Month: October 2004

Was half way through a post when the Mac seized up. Hopefully the laptop will behave a bit better.

We had a birthday party for him on Thursday at a local sports centre. It was a football party and most of the kids joined in. It was a little weird where two of the kids wouldn’t because they don’t like football. I don’t get it myself in that why can’t you do the football thing for 20 minutes? It just goes to show that people are weird, even when they’re kids.

Birthday proper today. Gave him a kite from the Kite Shop. It’s an Orca and is good in relatively little wind. However there wasn’t quite enough on the beach today so we gave up after about 20 minutes.

Lots of cool presents.

I’m a bit skint at the moment, waiting for my other business to start paying and the job pays about 20% less that I was earning 2 ¹/₂ years ago at the peak of the boom. Ah well, all the more reason to put my efforts into my other business.

Writing

I’ve decided to do another draft of Archive Fragments, play around with the formatting so it’s clearer what is happening in what time period. Also revise it some. I will start trying to tout it round in the next few weeks. The way to get published to be persistent. I have just been reading a book where the writer was rejected over a hundred times before making it into print. He didn’t bother counting the “failures”, just kept on asking the next guy. This is how you succeed.

Software projects

Done nothing for a while on my own projects. Suspect this is because I spend all day designing and writing software and I can’t face it later. Better payoff in other business anyway.

I remember doing this a long time ago and couldn’t work out what to put in the procedure to get the damn thing to tell the browser to start a CSV download. I was mixing up my protocols and couldn’t work out how to set the MIME type. Ultimately I needed to split it up and just put this at the beginning of the procedure:

htp.p(‘mime-type text/csv’);
htp.p(’’) ; — The blank like is mandatory

Then do ya thing.

Fun with CSS styles

This is a total pain.

Define a style, say, fred

<style>
.fred { color : white ;}
</style>

How do I pick up this style’s colour somewhere else? Inherit is simply to inherit from the containing style.

This doesn’t work:

<style>
.jim { color : inherit:fred }
</style>

Think I’ll have to do something in javascript

<script>
for ( var i = 0 ; i <= document.syleSheets.length )
// find my style jim (not sure how yet)
document.writeln(‘<style>’)
document.writeln(‘.fred { color : ’ + jim.color + ’}’
document.writeln(‘</style’);
</script>

Don’t know if this will work

Birthday

Birthday on the 8^th, we went paddling in North Wales (Llangohlen and the Treweryn) that weekend with the club. Stayed at a nice pub called The Goat  where the kids had a good time. Poor Pete had a bit of an epic on the Trewy, but enjoyed it up until then. I drove us home in his Saab, which was a lovely drive. Piccies to follow if I can get hold of them.

Really fed up with being broke and also the work thing. Just not that interested, but keeping a professional attitude.

Birthday Meal

Excellent meal in Valpariso in Liverpool. Food cooked by a chef rather than assembled by a catering college graduate (no disrespect but you see what I mean?). Have the sea bass, or the rabbit, and the strawberry flambe!

Bristol

Odd place. Originally designed for pedestrians I think, cars just don’t work there. Went there for a couple of days’ meetings with customers. Really interesting how everyone’s needs were slightly different and we need to support them.

We went for a drink in the Coronation Tap (a dive, to be honest – didn’t like it a whole lot) and then on to an Indian restraunt called the Bombay Spice, food good but popadums were soft. Corrie Tap served stuff in plastic half pint glasses becuase apparently you can lose the ability to hold a pint if you drink too much of what the guys were drinking (Exhibition? something like that). I was drinking soft drinks and had a glass of wine with the meal. Don’t give a toss about this macho stuff, would rather not be ill.

Business

Still plugging away, making progress. This is not the forum to discuss it though.

Rownum in XSL

This is a special function in Oracle that allows you to get the number of the row you have retrieved, it can be used to manufacture a key or to restrict the number of rows you get in a query. XSL also has a rownum operator that tried to work because we had a string in a stylesheet that had the < character followed by rownum. Had to escape it and it startred working. Took several hours of head scratching to get to the bottom of it.

Portal

Doing some work with Portal 9.0.4. Yawn. Same as old portal but needs an enormous web server to get it going now. Not sure if this counts as progress.