Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

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).

I feel I have been quite productive with regards to coding recently. I got to bed at 1:30 am on Monday night and dragged my ass out of bed at 9 the next morning so I could get some work done and I got a full day (well not a full, full day but a good day at least) of coding in before going to Sarann’s for the movie night. Well, movie night is probably a bit of a strong term, we put on Madagascar but we soon got talking and I don’t really know what happened once whey were sent into the wild.

Myself, Claire, Kieran and Michelle all ended up crashing at Sarann’s. Claire has a quite amazing ability to fall alseep at super speed. Me and Kieran were just talking for a few minutes and next thing we know, Claire was fast alseep. And this was only at like 1:30.

I woke up at 6:30 at which point Kieran informed me we had achived the required 5 hours sleep and so should now get back to coding :D. Which I pretty much did, I got a bus home and coded until I had to leave to met everyone back at the Quilted Llama for lunch. Luckily my EFT had kicked in as I literally had no money in town. I spent the remaining cash I had on my day rider in the morning and lent £2 to my sister so I literally had nothing at all. But I was able to take some money out even though that money should be in my savings account. But I AM going to put it back, someone make sure I don’t spend it!

I now have more money thankfully as my gran and grandma have given me £80 worth of back-dated pocket money (I still get pocket money off them, how cool is that :D) so I’m less screwed that I thought I was but I am still going to keep expenses to a minimal, at least until I get a job.

So yeah, over today and yesterday I have done a lot of coding which has been cool, I hope I can sustain the amount of work I’ve been putting in to some of the projects as the things that are being coded are the moment are so awesome. I love when you are really fired up about a project, you have so much energy for it.

Oh, how did I manage to go 4 days without llamage? It’s crazy. Although there will probably be longer gaps over the summer. Still my EFT came through so I had a bit of money to see my through a quick session. Still no luck on the job front though, I managed to find another agency today but they said they weren’t registering anyone else at the moment. They did take my CV though. Not much hope there though.