", though I suspect it isn't particularly legal, but I do know that the next time our Dear Leader has a meeting with — just as a for-instance — Rupert Murdoch or — another for-instance — Rebekah Brooks then I'd like to be told! I dare say though, that in the future such reporting might be considered illegal and we'd all be the poorer for it being so.

I'm not defending the News of the Screws (though I did sort of enjoy reading it on a night-shift) but I am wary about what this might lead to — if anything I really, really don't want legislation to be created as a result, rather I'd like less legislation. I'd like people to be a little more aware of their responsibilities in regards to their own security. I'd really, really like News International to lose all investment and market share — I for one am thinking of boycotting anything which advertises in those outlets, I'd suggest that others do as well, I just need a register of who advertises with them now…? (Just hope it's not Tesco or I'll starve!)

Buying anything from News International is something I'll also avoid now! Thankfully I don't buy a paper but what else do they do?

Chased by a herd of cows

2011-06-26T16:29:00.000+01:00

I've mentioned before the penchant 'er-indoors has for things that make odd, often random, noises here. Thankfully there is no longer a killer machine in the bathroom! Ohh no, I'm safe from being annihilated by Summer Glau (imagine me rubbing my thighs and leering wickedly right about now)... now I've got to contend with being chased by cows!

For some reason, only know to 'er, she decided that it'd be useful to have the SatNav moo when the car is going over the speed limit!

I've given up trying to understand quite why she does these things... perhaps it's because she's just had a speeding ticket (that makes 2 now)? As I say, I don't want to know why she did it, I just want to know how to turn it off as, whenever I'm in the car, it sounds like I'm being chased by a herd of cows - a herd of cows actually in the car!

Yesterday though I solved the problem, yesterday I realised that it only moos when you go over the limit, it doesn't keep on mooing while you're over the limit, just when you go over a given threshold. Happy days are here with consistant speeding!

Either that or I could keep within the speed limit?

2011-06-04T08:24:00.002+01:00

So on Wednesday I went to empty my loo. Once or twice a week a put a full cassette of waste on the back of my bike, sling my pannier on my shoulder, and ride 20 minutes or so up the river bank and empty our effluent into the sluice at Jesus Green.

I've been doing this for more years than I care to remember and now we've 3 cassettes I can afford to be a little blasé about my routine. Wednesday though I had only a little amount of stuff to put in the pannier so thought that it'd be a good day to empty the cassette.

Anyway I got there and found the door to the sluice open. This is annoying but fair enough as the lock has been broken for a while and after phoning the Cambridge City Council and complaining about it once to be confronted with it being replaced with a lock which no one had a key to I've come to the conclusion that, at the end of the day, it's better to have a door which won't lock than a door which won't open.

I do though, every time I go past and notice it swinging open, use a dog end to wedge it shut. Not the best solution I know, but security through deception is better than no security at all.

I emptied my loo but nothing went down the sluice (that might not be the correct phrase - coming from the world of nursing as I do though - it looks a lot like a sluice in a hospital), but it wouldn't go down! Not only would it not go down but it started bubbling and splashing all over the shop! I've not got the most robust nature when it comes to bodily fluids at the best of times but I challenge anyone to be relaxed at a pot of shite bubbling and splashing!

I've got a thing whereby I choke if anything constructs my chest or neck, even to a minuscule degree so I'm doubled up and dry heaving from the pannier being around my shoulder and then these's some sort of gelatinous bubbling monster growling at me from the pan smelling like we've been eating dead things for the past half week! Not nice!

So I leave the sluice without rinsing out the cassette - which I like to do so that we're at least pretending to be hygienic - and phone the Cambridge City Council again to suggest that someone unblock the sluice. They assure me that someone will do so and take my phone number. Come the end of the day and no phone call so I check anyway. Guess what? Still a bubbling brown mess in the pan (what had I been eating?) and a handwritten note from another boater saying that s/he too had phoned the council at 14:00hrs and been assured that the problem would be resolved in a couple of hours. It was 3 hours later when I came past.

I pay my mooring fee and I welcomed the Cam Conservancy when they visited boats with the Environment Agency and talked about the importance of not emptying effluent into the Cam. I've been faithfully emptying mine into the sluice, as I've already said, for more years than I care to remember. Cambridge attracts an awful lot of visitors on boats and the boating community is a vibrant part of life in Cambridge. you'd think that making it possible for locals and visitors both to not put our shit in the river would be an important thing for the Council to understand.

Guess not.

Saturday morning and I've been up there again with a full cassette and nothing happening! I've come back with it full because, frankly, I can't be doing with heaving again. Strawberry Fair is on today and I want to save my heaving for the beer tent later on!

Perhaps I'll phone again on Monday and suggest that when they unblock the loo they might want to look at fixing the lock so that random piss-heads wandering on Jesus Green can't decide to shove random crap down the sluice and block it again... At least I assume that that is what happened!

To an extent I'm all for the big society but after clearing shite professionally for donkey's years I draw the line at unblocking drains filled with shite and goodness knows what other shite (see what I did there?). Running the risk of getting a needle-stick injury at my age is no fun at all.

We've a cassette and a half empty so I'm hoping that it'll be fixed by the end of next week or I'm not sure what I'll do. Perhaps I should start flinging it in the river or throwing it at the coaches using loudhailers outside the boat at 06:00hrs? Perhaps it should join the cow crap all over Stourbridge Common... I could even dry it out on the roof and burn it when it gets cold on an evening?

Anyway, rant over. I'll keep you updated.

100%

2011-05-27T09:04:00.000+01:00

100% on LEGO® Pirates of the Caribbean The Video Game. Now what to do?

Can't play Plants vs. Zombies anymore as 'er-in-doors has taken my iPad away to play it!

Guess that means I'll have to code now, that and investigate the coolness that is Node.js! Think that I'll try and get it to parse XML based web services and throw out JSON...? That'd be cool, especially if I could do some caching on the server... ho hum!

Travelodge - City Road, London. Not Priceless

2011-05-05T21:41:00.003+01:00

A room that smells of piss, a bath only big enough for my feet, a room key that wouldn't work, 'orrible young people and ladies of negotiable affection being in the - I use the term loosely - hotel, not having my phone charger, taps that give me a shower when I want to turn them off, boarded up slums outside my window, utter shite on the telly, and internet connection form the darkest days of dialup, one of the nastiest pubs and a Tesco's Express outside... all these things, and so many more, make this quite possibly, not in the least priceless.

At least I'm not paying for it... ;-)

That and the Tesco's Express selling pre-mixed JD and coke, minus the calls from work as something died yesterday, means that I'm not an overly happy camper!

Still, the AWS Deep Dive training means that I'm not terminally suicidal!

CSS shorthand

2011-05-03T14:33:00.004+01:00

There's all sorts of CSS shorthand available online and I get confused easily. This is what is meant by the differing formats of CSS shorthand:

.someClass { padding: [top], [right], [bottom], [left] }
.someClass { padding: [top], [right & left], [bottom] }
.someClass { padding: [top & bottom], [right & left] }
.someClass { padding: [top, right, bottom & left] }

So we can have 1, 2, 3 or 4 entries after the property, this is represented in the list above by square brackets, these can be whatever your chosen values are (e.g. px, em, % etc.)

Cracking images

2011-04-14T13:46:00.000+01:00

Cracking sinful images from chill07 via who killed bambi?.

Also found another, virtuous, set by pat7:

Castles in the air

2011-04-04T09:07:00.000+01:00

In a previous life I was a psychiatric nurse. whilst I was doing my training I came across a cool quote to do with neurotics, psychotics and psychiatrists. I'll repeat it below. It's attributed to Jerome Lawrence, a famous American author and playwright.

"A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent."

Now in a previous life my Dad was a structural engineer. One of the things he used to say about his job was that when architects came up with a cool looking design for a building the structural engineer would take those pretty pictures and make sure the finished, pretty, building wouldn't fall down.

What, you may be wondering, is what my old man's and my previous jobs has to do with what I'm doing now in terms of being a developer...

Well, I'm tasked with making things work, I'm not always privy to the decisions that go into why they should work, but I have to make them work!

This is lovely!

I get told to do something, sometimes I get told what techniques to use to do that thing - more often than not I get to decide what techniques I get to use.

So I go off and to that thing. If it's a web-app I get to decide on what mix of server- and client-side technolgies to use... being something of a fan of ajax I usually plump for JavaScript.

I use JavaScript just so long as it doesn't slow me down too much. I'll write a script that takes every element of a page which needs content and get it dynamically, until I'm making something silly like 150 ajax calls, and then I'll realise that the server would be better off making those calls before the page ever reaches the client. PHP on the server is an order of magnitude quicker than JavaScript on the client!

Thus I get to my theory of gradual optimisation. Do something so that it works - it might not be pretty but it'll work - and then squeeze every last bit of it until it's a lean, mean, web-app. That'll often mean making changes to the page structure so that the bits that were filled in dynamically are removed if there's nothing to process but hey-ho!

Random Minute Generator

2011-03-04T10:44:00.000Z

Had a need to turk some numbers for putting into a DATETIME field in MySQL so came up with this little script for generating a set of minutes:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>Random Minute Generator</title>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      window.onload = function addNumbers(){
        for(var x = 0; x < 217; x++){
          if (document.createTextNode){
            var myNumber = Math.floor(Math.random()*60) + 1;
            if(myNumber < 10){
              myNumber = "0"+myNumber;
            }
            var myText=document.createTextNode(myNumber);
          }
          document.getElementById("myDiv").appendChild(myText);
          var newLine=document.createElement('br');
          document.getElementById("myDiv").appendChild(newLine);
        }
      }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="myDiv">
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Do enjoy if you use it and perhaps leave a comment...?

mod_expires on Ubuntu Server

2011-03-03T10:52:00.001Z

I love Firebug, it's really the only reason I use Firefox rather than Chrome as my main browser.

