Want to book a flight on http://scandinavian.net/ , you better have nerves of steel. This website is the biggest heep of pure crap I have ever encountered. I cannot book anything, on any browser on any platform. Error messages are nice and informative too "Severe error encountered"… cheers mate. I vote start a Google bomb -> worst website .Anyway Sya

Update: Only way I could book was to ring the Danish Business class hotline (thank god for my multilinguistism). All their other numbers hang up the minute you get through.

Second Update: Let me qualify my quibles so as you don't think I am too harsh. On Internet explorer you cannot get past the first stage of booking.. ie selecting destination. On Firefox and Safari you can get past the third stage after entering passenger details, it fails with "Severe error encountered". On all browsers, after  abit of browsing, the page turns into half swedish and half english. The destination keeps defaulting to Thailand. It thinks Aberdeen is in Thailand. Their phones hang up after 2 rings. None of their offices answered today (UK, Ireland, Sweden, Norway), only the danish business class hotline answered. Their confirmation emails do not work. I have supposedly been sent 5 confirmation emails . I have only received one which has no mention of prices or method of payment at all, only flight details. I am now awaiting the tickets to be delivered.. I'll hold my breath. I have been flying with SAS for 24 years and they have been great but for f*^k sake get your website sorted …. You've had long enough and stop using the general public as your testbed. I hope I have qualified my rash remarks now.

It's been a week of CSS turmoil (browser inconsistencies), XML and XSLT at work.

Mette (Mother Roche) was over last weekend which was great and we got to see all the Liverpool sites which I hadn't really seen yet. The clash of the two Titans was last weekend too (Gill's mam and my mam), It went well.

I've been playing around with redesigns of Philroche.net this week and have come up with a mock up @ http://www.hoursintheday.com/ . It's all CSS based and is XHTML1.1 Strict too. Oh and the domain is just another test domain. The header image will rotate through a library of images chosen from my travel photos.

I've looking at Wiki's lately too and I have I reckon Tiddly wiki (TiddlyWiki, TiddlyWikiPLus, PHPTiddlyWiki, Server side TiddlyWiki)is really neat and I reckon I might implement it sometime. DokuWiki is really nice but a login feature would be nice. I have tried PHPWiki too but the login feature isn't that easy to implement and I don't have time to get it working. Media Wiki that wikipedia is built with but the nicest themes or skins don't work with PHP5. I have chosen Dokuwiki as it is simple to use, simple to set up, CSS layout and XHTML.

This entry was brought to you by the iBook in the Bed while watching the SoccerAM. sweeeeet

Reason for lack of updates : Decorating spare room.. Over the last two weekends I have slaved away over industrial sanders, varnish and paint. We finally managed to get the spare room completed just in time for the arrival of mother superior (Mette [Mother Roche]) on Thursday of this week. We also managed to get a £900 Sofa Bed for £260….. always out for a bargain am I.

Workwise I've been playing with PHP5 a bit , the new Tidy functions, XML functions and also SQLite. Pretty good really. We're taking on a big site in work and we'll be using PHP5 so that'll be a good opportunity to try out all the new stuff. I managed to set up my SUSE box but running KDE is mega slow on the 256MB Ram and PIII 600MHZ but it does the job. I set up Apache PHP and MySQL but I'm going to wipe PHP and install PHP5. I've been using Apache Redirects too to reformat query strings from the ugly ?query=1&query2=5 to something like /2/5/ . Really neat.

Jpeg Virus (windows only of course) [http://www.easynews.com/virus.html]

http://feedster.com/claimfeed.php?key=21140c64b76dbbde54eaa9e0b50b9b29

Right then…..I tried to recover the data on my Suse Drive but alas to no vail. I bought a new drive and installed Linspire on it. It is a really nice Distro and their CNR application installation centre is second to none. But some things wouldn't work, PHP for one. I have thousands of photos and like to keep them organised and to edit them every now and again. LPhoto was just not up to the job, it crashed any time you tried to import more than 500 photos. I also have tons of songs and LSongs couldn't cope witht the number I had. Juk wouldn't install either. It also took an absolute age to boot up. So after having spent $50 on a years CNR subscription I ditched it. I formatted the Suse Disk I couldn't use any more and installed XP on both Disks (200 GB in total). I will install Suse 9.1 on my old XP box and use it strictly as a server as, as far as I am concerned, Any Linux Distro i have tried is just not ready for the desktop. The apps are good but they didn't cut it. The Dev apps are a different story though KDevelop and the likes.

