It's been a good couple of weeks since writing anything on here so I thought I'd sum up what's been going on lately, mainly because I'm bored.
It's not that easy a task mind you since I'm using Kate's laptop which has a missing 'S' key so I have to press on the metal contact to type the letter. Not having any tactile feedback makes it quite difficult to realise whether I have typed the letter or not. Fortunately Kate's ordered a replacement from IBM which should be delivered by the end of the week. So I guess the weekend will see my first attempt at servicing a laptop computer. Should be fun!
Actually, regarding Kate's order from IBM, she received a great email from them. On the order she requested that I take delivery of the keyboard at work since we're not to confident that all of our post is getting through, especially in the case of larger packets and parcels. I don't particularly trust Royal Mail with mail at the moment so it's best to get things delivered where a card won't need to be left. Anyway, on this email that Kate received it asked her to confirm the delivery address for security reasons. Thing is that my delivery address is "######################, blah blah blah". I really don't think that someone up to no good would have the item delivered to a ###################### department do you?
I've started getting my Amateur Radio equipment set up again. Actually saying it like that makes it sound as if there's a lot. There isn't. It's just my old Yaesu FT-290 MkII. I had to fix an 8pin plug onto an old Trio microphone since I can't find the original Yaesu. I was quite pleased with that since it worked on my first attempt. I've got a 2m whip aerial on loan from Charlie at the moment which is connected directly into a duplexor then into the radio. Therefore there's not much cable to play with. So I've been on ebay and bought a mag mount base to connect the aerial to. I'm getting that delivered to work too :-)
Charlie pointed out to me that an amateur radio advanced licence course is starting in August, so I've registered my interest for that. If I pass the exam in December, I should be able to apply for an M0 callsign. That will mean I can run the legal maximum power on all bands and work satellites which is something I've been interested in doing for a long time. Obviously I'll need to obtain the equipment and a more suitable home before I can get really serious with satellites and even HF working but it'll be nice to have the option of using the extra facilities a full licence will offer me. I've also borrowed a couple of study books from Charlie and am spending some time most days reading them and trying to learn the maths!
On a completely unrelated topic, I went to a boot sale on Sunday - the first one I've been to for 2006. I have to say it was the worst bootsale I've ever been too. It was only about four aisles wide and ten cars deep. Needless to say there wasn't much there. So we left empty handed (although not empty stomached - I had to have my cheese burger with onions and Kate had a hotdog. Has to be done when you go to a boot sale).
I'm having some problems with PHP and MySQL at the moment. Currently the music library on my website lists the contents of my songs folder every time it's loaded. This means it's quite slow to load. I wanted to improve the loading speed and add functionality by having each song listed in a database table. The easiest way I thought to do get the information into the database would be to create a PHP script based on the current songs list that reads the contents of the songs folder but instead of outputting it to the screen, it runs an SQL INSERT query to put the track into the database.
In order to test that I was getting the information correctly, I put an echo command into the script and ran it. This way I could see on screen that the entire folder contents where being read and that the information was formatted correctly. There was no problems here. Next I replaced that echo command with a mysql_query command to run the SQL query and put the information into the database. However on running the script, it only goes as far as the first 800-1200 songs. And to make it even more weird, each time I run the script, the number of songs stored varies but it's always around that figure. I can't for the life of me figure out why so if there is a PHP/MySQL genius reading this, please do get in touch :-)
I've got VH1 on TV at the moment and they're doing an hour of music from 1993. What a great year for music that was - Ace of Base, Sting, Bjork and playing now is Billy Joel - River of Dreams which is one of my all time favourite songs!
It's not that easy a task mind you since I'm using Kate's laptop which has a missing 'S' key so I have to press on the metal contact to type the letter. Not having any tactile feedback makes it quite difficult to realise whether I have typed the letter or not. Fortunately Kate's ordered a replacement from IBM which should be delivered by the end of the week. So I guess the weekend will see my first attempt at servicing a laptop computer. Should be fun!
Actually, regarding Kate's order from IBM, she received a great email from them. On the order she requested that I take delivery of the keyboard at work since we're not to confident that all of our post is getting through, especially in the case of larger packets and parcels. I don't particularly trust Royal Mail with mail at the moment so it's best to get things delivered where a card won't need to be left. Anyway, on this email that Kate received it asked her to confirm the delivery address for security reasons. Thing is that my delivery address is "######################, blah blah blah". I really don't think that someone up to no good would have the item delivered to a ###################### department do you?
I've started getting my Amateur Radio equipment set up again. Actually saying it like that makes it sound as if there's a lot. There isn't. It's just my old Yaesu FT-290 MkII. I had to fix an 8pin plug onto an old Trio microphone since I can't find the original Yaesu. I was quite pleased with that since it worked on my first attempt. I've got a 2m whip aerial on loan from Charlie at the moment which is connected directly into a duplexor then into the radio. Therefore there's not much cable to play with. So I've been on ebay and bought a mag mount base to connect the aerial to. I'm getting that delivered to work too :-)
Charlie pointed out to me that an amateur radio advanced licence course is starting in August, so I've registered my interest for that. If I pass the exam in December, I should be able to apply for an M0 callsign. That will mean I can run the legal maximum power on all bands and work satellites which is something I've been interested in doing for a long time. Obviously I'll need to obtain the equipment and a more suitable home before I can get really serious with satellites and even HF working but it'll be nice to have the option of using the extra facilities a full licence will offer me. I've also borrowed a couple of study books from Charlie and am spending some time most days reading them and trying to learn the maths!
On a completely unrelated topic, I went to a boot sale on Sunday - the first one I've been to for 2006. I have to say it was the worst bootsale I've ever been too. It was only about four aisles wide and ten cars deep. Needless to say there wasn't much there. So we left empty handed (although not empty stomached - I had to have my cheese burger with onions and Kate had a hotdog. Has to be done when you go to a boot sale).
I'm having some problems with PHP and MySQL at the moment. Currently the music library on my website lists the contents of my songs folder every time it's loaded. This means it's quite slow to load. I wanted to improve the loading speed and add functionality by having each song listed in a database table. The easiest way I thought to do get the information into the database would be to create a PHP script based on the current songs list that reads the contents of the songs folder but instead of outputting it to the screen, it runs an SQL INSERT query to put the track into the database.
In order to test that I was getting the information correctly, I put an echo command into the script and ran it. This way I could see on screen that the entire folder contents where being read and that the information was formatted correctly. There was no problems here. Next I replaced that echo command with a mysql_query command to run the SQL query and put the information into the database. However on running the script, it only goes as far as the first 800-1200 songs. And to make it even more weird, each time I run the script, the number of songs stored varies but it's always around that figure. I can't for the life of me figure out why so if there is a PHP/MySQL genius reading this, please do get in touch :-)
I've got VH1 on TV at the moment and they're doing an hour of music from 1993. What a great year for music that was - Ace of Base, Sting, Bjork and playing now is Billy Joel - River of Dreams which is one of my all time favourite songs!