Rob's Ego Trip!

Release ADiary version 1.1. Cool new feature is the ability to re-order tabs using drag and drop. I've also fixed an annoying bug that left empty diary files around too!

A very productive day today... the only problem was that I ended up doing stuff I thought that I'd already done!

The stuff I posted yesterday seems to have disappeared. Well you won't get the eloquent wording that I did yesterday again!

Yesterday was spent solving a problem with a COM+ DLL written in VB. (No, I didn't write it!). I solved a problem with an assumption about date formats that really didn't hold true for 90% of cases! What is it about dates and computers that programmers don't get? Maybe it's only VB programmers, but if you are going to use dates with a SQL database, use ISO format of yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss and nothing will get confused. Display it how you like, but please don't manipulate it assumming it'll be in the format dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyyy!

The other problem I may have solved is with this COM+ DLL randomly crashing for no apparent reason. Googling showed up a possible cure though. It appears that a MS security fix for an RPC vulnerability breaks the Microsoft Transaction Server...

oops!

Monday morning and there's a major accident on the M25, so I'm nearly late for work.. and the day goes downhill from there...

I did however get a handle on a datetime problem I'm having with a COM+ object on our live server that doesn't happen on the test server!

You can tell it's a Sunday... we got Jon dressed just in time for lunch and a nap!

We got Jon a "real" bed today. It's so huge in comparision to him! he looks lost in it. Of course, he doesn't seem to have really grasped the concept of a bed yet and didn't sleep at all during his lunchtime nap. Maybe he'll sleep better tonight as a result though.

Reuters has a report that the US are keeping CHILDREN in the Guantanamo Bay as prisoners. I just don't know how to express my disgust. They aren't even allowing the kids to phone their parents! It seems that they were forced into service by warlords and I think it is shameful that they haven't been returned to their families.

It seems that there are a lot of prisoners being held without charge at Guantanamo Bay. It's about time the US allowed these people legal represenation and the right to a fair hearing. You can bet that if Americans were being held without charge by another country, there would be an outcry from the US...

Discovered that it's fairly easy to lose data in ADiary if you have Windows crash. Have taken more steps to help ensure that if that does happen, there's more chance that you'll get your last backup back.

It really didn't help that I had a couple of silly bugs that meant that ADiary was autosaving once per minute and wasn't checking if the file had been modified before it did the save :(

Was a great game to watch last night! I didn't particularly care who won; I just wanted to watch a good game of football. Well I got that in spades last night! The Real Madrid goalkeeper is either really good or really lucky! or maybe a good keeper is a lucky keeper.

Seven goals, Manchester United won the game but lost on aggregate. Clearly they had learned from the shambles of the first game and football fans had an enjoyable evening.

Today has been a day of travel. As it's the first day back at work after the long weekend I drove up from London this morning to Stratford-upon-Avon to do the work thing all day. After work, I drove over to my Mother-in-Law's to do a couple of jobs and then drove back to my digs ready for tomorrow! All in all about 300 miles wrapped around a nine hour working day.

Now I'm tired...

I bugfixed/enhanced ADiary a bit today. First time I've changed it in nearly a year and only one "real" bug reported (bug 10)! Pretty pleased about that so will look at more enhancements, even though I'm pretty sure that only Sylvia and myself use it :)

I arranged for a man to come and look at my old Peugeot this morning at 10:30. The general idea was that he turns up, looks at the car, offers me some money for it and then takes it away. However, he didn't turn up. Phoned him at 11:15 and he said that he "was running late". That sound's similar to "the cheque's in the post" to me...

and so I'm doing not a lot at the moment :)

It's Friday and I'm not at work! Can we have a 4 day weekend every month please?!

Spent the day with Jon. Didn't do a lot, but he enjoyed seeing the diggers at the dump and playing with the football in the sunshine all afternoon. It's a shame that today was the last of the good weather (until Tuesday of course!).

Got home today from the week at work to a pile of paperwork. Going through the paperwork showed that we have moved on a few steps in our efforts to move house.

We've had our application for a mortgage approved by Natwest! Yay! For some reason ("Drawdown of loan fees") we have had ?30 deducted from the amount we have borrowed. Will have to ask the solicitor what that means!

Also, the paperwork for the purchase of the new house has turned up. I have now read all of it; not a particularly interesting task. It all seems fine except for the details of what's included in the sales which clearly wasn't updated based on our offer which specified that we wanted the curtains too. Presumably, that's an oversight and we'll get it sorted on Tuesday.

As I said, we are now a step or two closer to moving :)

Came across this in The Register:

"In the UK nine out of ten children own a mobile phone, and spend ?100,000 a day solely on text messaging."

Wow! That'a lot of text messages at 10pence per message!

Phoenix is no more; welcome Firebird!

Picked up my "new" car on Saturday. Of course, I mean, "new to me" rather than "new" - it's an N-Reg Rover 200SD and is very nice. It's a diesel so is much more efficient than my old Peugeot 405!

However... (and there's always a however!) I've just got in it to go home and it hasn't started :( The garage was supposed to do a service before I collected it - hmmm... will have words tomorrow I think!

Waiting for the RAC as I write this....

Update: The RAC man has come along and poked around in the engine bay... then the car started :) Apparently the immobiliser had turned itself on and the little light on the dashboard that indicates this wasn't lit... a bit more poking and that now works too :)

Today Jon and I went to a Pub near Newbury for a family reunion with my dad's side. Georgina didn't come along as she was ill :( We all had a meal together in the pub and caught up with what's going on in each others' lives; a typical get together I think.

