Sadly the Welsh don’t celebrate St. Patrick’s day so I am working today (dreaming of having a nice creamy pint(s) with my mates back home) [hover over shamrock :)]
Yearly Archives: 2006
Vivacious Volvo
Well, it’s done. After many weekends deliberating over whether to buy a second car, I’ve finally taken the plunge and purchased a long time dream of a car (note I didn’t buy this car with economy in mind ;)) – Volvo v70 2,5 litre 20v Turbo. Even saying it gets me excited. It’s a 1997 model with a cool 160,000 miles. I paid £1900 (2,752.18 EUR) with a new cam belt fitted which after much research is a good price. The mileage does not bother me as I have read of v70s doing more than 700,000 miles. I pick it up next saturday and I cannot wait.
I predict that this car will feature heavily in my future posts.
Flickr Leech
From Digg I found Flickr Leech. A quick gimp->”acquire screenshot” and upload and hey presto :
Awesome Synergy
Damn those open source developers. Synergy is excellent. I recently bought a USB switch so I could switch my trackball and keyboard between machines. It works well but then I tried Synergy. I have heard some talk of it but thought it was still alphatastic but I ran the installer on my home machine, my work laptop and my brothers laptop, configured it . Now all I have to do is flick the cursor from screen to screen and start typing. This is the best application I have seen for months.
Update:
As suspected, it is a bit buggy in that sometimes my mouse stops being able to click on anything. But restarting Synergy on the server machine fixes it.
Second update:
Myself and Matt at work (whose new site is almost out of beta) were having a play with synergy and he found quicksynergy (http://quicksynergy.sourceforge.net/) which means it’s super easy to install synergy on OSX. It also seems to work with Linux. SynergyKM (http://software.landryhetu.com/synergy/) is another synergy gui for OSX
Fastest ebay transaction ever
As I’m working at the office at the moment, I don’t have my tracbal and am using a tiny usb mouse. I’ve been doing that for about a week and yesterday evening I had enough and went on the hunt for another Microsoft trackball explorer to keep in the office. Nobody sells it anymore as it looks like it has been discontinued so I hit ebay. There was one up for auction @£9.99 wih 4 days. It was in good condition and I was not letting it go. After some email bartering, I got it for £30 delivered. I paid at 4pm and I had it connected and tracking and balling about by 10am, truly awesome. well done ebay user golfbidder_2000. Ebay focking rooools. On another note my mum and I got my bro a new laptop for his 21st and I have it untill then to set it up etc. I’ll post a full review in the next few days. It’s a acer, it’s a beast and it is truly excellent.
Addicted to http data
Addicted to http data
I got into work today and I could not get access to the internet. I was flumuxed. What am I meant to do now. I knew I had plenty to do that didn’t need net access but the first thing I do when I get in is check my mail, check digg and check some of my feeds. I felt utterly lost. Does anybody else feel like this when their net connection goes down.
I can’t remember having this kind of dependency when I was on dial-up (dial-up, hi hi…. what fools we were :))
Thankfully downtime was limited to 19 minutes but still, it was touch and go for a while there.
Update:
Look slike there is a clinical (kind of) name for this – Hyperconnectia
Bobby .. again
Not much but work going on lately so here’s another picture of Bobby.
XSLT output CDATA sections
I was transforming some xml to xml another format and some of the text nodes could potentially contained invalid characters, so placing them in CDATA sections would be wise. I tried the following –
[code lang=”xml”]
…….
< ![CDATA[
]]>
[/code]
which of course did not work and resulted in what you see below. I knew this would happen but I was real busy and figured it worth a shot.
[code lang=”xml”]
<xsl:value-of select=”fields/field[normalize-space(@name)=’Description’]/value/text()” />
[/code]
Some digging resulted in the finding of the “cdata-section-elements” attribute which contains a whitespace-separated list of QNames so using –
[code lang=”xml”]
…….
[/code]
I get the desired result
[code lang=”xml”]
[/code]
Marvellous I tell you, It’s amazing what you can actually learn when you RTFM , in this case the XSL W3C recommendation.
ValueError: bad marshal data
Very strange error happened today – I was running a few python scripts I was writing when I suddenly started getting a “ValueError: bad marshal data” error .
It was due to libxml2 but I didn’t know why. I deleted the “C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages\libxml2.pyc” and the “C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages\libxml2.pyo” file which solved the problem. No idea why as the error message means nothing to me.
Viking Textorizer
Textorizer is a tool that was linked to on Digg. It converts an image to SVG but the lines in the image are replaced with text that the user supplies. I tried it out with the viking head image and the words “philroche”, “philip”, “roche” and it out put an svg file which I opened in illustrator and saved for web. It works really well, shows how good SVGis.