I particularly like Google's Page Speed add-on for Firebug - except that I always ended up scratching my head about the "Leverage browser caching" messages I heard. This hasn't been a major problem as I've usually been working on a shared server - so couldn't do anything about it. After setting up an Ubuntu Server in EC2 however I realised that I could do something about it. After having a quick search around I found this post on Absolutely Tech which led me to this post on Absolutely Tech which enabled me to install mod_expires.

Basically the process I used was to check to see if mod_expires was installed using phpinfo(), after realising that it wasn't I did sudo a2enmod expires followed by sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart. Now I can cache all the images on my site by adding this to .htaccess in my root directory:

# Turn on the Expires engine
ExpiresActive On
 
# Expires a week after client accesses the file
ExpiresByType image/jpeg M604800
ExpiresByType image/gif M604800
ExpiresByType image/png M604800
ExpiresByType image/x-icon M604800

Job's a good'un!

My next job is to check out Google's mod_pagespeed.

New Tomb Raider?

2011-02-17T14:01:00.000Z

http://www.google.co.uk/images?q="Olivia+Wilde"

Stormtrooper RIP

2011-01-31T13:00:00.000Z

Wow, just so cool!

HTML Entities Decoder

2011-01-27T12:13:00.002Z

So I was looking for some some lyrics... can't actually remember why now TBH. When I found them the site I was on refused to let me copy them so I thought I'd be clever and check the source... only to discover that the individual characters in the lyrics had been converted into their respective HTML Entities.

Arse!

I copied the lyrics anyway and googled for a way to convert HTML Entities back into characters and found a site that did what I wanted but with an overhead of having to do a Captcha... no fun!

So I wrote my own, the result is the HTML Entities Decoder. It uses jQuery and a nifty JSON object to do the calculation so I don't really feel the need to control access - enjoy!

Activated charcoal knickers... please!

2011-01-21T09:37:00.000Z

'er indoors, who very rarely is, has the most gad awful wind!

I'm not saying this just to be rude; I feel like I've got to justify myself as I've often been accused of smelling like a skunk - she takes the biscuit. Not only does she smell like a skunk she smells like a skunk crawled up there a month or two back and died due to the existing smell, adding it's own distinctive aroma to the original stench.

I'm saying this because, thanks to my insomnia, I was up at 03:30hrs working, I finished what I was doing at about 06:30hrs and decided to get a little more sleep.

I might have said this before but the feel of getting into a nice warm bed and spooning next to a lovely warm body is just about the best thing in the world to me.

I was loving it this morning as it'd got a little cold while I was up and the throw was atop the bed as well as the monstrous quilt but then...

A quick eruption of gas were not only heard, but felt on my upper legs. I'm not sure why - perhaps it's some sort of masochistic streak or something - but I wafted the quilt in order to sample the bouquet. How I wish I hadn't!

I remember as a kid getting into my parents bed when I was little on a Saturday morning and being somewhat comforted by the smell of my parents. This wasn't that smell!

This smell was almost indescribable in it's vileness, in fact it was indescribable! Imagine the worst smell you've ever smelt and double it and you'll be getting close!

As I'm gagging she starts to chortle and says, "You shouldn't have put your cold legs on mine"! She took no notice of my reasoning about reasonable force and continued to giggle!

Quickly clamping the quilt down I decided that that was that and I wasn't disturbing the quilt again as there was no way I was going to submit myself to that again! I was going to submit to voluntary cataplexy or some sort of self-induced sleep paralysis rather than risk a waft of that evil smell again. I was trying to calculate how long before the stench had either evaporated or been absorbed by the bedding (or eaten it's way into my pores) when a further two eruptions occurred! I wasn't aware that I could grab material that hard but there was no way I was going to relinquish my hold on the quilt, there was no way that more of the miasma was going to escape when...

"I'm getting up now, are you stopping there?", and it - and her - escaped!

Helped me get back to sleep for an hour though, I'm only grateful that I woke again at all!

What've you got installed?

2011-01-14T10:12:00.000Z

A colleague running OS X asked me to run this command on my Win 7 machine today in order to test an audit idea he had: WMIC product > wmic.txt, after a fair old wait I had a nice text file with a list of all the software installed on my machine... how cool!

I'm hurt!

2011-01-13T14:51:00.000Z

Simple backup of a directory on Ubuntu Server

2011-01-13T11:44:00.001Z

So I set up an Ubuntu Server instance but need to backup my development folder on a regular basis. I've got SSH access so can access it via PuTTY and FileZilla. In PuTTY I use tar -cvf [YYYYMMDD].tar [directory]/, when it's done I use gzip [YYYYMMDD].tar and then use FileZilla to copy across the resulting [YYYYMMDD].tar.gz file.

Now I just need to remember to do this at the beginning and end of each day!

Or:

#!/bin/bash
# declare DATE variable
theDATE=$(date +%Y%m%d)
tar -cvf $theDATE.tar www/
gzip $theDATE.tar

XSS and the BOM (“ï»¿”)

2011-01-06T13:17:00.002Z

So I was working on a script to get the Latitude and Longitude from postcodes using Bing. I set up a simple page with a box where a postcode could be entered, Upon a button being pressed the postcode is checked using the fantastic UK Postcode Validation JavaScript by John Gardner. I then used jQuery to query Bing but ran into problems thanks to ajax restrictions on cross site scripting, I got over that using a PHP proxy on the same domain that basically echoed the XML that I wanted originally. Thus:

<?php
  header ("content-type: text/xml");
  header ("charset: utf-8");
  $bingURI  = "http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Locations/UK/";
  $apiKey   = "?o=xml&key=yourKeyHere";
  $file     = file_get_contents($bingURI.rawurlencode($_GET['postcode']).$apiKey);
  echo $file;
?>

All well and good except that there was a rather odd set of glyphs (ï»¿) at the beginning of the echoed XML… after a fair bit of searching I discovered that it was the BOM, whatever it was I didn't want it! After a little more searching I found this PHP function from Philipp Michels:

<?php
function rmBOM($string) {
  if(substr($string, 0,3) == pack("CCC",0xef,0xbb,0xbf)) {
    $string=substr($string, 3);
  }
  return $string;
}
?>

Which worked a treat and allowed the XML to be parsed properly!

The result is here: http://drmsite.com/postcode.html.

Setting up Ubuntu in the cloud with ElasticFox, PuTTY and FileZilla

2011-01-05T13:36:00.000Z

My mornings work! YMMV, worked for me at time of posting!

Install PuTTY and PuTTYgen from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html.
Install FileZilla
Fire up Firefox and install ElasticFox.
Re-start Firefox and feed ElasticFox your credentials.
Generate Key Pair on the KeyPairs tab. Download the file and fire-up PuTTYgen.
In PuTTYgen hit Conversions » Import key. Select the downloaded .pem file then hit Save private key, hit Yes and save the .pkk file where you'll remember where it is.
In ElasticFox hit Create Security Group (green plus on the left-hand side) on the Security Groups tab. Give it a name and a description and select "I will authorise protocols for this group as needed", hit Create Group.
With your new group selected on the left-hand side hit Grant Permissions (green tick on right-hand side). Select SSH from the drop-down, select Network and enter 0.0.0.0/0 then hit Add. Repeat but select HTTP from the drop-down, again add 0.0.0.0/0 as the Network address.
Still in ElasticFox hit the Images tab and enter "20101225" in the top-left text-box. Select the "ami-339ca947" image then hit Launch Instance(s) (green start-up on top pane).
Select your Key Pair in the KeyPair option and move over your Security Group to the right using the arrows below - but other ones apart from yours on the left.
Hit Launch.
In the Instances tab right-click your instance and select Copy Public DNS Name to clipboard.
Fire up PuTTY, crtl-v into Host Name, on Category pane select SHH » Auth then browse for you .pkk file. Finally go back to Session on the Category pane, enter a name into Saved Sessions and hit Save.
Click Open on PuTTY and if all went well then there should be CLI. Login as "ubuntu".
Type sudo tasksel --section server like it tells you to. To select something move with the arrow keys and select using the spacebar. Select LAMP server and let it roll.
ctrl-v into the address bar of a new FireFox tab... It works!
Fire up FileZilla and hit Edit » Settings.... On the Select page: pane hit SFTP, then Add keyfile... button. Browse to and select your .pkk file again, hit OK.
Next go File » Site Manager..., hit New Site, give it a name and then ctrl-v address into Host: textarea on the right. Server Type: is SFTP, Logon Type is Interactive and User is ubuntu. Hit OK.
Select your site from the drop-down beside the little Site Manager icon on the top left under the menu strip. Navigate to /var/www and you should see the index.html file.
'nuff said, have a coffee and a fag!

M255 Results

2011-01-05T09:15:00.001Z

These came mid-December but I forgot to document them:

Course	M255 Object-oriented programming with Java	End Date: October 2010
Scores	OES: 63 OCAS: 92 (Substitution applied)
Result	Grade 3 Pass

Not too bad but the exam was a let down

Such a bad…

2011-01-02T17:51:00.000Z

…husband (Check the snigger at the end!)!

