Rob's Ego Trip!

The weather is absolutely wonderful! Personally, I would like to see it this hot for the next 3 months :)

I have a lot of work to get done today. Discovered that I've missed a whole section of work on a microsite due to the project scope not being very explicit :( Deadline is today (of course) but shouldn't be too hard. The biggest problem is that the spec I wanted to get written today will probably slip into Monday.

I've also been told by Len (our MD) that the offer for Ross will go out today.

Hmm...

I was listening to the Today program on Radio4 this morning and there was a report about the first dossier produced by the Government about the Weapons of Mass Destruction that Iraq was purported to have. Just to be clear, this dossier was before the 1441 resolution and wasn't the later one that the Government just copied from the Internet.

In the dossier, which was presented to the recalled House of Commons, Tony stated that Saddam had weapons that could be used within 45 minutes of the order to use them being given. Obviously that sort of information focussed MPs minds, especially when Jack Straw pointed out that our troops based in Cyprus are within the range of an Iraqi Scud missile...

However, it appears that that particular piece of information was from a single source that the security services didn't completely trust and thought might be unreliable. The first version of the dossier didn't include this information, but according to the BBC's source was added at the request of Government to make the report more lively.

The official response has been to deny any interference from Government and that all the information in the dossier came from the security services. Personally, I don't like the idea that the Government published information that the security services didn't trust without any qualifications attached to it and presented it as fact. Especially information that seems so blatently wrong. It smacks of Propaganda to me, not a "Security Assessment".

I know it's been out a while, but I've just found it and it's very nice!

The links section of my blog is generated from a php array because I'm too lazy to sort the list myself.

The current code is:

<?php
$links = array(
  "Pewari's Prattle" =>"http://pewari.may.be"
  ,"Mitchell's LiveJournal" =>"http://www.livejournal.com/users/mjquinn"
  ,"Wintermute's Journal" =>"http://www.livejournal.com/users/wmute/"
  ,"Glazblog" =>"http://daniel.glazman.free.fr/weblog/"
  ,"Adot's notblog*" =>"http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/asa/"
  ,"Brinx" =>"http://www.brinx.org/"
  ,"famousamy" =>"http://famousamy.livejournal.com/"
  ,"sjd blog" => "http://www.stephsjournal.says.it/"
);

ksort ($links);

foreach($links as $title => $url)
{
    echo "<a class='menu' href='$url' target='_blank'>$title</a>";
}
?>

i.e. it's really simple. I just use the ksort() function to do the sort.

Question: how do I get it to do a case-insensitive sort without resorting to doing most of the work myself?

The question may become moot, as I'm considering converting it to a database system so that I can edit them using a simple on-line form rather than editing a file :)

Update
Of course, having linked to the function call in the manual, I started having a hunt around as it's more fun that actually working!

The answer is to use the SORT_NUMERIC flag, which when I think about it, it pretty obvious... *sigh*
So, the correct call is

ksort($links, SORT_NUMERIC);

So I can now correct the title of famousamy's link :)

Update 2
Okay, I'm being dense; it's still not working :)

So the original question still stands!

I may well soon be addicted to Twixels. Unfortunately, I can't find a good link to them, but they are basically like Cadbury's "Fingers" biscuits only they are mini-"Twix"s :)

the weather! It's a typically British topic, so I thought I'd mention that it's a Bank Holiday Monday today and it's sunny! Well, I say "sunny" when I really mean that there are more breaks in the clouds than normal. It's great! We've put up Jon's play tent in the back garden and he's had a whale of a time playing.

We need more warm days...

I've read it before, but I'm still hooked on the Nights Dawn Trilogy by Peter Hamilton. Can't see me doing much until I've finished it :)

Pictures of my 30th suprise party are now up on our website.

So the politicians are protecting themselves from attack and say that it's so that we, the general public, will feel reassured...

who are they kidding?!

The biggest benefit of completely ignoring anything to do with The Matrix Reloaded before I went to see it was that I really enjoyed it.