Jon took along his Lofty crane (a Bob The Builder character) and enjoyed himself, though I think he missed his mummy a bit.

Georgina made a very nice banana cake this afternoon. For tea, Jon, myself and Georgina have managed to polish off half of it already!

All you could hear from Jon was "mmm" and "yum"... that's enough of a recommendation for anyone!

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf is known as "Comical Ali" in our office and we admire his PR ability. Someone else likes him more that we do!

The Register had this to say:

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, we salute you. And, were it not for the fact that you are (were?) the wise-cracking face of a brutal and murderous regime, we'd like to think that you'd always find a home with the British Labour Party. You're a lot more entertaining than Clare Short, that's for certain.

Update: Try http://64.39.15.171 until www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com starts working...

Georgina phoned me early this morning feeling very ill, so I went home this morning to look after her and Jon. Well, actually to look after Jon whilst she slept! Didn't get a lot done work wise today as a result, though did fix a fairly fundermental bug on one ordering page.

She seems a little better this evening which is good :)

This morning I wrote a programming spec for the website I'm currently writing. This hasn't been too taxing as it's a simple enough site with the only "difficult" bit already written up in the "Project Scope" document.

The nicest thing about this site is that I've had some input into the technology used, so it's being written in PHP with a database abstration layer (ADOdb). The database is SQL Server 2000. Not my first choice, but the company currently has an SQL Server 2000 system set up so it makes sense to utilise it.

Whilst looking up Coldplay's website, came across the Top 40 chart on the BBC site.

All very good looking.

Then I noticed the Text only link so I clicked it. The BBC website is regularly cited as an example of a good website. Mainly because it's the most popular website in Europe, so it must be doing something right. What the hell is with the text only version ?!?!? I mean, come on! surely the BBC with all that license money could come up with something that looks a little bit better for a top 40 list for text-only viewers ?

Further investigation shows that the BBC uses a tool called Betsie to generate it's text only pages. Now Betsie is really clever and you can change the default text font/colours that it displays. I'm very impressed. The source is also available.

The only question then becomes "why did they choose those colours and sizes by default ?!?!?!?" On an 800x600 screen you can't see much content!

At work we have Radio 1 on all day. As you can imagine, it plays songs that are "current" several times a day... for weeks on end!

I am so fed up of Coldplay's Clocks that I can't wait for it to drop off the list!

I've upgraded the engine that runs this blog to the latest version. Not sure if the improvements make any difference to me yet, though. The ability to back up the skins might be useful I suppose, but I trust our sysadmins to do backups :)

The upgrade went really smoothly. I am suitably impressed with the documentation and the fact that it "just worked"! Also I noted that they provide upgrade scripts from the last 6 versions to the latest version. That is really good as not everyone bothers to keep up to date and it would be a real issue if you had to upgrade to each version in turn in order to get to the latest version. A lot of software could learn from this.

Our chain has broken for our house move :( The buyer at the bottom has pulled out so the lady buying our house now has to find someone else to buy her place before she can buy our place.

We had high hopes of moving next week and I'm gutted.

Damn! Damn! Damn!

Happy Birthday Jason... my present will avilable at the bar of the Dog & Bull this evening :)

Gave Jon a treat at breakfast this morning - a second helping of weetabix rather than the toast that I normally give him!

He was chuffed! Isn't it nice that I can "treat" him with something so simple and it's not even made of sugar!

Reading, mpt, I found my way to iTnews where Larry Ellison of Oracle is quoted as saying:

""There is also a new browser, Mozilla, which is Netscape 7 plus bug fixes. It's not bad,""

Um... Netscape 7 is based on Mozilla 1... Keep up at the back, Larry!

I'm in the process of getting a new car. Well, when I say new, I mean new to me!

The current car is a J-Reg Peugeot 405 1.6 petrol. Nice enough car - not especially quick off the blocks, but sits on the motorway quite happily. Sitting on the motorway is something I do a lot of and when we've moved, I'll be commuting 40 miles each way to and from work. As a result I'm thinking that I need a more fuel efficient car - i.e. a diesel...

That's not really a problem, you would think - just pop into a used car dealership and buy one! Hmm... diesel cars are rarer than I thought as I found out last Saturday when I traweled round a lot of car dealers in Croydon.

This week, things look a bit more hopeful. A little bit of work with autotrader has resulted in 4 possibilities of which I have phoned 2 to ensure that they are still on the forecourt. The problem now is finding the time to actually go and see them as wmute's over tomorrow and my parents are here Sunday...

I live away from home 4 days a week at the moment and I've noticed that my diet during these days has become bland. I suppose it's because I'm not particularly interested in cooking just for myself... That's right I'm eating ready meals!

I've discovered that Tesco will sell you 3 meals for a fiver, so you can tell that I'm not going for top notch quality here :) Iterestingly I seem to go for the one's with rice - sweet and sour, chicken and mushroom, Thai chicken, etc.

The food's OK.. the beer that I have with it is better!

This will be great!

Has the world stopped everywhere apart from in Iraq?

I turn on the TV in the morning and there's "News" from the war in Iraq on all 4 channels! Isn't there anything else to talk about? No murders? No RTAs? I know it's important to cover it, but come on! Not 24x7 please!