Alpha transparency

2010-12-07T15:14:00.000Z

So I'm looking at 8 increments between 0 (Hex 00) and 255 (Hex FF)... except that there's really 9 because of numbering starting at 0... adding 32 (256/8 = 32) each time worked a treat... especially when I knocked the 1 off of each result:

0	00
31	1F
63	3F
95	5F
127	7F
159	9F
191	BF
223	DF
255	FF

Which allowed me to create this PNG image via SVG:

Wampserver & Symfony

2010-12-05T16:34:00.002Z

http://www.wampserver.com/en/download.php for WampServer 2.0i. download and install
WAMPSERVER (System Tray) » Apache » Apache Modules » rewrite_module
WAMPSERVER » PHP » PHP Extension » php_xsl
remove ";" from line ;extension=php_xsl.dll in C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.0\php.ini
Add C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.0\ and C:\wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.1.36\bin\ to PATH in ENIVROMENT VARIABLES
Cmd to C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.0\ and "php -d phar.require_hash=0 ./PEAR/go-pear.phar
Execute C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.0\PEAR_ENV.reg
pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
pear install symfony/symfony

Thanks to Anand Sharma and michoz.

Bloody Cold...

2010-12-02T11:47:00.002Z

Me and 'er-indoors spent most of the evening arguing about who'd be wearing my hap last night... just a shame that it looks like I'm wearing a cat on my head!

One for #3 son (check the originals here):

Ponies Of The Apocalypse

2010-11-30T14:51:00.000Z

Ponies Of The Apocalypse by ~carny87 on deviant ART

Move Window & SendTo Menu

2010-11-25T09:14:00.002Z

I'm not sure why but I'm forever finding Windows just at the edge of the screen so I can't see what's on them... a quick Google always find a solution but in the interests of not making Google my brain I've decided to write down here the solution:,/p>

Hold down the ALT key.
Press SPACEBAR.
Press M (Move).
A 4-headed arrow will appear. When it does, use your arrow keys to move the outline of the window.
When you are happy with its position, press ENTER.

Another thing I keep having to Google is the location of the SendTo Menu, so here it is:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

Nuff said about this!

The other thing I need to remind myself is the SendTo.

It's relatively easy to get a Visual Studio Installer to create a shortcut within the SendTo menu directory (see above), if a little convoluted but to get that shortcut to show is less easy... in fact it's a bit of a killer! Which is where Orca comes in handy (Orca - The Killer Whale... geddit?).

Open the msi, select the Property table and add another row with a Property of DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS and a Value of 1. Save and exit and the next time the installer runs then the shortcut will appear in the right-click context menu.

20/10/2010

2010-11-23T08:34:00.000Z

My weekend watching:

Skyline: brilliant special effects but a story with more holes than my Dad's vest and characters you can't care about. If you've watched Independence Day, The Matrix and Cloverfield you've seen it already!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1: Miserable as sin but not as much fun! Felt like an obvious lead-up to the last film. A filler like The Empire Strikes Back was a filler - can't be blamed for that though - Part 2 wouldn't be as cool as it's promising to be without it. Life is a narrative and sometimes the middle act needs to be a bit boring and mundane.

Predators and The Tournament on DVD, both marvellous in their own way. Predators was a astoundingly well-made homage to all the previous films and managed to make me forget all the other, less-well-made sequels to the original film. Whereas The Tournament was a non-stop, action-filled exercise in gorgeous sillyness! Excellent and worth a watch!

Devilishly good!

2010-11-18T12:07:00.003Z

Got this for an early Xmas present and used it yesterday with #3 son. We only had cheese and veggie ham with some veggie worcester sauce (what’s going on with the spelling there, I thought it was Worcestershire – it is!) or cheese and prosciutto with some baked beans and coleslaw - but it was lovely. One of the things I miss about living on dry-land is the lack of mains electricity, no Microwaves, toasters or sandwich toasters (or TVs for that matter) but this makes it all okay as I can still have toasted sandwiches! Yay!

It comes with a leaflet full of recipe ideas but I can’t bring myself to do the sweet recipes… toasted sandwiches should be savoury and not sweet! As should, thinking about it, French toast – though Wikipedia doesn’t agree. I find there is little better in life that French toast covered in Ketchup or Brown Sauce. I’ve a theory about the age of children and their taste in French toast condiments: when they’re young they invariably choose Ketchup but you can chart their maturity by the propensity to opt for HP. I’d be interested in your opinion of this theory as I’ve a limited dataset with which to work.

Also finished Doctor Who: Evacuation Earth yesterday. A lot like the Professor Layton DS games but with somewhat easier puzzles, which is why it only took me a couple of days to complete it. Didn’t like the Sliding Puzzles though managed them, more than likely due to brute force attacks rather than any strategy.

Not Kitkat

2010-11-17T10:04:00.002Z

Pub quiz score = 30/60... valdy poor!

Knew I'd seen this advert just not where... knew it was advertising something long, sticky (as in stick like) and brown and thought it was Kitkat or Pepperoni... forgot about the chocolate fingers!

Arse!

Web Designers vs. Web Developers (Infographic)

2010-11-14T11:08:00.001Z

Web Designers vs Web Developers is brought to you by Wix.com
Use creative design to make a Free Website
You are most welcome to share this infographic with your audience.

Clouds are cool!

2010-11-11T12:20:00.001Z

Clouds are cool by *annoyingmouse on deviant ART

Windows 7 hosts file

2010-11-10T10:42:00.001Z

So Windows 7 uses the hosts file like nigh on every other OS and, thanks to lots and lots of messing around with servers, my hosts file was messed up. All I wanted to do was set up localhost to point to 127.0.0.1!

I use Boxer but every time I edited the file and tried to save it it wouldn't let me, telling me that Access was denied!

I guessed that this was down to not running Boxer as an administrator so instead of using the nice shortcut I usually use to launch Boxer I found it in the Start menu and right-clicked it as chose "Run as administrator", this let me save properly and now localhost points to the IP address 127.0.0.1! Yay!

Brain not working

2010-11-08T14:14:00.000Z

I'm not sure why it is but my brain has crashed today. It could be the weather (which is dull and wet), or the odd Camelot liqueur that my Ma brought me back from Ibitha. Whatever it is, my brain's just not working! Woke at 7:30 after going to bed at 21:30 last night and I'm still tired! That after getting up at 10:00 yesterday morning!

Shame really as WordPress is defeating me - or should that be that my previous hacking of wordpress is defeating me when I'm trying to rationalise a theme I'm working on - ohh woe is me!

Did hear something interesting over the weekend though... someone said, "put a backslash on that". How cool!

Luke’s Parrot

2010-11-06T11:11:00.001Z

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future has some cool Parrot mini-games. After getting stuck I did some research and found these images (Thank you Isenet via this post):

Disposable Panda

2010-11-02T14:56:00.001Z

// The instance field Name pertains to an instance of a particular Panda,
// whereas Population pertains to the set of all Pandas:

public class Panda : IDisposable{
  public string Name;                     // Instance field
  public static int Population;           // Static field
  public Panda (string n){                // Constructor
    Name = n;                             // Assign the instance field
    Population = Population + 1;          // Increment the static Population field
  }
  void IDisposable.Dispose(){
    Population = Population - 1;          // Decrement the static Population field
  }
}

static void Main(){
  Panda p1 = new Panda ("Pan Dee");
  Console.WriteLine (p1.Name);            // Pan Dee
  Console.WriteLine (Panda.Population);   // 1
  using(Panda p2 = new Panda ("Pan Dah")){
    Console.WriteLine (p2.Name);          // Pan Dah
    Console.WriteLine (Panda.Population); // 2
  }
  Console.WriteLine (Panda.Population);   // 1
  Panda p3 = new Panda ("Zi Chi");
  Console.WriteLine (p3.Name);            // Zi Chi
  Console.WriteLine (Panda.Population);   // 2
}

I'm working through the examples in C# 4.0 in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition and I got to thinking about how to erase an instance of a class... using seemed to be the way to go so I implemented the IDisposable Interface and now I've got disposable Pandas!

Appraisal

2010-11-02T10:45:00.001Z

Now after years of working in the NHS the idea of an appraisal fills me with dread. I worked nights, you see, and no one could be arsed to appraise the night staff. Every so often some nice, well-meaning, newly-appointed and probably almost terminally-naive DCN would suggest checking how I was getting on.

What with my great hatred of getting there earlier than I needed to (except, of course, to give me enough time to make a coffee and have a fag before hand-over) - and their soon-waning desire to stop later than they absolutely needed to in order to listen to my rants - I very rarely left work in the morning with a new set of aims and objectives.

Cool ehh?

That is/was the case anyway… except when something had gone pear-shaped… then I was bombarded by enquiries about how I felt about the job (hated it), how I felt I was getting on (hadn't killed anyone, so not so bad) and, every-so-often, what I wanted out of the future (NASA has unfortunately stopped taking applications from balding, fat Yorkshire men who drink like fish and smoke like chimneys so I'll be waiting until the aliens come before I can visit space shall I? (I did say about the ranting above)).

All very usual really… but now I'm in a job I enjoy and the idea of an appraisal fills me with dread for a different reason… what if they ask me how I feel about the job (love it), how I fell I’m getting on (flashes of pure genius and then long periods of slog (everyone who's worked with me will know how much I swear at the computer and then, every-so-often, how I wake up from introspection and declare myself the GREATEST!)) and what I want from the future (more of the same but with shorter periods of slog and more flashes of genius - ohh, and the raise in retirement age isn't a problem as I'd happily do this forever)?

What if they say they need to speak to me because, horror of horrors, something I’ve done has gone pear-shaped (surely not, I now check everything I do in IE6 as a matter of course)?

But it was all actually very civilised, they did just want to know what I’d enjoyed, what I’d not enjoyed. What they could do to make things better and all that sort of stuff… I left feeling as though something had been accomplished rather than as if someone had had an awful thought in the middle of the night and realised that the night staff hadn’t been appraised for the last five years… and what would the Care Quality Commission think of that?

I’m not sure how long my dread of appraisals will last though, I think it’s going to take a fair few in order to get over my phobia of them and for me to appreciate that they don’t just happen because someone's got a bee in their bonnet or because something’s gone wrong.