I am now quite happy with mu decision of going back to XP. Everything is working well and I have SP2 installed and AVG installed too so I feel quite secure. Firefox 1 Preview Release is also out so I'm loving that, too (I know it's out on the other platforms too).

So after a hellish week of installas and re-installs and drive formatting and backups galore, I am ready for a week without computers….. No chance.. back to work tomorrow. I found FoxyTunes Extension for Firefox…. excellent, It ties in with loads of media players including iTunes so you can control your music from your Firefox status bar…:)

I was trying to resize the main partition on my Suse Box so I could install Linspire. I was using QTParted from a Knoppix live CD. It finished with an error. I had a look at the partition table and nothing had changed so i presumed everything was ok…… Oh No it wasn't. I can't boot into Suse now as it says the partition is corrupt. I am now trying some of the Suse Repair tools form the installation CD. Stupidly I hadn't backed up email or bookmarks or documents. This is a real pisser. Luckily I only had the system up and running a couple of months so I didn't have “too” much on it. Just my luck…….. Argh!!!

Update: I have since used QtParted from a live cd and it worked a treat and saved my ass big style

I was around at my inlaws house last weekend and was asked to have a look at their PC as it was playing up. They have AOL and seemingly they were getting a ton of pop-ups. I knew that AOL has some pop-ups but not a ton of them so I booted up and logged on to AOL and had a little surf…. There was tons of pop-ups. I had a look at the processes running and low and behold, I spotted Blaster.exe or something similar. I knew then that the PC was probably riddled with all sorts of trojans ad spyware and what have you. I ran Symatec's removal tool for Blaster and then installed AVG Free (from grisoft). I ran the complete test and it found 35 infected files….. sheesh. I have left it running in the background so hopefully they won't get any more.

Last week I started using BitTorrent and came across the Linspire Live CD iso image. I downloaded and burnt to disk. I booted from the CD  with no problems and had a look around and the application list is quite comprehensive. I then thought I'd try my Thumbdrive to see if it found that… Yup and I could write to it (I could not in Knoppix). I then tried my new external hard drive … Yup it found that too and could write to it (Knoppix could not). I then tried my iRiver hard disk  MP3 player…. Yup found it and could write to it (Knoppix could not). No as a distro that doesn't get that much coverage in the Linux community… I think it is absolutely brilliant….. It has most needed apps installed (I'm basing this on the LiveCD) and it has a one click install system too (CNR)… where you can get all manner of apps and utilities (Kdevelop, Apache, PHP, ect).You can also use apt-get and install rpms. I reckon I might dual boot my Suse box with it.

What I find hard to fathom is how Linspire (Formally lindows) manages to get usb working so smoothly without having to fuck about in /dev/ and manually mounting, Suse has been in the game much longer and they can't get it right (they won't even support their own usb mount system either). Linspire has only been around for a few years and I reckon they hav nailed the Linux Desktop to a tee, Granted you have to pay but I paid for Suse too so that's that argument out the window. For any Nooobies (I still consider myself a relatively noob) I would highly recommend it. A+++++++++

My Housemate just got a mini iPod and it is really great. Just like the regular ipod, it just appears in itunes and playlists galore are loaded on. There is one drawback however …. it's Pink.

An update on the memory issue. The memory I bought on ebay did not work. It was defective. I have sent it back under warranty and am awaiting a refund. I then went on the crucial website and 512MB for £50with free delivery. Knowing that this would definitely work, I got it and now have a not too shabby 1024MB RAM.

I'm looking at holidays lately for the middle of November so if anybody has been anywhere spectacular and cheap let me know.

It seems Frank (BigFrankSmyth) is in NZ at the moment and has just eaten the killer kilo steak…. (everybody wants to be like me).

Gmail invites. I've got  5 2 invites if anybody is interested,

The RocheMobile is sadly no longer Irish, It was stripped of it's irish plates last week and replaced with a white and a yellow english one. It was a sad day but I still have the plates to reminisce over. I'v ebeen busy in work and at home but I'm making an effort to blog more now and also to reply to emails as I know I am shit at that.

Anybody know which is better?
http://tsep.sourceforge.net/ or http://www.phpdig.net/, also is any of y'all familiar with web scrapers?