March 2003 Archives
Well last night I finally figured out why I couldn't get the weather working. I found a subtle bug in gav's InterceptVectorWeather module. I sent him a quick patch this morning.
I've said if before and I'll say it again, Data::Dumper is so bloody handy when debugging Perl data structures. Running the data structure through Data::Dumper revealed rather quickly that $self->{hr}->{temp} was not a reference therefore this statement would always be true:
( ! ref $self->{hr}->{temp} )
The patch was this simple:
( ! exists $self->{hr}->{temp} )
Today hasn't exactly been the best Sunday I've ever had but this cheered me up right away. Via Jeremy, the headline of the week: Sudden, Unexplained Death May Kill Many Adults. To be honest, I haven't even read the article because the headline is enough to make me giggle :-)
I've been farting around with the weather for this site again. I have to admit that after the initial "oooh look, pretty graphics" when I first started using weatherforyou - I really don't like it. After having my nose in gav's weather plugin I really wanted to use that code again as it's really quite good.
So today on my lunchbreak I grabbed the latest version of the plugin and noticed that gav has added a couple of nice features including support for weather images. Haven't finished playing with it yet so the site will be without weather for the time being :-)
Do I ever want one of these babies? So that there's no confusion, I'll spell it out - YES I WOULD LOVE ONE.
Ok, I'm done now :-)
And if the whole 'Freedom Fries' thing wasn't enough to piss you off, how about this. I'm not going to go on a rant here but this kind of thing makes me angry.
So yesterday I had to get a new base ID card. Why is it that you always end up looking like a total wanker on ID card photos? I think somehow the camera does it on purpose. Of course it may not be the camera at all - perhaps I really DO look like a total wanker in real life - I can't decide :-)
No matter how hard you try, you cannot avoid the ol' pet hair on black t-shirt syndrome in our house. This has probably got something to do with the fact that we've got 5 cats and 2 dogs :-)
It's jeans & t-shirt week at work (which is REALLY cool by the way) so this morning I put on a black t-shirt. As usual I'm EXTREMELY careful not to go too near the cats. Didn't matter, just walking downstairs is enough to catch the odd hair or two that happen to be floating in the air. I swear black t-shirts are like a bloody hair magnet :-)
I get to work and the first thing I hear is "Kev, did you know you've got a couple of cat hairs on your shoulder". Yes, I did know that and thanks for pointing that out.
My sister that is. And that's all I've got to say about that :-)
Well, after 2 1/2 months I gave in last night. After a particularly hectic week I thought it would be nice to have a couple of glasses of red wine. Very nice they were too. Funny thing about not drinking for a while is that your alcohol tolerance is extremely low. Think of the phrase 'pissed on a pint' and you can imagine how I was :-)
Sal and I were watching TV last night when they switched to the breaking news from Baghdad. We were listening to one of the Sky News reporters and watching a live feed of the Baghdad skyline when the explosions could be heard. It was really quite weird that we were watching/listening live as this was happening. Usually it's something you read about the next day. Looks like Ken felt the same way about watching a war begin live on TV.
I can't remember when I first heard of plans for a Superman remake. I do know that it was bloody ages ago though. Looks like the latest candidate for the 'man-of-steel' has decided he doesn't want the job either. I dunno, perhaps they should just give up looking. Shame really and I would have loved to have seen a Superman vs Batman movie. But that's just me :-)
According to the London Evening Standard, the war has started.
Seeing as it's been out of action since I modified the site layout a few months back, I thought it was about time I got the photo gallery working. So while watching TV tonight I hacked on photo.pl for a little while. Unfortunately I broke some of the DBI code and I'm too knackered to do any more debugging tonight. Oh and I've got another idea about a Perl module that I may end up throwing on the CPAN and another idea for a MT plugin.
Oh and class starts again this week so just when I'm going to find the time to work on all these things is beyond me :-)
Watched the 2003 Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame show on VH1 last night. I thought it was really quite good. Nice to see The Clash get some recognition. Mick Jones cracked me up as they were leaving the stage when he mumbled thanks to The Sex Pistols :-)
The highlight of the evening for me was seeing The Police play together for the first time in 18 years (apparently the jamming they did at Sting's wedding doesn't count). The first time I remember really liking The Police was seeing a live concert on 'The Old Grey Whistle Test' when I was a kid. As I recall the show was taped in Atlanta and it was from the Synchronicity tour.
I was really disappointed that we didn't see more of them last night. What we did see was awesome though. Stewart Copeland's drumming was insanely good, as always. He has a unique style that I absolutely love. He even broke his snare drum!
If they had a reunion tour I know I'd be there :-)
I'm not quite sure when it was that I started getting allergies (hayfever). I don't feel the symptoms very often but this morning I woke up with an absolute bastard of a headache. Seeing as I don't drink anymore this was quite unexpected. Not just a headache though, my eyes were a little itchy and I could not stop sneezing. Sal is a long time allergy sufferer so luckily we have a plethora of allergy medicine in the house. One allegra pill & 20 minutes later all was well. That's some bloody good stuff I tell you!
Ooops. News like this won't exactly help the Bush administration sell their "Iraq is a threat" position.
The new version of Mozilla is out. 1.3 has some cool new features and I'll be giving the new spam filtering a try to see if it's as good as spamassassin. Oh and orbit still works which is always a bonus :-)
So James Gandolfini is throwing a tantrum because he wants more money. I think the success of the show has gone to his head. If I were HBO I'd tell him to piss off back to his 'bit part' movie career. If it wasn't for HBO, people would still be thinking James who?