We’ll see.

Very, very cool... but is it art?

2010-10-29T09:41:00.002+01:00

Came across this via Who killed Bambi and I think it's lovely but it did get me thinking.

I've heard criticism of Banksy's work which states that it isn't art but is simply playing. I'm not sure that I'm qualified to judge that (Banksy is careful not to call himself an artist anyway) but I know what I like… and I really like Lipstick Enigma. That might be the juxtaposition of something so soft, curvacious and feminine as lipstick with something like a bitmap font.

Lipstick Enigma from Janet Zweig on Vimeo.

Anyway, I think that this is cool and should I be loaded I'd certainly buy it… in the meantime I'll keep on trying to figure out how it's done so I can recreate it myself.

Co-ordinates

2010-10-25T13:24:00.001+01:00

I've been learning C# for a week or four and a lot of the examples I've looked at deal with Point values… these are to do with Co-ordinate systems. I like co-ordinate systems generally - I'd not like SVG as much as I do if I didn't - but I'm not totally au fait with the lingo in this respect so when I came across this:

The easiest way to construct a Point is to pass two integers as the abscissa and the ordinate parts of the coordinate...

I nigh on shat!

After a bit of judicious define:ing though, I discovered that the abscissa is the “the value of a coordinate on the horizontal axis”… cool ehh? The ordinate is simply the other number.

~~Having said this I do get a little confused with these systems as I’m pretty sure that SVG and the Canvas use different co-ordinate systems~~ (Nope, that’s wrong, they both count down from the top, as does Processing (the next thing I need to play with))… wonder what I could have been thinking of…?

Beer Isle

2010-10-21T11:37:00.003+01:00

Despite #3 son having the opinion that anyone who drinks, even if it's a solo port and lemon at Christmas, is an alcoholic he's got the eyes of a SHR when it comes to the beer isle in Tesco's. Once he's gone and got his pre-tea nuts, and I've got the fixings for that nights tea, we wander down the beer isle and he checks to see if they've got Poacher's in yet... when we see that they haven't his eyes start roaming the shelves. Yesterday he found Tesco Finest American Double IPA. A very fine beer if enough to make you go crossed-eyed (9.2%), truly a beer on steroids!

I found Greene King Very Special India Pale Ale all by myself, that's tasty as well!

The problems with tea-tree and gravity

2010-10-19T11:53:00.002+01:00

I love the feeling of tea-tree shampoo on my head... a bit like having a million pins pushed into my scalp slowly, exciting and just on the nice side of painful (now that does make me worry). So I got all excited when I found some nice tea-tree shower-gell. I thought that that, along with a buf puf, might make for a lovely, invigorating shower!

Unfortunately, the astringent property of the buf puf combined with the aforementioned "million pins" qualities of the tea-tree led to some little discomfort. A scrotal sac has, even at my advanced age, a lot less surface area than a scalp (especially at my advanced age - interesting thought there: if the number of wrinkles increases on your scalp, does that mean that the surface area of your scalp increases... and does that rate of increase match the rate of increase of the old scrote caused by gravity?), but quite probably the same or even many, many more nerve endings.

Needless to say I stopped using it!

Except that on Monday I thought I'd try to wake myself out of a nigh on terminal case of man-flue with a hair wash using the tea-tree shower-gell, and some nice, gentle stuff on the rest of me... I didn't count on gravity - and the action of the water rinsing off of me - to transport the god-forsaken tea-tree oil down the rest of my body though! It woke me up all right, but it was a bit of a rude awakening!

It's in the bin now!

Frobnicator

2010-10-14T12:36:00.001+01:00

Who'd a thunk it! From the divine Programming C# 4.0 (p25).

Earwigs in my handlebars

2010-10-14T11:13:00.000+01:00

Most mornings I get a tickle on my left hand while I'm cycling along Midsummer Common, it's not a creepy tickle but certainly noticeable. I look down and there's an Earwig scuttling along the back of my hand, so I flick it off. Monday morning there were three: two on my left hand and one on my right hand. Last week I saw one half in and half out of the little hole at the end of the handlebar so I'm guessing they live there or something...?

Talent book profile

2010-10-13T10:03:00.001+01:00

POTENTIAL	Seeks new Challenges	Enigma	Growth Employee	Next Generation Leader
	Potential growth / role expansion	Dilemma	Core Employee	High Impact Performer
	No / Limited Growth	Under Performer	Effective	Trusted Professional
		Does not / partially meets expectations	Meets expectations	Exceeds expectations
	PERFORMANCE

The jQuery plugin that ate the world!

2010-10-13T05:48:00.000+01:00

So I was looking at placing a Wordpress pages content flow into columns as I was using the YUI 2 to format the page… I thought about using jQuery and worked up an example using some of Karl Swedberg's work as a basis along with inspiration from Adam Wulf. But… the script worked by looking at each element… each p, each hr and each and every h2. After it counted 'em all it divided 'em by 3 placed that number in each column… which is cool except that a hr is a lot shorter than a paragraph (generally) and the layout broke.

I then started pondering getting the computed style (and don't get me started on how this is a bugger when IE is involved) of an imaginary page with the same width of the columns and then splitting that in 3 and somehow getting that chunk of elements (and perhaps splitting the odd p in the process) and putting them in the place where they're supposed to go… but that get problematic when you start to ignore hrs, you might end up getting the hr, which I was using as an underline to the h2, at the start of one column when it should be at the bottom of the other… or even better, beneath the heading at the top of the next column because the script was smart enough to know where headings - as well as horizontal rules - should properly go. Needless to say, it was getting far too complicated!

I had visions - nay, nightmares - about this plugin. I dreamt it got more and more complex, that I managed to write some weird, otherworldly, algorithm to predict where the breaks should occur, that it began to read the minds of the authors to such an extent that it'd correct the content on the fly, that it became… to all intents and purposes, the jQuery plugin that ate the world!

So I looked at something else before the weird little plan that I had in my head started to develop it's own form of consciousness and looked at the Wordpress Codex again.

I found some stuff on shortcodes (which are a simple set of functions for creating macro codes for use in post content). and so I wrote these:

<?php
function basic_leftcolumn($atts, $content = null) {
  return '<div class="yui-u first">'.$content.'</div>';
}
add_shortcode("leftcolumn", "basic_leftcolumn");

function basic_middlecolumn($atts, $content = null) {
  return '<div class="yui-u">'.$content.'</div>';
}
add_shortcode("middlecolumn", "basic_middlecolumn");

function basic_rightcolumn($atts, $content = null) {
  return '<div class="yui-u">'.$content.'</div>';
}
add_shortcode("rightcolumn", "basic_rightcolumn");
?>

Which, when placed in the functions.php file in my theme worked a treat except that extra brs were introduced... after some research I found this code from Adding Column Layout Shortcodes to Your Wordpress Theme:

<?php
function webtreats_formatter($content) {
  $new_content = '';
  /* Matches the contents and the open and closing tags */
  $pattern_full = '{(\[raw\].*?\[/raw\])}is';
  /* Matches just the contents */
  $pattern_contents = '{\[raw\](.*?)\[/raw\]}is';
  /* Divide content into pieces */
  $pieces = preg_split($pattern_full, $content, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
  /* Loop over pieces */
  foreach ($pieces as $piece) {
    /* Look for presence of the shortcode */
    if (preg_match($pattern_contents, $piece, $matches)) {
      /* Append to content (no formatting) */
      $new_content .= $matches[1];
    } else {
      /* Format and append to content */
      $new_content .= wptexturize(wpautop($piece));
    }
  }
  return $new_content;
}
 
// Remove the 2 main auto-formatters
remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
 
// Before displaying for viewing, apply this function
add_filter('the_content', 'webtreats_formatter', 99);
add_filter('widget_text', 'webtreats_formatter', 99);
?>

Which also got added to functions.php and everything worked a treat!

Everyone is now happy and they can use a simple mechanism to split the content between the columns and the plugin is safely locked in the back of my head… never to menace the world again!

Suppression of IE Tooltips on an imagemap area

2010-10-11T12:06:00.000+01:00

So I was messing around with image-maps so that I could get a visualisation to work properly on Internet Explorer... Except the tooltips which the browser threw up interfered with my own tooltips!

There seems to be masses of debate about whether or not it's a good idea to show the alt text for an image as a tooltip and the way around it generally is to have an empty title attribute suppress the alt text tooltip in Internet Explorer... except that that doesn't work in the context of image-maps...

Now I was looking into this as I was using javascript to generate a tooltip so I had to add event listeners (don't get me started on how that's a pain in the arse for Internet Explorer).

So within my code for the event handlers I simply used javascript to create a name attribute for the area and then populate that attribute with the alt text before clearing the alt text for the onmouseover event. For the onmouseout event I nigh on reversed it by adding the name text to the alt attribute before removing the name attribute.

Simple ehh?

This is the code, truncated to show what I mean:

onmouseover

function doSomething(event){
  // ...loads of code here...
  if(!document.addEventListener){
    event.srcElement.setAttribute("name", event.srcElement.alt);
    event.srcElement.setAttribute("alt", "");
  }
}

onmouseout

function doSomethingElse(event){
  // ...only a little bit of code here...
  if(!document.addEventListener){
    event.srcElement.setAttribute("alt", event.srcElement.name);
    event.srcElement.removeAttribute("name");
  }
}

Tories are wrong!

