The following events take place between 11am on Monday and 6pm on Tuesday

Dramatis Personae:
D: Dragon, the protagonist.
RC1: Recruitment Consultant number 1, an antagonist.
RC2: Recruitment Consultant number 2, another antagonist.
I: Interviewer from company looking for a protagonist.

#1. Monday AM
D: Hello Recruitment Consultant One. I just thought I’d let you know that I thought the interview went well. They seem very friendly and I’m sure the job would be no problem.
RC1: Wonderful, I’ll get back to you when I’ve heard something.
D: Kthxbye.

#2. Monday PM
RC2: Dragon, you know that well paid job that we put your CV forward for?
D: Yes?
RC2: Well, I’ve a couple of things to mention about it.
D: Go on.
RC2: First, it’s not as well paid as we made it out to be.
D: I see.
RC: Second, they’d like to do a telephone interview with you.
D: Okay.
RC: In the next hour.
D: Ah.

#3. Monday PM, a few moments later.
I: Yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. How good are you with Lotus Notes?
D: Amazingly good.
I: Kthxbye.

#4. Tuesday AM
RC1: Hello Dragon, this is RC1. You are live on a phone call, please do not swear.
D: Hello.
RC1 Three of you were up for evicti… interview yesterday. The phone lines are now closed and the votes have been counted.
D: Uh huh.
RC1: One of you will be lucky, two of you will be leaving empty handed.
D: Uh huh.
RC1: The winner of this weeks public company interview is…
D: Uh huh.
RC1: is…
D: Yes?
RC1: is…
D: Go on!
RC1: …not you. You have 30 seconds to hang up.
D: Fuck!

#5. Tuesday PM
RC2: Dragon, RC2. They liked you.
D: Cool! Second interview?
RC2: No. Three month contract, start on monday.
D: Woah! Excellent.
RC2: In Dublin.
D: …

Anyone know any cheap places to stay in Dublin?

I went into London today for the first time in over 3 months. I’m surprised it’s been that long but time flies when you’re changing nappies. I went in for a job interview for a contract position as I’ve decided that’s what I’ll try next. I’ve been worrying all weekend that my skills aren’t up to it because although I’m a seasoned developer, I’ve become so disillusioned with it all that I haven’t really been keeping up to date.

By day, you see, I masquerade as a Lotus Notes developer. This normally causes sniggering in the back because we’re not perceived as proper developers at all which is harsh and more than a little unfair. It’s also, on some levels, quite justified. Over the last few releases, the platform has considerably improved it’s capability to deliver browser based content and, although there aren’t many out there, there are blogs built using Lotus Notes. There are even wiki templates, applications using AJAX and all these other clever things that can be done in Notes.

My contribution? Zilch.

This is the software I’ve been developing for ten years and I haven’t even bothered to find out how to create an RSS feed with the data I’m storing. Until lately that is.

However, if my career as a contract developer takes off and if I can wangle some consultancy roles too then I may start up another blog, written in Notes (provided I can find a host) and using the domain name I bought years ago that is my equivalent of Gordon’s domain.

I’m expecting a call from the agency any minute now.

PHPBB has got to have just about the worst goddam custom style template system ever. That’s the problem with freeware systems like this (and PHPNuke CMS which I evaluated recently), they’re just so, I don’t know, leaden. So fucking counter intuitive.

One of the joys of Wordpress is that it’s very easy to set up a new theme for your blog and roll it out. I’ve recently been messing with Subdreamer and, quite frankly, customising that makes Wordpress looks like it needs a phD in CSS engineering. PHPBB, on the other hand, does require several rocket scientists, a couple of brain surgeons and a 4 year old video timer reprogrammer to understand what the hell is going on.

The article in the knowledge base that tells you how to start making your own style begins something like this.

Copy the existing default style and change the name of the .cfg file, the folder and the contents of the info file.

