Posts for January 2004 (26 entries)

More syndication feeds added

31st January 2004, the wee hours | Comments (7)

Just a quick one to let you know that I’ve revamped the syndication stuff. ‘Full post’ and Atom feeds are now up for grabs. Any problems then let me know.


Cutting your own hair

28th January 2004, mid-afternoon | Comments (74)

Ignoring my just-woke-up blotchy face and need-a-shave chin, please enjoy my first efforts at cutting my own hair…

View this post in full (130 words, 1 image).


Aaargh! My eyes!

27th January 2004, late at night | Comments (4)

My friend Tara really is a very nice lady indeed.


Photos of chickens and the garden

27th January 2004, mid-afternoon | Comments (14)

We have some beautiful looking French chickens and some funny looking Silkies, so I thought I’d grab some photos of them. I also took a few more of the garden (there are 12 more in the full post):

View this post in full (31 words, 14 images).


Our garden and the surrounding fields

25th January 2004, early evening | Comments (20)

I took Poppy for a walk again today, all wrapped up with a warm hat on (me, not the dog). While she ran around trying to find pheasants, I snapped a few photos (there are 16 more in the full post):

View this post in full (33 words, 18 images).


A scientific weather garden

22nd January 2004, mid-afternoon | Comments (11)

Over in Holland, a guy called Roberto Antonio Ferreira De Almeida (catchy!) has taken my weather idea and got all ‘scientific on its ass’…

View this post in full (303 words, 1 image).


A few problems with blo.gs

22nd January 2004, early afternoon | Comments (9)

The blogroll that I recently added to this site is powered by blo.gs, and while I like their service, I’m not so happy with some of their content. Here are three things I’d like to see improved…

View this post in full (430 words, 3 images).


Eric Meyer ate my Robot

20th January 2004, evening time | Comments (12)

On IM:

Dunstan
…the Blue Robot guy
Who is that guy? is he dead?

View this post in full (131 words).


How I got involved in web development

19th January 2004, evening time | Comments (19)

Someone just asked me how I got into web development. Well, the short answer is I used to do quite a lot of (decidedly amateur) computer graphics, specifically vector and 3D stuff, and through that, and a general interest in computers, gradually fell into making a web site…

View this post in full (170 words, 1 image).


Adding in tabs, blogmarks and a blogroll

19th January 2004, early evening | Comments (19)

Amidst the madness of being inside all day, drinking tea, and tidying up my collection of pens, I’ve found time to make a few small changes on the site…

View this post in full (581 words, 2 images).


Swimming with dolphins

17th January 2004, late evening | Comments (21)

A few weeks ago a pod of over 1,500 dolphins was spotted off England’s south coast. While we’ve long known that dolphins, whales and sharks are regular visitors to our waters, I don’t think anyone had seen such large numbers here before. It must have been fabulous to be out in a small boat with them racing around you…

View this post in full (806 words, 3 images).


On a walk with the dog

17th January 2004, late evening | Comments (5)

Our local fields are always interesting:


Who, where, how?

16th January 2004, evening time | Comments (7)

A while back I promised I’d do a write-up on how I build my blogged people and blogged domain pages. So, here ’tis…

View this post in full (1496 words).


Calendar girl

15th January 2004, the wee hours | Comments (12)

This is the most beautiful calendar I’ve ever seen on the Web. I think it’s gorgeous…

View this post in full (53 words, 1 image).


Rudy Limeback

13th January 2004, early afternoon | Comments (14)

My Grandma came over yesterday:

Dunstan
Hey Grandma.
Grandma
Hello darling, what are you up to?
Dunstan
Ugh, well, I’m stuck. I’m trying to understand adjacent lists, modified pre-order tree traversal and x-depth recursive nested queries, to get this SQL statement to work.
Grandma
Hmm, have you tried limiting your query loops to a set depth? That’s what your Grandad and I always do. Or a four-way left outer self join might do it, to show the current level, plus 3 levels of the tree?
Dunstan
Well that’s just it, I don’t want to go that route. It’s too limiting.
Grandma
Yes… tricky. Well, why don’t you give that nice foreign man, Rudy Steinbeck a call, dear. He’s always been very helpful in the past hasn’t he?
Dunstan
It’s ‘Limeback’ Grandma, ‘Steinbeck’ was the Of Mice and Men chap. But good point, old thing, I’ll give Rudy a buzz.

And you know what, she was right. She might not have the first clue about appropriate SQL statements ("a four-way left outer self join" — I ask you!) but she surely knows her database gurus…

View this post in full (463 words, 1 image).