2010-10-08T07:54:00.002+01:00

After news of Jeremy Hunt's pronouncement that the workshy should stop having children if they cannot afford them one is minded of the words of Jonathan Swift when he said:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled…

Food for thought indeed ;-)

How long will it be before he's slapped down by his superiors and the children of the poor are sent to schools where they are taught valuable skills a la Children of Earth and are never to be seen again? Except, perhaps, as a tasty pie…

IE8 and SVG

2010-10-07T13:34:00.003+01:00

So I've been working on and off on a visualisation for a few weeks now... I was really quite happy with the result too. Except that the client was demoing on IE8, which is a huge improvement on IE7 and IE6 etc but still sucks!

Everything was working fine in Opera, Firefox and Chrome but what with the client using, as I've said, IE8 I needed to think of something else.

So I looked at Raphael and other libraries but then I got to thinking how IE8 was an improvement because it could handle alpha-transparency.

Now the visualisation involved transparent layers upon a map. This got me thinking: The map could be a suitably sized div with a jpeg background-image and then layering the different images atop that div by setting their position as being absolute in regards to the absolutely positioned map div.

The original visualisation used the SVG in order to trigger some pop-ups that gave further information, but that wasn't now possible so instead I looked at something really rather old school and thought about image-maps.

Image-maps used to be really quite popular but have recently lost ground to more modern approaches, I'm not totally sorry to see them go but I did find them a little useful at times... if a bit of a bugger to sort out by hand!

This is where Mapedit comes in useful though! What with the ability to zoom and having pixel-perfect control of the points of the image-map (and the judicious use of my Wacom tablet), it makes making an image-map a joy, and only $15!

So now I'm not quite so naffed-off with having to support IE8, that is unless future versions of browsers stop supporting image-maps!

Speaking of maps, prettymaps are cool, especially this one:

Bradford Factor

2010-10-06T14:44:00.005+01:00

I've been doing a fair bit of work on the Bradford Factor for work... it's really quite nasty. I've had to generate some figures but couldn't clock what valid numbers there were so I created this spreadsheet to look up valid figures (no prime numbers allowed... except you can up until a certain number). If it help then please use it. It's got the number of periods of time off along the left and the total number of days off along the top.

Also had to do some stuff on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and I wanted to know what they were, the table below has a title attribute to each cell which'll show a tool tip for each type:

ISTJ	ISFJ	INFJ	INTJ
ISTP	ISFP	INFP	INTP
ESTP	ESFP	ENFP	ENTP
ESTJ	ESFJ	ENFJ	ENTJ

JavaScript 'if' shorthand

2010-09-17T10:36:00.000+01:00

I'm not generally a fan of shorthand but the code I'm working on at the minute has loads and loads of if... else statements and they're making the code look bloody ugly so I thought I'd look at the shorthand for if... else. Turns out that it involves a ternary operator.

Anyway the code I'm working on looks like this:

if($('#reverse').attr('checked')){
  newColour = red;
}else{
  newColour = red;
}

Which becomes:

newColour = $('#reverse').attr('checked') ? red : green;

One line instead of five is a big improvement. And it works like this: condition ? result1 : result2;

Shocking Ice Cream Commercials

2010-09-16T13:02:00.003+01:00

Thanks to a post on Dvorak Uncensored:

I'm not sure about what message they're trying to give and I'm sorry about the ordering, I'm not sure what that's trying to say either...

M255 TMA 04 is in the bag!

2010-09-16T12:01:00.000+01:00

Finally finished the latest and last TMA about half an hour ago thanks to insomnia and caffeine so today I get to play with maps of the RBWM. Yay!

As an aside there seemed to be an issue with the Bach/Chill interface (how often does one get to say that? (Twice now)).

JavaScript getBackgroundImage(myDiv)

2010-09-09T15:16:00.000+01:00

function getBackgroundImage(myDiv){
  // string to be returned
  var returnString = "";
  // Grab the offending element by id
  obj = document.getElementById(myDiv);
  // IE Opera
  if(obj.currentStyle) {
    returnString = obj.currentStyle.backgroundImage;
  }else{ // Firefox 
    returnString = getComputedStyle(obj,'').getPropertyValue('background-image');
  }
  // this gives is something like: "url(someDomain.com/someImageDirectory/someImage.someFormat)"
  // so we get everything after the last "/" which leaves us with "someImage.someFormat)""
  returnString = returnString.substring(returnString.lastIndexOf('/') + 1);
  // so we get rid of the last 2 characters leaving us with:
  returnString = returnString.substring(0, returnString.length-2);
  // "someImage.someFormat"
  return returnString;
}

With thanks to this post on WebmasterWorld. So much for being a birdbrain!

JavaScript isEven(value)

2010-09-06T14:21:00.002+01:00

Nice easy function to tell if a number is even:

function isEven(value){
  return value % 2 == 0;
}

Seperate and Different

2010-09-02T10:59:00.000+01:00

I though I needed to split the functionality of some similar pages depending upon the name of the page... I should explain better! I have some pages that all do pretty much the same thing on a given set of data... but not all of the pages react in the same way to events. So I got to thinking about how I could branch the code depending upon which page was calling the JavaScript, so then I got to thinking about how to find the name of the page and came across this code:

var sPath = window.location.pathname;
var sPage = sPath.substring(sPath.lastIndexOf('/') + 1);

But then that got far too complex and the JavaScript kept getting bigger and bigger and uglier and uglier so instead I had a different version of the same basic file for each page... but that got far to complicated in terms of remembering what I'd updated and where as I was developing... so I got the thinking about PHPs include() but JavaScript doesn't have one, it does however have fantastic DOM support so, thanks to a little research, I found this code from the really rather excellent Stephen Chapman. Now I've still got the separate JavaScript files for each page - but these pages are far smaller and concentrate on the differences rather than having to keep abreast of the similarities - but all the common functionality is kept in a separate file so that I don't need to hunt down each function in each file and update with the latest version. Cool ehh?

createLink(text, uri, img, alt)

2010-09-01T08:58:00.002+01:00

So I've been working on a breadcrumb navigation where I'm using JavaScript to generate a number of CSS styled HTML list elements. Each of these elements are made up of a text element and an image so that in terms of the DOM they look like this:

<li>
  <a href="someUrl.html">
    someText <img src="someImageLocation.png" alt="someAlternativeText"/>
  </a>
</li>

There were 3 of these links and the function was getting longer and longer, so I got to thinking about having to repeat so much redundant code so I pulled the 3 list items out of the function and created another function:

function createLink(text, uri, img, alt){
  var li = document.createElement("li");
  var a = document.createElement("a");
  a.setAttribute("href", uri);
  var liText = document.createTextNode(text);
  var liImg = document.createElement("img");
  liImg.setAttribute("src", img);
  liImg.setAttribute("alt", alt);
  a.appendChild(liImg);
  a.appendChild(document.createTextNode(" "));
  a.appendChild(liText);
  li.appendChild(a);
  return li;
}

Then I called that 3 times thus:

breadCrumb.appendChild(createLink("someText", "someUrl.html", "someImageLocation.png", "someAlternativeText"));

And Bob's your Uncle and Fanny's your...

beating the game

2010-08-31T15:07:00.002+01:00

According to this post on the googlereader blog I'm beaten the game by reading more than 300,000 posts. YAY!

Older Men Scam

2010-08-31T13:35:00.001+01:00

(Thanks to this post on uk.rec.waterways - I'm pretty sure that this has made it's way across the pond but I found it funny ;-))

Women often receive warnings about protecting themselves at the mall and in dark parking lots, etc. This is the first warning I have seen for men.

A 'heads up' for men who may be regular customers at Sainsburys, Tesco, Costco, or even Asda. A man can become a victim of a clever scam while out shopping. Simply going out to get supplies has turned out to be quite traumatic.

Here's how the scam works:

Two nice-looking, college-aged girls will come over to your car or truck as you are packing your purchases into your vehicle. Both start wiping your windshield with a rag and squeegee, with their breasts almost falling out of their skimpy T-shirts.
When you thank them and offer them a tip, they say 'No' but instead ask for a ride to McDonald's.
You agree and they climb into the vehicle. On the way, they start undressing. Then one starts crawling all over you, while the other steals your wallet.

I had my wallet stolen May 4th, 9th, 10th, twice on the 15th, 17th, 20th, 24th, & 29th. Also June 1st & 4th, twice on the 8th, 16th, 23rd, 26th & 27th, and very likely again this upcoming weekend.

So tell your friends to be careful. What a horrible way to take advantage of us older men. Warn your friends to be vigilant. Asda has wallets on sale for £2.99 each. I found even cheaper ones for £0.99 at the pound shop. Also, you never get to eat at McDonald's. I've already lost 11 pounds just running back and forth from Sainsburys, to Tesco, to Asda, Etc.

Please send this on to all the older men that you know and warn them to be on the lookout for this scam. (The best times are just before lunch and around 4:30 in the afternoon.)

