Google Suggest

Google has introduced a new service - Google Suggest. It is, essentially, tab-completion for Google. If you go to the homepage and type "lowey" you wil see that a list of items drops down for you to choose possible completions from, and LoweyBlog is the 8th item down! Items can be selected with the up and down keys.

Also of interest is that Google.com seems to redirect UK visitors to the .co.uk site now.

Drink With An Old Friend

Went out for a drink with an old friend earlier. It's strange: We live just around the corner from each other yet we have seen each other a grand total of 3 times this year, 4 times if you include this evening. And, of the 3 times we saw each other, 1 of those times was merely a follow-up because I needed a certain CD I didn't own in order to fix her computer for her. Madness. It was nice to meet up and have a beer, catch up etc. Sad thing is, these days I don't seem to be able to handle more than about 2 pints. Anything more and I start to feel rather hammered.

Tomorrow I shall be supervising a practical ("demonstrating", they call it round here) and then meeting some more friends in the evening as this will be my last night in Aberystwyth before Christmas. Then it will be a case of driving to Newbury again on Wednesday morning. Hopefully without nearly hitting anything this time around.

Before then I suppose I ought to wash some of these dirty dishes that are littering my bedroom.

Back From Newbury

Exciting breaking news: I have returned from Newbury. Okay, it's not that exciting. The Gentoo case-badge for my PC has finally arrived. T'was an uneventful journey. Apart from the point where I nearly skidded into the back of a tractor. And apart from the idiot who decided to randomly give himself right of way in the middle of Rhayder. Oh yes, and the huge crash on the A44 that was blocking the last stretch of road to Aberystwyth, meaning I had to go the long way round. Other than that it was completely uneventful.

The weekend on the other hand was far from uneventful. I kind of wish it had been.

Session Handling

I got the session handling to work on my major project at long last! It turned out that the problem was that a variable was being considered out of scope when, in my opinion, it shouldn't have. Anyway, a small change of a keyword and all is fixed again. It is now possible to store anything I want in the session and have it maintained for me, even the word Brussened.

In other news my sinuses (sinusi?) still hurt. Oh, and in other other news the Univerity's network has been all over the place today and last night. There's no telling what it's going to do next. Each time it goes down it goes down hard and, for some reason, it crashes Firefox on my main machine each time. Mind you I am running a "preview copy" so perhaps they fixed it in the release version - it doesn't crash on the laptop after-all and that's the release version.

Oh, by the way, according to that incredibly reliable news source "The Sun" (which is known for its' fair and unbiased journalism) Christmas will be banned by next year. Apparrently this year the words "Merry Christmas" have been removed from thousands of cards in favour of "Seasons Greetings" because it could prove offensive to people who are not Christian. IF THEY ARE SO OFFENDED BY CHRISTIANITY, WHY ARE THEY LIVING IN A CHRISTIAN COUNTRY?! Oh great, The Sun just made me resort to underlined capitals. This is why I don't read newspapers. It was one of my flatmates reading this out last night that sparked my attention. The article claims Christmas Trees have been removed from job centres up and down the country, and there is a bill in its second reading which will make it illegal to show that one is a Christian by the use of symbollism, such as Christmas trees.

Now feel free to stop me at any point ... but surely Christmas trees have nothing to do with Christianity anyway? The 3 wise men brought gifts of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. I don't ever remember reading of them arriving on a reindeer-pulled sleigh with a conifer in the back, or them wearing jolly festive fur-trimmed red suits with jolly white beards. As I recall they were in Bethlehem at the time which isn't well known for its snow. Nor was there anyone called "Santa" climbing down chimneys to give children presents. So even if this bill exists and is indeed in its second reading, surely Christmas trees and santas could not be made illegal?

I therefore propose that The Sun is talking a big steaming pile of crap as per usual, or that the entire world is going insane. Sadly both are equally plausible.

Apologies

Under normal circumstances I would never delete an entry from my blog, what has been said has been said. However there were ... reasons ... to remove the last post. I'm not going to go into it. Suffice to say that the blog was not intended to attack anyone, the figures were entirely quoted from reliable sources and I am allowed my own opinion on matters. I don't think it's fair to have my opinions thrown back in my face with the universal "fuck off" logo: o_|/ But hey.

Anyway the offending article has been removed and normal transmissions will now continue, we apologise for the inconvenience. Here is some light music to drive you insane while you are waiting...

Brussened

I'm glad to see the word has spread. Brussened has been sighted on Ducki's Blog, Burt's Blog and therefore also on the planet #aber website. Googling for Brussened now returns 4 matches, none of which are from my blog for some reason.

Major Project

Should have mentioned this yesterday really but I forgot. My major project now has a rather sexy looking login screen tied to a PostgreSQL database. PostgreSQL seems alright, this is the first time I've really played with it. It's not too much of a pain to set up and it seems quick enough. The website I am building for my client will also feature a PostgreSQL database as the website will need to collect names and addresses etc, maintain sessions and store files. A database seems the obvious way to go and, as I am using Perl, the choices are MySQL and PostgreSQL.

MySQL was proving a pain to install and configure so I gave up on it and gave PostgreSQL a go instead. It was far less painful and so is, currently, my database server of choice. I am told that PostgreSQL scales better too which makes it ideal for the website I am building, as there is quite a large probability that the website will be getting a helluva lot of hits each month within a year. Which is nice. It'll be splendid to be able to put on my C.V. "I made this; A nice professional-looking website that gets lots of hits each month".

It Makes Me Sad

REMOVED - no opinions to be found here.

Impressive

That was one impressive bit of tidying - my room went from "disgusting" to "not too bad at all" in the space of 5 minutes. Now to go and hunt me some breakfast.

Password Stupidity

I'm so tired that I just tried to use tab-completion when entering my password. My god I am stupid sometimes.

Oh and hello to the floods of visitors I'm getting at the moment. Great to see you all! Enjoy your stay. You can find the archives menu on the right if you want to see the whole sordid tale, or you can keep up to date with the (recently revamped) RSS feed Well, I say floods of visitors... I'm getting more than usual anyway.

RSS Validates

Thanks to Randy Morin of KBCafe.com the RSS feed now validates. Now I just need to rework all the code that handles the production of the XHTML - now there's something to look forward to. However, all of this stuff has to take the back-burner as I really need to get some work done on my major project.

Oops

I think I may have just crashed my favourite radio station for a short while. They put some god awful song on which featured lots of drums, and some guy who couldn't sing shouting "fly-y" every so often. It was so bad I wanted to write about it on here, so I tried to copy and paste the name of the song by going to "View File Info". However this particular dialogue box tries to read ID3 and ID3v2 tags and stuff. As soon as the box opened the station stopped dead and was refusing connections for about 2 minutes.

Brussened. Don't forget to use Brussened in polite conversation some time this week. Brussened!

Hmmm, I should be about halfway through my major project by now. I'd say I'm about 5% of the way through. Arse. Time to knock it up another notch. BAM!