Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

So yeah, getting back to last night. It was a fairly decent night, probably not quite as good as previous Oblivions but still good. The problem was the music took a while to get going. They did play quite a lot of music I really like though, I mean it’s normally in the genres I like but they really play some kick ass, that’s what I would play if I had control of the playlist type stuff.

Not sure how much everyone else appreciates it though, they played Lostprophets – Rooftops at the end and most people stopped dancing whereas it’s a fantastic song as one of the final ones as you can really scream your lungs out.

The other problem was that there was quite a high percentage of assholes there. While I would generally agree that there is less tension at alternative nights than mainstream clubbing nights, I don’t subscribe to the idea that goths, indie kids, etc are more chilled out than mainstreamers. I think the difference is between students and locals and it’s just there is a higher percentage of students in the alternative crowds. But in terms of percentages of assholes in mainstreamers vs alternatives I think they are about the same.

Fonze continued his career as a sex stud by pulling again. Not a particuarly attractive girl though and the fact she just walked up to him, said a few things to him and then went off to make out with him shows in kind of in depth meaning their joint activities represented.

After leaving Oblivion we headed off for some food at Luckys and then Lunn suggested we go somewhere else as “me and John are used to staying out till 5 in the morning” which is ironic considering by the end of the night Lunn was the one complaining about wanting to go home.

We ended up at the shesha bar Cafe Denero’s I believe it’s called which is open 24 hours (or so it claims) on a Friday and Saturday. They were shutting as we left though. but yeah, we got two shisha pipes as Lunn wanted one to himself and me and John were splitting one, which Fonze ended up joining in on too. Lunn’s decision to take one to himself probably wasn’t the best given he ended up being sick, or maybe he is just a lightweight :p. It does make you lightheaded when you are doing a lot of it though, I don’t think it’s effected me before as we were passing it round a lot of us but when there is only a few of you doing it, you feel it.

I suppose I should mention these as everyone else has blogged about them. To be honest though, they don’t really bother me much. The first year of uni is all about the partying, as is uni in general really.

But I got some pretty good results anyway…

SY11: 55
MA12: 65
CS12: 67
DB11: 78
SE15: 87

I’m still missing my SE12 and SE16 marks but so far (including both semesters of SE15 and therefore counting it twice) I am averaging a 73 on these results which puts me in the 1st category (even though I really don’t like to categorise as this year doesn’t even count) although if you add in my first semester results it would probably drop below the 70 mark as I was really pulled up here by my stella SE15 mark (it’s worth noting 90 is the maximum I could have scored). Although I’m hoping for a decent mark in SE12 that should drag my average up a little.

So tonight we did Oblivion. We being myself, Fonze, John and Lunn. It was a good night although the music wasn’t quite as good as normal (though still excellent) and the people weren’t that brill. With all the students gone home the percentage of assholes was higher as locals tend to be assholes despite being alternatives rather than mainstream clubbers.

We then went to Cafe Denero’s and did some sheesha which was fun. And explains why why I’m getting in at this time lol.

OMG! Ok, so we were going for pre-Oblivion drinks at the Llama (as ever) and when we got there the door was closed. And locked. I wasn’t about to walk away from the Llama just because of a closed door but it was locked as well when I tried it and the Halo entrance wasn’t open so I couldn’t even go round and ask what was going on.

I might find their number and ring them actually. This is scary, I really don’t want to have to find somewhere else to live, the Llama is irreplaceable.

I ran my code through the W3C validator. It validated fine.

It also displays fine normally. But if you put it in a frameset you get an interesting result.

The admin panel to one of my new projects uses a menu frame on the left and the main frame on the right similar to how phpBB, vBulletin and probably countless other scripts do it.

The problem was that Internet Explorer would add un-needed hoziontal scroll bars to every page. Well, I thought it was the menu at first, then all pages then I noticed it was only some pages. I tried to work out which pages it was but I couldn’t find anything in the HTML. It turned out to be whether there was vertical scrolling or not. If there was, IE would also add a horizonal scroll bar.

I found the answer in a journal post on No Scope which presented several solutions, I went with the one that forced vertical scroll bars which for some reason makes IE act normal. The only problem was that this forced a vertical scroll bar in even when it wasn’t needed. I could settle with having it forced upon IE users but I didn’t want Firefox users to suffer so I then went in search of the easiest solution to include extra CSS information for IE preferably without using server side.

I found this answer on Arve Bersvendsen‘s website as you can comment code out and put in [if IE] and Internet Explorer will pick it up which is pretty neat.

JavaScript is a funny language. This causes a “not implemented” error in Internet Explorer…

window.onload = document.forms.f.q.focus();

But this works fine…

window.onload = function(){
	document.forms.f.q.focus();
}

Hmmm.

My windfall on Wednesday has left me in a good situation. Now that I once again have money I can get some Llamage in. Such as today when we went for lunch as a last outing before Sarann goes home. Sarann actually turned up virtually on time and was the first one there, I joined her soon after and we ordered food though unfortunatly by the time Matt and Kieran turned up they had just stopped serving.

Just after 8 everyone else headed off for a curry but I bailed at this point as I had already eaten a lunch at home and at the Llama so I got the bus home and did some coding. Which thanks to my time at home is going pretty well, I have quite an exciting project nearing a release candidate so yay, hopefully that will be available at least in demo form soon.

Well, sort of.

It could only really last so long really. If you are looking for one central target for abuse on the internet, Wikipedia has to be a good candidate.

But it was also a shining star. If anything saved my belief in humanity, it was Wikipedia and the general concept of wikis. The fact you could put something on the internet that anyone could edit and people wouldn’t crap all over it and abuse it as much as possible.

Of course this isn’t the case, there is a lot of abuse of wikis, most of which seems to be targetted at mine. Still, it was nice to imagine, at least for a little while that people on the internet were on the whole nice people that weren’t looking to screw you.

Wikipedia has now increased it’s restrictions though. It has three levels, protected (nobody can edit), semi-protected (you need to be registered for 4 days) and unprotected. Recently, lots of pages have been moved onto a higher protection level. To stop abuse of course, but it’s a sad that they need to use this kind of protection to protect pages.

If you want to read more about the changes, there is an article on News.com.

If you ever find yourself needing to escape literal characters such as \n in PHP, the function you are looking for (and which I have been looking for, for the past few days (on and off at least)) is addcslashes.

This seems to take care of it…

<?php
$escaped = addcslashes($not_escaped, "\0..\37!@\@\177..\377");
?>

Then use stripcslashes when decoding it. If you are putting it into a database you will need to escape it again when inserting it but you don’t want to escape your literal characters then so you can just use addslashes (or something more secure, try mysql_real_escape_string).