JavaScript trim functions

2010-08-31T11:09:00.001+01:00

These are from: Shailesh N. Humbad, and they are really rather cool, check out his site.

function trim(stringToTrim) {
  return stringToTrim.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g,"");
}
function ltrim(stringToTrim) {
  return stringToTrim.replace(/^\s+/,"");
}
function rtrim(stringToTrim) {
  return stringToTrim.replace(/\s+$/,"");
}

arrayValueExistsAdapted(anArray, aValue) JavaScript

2010-08-31T10:26:00.008+01:00

/**
 * Tests to see if aValue exists in anArray. Doesn't check to see if the whole of aValue exists but instead looks at the 
 *   string which comes before a colon punctuation mark (":") within each string element within the array.
 * @param anArray - an string array which is parsed, the element which is tested is anything before a colon in each 
 *   element of the array.
 * @param aValue - a value which is compared to the part of the element of anArray which comes before the colon 
 *   punctuation mark.
 * returns true if aValue is found within anArray, else return false. 
 */
function arrayValueExistsAdapted(anArray, aValue){
  var found = false;
  for (var i = 0; i < anArray.length; i++){
    var crumb1 = anArray[i].split(":");
    if (crumb1[0] == aValue){
      found = true;
    }
  }
  return found;
}

Adapted from arrayValueExists(anArray, aValue):

/**
 * Test to see if aValue is present within the elements of anArray, returns true if it does, 
 *   else returns false.
 * @param anArray
 * @param aValue
 */
function arrayValueExists(anArray, aValue){
  var found = false;
  for (var i = 0; i < anArray.length; i++){
    if (anArray[i] == aValue){
      found = true;
    }
  }
  return found;
}

valueToInt(value, up) JavaScript

2010-08-31T10:26:00.007+01:00

/**
 * Function which accepts two parameters.
 * @param value - value passed into the function either a float, int or string (containing a number).
 * @param up - boolean value which defines whether returned integer should be rounded rounded up or rounded down
 * 
 * If "up" isn't present then the number is rounded, if "up" is true then the number is rounded up 
 * else it's rounded down.
 */
function valueToInt(value, up){
  var returnValue;
  // From: http://joeyjavas.com/2007/06/25/javascript-how-to-remove-all-commas-from-a-number/
  // If we have a number that's in the format 123,456.00 this removes the commas and gives us 123456.00 
  // which can subsequently be parsed as a float.
  if(typeof(value) == "string"){
    value = value.replace(/\,/g,'');
    try{
      returnValue = parseFloat(value)
    }catch(e){
      returnValue = 0;
    }
  }
  if(typeof(value) == "number"){
    returnValue = parseFloat(returnValue)
  }
  if(!up){
    returnValue = parseInt(Math.round(returnValue));
  }else{
    if(typeof(up) == "boolean"){
      if(up){
        returnValue = parseInt(Math.ceil(value));
      }else{
        returnValue = parseInt(Math.floor(value));
      }
    }else{
      returnValue = parseInt(Math.round(returnValue));
    }
  }
  return returnValue;
}

And to add them back:

function commaFormat(amount){
  var number = '' + amount;

  if (number.length > 3) {
    var mod = number.length % 3;

    var output = (mod > 0 ? (number.substring(0,mod)) : '');

    for (i=0 ; i < Math.floor(number.length / 3); i++) {

      if ((mod == 0) && (i == 0)){

        output += number.substring(mod+ 3 * i, mod + 3 * i + 3);

      }else{
        output+= ',' + number.substring(mod + 3 * i, mod + 3 * i + 3);

      }
    }
    return (output);
  }

  else return number;
}

As per CodeColorizer or here.

Burnt ankles

2010-08-24T11:53:00.005+01:00

On Saturday (21/08/2010) we went kayaking, and it was top - what wasn't top was that we/I went without sun-cream!

Now, #3 had been in the water for much of the previous week so he was reasonably protected, that and him jumping in the water regularly meant that he was perhaps the least affected.

#2 had been wandering around outside a lot and had been at the beach as well so he was a little more burnt, especially on his legs.

#1 was more burnt especially on his shoulder, but what with him being 17 we didn't insist that he keep his shirt on... figuring that he was old enough to make his own decisions about his skin... like his Dad!

After trying to ram another boat we (me and #3), smacked right into a canyon wall and he nearly discovered what it would be like to be crushed by his Dad... whereas I discovered what it'd be like to run my bum down a funnel-shaped, blunt, plastic cheese-grater! Just as well it was funnel shaped though or the last thing going through his head as he smacked into stone wall would of been my arse!

And after catching a glancing blow from another canyon wall to the left of my head and capsizing a treat (lost me trousers, sunglasses and shoes - though managed to get my shoes back!) I started to smell an odd burning smell... little realising that it was the smell of my inner legs burning due to the configuration of the kayak.

I've got a cracking set of blisters on my ankles now... I'll have a wee dram later on in order to work up enough courage to lance them and finally be able to walk properly:

Update:

Just been told to call NHSDirect by her-indoors and they said that I need to raise my legs until the swelling in my ankles goes down (I feel bloody ridiculous... and pregnant!) and pop the blisters (YUCK! I WAS the wrong sort of nurse to be happy about that!) and dress the burns with non-lint dressings (It's not for nothing that I WAS the wrong sort of nurse! I'm going to end up looking like a B movie Mummy dressed by half a dozen kids suffering from ADHD and wired on Caffeine enriched beverages!).

Lucky Boy

2010-08-08T10:08:00.003+01:00

I am ever such a lucky boy!

Got my birthday present early and it's a PRS-300. How cool!

I tried the Sony software but I've gone over to Calibre as I really, really don't want DRM content on anything that I own, I now have to find a decent store where I can buy content though...? I tried Diesel for some stuff but they didn't have what I wanted for sale in the UK, arse!

Seems like even if you can find content legally the powers-that-be get all twitched about licensing issues and things go pear-shaped. I know that licensing and DRM are something of a hot-potato (I seriously considered joining the UK Pirate Party) but I now work within the field of sculpting bits to do what I want and I wouldn't want someone to take the code that I write and make money from it without recompense, but all the same...

I read TeleRead regularly and I know that slowly things are getting straightened out but it can't come quick enough for me.

Anthony & Ashley's Wedding

2010-08-04T14:56:00.003+01:00

Had a cracking time on Saturday (31sy July 2010) at the wedding of Anthony and Ashley, we'd like to thank them for a cracking afternoon and evening, just wish I'd not drank enough to sink a battleship so that I could remember getting to bed.

Will have to look around Clacton properly though... ;-)

Was a nice Church as well, especially a having a Reverend who was a Yorkshireman!

4 or 5 booze adverts

2010-07-30T11:13:00.001+01:00

We used to have Cineworld Unlimited cards but got naffed off with being covered with popcorn and having to listen to mobile phone ring tones and teenagers talking through films so we went up-market and became members of the Arts Picturehouse.

A much nicer clientele and no ring tones nor popcorn!

All good so far except on Sunday when we went to see Inception with #3 son (10) and we were confronted with 4 or 5 adverts selling alcohol in the 1st 23 minutes or so. Now we had a discussion the week before about whether or not someone who drank a beer with his tea could be called an alcoholic (Cheers son), and came to the conclusion that if you didn't need a drink with your breakfast you were generally okay. So he's reasonably drinkaware, he's also reasonably savvy about advertising and knows that one of the reasons why he's so into Dominio's Pizzas is that they sponsor The Simpsons. And he also noticed the number of adverts!

Now I'm not sure that the adverts add anything to the experience, we've paid our subs and bought membership so why do we have to see adverts at all? And why so many adverts for alcohol?

Not impressed Arts Picturehouse, not at all, I'll be thinking twice when it comes time to renew my membership!

My name is Khan

2010-07-30T10:28:00.002+01:00

When her-in-doors brought a film home from work that she was given by her Kiwi boss with a title like the above I was initially excited, especially as her boss is into Deep Space 9. Then I got to reading the back and it looked like a Bollywood film, which I don't have an issue with except that the dancing makes me wish that I'd learnt to dance properly rather then resort to head-banging and dad dancing!

Then to read that it dealt with someone who's got Asperger's syndrome... I have to admit that I was looking forwards to an early night with a good book rather than watching another square.

But MNIK was top and I have to admit to shedding a tear once or twice. Completely different from the tear-jerking of a block-buster movie it was, it seemed heart-felt and honest rather than cold and calculating. I'd advise anyone to watch it, and lay in a supply of tissue!

Fibroids...

2010-07-30T09:53:00.002+01:00

...not your regular breakfast cereal!

(Nasty images in link, only look if you're used to the wound supplements in the Nursing Times!)

Microsoft BPOS vs Google Apps pricing

2010-07-28T12:55:00.003+01:00

So I'm looking at Microsoft's BPOS and pricing: It starts at $10 per user per month with a minimum of 5 seats, taking account of an exchange rate of 1 U.S. dollar = 0.64230201 British pounds (at 28/072010) that's £6.42 a month but a minimum of 5 means that the least that can be charged is £32.10 a month for the Standard Suite. That's £385.20 a year for the minimum number of users (5).

Then I looked at Google Apps, they charge £33 a year a user.

Already it looks like Google are cheaper at £33 as apposed to £77.04 for a years subscription.

But that there minimum user thing is a kicker. If we look at a like-for-like of 5 users then the difference is £165 for Google Apps and £385.20 for Microsoft BPOS. That's a £220.20 saving!

It's not a totally fair comparison though as the offering are different. With Microsoft there does seem to be many more whistles and bells though you're limited to using it with Internet Explorer or FifeFox (> 3.0)... there are also stipulated system requirements which might make a difference to some organisations.

It also links in with other Microsoft products, which can be either good or bad depending upon how you feel about it I guess, it'll certainly make a difference when it comes to upgrading software on the User's machines though. Whereas all that seems to be required with the Google Apps is to have a browser (though using IE6 might be an issue).

With the drive to do more with less at the forefront of most organisations' thinking it'll be interesting to discover who does best. The expensive security blanket offered by Microsoft is a definite choice but Google Apps is getting to be more and more mature and there are more and more things that can be done with it. It seems to be a much more innovative approach, and certainly closer to the ideal of cloud based applications.

Lego Steampunk

2010-07-24T09:14:00.002+01:00

Alas, I don't own enough Lego as I was pondering...

Whilst trawling through the stuff I'd starred in Google Reader I found this post from The Brothers Brick: Church of St. Lazarus. Much later I came across this post from the same site: Crawler Town brings the city to you!.

Then I thought about how cool it'd be to combine the two à la Kris Kuksi. But, like I say, I haven't enough Lego... or time for that matter!

Java too hard?

2010-07-24T08:31:00.000+01:00

Interesting article via /. here:Google Engineer Decries Complexity of Java, C++.

