Archive for January, 2004

A walker for my goblin

Friday, January 30th, 2004


I bought a walker today for Jareth. It’s cool, but it sucks as well.

It’s cool, because he likes it, and seems to be getting the hang of it.

It sucks because:

  1. It’s not adjustable, which is weird because making it adjustable involves modifying just one piece of plastic in it, so I don’t know why they haven’t done it.
  2. It has a few toys built into it, but none of them are noisy, and they’re all one colour except for the phone, which is red.
  3. It cost €35, so I hoped for at least an instruction booklet. The box was even plain white cardboard. Cheap.

Tesco made some money from me. I hope that money goes towards researching improvements n that monstrosity. I’ll use it, but I think it could have been better.

Posted in Family | 4 Comments »

hungover and grateful for the heat

Friday, January 30th, 2004

9° in the house today. I should get some oil. thankfully, i’ve wrangled a pay-day change from da bosses, so I can order it today.

I was admiring the subliminal background image of Kevin Lyda‘s homepage. Made me chuckle.

Posted in General | 7 Comments »

bbbbbbblogs

Thursday, January 29th, 2004

Nice engine in this thing. The backend is not as themeable as the front end, it seems, but I managed to copy my “other” site‘s theme in a matter of minutes. Purty cool.

I’d still love to get my hands on the writer of that damned calendar, though ;)

As mentioned by Donncha, I believe HTMLArea would be a useful tool for the backend.

Maybe I should stop chatting about revolution and just do it. I’m similar to the Judean People’s Front in that matter…

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

cold… so cold…

Thursday, January 29th, 2004

central heating packed it in a few days ago, so I woke up, 7am, shivering to a freezing house. the thermometer said 10° celsius. I think it was lying.

I discussed the idea of moving to Belturbet with Bronwyn yesterday – her parents are offering the house to us on a low-rent basis. after a little thought, we both agreed it was ridiculous. no broadband, no prospect of broadband, and the only way I could get to work is with a bus which leave to Monaghan at 12:30.

better off where I am.

we’ll keep on looking

Posted in General | No Comments »

image formats

Tuesday, January 27th, 2004

I’m about due to improve my community site, and was polling the regulars for some ideas. One idea was “avatars” for forums. Simple, I thought – after all, one project I’m working on for work is a large photojournalist site with lots of funky image manipulation. Then I remembered that avatars are usually in .gif format. Why can’t web browsers stick to open formats like .mng??? That’d make life easier (.gif is not handled by the open source image manipulation libraries I use – GD and the like).

Posted in PHP | No Comments »

overuse of css

Tuesday, January 27th, 2004

There comes a time when a man must scream and threaten bloody murder. One point of CSS is it’s ability to optimise the code needed to lever style into an element. This ideal is thrown out the window when the optimization looks like the following:

<tr class="b2calendarrow">
<td class="b2calendarcell">7</td>
<td class="b2calendarcell">8</td>
<td class="b2calendarcell">9</td>
<td class="b2calendarcell">10</td>
<td class="b2calendarcell">11</td>
<td class="b2calendarcell">12</td>
<td class="b2calendarcell">13</td>
</tr>

The above could be written a lot more efficiently by leaving out the b2calendarcell class, and instead addressing the cells as “.b2calendarrow td“. And don’t forget the indentation! In this case, it’s probably best to have all <td>s on one line. This would give the following:

<tr class="b2calendarrow">
 <td>7</td><td>8</td><td>9</td><td>10</td><td>11</td><td>12</td><td>13</td>
</tr>

Isn’t that much nicer?

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

mr – no, Sir. feckit – i have no title

Tuesday, January 27th, 2004

typing is difficult when there’s a three month old nipper screaming and wriggling on your lap.

Posted in General | No Comments »