Joe's Jottings

Author: Joe

  • WordPress Template Pages

    I use WordPress to run a few other websites, such as my CommunityHost site, and wanted to add a form to support a mailing list.  My hosting company, Servage, supports mailing lists and I’ve used them with some success, so I didn’t need to re-invent the wheel and decided that the best bet would be to somehow get the HTML form that Servage supply on to a WordPress page.

    I did try the obvious – just paste the HTML source code in to a page – and that was about as effective as the proverbial cat flap in an elephant house.  So I then decided to create a new template page containing the code.  And for all who’re interested, here’s what I did in Version 2.3.x.

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  • Jeff Healey – Like a Hurricane

    Canadian guitarist Jeff Healey died this week, losing a battle against cancer.  I have to say that he’s a musician that I’ve heard occasionally and really enjoyed.  He was younger than me when he died – something that always brings me up short.

    Tonight on the Bob Harris show (http://www.bobharris.org/pages/playlist.asp?progcode=s08032008 Jeff’s version of Neil Young’s ‘Like a Hurricane’ – quite a brilliant version of a classic song.  Thanks Jeff!

    I have a definite weakness for this particular Neil Young song. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Hurricane_(Neil_Young_song)  It goes back to my student days when I was introduced to Neil Young by a housemate, who referred to the heavy electric version on ‘Live Rust’ as ‘Like a Steamroller’ – a phrase that I remember and occasionally use to this day, almost 30 years later.

    Like a Hurricane is definitely one of my favourite love songs – I think I’ve found a new favourite version tonight!

    http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourview/2008/03/memories_of_jeff_healey_1.html

  • The sorry saga of varchar(Max) and ODBC in PHP

    A project I’m currently working on uses SQL Server 2005 with PHP, the database being accessed via PHP’s ODBC library.

    I have to admit that I love my Stored Procedures, and rather than use ‘inline’ SQL SELECT statements in my data classes I’ve usually used Stored Proceduers when talking to SQL databases in the past.

    However….believe it or not this is the first PHP / SQL Server project I’ve ever done that used ODBC and also featured VARCHAR(Max) or Text fields….

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  • Web’n’Walk to the Rescue

    Well, BT decided to throw some sort of unholy wobbly on me this evening and I ended up being unable to contact numerous sites I regularly use (including this Blog) and also experienced extremely slow performance on other sites and mail servers.

    The irony was that I couldn’t actually get to BT’s ‘Service Status’ page – it kept timing out – which I guess gave some indication of where the problem lay.

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  • The Bus Book – w/c 25th February – The Master and Margarita

    This week’s book was a very old favourite of mine – Mikhail Bulgakhov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’.  If you haven’t read it – all I can say is get a copy.  It’s a lovely, funny, sad, enchanting book which details the visit of the Devil and his entourage to Moscow, a novelist known only as ‘The Master’ who is incarcerated in a lunatic asylum after writing a novel about Pontius Pilate, and Margarita, the woman who loves him.

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  • Eclipse PDT – I’ve had to give up on it! Vs.php – come on down!

    I’m peeved.  The last 2 days have been incredibly frustrating for me with regard to using the Eclipse PDT PHP environment.  I mentioned here that I’d been having problems with the workspace, and thought that I’d managed to get things sorted out.  I kicked off a new project and I thought that all was well….

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  • It takes a lot to sleep through an earthquake….

    But I managed it.

    As it would be churlish not to mention the most powerful earthquake to hit England in 25 years, I feel honour-bound to post a comment, but my involvement in this national event is hardly glorious.  I was awoken by my wife who claimed the bed had moved, and could I check under it.

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  • Eclipse PDT crashes when starting new Project – Fix!

    I’ve been using Eclipse PDT as my PHP editor of choice for some time now and it’s pretty neat.  I even started extolling it’s virtues to other developers…which is when it suddenly stopped working on my machine.  Which was slightly irritating because I really needed it working…

    The precise problem was that when I tried to create a new PHP project, processor utilisation went through the roof and the program simply stopped working.  The only solution at this stage was to use Task Manager to stop the program.

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  • The Bus Book – w/c 18th February – The Threepenny Novel

    This week’s book was ‘The Threepenny Novel’ by Bertholt Brecht.

    I have to admit that I didn’t even realise we’d got it in the house until I was browsing the shelves and I came across it.  I knew it was based on his ‘The Threepenny Opera’, which in turn was based on John Gay’s ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ , and I knew it featured the character Macheath.  And that was it.

    So…what did I think? 

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  • Old and Wise – Alan Parsons Project

    The Alan Parsons Project is one of those bands / musical collaborations / call it what you will that I keep promising to listen to and never get around to it.  Having just heard the song ‘Old and Wise’ on the radio, I really think I should get my bum in to gear.

    Here are the lyrics – wonderful…

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