Cricalix.Net

February 18, 2006

Of futons and farmer’s markets

Filed under: 42 — cricalix @ 21:57

The beginning of this weekend has been very fruitful - and not just in the sense that I enjoyed the last bit of Gran’s banana bread. Dad stopped off at Ikea in Leeds on the way south, and picked up a Beddinge futon for me (as my car doesn’t have seats that fold down, merely a ski hole). We put that together on Friday evening, after a nice bit of stir-fry (turkey, carrots, mange tout and other veg), and Dad was able to sleep on a bed rather than on a mattress on the floor that night.

Travelled south to my parents today with Dad to collect my car - Mum had borrowed it on the way home from Barbados, and had it serviced for me. Good thing too, as the exhaust pipe had disconnected itself from the catalytic converter. This happens to be illegal in the UK, so the fact I don’t drive much has probably saved my bacon. It was foggy all the way down the motorway, pea-soup foggy in places. Cars with just their running lights on would pass us in the fast lane, and they’d be invisible in a few seconds.

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February 12, 2006

YABP (Yet Another Bathroom Post)

Filed under: 42 — cricalix @ 17:22

This weekend has seen the installation of a glorious thing - an electric shower.

I now have a hot shower in my bathroom.

Unless you’ve gone without shower functionality for 3 years (or more) and are a person who likes showers, you may not be able to comprehend how much I’ve missed a shower.

Big Dumb Grin

I think I’m at the limits of power to my house though - turning the shower on makes my lights dim ever so slightly :)

A little bit of trim, finish the boxing, change the flooring and that’ll be one room done. Oh, and install the new pedestal sink.

February 11, 2006

WordPress upgrade

Filed under: Technology — cricalix @ 8:53

Well, I bit the proverbial bullet, and upgraded from WordPress 1.5 to WordPress 2.0.1, hoping for some useful upgrades.

The best one so far has been the fact that my £ signs entered directly with a UK keyboard have been displaying nicely for me - before they displayed as A circumflex followed by the symbol. The new MCE based editor is nifty, as are the DHTML tweaks to the posting interface to make things smaller. The templated preview also rocks - I’ve always had to be careful about how long I made my posts, because I couldn’t see the templated form without posting.

The biggest problem to date though, is that the Gallery 1.5 random block code, and the WordPress code both contain a function with the same name, and this upsets PHP no end. I haven’t seen any postings on the net about this yet, but that probably means I haven’t looked hard enough. Push come shove, I’ll post in the Gallery forum and the WP support area - someone might know a fix that doesn’t involve renaming all calls to the function in one package or the other (and renaming the function in that package).

Getting used to this MCE editor will take a bit of time, I’m far too used to pressing Enter twice to end a paragraph and start a new one - MCE detects the enter and closes the paragraph and inserts a blank line and starts the next paragraph.

February 8, 2006

Date::Parse and str2time

Filed under: $work — cricalix @ 8:10

While working on the web-proxy component of $dayjob’s software, I ran into a silly glitch with Date::Parse’s str2time() function. str2time converts string formatted timestamps (Thu, 13 Oct 94 10:13:13 -0700 for example) into epoch seconds (the number of seconds since a certain point in time in 1970) - very useful when working with the Last-Modified header that web servers offer up.

To fix an FTP caching bug, I needed to add a Last-Modified header to the cached file, and did this with a str2time() call, thus keeping the epoch time in the file. Perfectly logical. However, when the proxy came around to reading the header out of the file to see if the timestamp in the header was too old (ie, go fetch the file again), it applied str2time() to the value of the header. Now, I’d have assumed that if you feed epoch seconds to a string to epoch seconds converter, it’d realise that the format was already in epoch seconds and return the input value (there are flaws in this approach mind you). I assumed wrong :) str2time(some_epoch_value) returns blank!

Live and learn.

*twitch*

February 6, 2006

More bathroom upgrades

Filed under: 42 — cricalix @ 9:41

This weekend has been quite productive. Mum and Dad came up to give me a hand with doing the panelling in the bathroom. 16 panels, the capping trim and 3 tubes of silicon sealant came to about £200, and the associated wood, screws and N0-Nails was probably an additional £30.

Saturday saw the removal of the tiles on the two brick walls (leaving the tiles on the plasterboard wall intact, not wanting to rip the plasterboard), and the placing of the battens on the long wall. Hammer drills are wonderful tools, making short work of the cement and bricks - my little 14.4V cordless drill was definitely struggling to get the bit through the wall. It also saw the learning curve of putting the panels onto the battens - it isn’t as easy as it might seem.
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February 2, 2006

Cardboard t-shirt folding machine

Filed under: Technology — cricalix @ 9:53

Ever find yourself folding lots of t-shirts by hand, and wished there was a better way? There is…

Courtesy of Boing Boing, I give you a cardboard t-shirt folding machine.

I’ll be making one this weekend :)


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