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Month: July 2003

Blogging: 1,000 Comments!

Woo! I’ve just hit the 1,000th comment entry with:

July 28, 2003 12:37 AM: on Game: Grid Lock by Canguy

i’ve been scratching my head so long over level 40 i’m bleeding
Canguy

Ok, it’s not the most inspiring comment on the most up to date post – but it’s still the 1,000th comment (baring duplicates and spam: both of which I should have eradicated by now).

If all goes well, the following piece of code snippet:

<ol>
<MTComments firstn=”1000″ sort_order=”ascend”>
<li><span class=”comments-post”><$MTCommentDate$>: on <MTCommentEntry><a href=”<$MTEntryLink$>
“><$MTEntryTitle$></a></MTCommentEntry> by <$MTCommentAuthorLink spam_protect=”1” show_email=”0″$></span><br /><$MTCommentBody$></li>
</MTComments>
</ol>

should mean the full entry of this post should have all 1,000 comments listed. I was hoping to be able to have cut’n’pasted the list in: but, again, I’ve hit the “maximum post size” of MovableType. Drat…

Update: Nope, it didn’t work. It seems you can’t use the template tags in an entry. Oh well, you’ll just have to look through the blog to find the comments!

Many thanks everybody for all the comments and trackbacks – and keep them coming! They make blogging worth the while!

Work: Site Redesign Finished

As the orders on the hosting side of work have been down the last fortnight, we’ve decided to take action and revamp one of our two web site hosting sites.

Well, I’ve ended up revamping it as the version done by a co-worker wasn’t quite -erm- I’m not sure, it just didn’t have the “umpf” factor. Anyway, after 10 hours of work I’ve completed it. It’s 95% CSS, XHTML Transitional and it looks quite good (in Internet Explorer and Mozilla!). It was a bit difficult getting things just right due to the various bugs in Internet Explorer: whenever you design a website, remember the following:

Put the DOCTYPE in the page FIRST! If you don’t have one in, Internet Explorer runs in “buggy” mode, put one in and it then changes the rendering model to be closer to the standard as used by Mozilla – but it’ll change how the site looks.

Be careful of “Float”. I’ve used the CSS float: setting to get some of the page positioning just right, but depending if it’s used or not effects how the elements render on the page (adding it double the size of some of the menus I was using it one). Totally unexpected, and probably another Internet Explorer bug.

Page sizes differ in browsers. I’ve set the width of the “main section” of the page to 100%: in Internet Explorer, it looks good and it fills 100% of the browser window (as expected). In Mozilla, however, it seems to fill 101% so you’ve got a very very tiny horizontal scroll area.

DIV and SPAN are different. Yeah, yeah – use “DIV” for divisions of the page (it automatically inserts linebreaks) and use SPAN for “inline” sections. However, the differences go deeper then that – the “width” setting doesn’t seem to work correctly on Spans and there are a few other differences.

Oh well, it’s all done now and I’ve sent the URL of the test site to my co-workers for their comments: fingers crossed!

Guess That Movie: LXIV: Joe’s Apartment

Guess That Movie 64It’s time for Guess That Movie round 64! Woo!!!!

For those who are new here, basically Guess That Movie (GTM) is a little competition where you have “simply” just got to recognise which movie the screen shot on the left has been taken from. I say “simply” as sometimes, it’s not quite obvious which movie it is (yes, the screenshot has been cropped and resized – but I’ve done nothing else to it).

Why bother guessing? Well, there are prizes to be won! Yep – prizes for a “free to enter competition” (well, a get a little kick back from the Google Adsense adverts at the top of each page which is just covering the prize fund: otherwise it comes out of my back pocket). What’s the prizes? At the moment, they are Amazon gift vouchers (for your local Amazon store in your local currency), but I’m open to suggestions.

What’s the value of the FREE to win Amazon gift vouchers? Well, it just depends on how quickly and accurately the image is guessed. As soon as I post each image, it’s worth 100 points and each 100points=£1 (roughly US$1.62 or 1.40EUR). However, each wrong guess brings the value down by 5 points and the value decreases over time. After 12 hours, it’s worth 10 points less – 12 hours after that and another 10 points are knocked off, and then 10 points for every 24 hours after that. Oh – and you can only claim a prize once you’ve collected 500 points.

Go on – have a go and Guess That Movie!

A: Joe’s Apartment. Film correctly recognised by Quida

TV: Cameron Won BB 2003

Cameron from Big BrotherWell, as expected and as you probably already know, Cameron Stout from the Orkneys (that’s oop in Scoutland) has managed to win £70,000 from the 2003 Channel 4 Big Brother UK TV show (Big Brother 4). Despite initially coming over as a bit boring in the early weeks (a 32 year old, virtually teetotal virgin Christian fisherman who took the Bible into the house to read – not someone you would think could provide good entertainment for 64 days), he’s really been enjoyable to watch and I wish him ever success in the future (PS: if you’re reading this Cameron, all donations are gratefully received).

I haven’t been “addicted” to the show, but I’ve tried to watch it every other night or so (even though my GESF keeps winding me up by saying I sound like the delectable Steph – I’m not from r-ddy Berminghumm).

Now the question is: Will Cameron and Steph Coldicutt (nee Smith) “get it together” (if Davina has anything to do with it they will)? How about Scott Turner and Nush (personally, I think this is unlikely) and will “Songs Of Praise” still be interested in Cameron even after the “Lisa’s Windpipe” comment?

Who knows? You decide 😉 (and I cannot do even a reasonable impression of Marcus Bentley – the narrator of BB 🙁 ).

To think, when Big Brother 2002 came to an end (with Kate Lawler winning), I was just meeting my GESF for the very first time….

Personal: Cat Must Love Me

Cat PresentAhhh, my puss cat must love me. Why else would she bring me a little present when I was relaxing and watching Big Brother last night. What a shame it was a LIVE mouse: but t’was a nice thought.

Actually, she walked in the back door – through the kitchen – with the mouse in her mouth. She then tried to go upstairs (but the door was shut) and then released the mouse and started “play chasing” with it: let it run a bit, catch it, swat it, wait for it to run and repeat. As soon as I realised what she was doing, I had to distract her whilst I got the mouse trapped in a container – then call Smokey for her dinner whilst I carefully slid some cardboard under the container so I could release the tiny brown mouse. It didn’t look hurt, but when Smokey was chasing it it would try and jump up around 6inches! However, it didn’t seem to look or act scared – it seemed resigned to just being a cat plaything.

Now if only Smokey just wouldn’t ignore all the proper toys I’ve got her…. Darn cats!