If you haven't already seen it, be aware that there is a trailer for the third film, Revolutions, after all the credits have finished rolling :)

Best Character: Link
Worst Character: Nayomi - wasted opportunity
Best Bit: The implications about Zion.
Worst Bit: Not seeing more of Trinity naked :(
Overall: Good film, but could have done with more plot.

For a better discussion see Dave Hyatt's weblog, though I am sure there are many others!

Watching The Matrix Reloaded tonight :)

Work, work and more work!

Finished off the 404 stuff and am very pleased that it's all working as intended. Rest of today was spent integrating my testbed app with the actual website it's going onto. I do wish the designers wouldn't do fixed height designs as it makes dynamic content that much harder!

I've been given a requirement to provide some "marketing" URLs on one of our websites. These URLS will then be advertised and we can see which work and which don't. The URLs will change each month with new one's being required. So.. thinking back to a solution that a friend used, I've decided to do it by processing the 404 request and if the requested URL is in the database, do a redirect and if it isn't provide a nice error page of some sort.

Doing via a database means that I can write an admin page that will allow the bods upstairs to do the changes each month and I won't be bothered :)

Also, I need to store the request counts in a database as the standard webserver logs don't contain the information required. No great hardship and providing some simple stats is easy enough.

All in all a good solution and I'm glad Cliff told me about about his solution to a related problem :)

I don't rant much, but this story really gets to me. What are these teachers thinking? Don't they realise that they world is a competitive place?! Hiding a child from it won't make them better at coping with it later in life either.

As for failure... Everyone fails at something and most of us fail at something regularly. School sports day is a good place to learn to accept defeat gracefully and understand that competing and doing your best is important. How can we instill the drive to win if we don't accept that to win, someone else has to lose?

Grrr...

Mark:

"My ring feels very strange. I?ve been twiddling with it all day and now it?s chafing. Also, it?s difficult to type, because it keeps catching my eye. Luckily we?re off to the honeymoon in 12 hours, where there will be no computers, no blogging, no typing of any kind. Presumably by the time we get back, it?ll feel normal.

Back in June."

I know what he means. It took me a while to get used to my wedding ring and now it's part of me.

Last night Georgina and I went out for a drink with me expecting to see a few local friends down t'pub. When we get there it turns out that Georgina has invited the whole world! Fortunately only 20 or so out of 4ish billion turned up. I had a great time chatting and not having to buy a round :)

The cake Georgina had got was also great - shaped like a computer funnily enough!

Thanks to Ross too for doing all the legwork :)

Yesterday afternoon I assembled a chest of drawers for Jon's room. Today I'm doing a bookcase for him. The new colour is beech and matches his bed. Looks good.

Also, I managed to break the dimmer switch controlling the lounge lights, so a quick trip to Homebase later, we have a new switch. We inherited the dimmer with the house, so this time we have a normal switch - much better :)

Read all about it here.

The laptop has been getting slower and slower, so it's time for a reinstall. The only question is what will I forget to back up?

Today I said goodbye to my youth... I can no longer pretend that I am closer to my teens than to middle age.

The wake will be held at The Stag's Head this lunchtime.

The time has come when I finally have to learn Macromedia's Flash and it's scripting language (ActionScript). How hard can it be?

All I want to do is dynamically change the speed of a dot that's moving along a line and as noone else in the company seems to know how to do it, I'll do it myself!

It's halfway through the week and it's ages until the weekend...

All in all, a productive day today. The last few working days have been wierd because I've been working at home and I'm no longer used to it, so was not as productive as I would have liked to have been. Also, I was working at home for longer than we expected, so didn't take home all the stuff that I should have done which complicated it a bit. I worked at home with easily in a previous job, but that was different as it was permanent, not a temporary couple of days.

Today though started out with no power in the place and all the network patch cables needing to be redone. Once that was sorted, I got a lot of "minor" jobs done so that, with any luck, the rest of my week is clear for working on a major project. I really need to get my head down and get on with this project as it'll slip if we aren't careful.

We might be back on track for moving...