Mind you he's not the only one that thinks he's special because the TV series is doing well. There's Rob Lowe who threw a similar tantrum with NBC because he felt he wasn't getting enough money from The West Wing. So he left and you know what, you'll never see him in anything decent again. Sure he'll make a few 'B' movies that will run on TNT but no-one will watch them. Is The West Wing lost without him? Er, no.
Same will happen with Gandolfini. You mark my words :-)
When I first read this I thought it was a joke. It's not a joke unfortunately. So now that the US doesn't like France, we can't say 'French Fries' anymore. Or 'French Toast' for that matter. Freedom Fries? Freedom Toast? You have GOT to be kidding.
Yep, your tax dollars hard at work :-)
I modified the CSS slightly for those of you who like your screen resolution a tad on the low side (you know who you are!). Lets see if that fixes the problem with the side div appearing at the bottom. I have my screen resolution set at 1280x1024 so I didn't realize there was a problem until today :-)
This week was the last week of the current semester (sorry, 'term' for those of you reading this from 'across-the-pond'). This means that I have no school for a couple of weeks and thank goodness for that. I'll say that again THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT.
So this means that neglected house projects finally get finished. Yesterday we spent most of the day outside replacing our window screens as our old ones had seen better days. Once you've got the knack it's quite easy really. Getting the bloody things back in the windows is another matter entirely. We've got a few upstairs ones to finish today and then we'll be all done.
Robin Williams was really quite good in One Hour Photo. I'd heard some good things about this movie and was not disappointed. Also watched The Ring. It wasn't really a bad movie it's just that it ended with so many questions that were left unanswered and I hate it when movies do that.
Well this just shows how much attention I've been paying to new releases. Erasure go and release a new album (albeit an album of cover versions) and I didn't even know it. I think I'll be purchasing that this weekend.
I'm giving comments another try by the way. I don't know why I didn't use the IP ban feature of MT in the past. When in doubt - read the documentation Kev.
My co-workers are not exactly 'johnny-on-the-ball' when it comes to celebrating birthdays. We went out to lunch today to celebrate my birthday. This was all rather amusing seeing as my birthday was actually back in November :-)
I wasn't the only one they forgot so it was actually a joint birthday lunch for Scott and I. There were about 20 of us and we went to Ajo Al's which serves yummy mexican. Had a good laugh actually.
The conversation eventually turned over to the President's news conference last night. My co-workers are quite a diverse group of people and I was quite surprised that everyone agreed that the President really didn't do a very good job at all. It was nice to hear that I wasn't the only one who got angry because of his refusal to answer any of the questions he was asked.
Anyway now I'm full :-)
Perltidy absolutely rocks! After running a quick perl -c on my program I was greeted with the following error message that usually makes my heart sink:
Missing right curly or square bracket at ccpd.pl line 1102, at end of line
syntax error at ccpd.pl line 1102 at EOF
Bugger. So that means *somewhere* in the code I forgot to add a curly bracket. In the past this meant having to wade through 1102 lines of code trying to find where the sodding curly bracket should have gone. Not anymore. Now I just run my program through perltidy. Then you just take a peek at the error file it creates and voila you now know where to go looking:
The most recent un-matched '{' is on line 567
567: sub createAuthMessage {
^
Nice :-)
It's looking increasingly likely that France, Russia, and Germany will use their veto power in the upcoming security council vote on a war with Iraq.
It will be interesting to see if the Bush administration completely ignores the results of the vote and invades Iraq anyway. I suspect that they will invade regardless of the outcome. They will make a complete mockery of the UN security council in the process and I think that is really quite worrying.
Thanks to Ken I'm now trying out WeatherForYou to grab the weather. Not only do I like the little graphic but it refreshes hourly. With InterceptVectorWeather, it only refreshes when I actually post changes to the site. Obviously I could hack together a quick cgi that would do the same thing with IVW but I really don't have time. Could put that on the ol' to-do list.
I'm thinking about posting a few random thoughts about work related stuff. This will be the first such entry.
Next week we'll be testing our new credit card processing daemon with one of our vendors. Today was the scheduled stress test to simulate extreme server load. I found a problem that had not occured with my unit testing. The bug was a pain in the arse to find though. The fix was trivial, 3 hours of debugging just to add this line:
next if (! -s $fileFullPath);
It was good to get past the server load test though. I left work in a happy mood as our ability to handle server load was worrying me a little. It's a big weight off my shoulders.
Sal seems to get motion sickness when playing one of our PS2 games. It's the weirdest thing. It only happens when playing Ratchet and Clank. It got to the point where we had to stop playing it yesterday. So now we're playing Summoner 2 which is quite good in fact.
It's been a long time since I've read a Stephen King book. As luck would have it, Sal bought Dreamcatcher a while back so I'm reading that. I only started it yesterday and I've read over 100 pages so you could say it has me hooked :-)
Well I decided that there's no time like the present so I hacked together a quick patch for InterceptVectorWeather.pm and sent if off to gav.
The IV Weather site is back from the dead which means the weather plugin now works again. It would probably be nice if we could use cached weather info in the event that the IV Weather site goes down. If I get time this weekend I'll hack on that for a bit and send a patch to gav.