Duke Street Alley

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

This is a complete sidetrack from all current projects, and I won’t have time to look at it for weeks, if not months, but…

Does anyone know of a service from which I could fetch weather predictions for an arbitrary area (specified by country and city, preferably) for the following day or week in XML or any other kind of web service? In particular, I’d be looking for predicted temperatures and precipitation types.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Licensing has been agreed for a Firefly MMO. If this works at all, it’s going to be good.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Before I go off to rentacoder.com or somesuch, I figured I’d ask here - anyone want to take on a small PHP programming job for me? It’ll basically be a set of database manipulation scripts - add items, remove items, list all items in category A, B or C or attached to user X, Y or Z. It’s simple enough stuff, but I haven’t the time to cudgel my brain into coding it from scratch. it doesn’t have to be pretty; I can take care of that end. The SQL to create the relevant tables would also be needed.
I’m looking to pay, mind - cash, if you prefer, although I can’t afford to shell out big money, or links, website consultation, or whatever barter takes your fancy.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The new office, now that it has blinds and we can take down the cardboard radiation shields we needed (the southwest-ish curving wall is all glass) is getting better. There’s still a lot of white and steel around, though, leaving it looking very cold. We’re considering getting some plants in.

My immediate reaction is to look for a bonsai tree, but they’re hard to take care of. Anyone got any recommendations for something pleasantly leafy, which requires very little care, and won’t trigger allergies? We’ve a lemon geranium at home I could snag some cuttings from, but I know it’s a common allergy plant.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve just hit the publish button on wyvernfriend’s second article on dukestreet: Libraries & Bookshops. Go read it!

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

For those gamers not reading the Duke Street feed (and why not, eh?), it may not have reached you yet that CCP have bought White Wolf. CCP are the people who make EVE Online, and White Wolf are responsible for the Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf RPGs, among others.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Does anyone know where I could get hold of a set of PHP scripts for basic user management for a website? Essentially, I need to have a registration form, confirm-reg-by-email, login, logout, something profile-ish, and so on. Preferably with the necessary SQL to set up the database tables needed. I can modify things for myself after that, but writing them from scratch is too much time and effort for something that I’m sure has been done thousands of times before. I’m willing to pay a bit for them if they can’t be got for free anywhere.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve started writing up the account of the India trip. The first day’s worth is now available for your reading pleasure, transcribed from my travelling journal. Illustrations will follow later.

India!

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Operation Move completed successfully while I was away, and the new office seems to be entirely bearable. We’re in Harmony Court, on Harmony Row, which is about three blocks east of Pearse Street Station. Therefore, if any of you fine people are available for purposes of lunching (I believe I can meet employees of the Great AI somewhere halfway) in the area, do let me know. Within sane parameters, I can decide myself when lunch should occur, although appointments later than 13:30 are likely to include me staring silently and hungrily at you until food arrives. Usual contact methods apply - or since I have a very fine window seat, you could just stand outside and wave.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

It’s 11:00 on a Monday morning, and I’m on the first actual day off of three weeks holidays. Tomorrow, at an hour so early it might as well be today, we’re flying via Schipol to India. This is the first break from work this year that’s more than two days, it’s the first time I’ve left the country in almost two years, and it’s the first time ever going to a place where I won’t necessarily recognise or understand anything. I’m really looking forward to it.

The last one might take some explanation - everywhere else I have ever been, there are some things I recognise. Trees, for instance, are not appreciably different in Finland, in the US, in France or Spain or Greece. Sure, there’s more cypress in Greece and less ash, but I still know what they are. I don’t expect to recognise any trees in India. Likewise, in all those places, a few brands carry across. In India, there’ll be stretches of time where even the omnipresent Coca-cola logo might not be seen for days. It might as well be another planet, and about the only things that will be the same will be the stars. It’s going to be great.

I’m reasonably confident of dealing with the temperatures. We’re looking at daytime temperatures of just under 40°C, and night temperatures hovering around 20°C. That’s a pretty huge drop, and I suspect the 20° might feel quite cold, relatively speaking.

