Richy's Random Ramblings – Page 126 – Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B

Snippet: Homer – The Odyssey

July 29, 2003

Well, for a while now, I’ve been meaning to purchase the classic book “Odyssey” by Homer but haven’t had the “umph” to really do anything about it. I know I could probably download it for free, but unless I’ve got a PDA (such as a Palm with a PDF reader) it just isn’t convenient to read.

However, I was in WH Smiths earlier today and just looking for a book – and I saw they had it available. Check the price on the back and it was £3.50 – quite pricey for an “out of copyright classic book” (I’ve picked up similar books for just £1). But I decided to buy it.

Got to the checkout, had the book scanned and the register said “Homer – Odyssey: £0.01”. Yep! ONE PENNY! The women on the register looked at the back of the book, looked at the cash register display, checked the front of the book and then said to me “Oh well, I just do what the machine says.”

What a massive saving – I’m planning on going in tomorrow and seeing if I can get Homer’s Illiad at the same price. I’m not sure if Odyssey was MEANT to be priced at 1p, but I’m not complaining 😉 If you’re after a copy yourself and fancy a “bit of a gamble” (as they may have corrected the price to £3.50 by the time you reach the store)…

News: Terrifica for Women

July 29, 2003

Blogging: 1,000 Comments!

July 28, 2003

2 Comments

Woo! I’ve just hit the 1,000^th 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

July 27, 2003

Comments closed

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

July 26, 2003

4 Comments

Guess That Movie 64 It’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