Swingers

11th January 2004, early afternoon | Comments (20)

Ever since my girlfriend broke up with me (back in January 2002) my cousin Kim has been telling me to watch the film, Swingers

View this post in full (361 words, 1 image).


Tender is the night

10th January 2004, late evening | Comments (8)

In our garden, the vegetable garden, there sits a terracotta bell. It’s about knee high and the top lifts off so you can peer into the gloom at the soil below…

View this post in full (1303 words, 5 images).


An ASP version of time_since

10th January 2004, mid-afternoon | Comments (16)

A while back, Natalie Downe published a very helpful bit of PHP code called time_since, which represents dates as the number of years, months, days, hours and minutes that have passed since that date. For example: “2 days, 6 hours and 9 minutes ago” rather than the more traditional “Thurs 8th January 2003 at 07:00”…

View this post in full (842 words).


Friendly error handling

10th January 2004, the wee hours | Comments (18)

I’m going to blow my own horn here for a moment, *toot*, and say I’m pretty pleased with the error handling on this site.

I’ve already mentioned the 404 error pages I’ve set up, but I’ve also taken the time to ensure that any other typos, broken links, or mistakes on my part give the user some friendly and helpful feedback.

Let’s try and generate some errors on the site and see what happens…

View this post in full (228 words).


On a slow safari to Dunstan-ville

9th January 2004, late at night | Comments (4)

If you’re a Safari user and you find this site rather slow then these comments from Dave Hyatt might explain why:

In my earlier blog entry on caching problems, the issue of CSS being overly aggressive about fetching background-images was mentioned. I have fixed the issue now so that background images will only be fetched when first used. Sites like SprintPCS load much more quickly with this fix.

It seems that the browser downloads all the images specified in a style sheet, regardless of whether they’re actually being used on the page. Since my CSS contains a lot of un-used image links, users of Apple’s browser have been greeted with messages such as Fetching 1 of 84 images when they try to view this site.

Apparently the latest version of the browser (1.0) still exhibits this behaviour, but the next build should include the fix.


Why do authors ruin books?

6th January 2004, late morning | Comments (12)

So, I’m reading a book, a novel, and it’s a murder mystery. The characters are well written, the evil guy is very evil, and I’m rather enjoying it. It is designated my official Book To Read On The Loo for the time being.

But then, about halfway in, there are a few paragraphs that seem to exist for no reason other than to say Um, hello? Hello, you there, yes you, on the loo, reading this book, can you see me? Ah good, so, I just wanted to point out, that this scene is by way of being a flashing light and blaring horn to alert you to the fact that the nice chap is not a nice chap at all, but in fact a stone-cold killer with deep-rooted mental problems and… well blow me, it rather looks like he’s our killer. Now there’s a turn up for the books, eh? So, that’s the plot ruined for you, I’ll, er, I’ll be off now, things to do and so on. Cheerio!

View this post in full (329 words).


NicerTitles

4th January 2004, the wee hours | Comments (11)

I got an email a few weeks back from Mark Wubben saying he’d re-written NiceTitles, the JS script that provides the wee pop-ups on this (and many other) sites.

It looks like he’s done a very nice job (not that I know an awful lot about Javascript) and seems to have fixed many of the problems that people complained about before.

Go get a copy.


Caterpillar, clitoris, butterfly

2nd January 2004, early evening | Comments (16)

Last week my cousin showed my Grandma an abstract photograph and asked her to guess what it was:

Grandma
A clitoris
Everyone
*Silence*
Grandma
Oh no! I got muddled up, I mean a chrysalis!
Everyone
Grandma!

Soul Brother Number One

2nd January 2004, early evening | Comments (7)

The other day my dad and I watched a documentary on the life of James Brown, The God Father of Soul. It’s not often that you watch an English-language documentary, interviewing English-speaking people and you find that subtitles are required…

View this post in full (147 words, 1 image).


Foster’s School

2nd January 2004, early evening | Comments (14)

In 1991 the grammar school that my brother and I both attended was closed and knocked down amidst a reorganisation of secondary education in Sherborne. Foster’s School had been open since 1640 (though the building we attended was only built in 1939) providing first class education to boys for 363 years.

With a total of roughly 150 pupils at any one time, and the pupil to teacher ratio hovering around 12:1 it was no surprise that my GCSE year achieved the highest pass rate in the country (100%).

I mention this because recently our old headmaster laid the school’s original foundation stone (rescued from demolition) in the new residential development that now sits on the site.

I had such a wonderful time at that school, it’s nice to know it hasn’t been entirely removed from this world.


When chickens don’t eat enough grit

1st January 2004, early evening | Comments (10)

Squishy eggs: