Category Archives: Old Blog

Live CDs

2 more Live Cds Ubuntu and Mepis. Well worth a try both of them. Ubuntu has Firefox 1.0PR installed too.

Al and Jean are coming over for the weekend so don't expect too much in the way of blogging this weekend.

Worst website

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.

XML and Tourism

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

Decorating

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.