To my mind, a decent theme system would start with instructions along the lines of

Create a new folder called “MyTheme”. Create a file called “MyTheme.xxx”

In an ideal world, you’d be nearly done by this point apart from adding a few colours, possibly altering the layout slightly and so on. But back to PHPBB - ready to change the colour of the background yet? Woah there, Tex! Hold your horses! Before we can even choose which shade of pastel sepia is ideal for a table border, we have to amend references in 18 (18! 18! Eight-fucking-teen!) template files to make sure that any reference to the default theme we copied.

Why? Because the references to the sodding images and other dependant files are all fucking hardcoded! I mean, what sort of shit is this? Who on earth hard codes stuff that might, you know, perhaps even possibly be changed by someone who wants to rebrand their forum. Maybe even change the layout a little.

Having just spent the last couple of hours trying to even begin to get the forum to recognise my copied and renamed theme folder without any joy whatsoever, you can imagine that I’m a little fricking pissed off with the system at the moment.

And now a message from our sponsors.

Nine Inch Nails are touring Europe again next year. They’re playing in London on the 7th and 8th of March.

Do I already have my tickets* booked? Is the Pope a homophobic former Nazi?

(*I’m going on the 8th if it helps you decide which night to avoid. If you are too, I might buy you a beer - depending on my work status at the time. Perhaps Lyle will leave his camera at home this time.)

For a stay at home dad, my baby posts have been remarkably thin on the ground. Probably because I don’t blog about my family. Or anything interesting but particularly not about my family or other personal stuff.

While not quite in the same league as Dan’s marvellous video, I put together a 20 second clip of my hatchling taking his first (assisted) steps.

I could really get into video blogging if it didn’t take such a damn long time to do!

(Originally posted on 27th October. This is a repost as, owing to a catastrophic hosting server failure, the original was lost. The follow up is tomorrow.)

It’s been quiet here because I’ve been preparing for the OMM. That’s “Original Mountain Marathon” which was the Karrimor International Mountain Marathon (KIMM) until this year. If you’ve heard of it.

In a little while I’ll be spending 6 hours driving my hired car up to Dumfries and the overnight pleasure of a Travelodge (provided they haven’t overbooked!) Then, bright and early, tomorrow morning my team mate and I will be setting out on the first day of our 30 mile run over the mountains of Galloway Forest Park. 15 miles a day with an overnight camp stop.

All kit must be carried.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been in a number crunching geeks paradise. It’s all about the weight, man! I’ve got to carry my kit so there’s no “I’ll pack an extra jumper just in case it’s nippy”: it’s how much does this fleece weigh? Will I be better off taking two lighter tops rather than 1 thicker top? Where can I find a lightweight water bottle?

But the real challenge has been the food. We have to take all food (including emergency rations) for 36 hours. And as we’re going to be running, we’re going to be needing about 4000 calories on the first day alone. I struggle to even take in 2000 most days! So I spent some time researching the best type of foods to take and it turned out that really, for the endurance type of events, you need carbohydrates to replace the energy you burn. (I could go into how your body can only really store 2 hours worth of glycogen but it’s very much blah blah blah blah so I won’t.) 4000 calories of pure carbs is 1kg of food (there being 4Kcal of energy in every 4gm of carb.)

Pure carbohydrate more or less comes in one form. Sugar. So 4000 calories for the first day plus 2000 for the second (don’t have to pack an evening meal!) is 6000 Kcal or 1.5kg of sugar.

Oh dear.

Some of it is easy. Jelly babies, energy bars/drinks and so on. Plus we don’t need to take breakfast on the first day. Couscous has a very good return on energy vs weight but eating it on it’s own? I could get quite sick of it very quickly.

So, what am I taking? Some scientifically planned, flavoursome meal designed for expeditions? Norwegian Army ration packs? Nope! Supper on saturday is going to be a family pack of supernoodles (1000 Kcal for only 200gm weight) followed by a Snickers bar, hot chocolate with the possibility of a “Pasta ‘n sauce” if I’m still hungry. All in all, 1600 Kcal for about 350gm of food.