We’ve a few days in Delhi before the tour proper starts, and the plan is to spend those days acclimatising, exploring Delhi, eating, and probably buying clothes, and music and books by the ton to post back. I gather from various sources that Delhi is a second-hand book paradise. We have two rucksacks, neither of which is currently more than half-full, so between what we can carry and what we can post back, we should rival a small import business. I intend to get a few nice statues of Ganesha as well - the little brass one that sits on my desk in work has done me nothing but good - and I suspect that a few more statues and devotional objects will find their way in as well.
The time difference is currently only four and a half hours - it should be about eight, but India has its own unique time zone. That’s going to do odd things to the sunrise and sunset times, but my maths - always prone to hiding when timezones come up - flees entirely when I try to work out what’s going to happen early or late.

We have both a digital and analogue camera with us. I can more or less work both of them, but I suspect Nina will be photographer-in-chief, as they cooperate far better with her. Expect very few pictures of us, and lots of scenery, buildings, and markets.

And there’s the food. Some of the guide books say not to buy from roadside stalls at all, only ever drink bottled water, and preferably bring all your food with you in non-perishable tablet form. I intend, within the bounds of common sense, to ignore all that. I like the Indian food we get here, and I’m damned if I’m going to travel eight thousand miles and not sample the food properly. Which means roadside stalls, markets, shops, restaurants, and whatever else comes my way.

I’ll be putting together a website when we get back, and we’ll be keeping journals while we’re away, so you’ll get as much detail as you ever wanted, and possibly more.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There are three positions currently going here in Sports Interaction - mostly in the casino area.

Marketing Executive

Junior Marketing Executive

Web Usability Specialist

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

And it’s launched. Several months of hard work, a few weeks of late nights, far too much coffee, and one very early morning have resulted in 2006’s new version of Sports Interaction. Key features here are that the frames are gone, and it does clever Ajax things while you’re not looking. The layout is also predominantly CSS. There are still a few bits and pieces to be fixed, but by and large, it lives.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I spent a total of about 12 hours trying to get some oddities of CSS in IE - z-index and stacking order - to work as I wanted them to in Internet Explorer. Essentially, any block element in the code defines its own stacking context for z-index purposes, if it has a position set. So if you’ve dropdowns from a menu bar across the top, they’ll vanish behind any divs with position: absolute or position: relative defined later in your HTML source. And since those two are pretty nearly essential for any kind of layout, that causes problems.

The solution? Rearrange the code so the menu is in the html source after the content, and use CSS to position it correctly. Brute force and ignorance, yes, but it works. And it has the added benefit of placing your content further up the code for search engines, if you consider that important.

I award myself 100 DKP and a biscuit, and proceed to the next problem.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I used to have a love-hate relationship with insomnia. I used to hate being tired and unable to sleep, but I used to love the stuff I produced when I wrote in that state. Now nothing’s appearing, writing-wise, and I still can’t sleep. Here, for you edification, is a list of things I have done recently.

• Produced an excellent Yorkshire Pudding
• Eaten an excellent Apple Crumble
• Started to download Anarchy Online to give it another try
• Got a link to dukestreet from cheapassgamers.com
• Begun building a new area of my campaign world
• Talked to a lot of people online about world building
• Read a huge number of Doctor Who novelisations
• Drawn some fine maps
• Started doing a rather technical perspective drawing
• Realised I need a t-square and some set-squares, and have neither

… and I’m still not sleepy.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So I finished one book at lunch, and didn’t have another to start. I poked through a few of the charity- and second-hand bookshops in Dun Laoghaire, and found: The D&D Red Box. I am a happy geek this afternoon.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Working with cross-browser CSS is like being released, blind-folded, into a large maze with mobile walls. While you make your way through it, you are occasionally beaten with sticks. Sometimes, the beating stops. You can’t always identify why.

