Rob's Ego Trip!

This morning, Jon couldn't find his mini car and so started wandering around shouting "Mini! Where are you?" over and over again! Of course the mini never answered and so Daddy was pressed into service to look for it...

So, if you've lost your keys, try wandering around the house shouting "Keys! Where are you?" and see what happens!

...for Jon today. He's been really tired, overtired almost, and hence mostly miserable. Poor mite. He didn't even get a good lunchtime nap and ended up screaming for a good while before falling asleep and then waking up a couple of times during his nap time. When we did get him up, he was inconsolable for a good 20 mins and we have no idea why he was so upset.

I've just put him to bed now and hopefully he'll have a nice restful sleep tonight and be his usual chipper self tomorrow.

I decided to give the site a little bit of a facelift - nothing too fancy, but I feel that it's a bit cleaner and much less cluttered than before. You may need to do a full reload (control+F5) to get the new CSS styles to show though.

Also, I've now got more room in the left hand column on the blog :)

Alastair Campbell quits

Took a day off today. No real reason, just thought that a long weekend would be nice :)

All we've done today is look for a greasy-spoon cafe... and we failed. In Croydon, we used to frequent the StarExpress cafe in the centre of town a lot. It does a nice fried breakfast and is very Jon friendly. We want something similar here in Worcester.

We've tried the Tesco's cafe and it's not up to scratch. The food is very much "pre-cooked" and sitting on warming plates for when you order. It certainly isn't as nice as a freshly cooked breakfast! Today we had a drive around looking for somewhere and couldn't find anywhere. Eventually we parked in a carpark and went and looked around the city centre. Again, not a lot to be seen in the way of places that do all-day breakfasts...

We came across a place called "Poppins". It was not a good experience. The decor was very 70s and the food was not fantastic - definitely not freshly cooked either. It was also quite expensive at ?15 for 2 breakfasts and Jon's meal. We won't be going back and so the search will continue...

Snagged from Tom Watson, a free version of 192 on the web: ukphonebook.com

A late night call-out

On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous "I have a dream" speech and changed the world. 40 years on, we still have some way to go to reach the ideals he set down.

The Herald Sun has the text of the Full Speech, as does the BBC

Do you value your privacy? Do you want adverts targeted at you as you walk past a sign because the sign can tell what you are carrying in your pocket/handbag? Even more helpfully, the sign could also work out if you have a credit/debit card on you. How about someone being able to drive past your house and get a detailed list of all the CDs and DVDs in your house?

RFID tags enable this sort of privacy invasion. They are starting to be trialled now with Tesco & Marks and Spencer leading the way. These tags are a great idea for stock control in warehouses and I can see some potential anit-shoplifting benefits. However, in my opinion, it should be a legal requirement that once the product is sold, the tag should be removed.

notags.co.uk and Watching Them, Watching Us have some interesting information about the issues these tags raise and are far more eloquent than I am...

I'm having lots of trouble setting up a subdomain in IIS today. I can't work out what I'm doing differently from the last time I did this, but it's just not working the way it ought to. The main problem is that it's picking a default holding page rather than the correct one and I have no idea why as all the settings look right!

Taking advantage of the long weekend, we stayed up later than usual last night watching rubbish on television. Definitely paying for it now though! We seem to have forgotten to tell Jon to have a lie-in, so he was up at the crack of dawn like usual...

It was a mixed bag on the telly last night. We watched a couple of Top Gear re-runs and then a documentary about Bill & Monica which was well put together and informative. Then came the rubbish - we ended up watching a documentary on Heidi Fleiss. It's an interesting story, but the reporter didn't have a clue what his focus was and the documentary wandered around as a result. In fact, by the end of the show, I had no respect for the journalist at all...

(Edited to include stuff I'd missed out!)

wedding was great! The bride looked really beautiful as shown here:

There was plenty of champagne, wine and brandy at the reception and so we had a good time. We managed to catch up with not only Ali & Simon, but also Lee, Gill & Tim and Big Andy which was great! Big Andy's been in the US for a fair old while now, but has managed to keep his British accent :)

It is Alison & Simon's wedding today, so we are going to Cirencester to celebrate with them. Mum & Dad are looking after Jon and taking him to the Severn Valley Railway so I'm sure he'll have a whale of a time!