As well as that, I have dried milk, tea bags, muesli bars, more Snickers and some Weetabix. My pack, with all my waterproofs, safety kit, food and sleeping bag currently weighs about 4.2kg and there’s only my 1.5kg share of tent and cooking gear to go. And water (which will mostly be got from streams, dead sheep or not!)

Of course, all this time spent working out the best combination of light weight kit (new toys Gordon? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!) and food means I’ve totally forgotten to spend any time doing any running! Oh well.

See you on Monday. Hopefully.

I made a cake today. It’s the first cake I’ve made in the best part of twenty years. It’s a trial run for the hatchling’s first birthday which is in a months time. I followed a recipe that was in the back of a baby book so it’s fairly healthy, although it does contain a pound (sorry, 4524g) of full fat cream cheese.

It’s turned out okay although for a carrot cake it’s got an awful lot of raisins in it. I’d even go so far as to say that, as there’s nearly twice as much raisins as carrots, it’s actually a raisin cake with carrot. It’s also lacking in sugar which means that the frosting (which is what the cream cheese is for but it also contains raisins) is a little bitter as it’s only sweetened using apple juice (of the concentrated variety). Either we need a sweeter juice or a little added sugar.

It was fun in a this-beats-being-at-work kinda way.

And isn’t raisin a funny looking word.

Now pay attention, 007.

The post two posts ago that I posted when I couldn’t post the post I just posted complained about not being able to post a post was referring to the fact that whenever I tried to post the post I’ve just posted before this post, I’d get a post error telling me I wasn’t allowed to post because I didn’t have access to the post function.

However, I’ve now posted the post I wanted to post.

I’ve marked a sentence in the preceding entry with an asterisk. This, as it turns out, is the line that is causing me trouble and hence why it’s got an out of place colon at the end of the sentence. Originally it ended

…so I’ve resorted to using the C-URL functions instead.

except without the hyphen in the word CURL. But it always throws an error - just like it did in this post when I tried it just now. It’s obviously to do with a combination of words because I have no problem saving the entry with them all in, as long as they’re not in that order.

If you use Wordpress, do you fancy copying that line and trying to save it yourself and see what happens for you?

UPDATE: the problem is to do with the word curl. Writing it is fine as long as there is no space after the word. So if I wanted to write “curl_up and die”, I wouldn’t be able to use a space. Weird.

This isn’t going to be as interesting as your dirty little mind thinks it will be.

There’s an error in the following code snippet that returns the message “Can’t open http://www.blah.com/blah.xml”. Can you work out why?


$xmlfeed = "http://www.blah.com/blah.xml";
$news=@fread(fopen($url,"r"),10000) or die("Can't open $xmlfeed!");
$news = @file_get_contents($xmlfeed);
$p = xml_parser_create();
xml_parse_into_struct($p, $news, $vals, $index);
xml_parser_free($p);


Got it? Simple eh. Took you, what, a second or two to spot that I was trying to fopen a variable that I hadn’t declared or populated. Doing this late at night (by late, I mean after about 9pm which is what construes late for me these days) after a couple of cans of Stella, it took me nearly an hour to spot this elementary mistake.

As it happens, the file I was trying to retrieve can’t be opened using fopen anyway so I’ve resorted to using another function instead: CURL*. My issue now is that the page always throughs up some Java/JSP generated session id or cookie which I’ve got to deal with. At least, I think that’s what’s causing the Null Exception Error I’m currently getting. I know it can be done because I’ve passed the URL (not, incidentally, www.blah.com) into a demo of “MagicParser” which reads the XML without a problem. But I ain’t going to pay for it!

Anyone have any handy tips on this sort of thing? Or even now of a freeware PHP XML parser library/function that I can crib?

(And yes, Endie, CTRL-C before pasting is always a good idea. I’m still suffering from the same befuddlement as above which made me not do it this one time! )

*See following post.

The long post I’ve just written has been devoured by a security access problem.

I think I’m going to scream.