I enjoy working with CSS. I must be a masochist…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Javascript in Internet Explorer makes me an angry, angry webmaster.
Two days ago, one of the developers passed me some AJAX stuff. “It’s all working,” he said, “it just doesn’t look that great.” It’s a search box, which, after the third character or so, goes off and gets the various possibilities, presents them in a neat two-column div that looks like a dropdown (think Google Suggest). The major problem was that the “columns” weren’t lining up nicely, and it took me about ten minutes to sort that out. And then I noticed that in Internet Explorer, for some odd reason, the first line of the div was blank.
I’ve spent most of two working days since then trying to work out why. I am now past the stage where I growl and threaten the folk who wrote the javascript engine for IE with grievious bodily harm. I’m also past the stage of muttering obscenities under my breath, which made one rather new co-worker, not yet used to me, back away hurriedly. I am approaching the zen stage where I try wholly unrelated things in the code, removing spaces, experimenting with the position of semi-colons and closing brackets, and so on.
So far, I have determined that the innerHTML thingmajgit does not play nice with the appendChild function - but only when you’re not looking closely. If you insert alerts to look more closely, it’s all sweetness and light, although it gets a bit un-cooperative when you try to do stuff with the div it has so politely produced. The moment the alerts are gone, it’s back to pushing poor innerHTML into dark corners and sitting on it.
As best I can describe it in more technical terms, here’s what’s happening:
resultArea is a div, initially styled not to appear. arrCurrentResultSet is an array of schtuff coming back from a database query.

resultArea.appendChild(document.createElement(”ol”)) ;

…creates an ordered list.

var theList = resultArea.childNodes[0] ;
theList.name= “liveSearchList” ;
theList.className = “liveSearchList” ;

… assigns it a nice handy variable, a name, and even a class.

for (var i=0; i<this.arrCurrentResultSet.length; i++) {

var tempItem = document.createElement(”li”) ;

tempItem.innerHTML = “<div class=’itemline’><div class=’eventItem’>” + this.arrCurrentResultSet[i].eventname + “</div><div class=’runnerItem’>” + this.arrCurrentResultSet[i].runner + “</div></div>” ;

tempItem.className = “liveSearchListUnHighlight” ;

theList.appendChild(tempItem) ;

}

resultArea.style.visibility = “visible” ;

… does the work of creating an li, populating it, appending it to the list, and finally making the div visible. Except, in IE only, there’s no text visible in the first li.
If, after the theList.appendChild(tempItem) line, I do an alert for tempItem.InnerHTML, it appears in the alert, AND in the displayed div - except that the second (runnerItem) div is missing in all the li elements. And once there’s some more or less unrelated JS run to highlight different li elements after you press the arrow keys, it goes back to the way it normally is - both divs showing, except in the first one, which is now blank again.
If anyone can explain any of this, offer a workaround, or send money, please do so. The money will buy me beer, which will make me feel better, even if it does nothing to the code.
EDIT: Wordpress’ spectacular inability to deal with <pre> tags is not helping…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Might I draw your attention to Nina’s new blog, Rocking Grass? Opening with two posts about medieval food - which, I can assure you, was every bit as good as it sounds.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So I posted an article on dukestreet.org this morning, and stuck it on digg.com for purposes of experimentantion. The very first response is from some guy who buried it, with the comment “Buried because I don’t want competition.” How peculiar. I assume he’s talking about competition on the auction house, rather than on his website.
If any of you use digg, feel free to push this one up. If it looks useful, I’m considering putting “digg this” links on the site.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m working on a site for my father’s stairmaking business. In looking around for other sites in the industry, I’ve discovered that not only are there very few, there are no portal sites for Irish Woodworking either. So, being as it’s something I know a little bit about, and since it’s very little effort to put up a site, I’ve constructed Woodwork Ireland, and I’m hoping it’ll be useful.

For anyone who’s interested, it’s syndicated, and also available on livejournal syndication.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

If you ask me, this is definitely headed for being a number one hit. It’s not often I hear such a mainstream sounding song with lyrics I can completely agree with.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The annual barbecue goes into full swing on Saturday. In advance of this, we could do with a few folks on Friday evening to move furniture, help put up rain covers and lights, and generally get the place in order. Any volunteers?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Your own old diaries may be simultaneously the most embarrassing and most fascinating thing you can find.