Having trouble motivating myself today mainly cos I'm doing lots of boring tidy-up stuff and it's a long weekend coming up!

Apostrophe Protection Society

"It's just software. You have to figure out what you need to do within your organization and then get the right stuff for that."

Tech News - CNET.com

I've been trying to improve the way we handle errors from a DB operation in PHP. We use ADODB for all our database access currently do stuff like:

$rs = $database->Execute($db)
      or die($database->ErrorMsg() . "<br>" . $sql .
      "<br>" . __FILE__ . " " . __LINE__)

Nothing wrong with this code, except that the die() statement has to be everywhere and if we ever want to change it, then we have to change it everywhere!

Looking through the docs for ADODB I discovered that if you include "adodb-errorhandler.inc.php" then if will report the error and die gracefully for you. However, it doesn't tell you the file line number where the error happened. Having the file and line number where the error was generate is really useful, so I decided to fix the ADODB version. This turned out to be quite easy - all you need to do is use PHP's debug_backtrace() to get the correct file and line number.

Having now implemented this, We can now write:

$rs = $database->Execute($db);

and know that if it fails, we'll get a useful error message to debug from!

I've been trying to get the menu system used on http://www.britlore.co.uk to work on Opera and now realise why Cliff couldn't get it working. Opera's interpretation of the CSS "visibility" property seems to be fundermentally broken!

One more year closer to old age :) Happy Birthday mate!

I had to go to Swindon this morning for a meeting. The RAC travel planner said that it would take 1.5 hours to get there, so I allowed 1h 45m just in case. Of course it took just under an hour... Coming back took over 2 hours though, so I suppose, on average, it was right!

Well done England!

BBC News:

"The US military said that soldiers had mistaken Mazen Dana's camera for a rocket propelled grenade launcher."

It just beggars belief...

We used our new barbeque last night for the first time. In time honoured tradition, this state of the art cooking machine was used to cook sausages! We were suitably impressed with how easy it all is with a gas barbeque and were soon eating sausages in a bap with onions. Even Jon enjoyed it so it must have been ok!

I have spent my lunchtime taking rubbish down to the tip today. We have now cleared the garden of all the stuff that was accumulating as a result of us unpacking :)

The tip here is a little disorganised with people just parking willy-nilly all over the place. In Croydon people parked marked out bays so as to maximise the number of people that could unload at one time. Presumably they don't have enough people here?

and 50 million people are without electricity...

or the lack of it! One of the side-effects of moving was that we cleared all our debts and have a clean slate. We did a rough budget and we are pretty sure that we can just live on my salary. However this month, that hasn't worked. I think it's because we over-spent at Homebase (buy shares - we are good customers!) getting stuff for the house. We also had a few one-off things that I didn't account for. Next month should be better as a result.

It's just a bit frustrating that we aren't quite living the easy life yet...

Our Internet connection isn't very good at the best of time, this is not the best of times... Today has been very frustrating because our Internet connection has been much worse than usual and has made dealing with our live server an excruciating experience.

MSBlast is an automated worm that is taking advantage of a MS RPC exploit. The main feature that you'll notice if you get it is that your computer reboots all the time!

elke_tanzer has a good description of how to get rid of it if you have it.

Good luck to famousamy and everyone else who's affected in getting rid of it.

Interesting weather forcast on the radio today:

"Finally some fresh air"

And that was it! Then the presenter moved on to another subject!

I'm struggling with SQL today. I've got a lookup table of a lookup table and can't work out the SQL to do a search. As an example, consider the following:

Table 1 - books:
fields: book_id, price, title, author
example:
1, 2.99, 'Life', 'A. Slug'
2, 4.99, 'The Universe', 'A. Planet'

Table 2 - book_fields:
fields: field_id, field_name
example:
1, 'cover_colour'
2, 'cover_type'

Table 3 - book_field_lookup:
fields: book_id, field_id, field_value
1, 1, 'blue'
1, 2, 'hardback'
2, 1, 'blue'
2, 2, 'softback'


How do I find all hardback books that are blue?