Not overly sure that I agree TBH... especially as he has a go at dynamic typing...

But what with Google pushing App Inventer for Android they're perhaps looking at a more drag and drop environment à la Scratch.

Hippo Roar

2010-07-20T11:08:00.000+01:00

Who said Hippos don't roar?

M255 TMA 3 Question 3

2010-07-16T16:23:00.002+01:00

What Fun!

He's a Catholic, devious, bookish crime writer in drag. She's a humorous dilettante on the run from her ex. Together they fight crime!

He's a tall retired cop trapped in the 1970s. She's a paranoid private detective on the run from her ex. Together they fight crime!

He's a Catholic, devious, bookish crime writer in drag. She's a humorous dilettante on the run from her ex. Together they fight crime!

He's a tall retired cop trapped in the 1970s. She's a paranoid private detective on the run from her ex. Together they fight crime!

He's a Catholic, hard-nosed chef in a wheelchair. She's a chain-smoking Judge in drag. Together they fight crime!

He's a small-town professor with attitude. She's a humorous, dishevelled priest who is looking for aliens. Together they fight crime!

He's a chain-smoking, bald mathematician in a wheelchair. She's a cadaverous, bloodthirsty mercenary on the run. Together they fight crime!

He's a bookish vampire who is looking for aliens. She's a Catholic, bald, devious detective inspector on the run. Together they fight crime!

He's a high-flying retired cop with attitude. She's a French-Canadian, cat-loving, dishevelled priest in drag. Together they fight crime!

He's a cadaverous alien on the run. She's a cat-loving, humorous vigilante in a wheelchair. Together they fight crime!

He's a chain-smoking astronaut who is looking for aliens. She's a dangerous, bald priest living in the 1950s. Together they fight crime!

He's a cat-loving Buddhist on the run. She's a devious magician's assistant who is trying to recover her memory. Together they fight crime!

He's a small-town ex-cop trapped in the 1970s. She's a hard-nosed, humorous, bald alien from beyond the grave. Together they fight crime!

He's a cadaverous, dangerous nurse in a wheelchair. She's a cat-loving werewolf with attitude. Together they fight crime!

He's a French-Canadian, dangerous private detective living in the 1950s. She's a sword-wielding alien in drag. Together they fight crime!

He's a Catholic nurse on a search for his missing sister. She's a bald priest with secret mysterious powers. Together they fight crime!

He's a high-flying, tall, Catholic, dignified Judge with attitude. She's a sword-wielding professor in drag. Together they fight crime!

He's a bookish vigilante who is looking for aliens. She's a humorous nurse with her own daytime radio talk show. Together they fight crime!

He's a bald, Catholic chef on the run. She's a humorous, high-flying, tortured, paranoid ex-cop on the run. Together they fight crime!

He's a French-Canadian chef who has been exiled to Newcastle. She's a high-flying coroner with attitude. Together they fight crime!

He's a bald coroner trapped in the 1970s. She's a French-Canadian alien with attitude. Together they fight crime!

He's a high-flying werewolf in a wheelchair. She's a bald astronaut who moonlights as a fashion model. Together they fight crime!

He's a cadaverous chef with secret mysterious powers. She's a tall lord living in the 1950s. Together they fight crime!

He's a cat-loving magician's assistant who may be from the future. She's a devious astronaut in a wheelchair. Together they fight crime!

He's a cat-loving, dangerous Judge on the run. She's a Catholic, tortured professor who may be from the future. Together they fight crime!

He's a cat-loving, hard-nosed Buddhist who may be from the future. She's a bald criminal profiler in drag. Together they fight crime!

He's a hard-nosed, small-town Judge on the run. She's a bookish werewolf from beyond the grave. Together they fight crime!

He's a small-town chief inspector on a search for his missing sister. She's a tall lord trapped in the 1970s. Together they fight crime!

He's a humorous, cat-loving dilettante with attitude. She's a chain-smoking, devious mathematician on the run. Together they fight crime!

He's a bookish, cadaverous, bald Judge with attitude. She's a bald professor on the run from her ex. Together they fight crime!

He's a paranoid chef on the run. She's a genetically engineered, trigger-happy werewolf with attitude. Together they fight crime!

He's a dishevelled lord with attitude. She's a tortured criminal profiler with secret mysterious powers. Together they fight crime!

He's a small-town priest trapped in the 1970s. She's a humorous mathematician who moonlights as a fashion model. Together they fight crime!

He's a dangerous vigilante who is trying to recover his memory. She's a humorous ex-cop in a wheelchair. Together they fight crime!

He's a dignified mercenary in a wheelchair. She's a dignified, dishevelled chef from aristocratic European stock. Together they fight crime!

He's a tall magician's assistant in a wheelchair. She's a small-town dilettante trapped in the 1970s. Together they fight crime!

He's a bloodthirsty crime scene scientist on the run. She's a devious Buddhist on the run. Together they fight crime!

He's a high-flying vampire on the run. She's a hard-nosed private detective who has been exiled to Newcastle. Together they fight crime!

He's a tall Buddhist who is trying to recover his memory. She's a dangerous chef in drag. Together they fight crime!

He's a tortured Judge on the run. She's a tall, dangerous chief inspector who has been exiled to Newcastle. Together they fight crime!

He's a dishevelled vampire in drag. She's a tall, sword-wielding detective inspector in a wheelchair. Together they fight crime!

He's a paranoid, bald vampire who may be from the future. She's a cadaverous retired cop in a wheelchair. Together they fight crime!

He's a small-town, high-flying alien looking for 'the Big One'. She's a paranoid Buddhist with attitude. Together they fight crime!

He's a paranoid lord from beyond the grave. She's a high-flying, devious medical examiner from beyond the grave. Together they fight crime!

Opera Speak works again.

2010-07-02T14:43:00.002+01:00

Just upgraded to Opera 10.60, and it has made Speak work again, time to work on some more experiments!

Lost in Recursion

2010-07-01T10:32:00.001+01:00

I’ve got into strife before about not being sure about recursion, but now I’m reasonably happy with it… I’d almost go so far as to say that I’ll use it when I can… So I decided to print out a 4-dimensional javascript array using recursion… as a table! It isn’t a proper array as javascript doesn’t do associative arrays… but there you go, anyway, instead of using a nice simple for(var something in somethingElse) I decided to do the for(var i = 0; var < somethingElse.length; i++) then thought it’d be a good idea to send it to itself… but i never changed the i and I ended up with something that Bridget Riley might be proud of ;-):

Cross Browser addEventListener

2010-06-29T11:07:00.001+01:00

So I got to thinking about why I hade loads of onclick elements written into my code and how it really didn't help the readability and purity of the X/HTML code so I decided to look at addEventListener which is something I've seen lots on comp.lang.javascript but has always worried me ever so slightly. Anyway, it's not all that hard really, you just do something like var helloP = document.getElementById("helloWorld"); helloP.addEventListener('click', helloWorld, false ); and then add a function like this: function helloWorld(e){ alert("Hello World");}

It's not all that hard except that you need to appreciate that Internet Explorer doesn't implement it that is!

Instead Internet Explorer uses attachEvent and it behaves in a different manner. Say we wanted to get the ID of the element that was clicked in the above example. In most browsers we'd use an alert like this: alert("Hello World, you pressed the paragraph with the id of \""+e.target.id+"\"."); but internet explorer will get all confused and say that it doesn't understand target... it does understand srcElement though. At the beginning of our script we can check whether the helloWorld function can't understand target by asking if(!e.target) and it it doesn't then e.target will become srcElement thus: if(!e.target){e.target = e.srcElement;}

If course we've still got to add the listener in the first place so we could replace addEventListener with a generic function which handles all the browser problems and I found one here, but I didn't like the shorthand of the variables it was using so refactored them to this:

function addEvent(element, type, listener, useCapture) {
  if (element.addEventListener) {
    element.addEventListener(type, listener, useCapture);
    return true;
  } else if (element.attachEvent) {
    return element.attachEvent('on' + type, listener);
  } else {
    element['on' + type] = listener;
  }
}

So we've a cross browser way of adding listeners and a cross browser way of handling the result of the listener, cool ehh? If only IE would stop being such a pig!

Edit: It would seem that that isn’t all that’s needed, after reading this article on quirksmode I may well have to do some more work if I'm after anything other than the ID of the element clicked!

A Place for Amber

2010-06-21T16:30:00.001+01:00

So I'm working on Information Visualisation using colours, something along the line of green being good and red being bad, but have you ever tried to blend red and green? The result is vary rarely pretty so I got to thinking about how to do it. Initially I went through The Gimp and the gradient fill tool with red being the background colour and red being the foreground colour. I created an image that was 90px long and 10 high and filled it with the gradient. Created another layer with black lines every 10 px. Copied and pasted the squares between the lines into another image and let the Gaussian Blur tool go crazy before pasting the result back into the image and anchoring the layer, I did this for all 9 squares and then converted to indexed colours using the web pallette. It worked a treat to start with but when it gets near the middle there is a really rather nasty brown!

