Cricalix.Net

Well, with a nice morning sky and light, I decided to carry the KM5D to work today and try for a shot of the morning light against the building. Said building has three stories of plate glass windows, so the reflection of the sky can be quite striking. Powered up the camera, framed the shot, hit the trigger release and … the damn thing crashed. Power-cycled it and I was able to shoot just fine. I’ll be calling Jessops today and talking to the manager, and hopefully arrange to come in to the store on Saturday to sort out a replacement camera. I’d love if I could get something like a Canon 30D, but I don’t see them agreeing to a replacement camera that’s worth twice what I paid for the KM5D.

Last weekend, one of my neighbours knocked on my other neighbours’ door, and asked them to knock on my door.  Dunno why, I’m not that scary looking (I think).  End result was me spending 2 and a bit hours at her house, working on a computer that didn’t want to work properly any more.  (I love Microsoft Windows, really, I do!)  The culprit that was relayed to me was her son had installed Limewire.  She had uninstalled it when things stopped working, but things didn’t start working again.

So, one fix of the browser proxy, one set of virus remanents removed, various anti-virus and anti-malware tools updated and the machine was back on the net.  It managed to lose the soundcard driver along the way, and the automatic upgrade to IE 7 broke a few other things – I dealt with those this weekend.  Should have been no more than 20 or 30 minutes of work, but I got dinner out of it, and an offer to help with curtains etc in the house.  Sounds like a fair deal to me.

This weekend saw the fixing of PSAPI.DLL (which caused BTHelpNotifier.exe to go belly up, thank you IE 7), the fixing of the sound card drivers and the installation of The Sims for the daughter.  Installing the Sims was interesting – I’ve never seen a machine complain about autoexec.nt before.  Turns out it wasn’t in system32 like it should have been.  Copied it from elsewhere on the system and life was golden.  My neighbour didn’t believe I could hear the speakers clicking once the driver was installed either.  Proved they were working by firing up Media Player :>

Also achieved this weekend – painting of some of the fresh (hah!) plastering (and the process of touching up a house is apparently called walloping in Staffordshire), emptied the pond, chucked pond muck on garden beds, refilled pond half-way.  Oh, and a good load of laundry.  Also achieved last weekend – got the corkboard up on the wall.  I’ve been meaning to do that for about a year now.

$self had the clever idea that we could use the sort of new ‘Web 2.0′ buzzword paradigm of Ajax on the software $dayjob produces. All well and good, the boss approved, and the mock-up worked – a simple form, Prototype as the Ajax library and some PHP (5.2 no less) that returned a JSON string in the header. Adding records happened in the background, and on success, the page updated, a little status field updated, a reload of the entire data set from the database server wasn’t needed and life was groovy. All of the content validation occurred on the server side, and because it’s in a library, I only have to write one set of rules, regardless of whether it’s Ajax, standard forms, or even SOAP.

Part the next was to integrated the entire thing into the real code that drives our web interface. ‘No problem $self, you know it works…’ Well, who tell me think dat!? After some fiddling with the templating engine (which uses { and } heavily), and some re-writing and re-forming of the proof-of-concept code into a generic routine that could handle any of the configuration pages, I had a test page ready to rock and roll. The code set the Ajax URL target on the fly in the template, and Firebug reported that ‘Yes Bob, the data went out, and the response came back.’, but nary an update occurred on the page.

Over an hour later, after stripping the code down to barebones, making copious use of the debugger statement that Firebug can pick up, and at least 2 cups of tea, I realised two things.

1. I had missed three semi-colons on code inside of the var myajax = new Ajax.Request( ); segment.
2. I had used the wrong name for two functions, also called inside that block.

If you do that outside of the object creation, the JavaScript interpreter in the browser yells at you loudly. If you do it inside the object creation, it fails silently. Not an error anywhere. Not in Firebug. Not in Firefox’s error console. Nada. Not a sausage.

I now remember why I dislike JavaScript. Hopefully the Ajax book I ordered will give me some insight into how to deal with stupidity (on my part, and on the part of JavaScript) like that.

Supposedly, since it’s early January, winter should be here, making my life miserable.

Strange as it may be, the weather in this part of England hasn’t dropped below freezing this year, there has been no snow.  It’s rained, it’s been gray.  But there’s been no snow.  No ice.  No heavy frosts.

Onions in my garden are still growing.  It’s the middle of winter and onions are growing.  I’m not saying that it’s not cool (it’s about 4 – 5 C on average), but onions are growing.

Boggle.