We had lunch out as we were still in Homebase at ten to 12 (Jon's lunchtime is midday). So we popped into the local pub for a Sunday lunch. Unfortunately, whilst they serve food, they don't do a Sunday roast :( Georgina's roast would have been better anyway!

Georgina's Mother and her boyfriend are up for the day today. Jon's thrilled of course that his Nana is here to play with him. Jacky made good her promise to buy me a barbeque for my birthday when we moved. It's a swish gas-powered one and we fully intend to test it out tomorrow :)

The commute is much easier this week. I think it's because it's the school holidays. The end result is that there is much less traffic on the roads when going to work at the moment. Very nice. It hasn't really affected going home though. Presumably this is because I usually leave somewhere between 5:30 and 6:00pm and so the school traffic would have finished by then anyway.

Nothing to rant about at the moment, as I have been talking to Ross whilst travelling to and from work rather than shouting at Radio 4 :) We've been discussing various stuff mainly the merits of different computer languages and their features (I won't bore you with the details!)

We've also started turning our CD collection into MP3s and I've found some CDs that I haven't listened to in ages. I think I'll be creating some more MP3 CDs for my in-car MP3 player soon...

Ross is here for the rest of the week so he's staying with us. Jon's thrilled to have another playmate :)

Interesting piece on the Today program about the Independant's reporting of Tom Kelly's remarks about Dr David Kelly. The Guardian journalist, Michael White, was saying that he would never have reported a "grey" conversation with explosive stuff like that in it. Yeah right!

Bernerd Ingham made an interesting point when he said that he always assumed that if he said anything interesting to a journalist it might get reported, even if it was agreed to be off the record. That struck me a sensible position to hold and I'm amazed that current senior Downing Street people don't think the same way. It strikes me as downright stupid to say anything to a journalist that you don't want them to report...

Michael White's most useful contribution to the whole thing was his comment at the end when he pointed out that the public doesn't trust the media or the Government at the moment and that this is damaging for public life. Of course this would have sounded better if he hadn't spent the last 5 minutes arguing with Bernerd Inghram rather than discussing the topic!

You have to laugh don't you? I realise that there are technical (and cost) issues why the rail can't cope with hot weather and cold weather without re-jigging, but it is funny nethertheless :)

In other hot-weather related news, it was reported that we do not have a hosepipe ban and the resovoirs are reasonably full at the moment! This unusual efficiency was blamed on people's usage pattern changing (more showers, less baths) and also on less leaks now that the water companies are being fined...

It's wonderful that the decent weather is back! However we have a "proper" Sunday roast planned for this afternoon, so we're having that anyway!

It's just a Saturday where Jon has been a joy to play with.

We went out for lunch at Tesco. Georgina and I both had the "mega" breakfast. It was OK, but nothing special. We are definitely going to have to find a good "greasy spoon" café around here!

Had a bit of a scare today too. My bank SMSs me my balance every Saturday and it was ?1000 down on where I expected it to be. Turns out that the Halifax had taken out the mortgage money for our last house!! They've already set in motion the process of refunding, and I've cancelled the direct debit now!

are really really nice! They are all sleek and black. We were less than impressed with the TFT monitors initially until we set them to their native resolution of 1280x1024 at which point, 17" TFT monitors really come into their own!

Now just to get all that software installed...

Update
Oops! We've managed to get a virus all over our network... massive cleansing program going on now!

I'm very lucky to enjoy my work. This job was a particular risk as it involved leaving London and taking a significant drop in salary. Now, having been here 8 months, I can look back and say that I'm really enjoying it. I like the work and the fact that I can set my own agenda. I like that I have a lot of control over the technolgies that I use and that I have a boss who listens.

All in all, it's good. Now "all" we need to do is settle in Worcester and make some friends.

Today is new computer day! I just hope they arrive...