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 800×600 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.