A little corner of the Empire on the web.

23 December, 2002

MPT, OK so the guy's a bit of a cock sometimes, but when I reinstalled OpenOffice.org today I did follow his OOo install guide.

09 December, 2002

Aaaagh, it's driving me nuts I can't work out the dates on my archives. How do I switch it out of this sodding US date format into the format that the rest of the entire world (that uses the latin alphabet and arabic number system) uses?

My default web browsers at the moment are all Gecko based. On my new WinXP Pro machine at work I'm using Phoenix 0.5 (very cool), at home on my Win2k box Mozilla 1.2.1 and Phoenix 0.5 are currently fighting it out to see who' ends up the dominant browser (at the moment my money's on Moz, as I do use it to pick up my POP mail on that machine). The XP Home laptop is still running Phoenix 0.4, mainly because that's got everything I need on it at the moment and I haven't got round to upgrading it yet.

To be honest Mozilla is my favourite internet application suite, it does have nearly everything I ever need for surfing the web, checking my email and testing my web applications. Phoenix is smaller, faster and prettier and so is great for general web browsing but is still missing a few features for the more advanced web stuff, it's great that they've got the Javascript console back in again, but currently my big Phoenix wants are the "Links Toolbar" (see below for more on this) and the "Style sheet switcher" from Mozilla, but then I guess I'm not your average user so I'm not going to moan.

Great stuff that has recently been added both to Phoenix and Mozilla includes the new Type Ahead Find it is such a time saver on large pages (although it's default mode only searches links, whereas I mainly use it to search through all text on the page, and I'm looking forward to daring to try out the new "Bayesian" intelligent, learning spam filters on my mail accounts (although I do still feel worried about trusting my main email accounts to what is currently pre-alpha level code, although I may give Moz 1.3alpha a quick spin when it comes out just to try this).

Standard add-ons that I install without fail are: for Phoenix Alternate Stylesheet Switcher (to emulate Mozilla's CSS stylesheet switching options) and Text Links both available from David Tenser's Phoenix Help site. For Mozilla the only extension that I regularly install is Tobias L�fgren's minirot13 from http://www.pinkroom.biz/owl/minirot13/

Well it's 12:40am on Monday morning, and I've got to be at work in 8 hours and 20 minutes. Guess it's time for bed then!

Still I guess I'd better do the old pre bed-time shave and cut my (green underlayed) nails. See ya 2moz!

04 December, 2002

Well I'm sitting here at work with a couple of pints inside me. It's the last half hour, I've done a fair amount of work this abo, and I've even updated my weather script to show actual weather phenomena using the far more optimal hash based lookup table implementation.

Yet I can't shake off the feeling that I've been awake for too many hours without sleep, and I really could do with curling up in a quiet corner somewhere and going to sleep.

I think I'm going to have to spend the next 23 minutes chain-eating my Penguin mints (mmm, caffeine) and hope that I don't eat so many that I end up bouncing off the walls on the train home!

03 December, 2002

It's quarter past one in the fecking morning!

Go to bed already! 8-|

Well haven't been here for a long time. Shows just how long I've been playing around with creating my own Blogging software for. Must get off my arse and actually finish it off sometime.

OK I did eventually manage to hack the Routefinder, but only through a weak password, and only after I didn't really need to anyway. So for a variety of reasons I'm not going to publish the details in public.

Must remember to jot down thoughts (roughly) when they occur to me and not months afterward.

Just got the test version of my Jard weather script showing actual weather conditions (albeit crudely) in addition to the bare temperature and wind strength/direction that it carried before. Must remember to convert the long list of "if... elsif... elsif... ...." to a far tidier hash based implementation once I can actually be arsed to type in (or copy-and-paste) the actual text for the decoded weather types.