After looking and looking I realised that there was something interesting going on in terms of the hex colour codes that was generated and they each seemed to jump in increments of 33 (that's 33 hex or 51 decimal!). So there was effectively a scale going on with 00, 33, 66, 99, cc and ff being the only red and green numbers... except for near the middle (where the browns live, with there being a blue at 33). Odd ehh? Have a look:

ff0000
cc0000
993300
996600
999933
669900
66cc00
33cc00
33ff00

Got to thinking some more and ff / 9 = 1c so I could make a scale between 00 and FF using 1c increments:

ff0000

e31f00

c73b00

ab5700

8f7333

738f00

57ab00

3bc700

00ff00

But then the penny dropped! Why not look at traffic-lights and replace that there nasty brown with Amber (Or at least Orange!):

ff0000

ff3300

ff6600

ff9900

999900

99cc00

33cc00

33ff00

IE6 and the empty div

2010-06-17T13:59:00.001+01:00

So I'm working on a site where the majority of the audience work within environments where Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is still prevalent... now I used to work in a similar environment so I always used to use Portable Firefox, one of the joys of which is that it doesn't touch the underlying OS, neither does it take any notice of the various rules associated with IE6 so while others were bemoaning the loss of access to facebook I was wondering what all the fuss was about... but without them being on there there was less of a reason for me to be and I realised what a drag it was... which is all a bit of a long-winded introduction to IETester which allows me to now view sites created using my bright and shinney Windows 7 machine running the latest IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera to run IE6... seems a bit naughty that though - like asking a supermodel to wear old, grungy Y-fronts.

Anyway, after playing with it for a while I discovered a problem with an underline I was using. Being the perfectionist I am I wanted the underline on some text to miss the descender of the text I was using, a little like underlining some text at school and wanting the line to miss the curly bits off the bottoms of "g"s, "j"s, "p"s and "q"s (and any other characters which your handwriting might make drop below the baseline). So I'd developed the site using lots of bright browsers and everything looked cool thanks to some judicious use of MeasureIt to make sure everything lined up correctly and then I looked at it using IETester and the underline was thick as anything (If in this instance "anything" is as thick as a line of text!) but, thanks to this post on The Webmaster World I clocked that IE6 was setting the height on an empty div as being the default height of a line of text. Explicitly telling IE6 that it wasn't so worked a treat and so a slung "line-height:1px;font-size:0px;" into the CSS and all was right in the world...

Still, a shame that I need to go routing around the internet looking for solutions for a browser that's nigh on 10 years old (released on the 27th August 2001) and is described as being the "least secure software on the planet". Perhaps I need to add a rider to sites in future that I'll not be supporting it anymore thanks to it's general crappyness... perhaps if I weren't working with an audience in mind that were constrained to use it I could get away with that... poor buggers.

And don't get me started about horizontal navigation uls... not even the judicious use of /IE7/ can solve that particular problem, I had to use CSS hacks (Which, as everyone knows, make the baby Jesus cry!).

96%

2010-06-16T11:28:00.001+01:00

Thought I'd done well when I got 90% for TMA1 for M255 but 96% for TMA2 is looking even better. Guess I'm getting the hang of this Java stuff after all. Still I keep saying "object orientated" rather than "object oriented", which is not the done thing apparently, comes from being so English I guess ;-)

Will find out today whether I get to carry on playing with OS API or I'll have to play with Google's Calendar API, not sure which I'll prefer. I guess the Calendar will be fun and will build upon the stuff I learnt whilst playing with the Contacts API. Though I'm wondering if it'll accept JSON rather than vanilla XML?

And then, in the meantime, I'm looking at Subversion and GIT and deciding which'll be the most fun to work with... looks like Subversion so far but research continues... suppose I should look at it for personal stuff as well as professional stuff as keeping 7zip archives of old projects gets old mighty quickly. Speaking of professional stuff the recent stuff about the BCS is interesting. I've been an associate member for ages as I wasn't working in the field but there's an entry in my Calendar to check about becoming a proper member 6 months after starting as a developer, don't know if it'll exist at that point though.

I've also been looking at the Office for National Statistics efforts to disseminate it's vast store of data in the form of Neighbourhood Statistics and it's Neighbourhood Summary, how cool is that site?

Dunham's Wood

2010-06-07T13:48:00.000+01:00

Went here on Sunday and I've got to say it was really, really cool. A little like stepping back to the 70's TBH but all the better for that. An old art teacher once told be I was a child of the 70's in terms of my approach to work so that must explain why I loved it as much as I did. From the miniature railway all the way to the maze I thought it was downright brilliant and I'd encourage anyone with kids and a hankering for a little nostalgia to give it a visit.

Chap we went there with said that the bloke who set it up just decided to plant a wood in a field and then decided to build a railway.

Each time it's open all the proceeds go to charity and this weekend they went to St. Mary's Church Restoration Fund and I'm pretty sure that it must have been members of the congregation that were staffing the stalls in the little glade near the entrance.

template.html to template-dashboard.html in Pentaho

2010-06-01T11:47:00.001+01:00

So I'm using Pentaho CDF and I was having problems setting up my own themes. Seems like I could create content using the local folder but when I tried to change the outer content I hit upon problems. I saw that the temples are split into 2, if you see what I mean, with the outer page wrapper living within the /system/pentaho-cdf folder but I couldn't see where they were. The .xcdf file points to template.html but there isn't a template.html file within the folder... then I noticed that there was a template-dashboard.html file and I started to get a glimmer of what was going on, especially as I looked at other .xcdf files and clocked that some had style elements.

Basically what I discovered was that template.html actually represents template-dashboard.html and if there is a style attribute within the .xcdf file then the value of that attribute corresponds to the naming if the template file such that a style attribute with a value of abc (for example) means that a file named template-dashboard-abc.html within the /system/pentaho-cdf folder is parsed.

Lot's of headaches led to this conclusion but I hope that other people don't run into similar problems... the solution sort of came to me while I was asleep - the cat was trying to wake me up and I was trying to stop asleep by thinking of something that was giving me problems, perhaps not the best approach to trying to get to sleep as the cat got his breakfast early and I went into work very early to try out my hypothesis.

Cool quote

2010-05-27T15:06:00.001+01:00

How very true:

Give a man a program, He'll be frustrated for a day. Teach a man to program, He'll be frustrated for a lifetime.

4 yesterday

2010-05-24T17:05:00.001+01:00

Managed 4 lengths yesterday, 3 on Thursday and only 1.5 on Tuesday.

Not too bad really, considering I've not been swimming in ever such a long time, must be a year or 2 TBH.

Work wise I'm stuck! Did something really rather cool to start with, then went looking at some other APIs and now I'm looking at a BI suite and the learning curve is going way over my head... I'm thinking that it's not so much of a problem once I get my head into another space... I think it's just an existential fear of change going on like when another way of working was introduced when I was working as a nurse. A new paradigm that'll just be like the next one but that'll take a wee while to get my head around. So I'll hold off looking for another job until I've given it a chance. On a plus side it's using Java so that'll help, on a negative side I've started smoking again, on the plus side I'm losing weight, on a negative side I'll die sooner! ARSE!

…

2010-05-18T12:14:00.002+01:00

Thus speaketh #3 son:

The very point of waiting is just simply to waste your time until you get what you wanted, until then you carry on slowly wasting your time, your life, slowly wasting away, every second until it all adds up and you realise what a knob you’ve been trying to get the thing you wanted in the first place. Why didn’t you try somewhere else instead of the most unreliable, irritating, and frankly dead boring place in the world? Why didn’t you just give up in the first place knowing that it was an utter waste of time in the first place so you can try and get something else still holding your dignity? Only you know so why didn’t you pointlessly waste your time trying to figure that out instead of being a complete idiot and wasting ages of your life waiting instead of thinking? Thinking is the more important; none of us would be here if we didn’t have it. Whereas waiting is pointless, dull and let’s face it, useless unless you have something to pass the time with, but most people are too busy waiting staring at a small piece of text that says

Loading…

Although you could be thinking while waiting but probably just thinking about what you’re waiting for, nothing else. Sure, you could try thinking about something else but that probably just means that you should waste your time with that instead of some pointless piece of crap you didn’t need in the first place. And if you try waiting for both then you just wasting more and more of your time, and because the thing you were thinking about is more important you’d probably spend more and more bloody time than before.

Altogether I think that waiting is basically supposed to get people like my pissed off and end up quitting it altogether just to get back at the people who think that you would waste a good half of your day waiting for crap. So to all those people I say NO.

The nuts that ate the world!

2010-05-18T10:28:00.004+01:00

I'm not 100% sure that testes are supposed to get that small but I swear that if they'd have shrunk any more then they'd have imploded and collapsed into some sort of weird black hole... I could have been the man who had the nuts that ate the world! Still, guess it was my own fault for buying a season ticket to the Cambridge Lido in a fit of enthusiasm for getting healthy. What with giving up smoking (except for the electronic kind and the odd crafty fag after tea while getting him-next-door over to watch a DVD (more of which later!)), starting to eat meat and no longer working nights things are definitely on the change!

Still, what with having a Mooring Licence, and thus access to a Leasure Card I thought it'd be a good idea to make use of the facilities, I just didn't reckon on the facilities being quite so cold - and the young chap on the entrance said it was warmer than usual as well! 13°C is not warm, I know it's not freezing, but it's not warm! It felt like I was getting attacked by a million nettles or something and my breath started getting harder and harder to bring down into my lungs and I was getting more and more tired and... being overtaken by the elderly! I only managed one and a half lengths and then had to get out for a shower and head to work.

We watched Legend of the Bog last night, except it wasn't called that... I loved the review by TwentyCamels, most especially this bit:

"The only saving grace to this joke is the on-the-floor-in-hysterics performance put in by whatever lunk they hired to play the bog man. He comes across like a supermarket trolley attendant lost in the woods on cheap speed, his facial expressions as he attempts to convey whatever the director told him to convey are priceless in their utter retardation, look out for a good bit at the end where the girl is squaring up to him, and for a minute he looks like he's building up to a really HUGE roar of fury, neck straining and everything, and then just suddenly looks confused, or constipated, a little embarrassed too."

Just don't get me started on supermarket trolley attendants after Saturday afternoon...

This is really rather funny:

Takes me back to my first contact with the internet in a Royston flat with Colin Campbell does http://www.textfiles.com, I remember doing searches for Men in Black and Black Helicopters then ;-)