Posted: Tue 7 July, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Driving, Own Business, Travel, Web Development, Work-related |
Today, I’m working in the office of a new client down in London. Thankfully, once this day’s done, I’ll be able to primarily work from home, which means I won’t have to do the drive down to London on a daily basis or anything.
It should be a good day, though – there’s a lot to be done for this project all told, but I’m glad it won’t involve shedloads of commuting.
Mind you, next Tuesday I’ve also got to drive down to Brighton for a meeting with another potential new client. Madness – although it should be fun, even if I’ll be coming back looking like a stunned primate.
Posted: Wed 8 April, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Own Business, Web Development, Work-related |
Currently, I’m working on a small e-learning project which is absolutely killing me mentally.
The work itself is OK, and the ideas behind it are quite cool. However, the people in charge of the project have put together the entire set of e-learning tests in PowerPoint (AKA The Software of the Devil), with one screenshot per PowerPoint Slide. All told there’s nearly 200 of these – and they’re not necessarily in order.
Now the order doesn’t matter too much – all this stuff is going into a database, and that’ll handle the question order just fine whether or not it’s out of order. However, having them correctly grouped does make it easier during the transfer to process them out of SatanWare into anything remotely usable.
As it is – and this could be because I’m not au fait with Powerpoint, so there may be some esoteric export function or somesuch that would’ve made life easier – I’ve had to go through the following process…
Phase One
- Select PowerPoint slide.
- Copy Image to clipboard
- Go to Image Software of Choice (in this case Fireworks, but Photoshop would’ve worked too)
- Create new blank image
- Paste clipboard-copy of image into new image
- Save new image as filename.jpg.
- Close new image.
- Repeat 200 times.
Phase Two
- Open each new image one by one in Photoshop/Fireworks (I could do it in batches, but again, one-by-one allows for consistency/sanity)
- Add four new layers for answer options (A,B,C,D) and add a pretty arrow pointing to a possible answer for each one.
- Make sure that the letter for the correct answer goes to the correct answer
- Save new image
- Close new image
- Repeat 200 times.
In short, it’s utterly soul-destroying. I’ll just be glad to get it over and done with.
Posted: Mon 16 March, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Web Development, Work-related |
It’s been one of those quiet days today – well, on D4D™, anyway.
Within work, I’ve had my head down, fixing a bundle of bugs on the latest thing I’ve been writing. Nothing world-ending, but still stuff that needed fixing.
Most of the problems came about because on occasion I’m a total flange, and screwed up some of the logic between Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the project. In short, the logic in certain pages has become so convoluted that I don’t really think it qualifies as logic any more.
In others it was more just that requirements changed, and I forgot to update things in accordance with those requirements. Or kind of updated them, but not entirely.
Still, finding these things is exactly what testing is for…
Posted: Mon 9 March, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, Own Business, Web Development, Work-related |
This will come as absolutely no surprise to many of you, but this morning I had a blinding flash of “Jesus I’m a twat”.
I’ve recently been working on a site where the server is based in the US, and I’ve been trying to sort out a regular task (a cron job, for those who know what the hell I’m whittling on about) that would run at midnight every day.
You can see where this is going already, can’t you? Believe me, I couldn’t until this morning.
I’ve been checking in the morning to see whether the cron job (timed to run at midnight, remember) had run overnight, and each day it hadn’t run. I’ve checked the logs – nothing. I’ve checked the command syntax umpteen times, and checked how it’s running via crontab. All fine. But the bloody thing’s not running.
However, I got a message at 7.05 this morning telling me it had tried to run.
And right then it occurred why this problem has been happening, why the script hasn’t been running at midnight.
It’s because:
- I’m a fuckwit
- The server’s in the US. Midnight in the US is (in this case) seven hours behind midnight here.
So come 7am GMT, the server runs the script at Midnight (US Server time). And all’s well.
I’ve changed it now, so that it runs at 5pm (US Server time) which is (of course) Midnight GMT. It means things will still fuck up come BST, but I’ll change things a bit to rectify that when I get round to it.
In the meantime, well, let’s just leave it that I’m a fuckwit.
Posted: Fri 30 January, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: @Media2009, Getting Organised, Own Business, Web Development, Work-related |
I’ve written many times about the @Media conference, which is one I always look forward to and attend when I can. I missed last years because we were travelling to Ireland on the Friday of the conference, so it wasn’t worth it.
This year it’s a bit later, on the 25/26th June at the South Bank Centre, which should be fun. I’ve never been there for conferences etc. before, so it’s another new place on the list.
Early-bird tickets (Two days for £299 plus VAT) went on sale last night, and I’m already booked in for it.
Happy, happy day.
Posted: Mon 19 January, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Redesign, Thoughts, Web Development |
Over the weekend, following on from a comment on here from Chris, I finally got round to making a change to the index page of D4D™ that I really should have made months (if not years) ago. And in honesty, I really thought I had done it years ago. I certainly planned to.
Anyway, the index page now redirects back to here. Which is how it should be, and what it should’ve been doing ages ago.
There are still plans for a redesign of D4D™, which would also involve moving servers to a new home. (That’s also related to another plan for some rationalisation of the number of hosting services I currently use) At that point, this section of D4D™ may change to being the index page of the entire site – so you’d only need www.dummies-for-destruction.co.uk , instead of remembering that extra /random – but setting things up in this way now will theoretically make things easier on that score anyway.
Come that time, I’ll be redirecting back the other way, so that anything at /random goes back to the index page. And all will be well.
We’ll see though. It’s a way off yet because like the builder who never completes his own extension, I’ve got enough work on right now that redeveloping/redesigning D4D™ keeps on getting put back.
Maybe I should set a target date, and then just work on thrashing it through. Or maybe I’ll simply let D4D™ keep on shambling along in its current guise for a while yet.
Time will tell.
Posted: Fri 24 October, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, Web Development, Work-related, Writing |
Over the last few days, I’ve spent a fair amount of time setting up the PC at the new workplace, so I thought I’d do a bit of a dump of what’s gone in – and, as a corollary, a dump of the development tools and software that I find essential.
Browsers
The first thing to get installed was, of course, Firefox. This is just essential – particularly when the company’s default browser is still the incredibly shonky IE 6. Following on from there, the following Firefox extensions got installed…
- WebDeveloper – just an essential tool for web developing, couldn’t do without it
- AdBlock Plus – not for web-development, but just for blocking adverts on sites. It was weird to see sites with Ads, I’m so used to Adblock Plus now
- FoxMarks – as a user of multiple computers (home, laptop, work) I love being able to synchronise my bookmarks between all three machines without needing to repeatedly export them from one machine to another. I used to use Google’s BrowserSync, but that doesn’t support FF3, so FoxMarks is a suitable replacement.
- FlashBlock – similar reasons to AdBlock Plus, but as download of the Flash plugin is also blocked, I might as well just block Flash entirely. Works for me, anyhow.
Then we get onto the development tools.
PHP – I’ve put on two text editors
- Crimson Editor
and
- phpDesigner 2008, which I’m getting to like.
CSS
- BradSoft’s TopStyle – my CSS Editor of choice. Yes, I can (and do) use text editors to do the CSS, but when I get lost to what’s doing what, TopStyle’s the place to go
MySQL
- MySQL’s GUI Tool suite is always useful
Others – there are probably some more things I’ll add in over time, but for now the only extra bits I’ve added on are:
- Open Office 3.0 – always a joy to use after experiencing MS Office again
- CeltX – For the writing side of things, just in case I need some diversion tactics to take my brain off PHP for a while
And that’s it – for now at least.