It appears that the buyer of our buyer didn't actually pull out, but cancelled the survey until he had received a response from the Council over a query. He's got that response now, so is happy to continue. However, in the mean time our buyer has put her house back on the market and has a few other offers on it. So she's said that she'll accept the offer that gets a survey booked quickest which is good. The people we are buying off are happy enough with this situation not to put their house back on the market which is even better news :)

Still don't know when we'll be moving though!

Sundays are turning into very lazy days for us now. I think it must be related to the stress that we are under and we try to "recharge" on Sundays before the next week's problems hit us. (We don't seem to get weeks that don't have problems at the moment).

Part of the reason Sundays are lazy is that we try not to get up until lunchtime. Well, I say "get up", I really mean that we try not to get dressed as Jon gets up at 7 as usual and so I'm up with him!

Today was no exception and I've really enjoyed myself.

We had a party for Jon's birthday today. My parents, Georgina's mum and Sam, Ross and Mitchel all turned up and a good time was had by all. Ross spent more time playing with Jon's toys than Jon did!

Our chain has collapsed again :(

Same problem as last time - the buyer of our buyer has pulled out before even getting a survey done! Looks like we won't be moving before the end of the month after all which means that we're going to be going into serious debt next month as the payment holiday on the mortgage is up. I don't earn enough to pay the mortgage...

We're going to leave it a week to see if our buyer gets a new offer, then assess what we want to do.

wmute has been kind enough to sort me out an LJ feed. I know that the links are quite right and will try and fix them shortly!

Been playing with CSS today for the message board system on BritLore. I want to take some code that Sixes wrote to display a list of message boards with unread threads on them. So I thought I'd be good an reuse all his code. There was no problem with the PHP side: that was easy! The CSS however...

Basically it comes down to how little advanced CSS I know! This is especially true of the positioning model and how multiple styles get agregated down to the final style applied to a given element. I'm quite pleased with the final result as I ended up with less than 10 new lines of CSS :)

Unfortunately we discovered that that SQL statement that generates this list takes a variable length of time between 3.5 and 7 seconds to run... and I called it again... I think I'll have to do get the results from the first run through of that function.

The contract is up on the flat in Stratford, so I'm back at my mother-in-law's during the week.

Except this week! We are having additional network connections installed at work and so I'm working from home Thursday and Friday :)

Happy Birthday Jon!

He's having a party today with his friends from Georgina's mothers' group and another party on Saturday. Lucky boy!

Today is the day before Jon's birthday! As I'm at work tomorrow, we started the celebrations today and let Jon open his big present from us. It's a safari animal set with plastic animals of elephant, giraffe, lion, tiger etc. Jon was thrilled! So thrilled in fact that he totally ignored the television in preference to his new toys!

We all went to the park today. The park was a big one in Beckenham with a lake and lots of ducks and geese! Jon had feeding the ducks - well throwing bread in their general direction anyway! He did lots of walking and as a result slept too long at lunchtime :)

The consequences are of course that he went to bed over an hour ago and he's still awake! Maybe he'll have a lie-in in the morning :)

Spent all evening last night setting up Movable Type. Took a bit of time, but I think that the end result is OK. The idea of nested template modules is similar to the way Nucleus works and makes life a lot easier for organising the site.

The entire site is styled using CSS to position the various content sections. We did however come across one problem. How do you vertically centre text in a <div>? In the end I put in a table along the lines of:

<table width='100%' height='100%'>
  <tr>
    <td valign='middle'>My text here</td>
  </tr>
</table>

But surely there's a way to do it in CSS?!

Been playing with Movable Type for a friend. Wasn't as easy to set up at this one though :)

I'm toying with using it here, for the pingback facility which I think is quite cool and I'm not sure if I can do that with this blog system. Depends if I can be bothered to do all the faffing around though!

Tiny Key Count is a cute little program. Team Mustardhouse started yesterday and we are currently ranked 40 though I'm sure we'll fall down the charts when the US wakes up.

My stats show that I did lots of work today :)