Category: Uncategorized

So, I finally got around to installing PHP5 today. Shock!!! Horror!!!

It’s been around for absolutely ages. I installed it when I was still using Windows (yes, that is quite a long time ago!). When I installed Linux and wanted to get a web server installed, I decided to use PHP4 because that was what my web hosts were using. I think, though, that they have now upgraded to PHP5 (or at least, you have the option of using PHP5). So, I decided to upgrade my system.

I have to say, I really like the new PHP5 features. It’s like a proper programming language! It makes coming from a language such as Java much easier. You can define interfaces and abstract classes and static variables and use reflection… it’s like an Object Oriented Programmers’ dream come true. Well, not really, but considering what things were like in PHP4 it’s a darn sight better.

Aaaanyway, I’m going to stop being geeky and go to bed. Night all!

I thought it was about time I had a “The Weekend” post, because I haven’t actually posted one in ages. Well, maybe not ages, but it feels like it! So… what did we get up to at the weekend?

The answer to that is “not a lot”. On Friday evening, we didn’t do very much. I don’t really need to say that any more, do I? I think the problem is that by the time Friday comes around we are both knackered, and just need the evening in to chill out and relax a bit!

On Saturday morning we did some food shopping (oh! the joy and wonderment!), and then in the afternoon we went into town for a bit to get some odds and ends. In the evening we went to the Strada Restaurant on North Hill, which is relatively new. We really enjoyed it actually, there was a wide variety of food on offer (not just your bog standard pizza / pasta which you often get in Italian restaurants – if you go, check out the specials they have!). It was also fairly reasonably priced, which was also good. I think we will be going again soon (well, relatively soon, we don’t eat out at restaurants all that much…)

We went to Fordham on Sunday morning as per usual, and then came back for lunch. Afterwards we sent a few wedding photos off to people (yes, we still have wedding photos to send to people… the list is vastly diminished, though!). In the evening we went round to see Alex, and we watched a few episodes of “Scrubs”. It was muchos funos.

Um, right, I think that’s just about everything. I don’t have much else to say, except that I have now added this blog into Facebook – so hello to all my adoring blog-readers from Facebook! 🙂 More ways to spread the madness, mwahahahahahaha….

I’m now on Facebook. Yes, I know, two social / networking sites in two months! Ah well. I’ve added a few people as friends, but I don’t really know who’s on there so if you’re on Facebook and are reading this, drop me a friends request on there and I’ll add you 🙂 (Unless, of course, I’m not your friend, in which case I won’t).

All for now.

Heh. I’ve just been looking at my search engine referalls page (you can examine the website logs and see who has come to you from search engines and what they were searching for), and apparently someone has come to this site searching for “Entertaining Witty Blog”. Obviously, I was the number one hit on Google 😉

Nah, actually it was just a post I’d made about Simon’s blog. I’m glad about that, for a second I thought Google had become deluded…

Aaaanyway. What have I been up to recently? Well, not a huge amount! I’ve signed up to Monster to see what’s available in terms of jobs at the moment, and there are a few possibilities opening up there. I don’t want to say too much at the moment though, but yeah… that’s one of the things I’ve been doing! The rest probably isn’t worth blogging about at the moment.

Right, well, that’s enough from me for the time being…

Phew. It’s been a tough old day, it has. Firstly, I got in at work this morning to find that the Exchange server was down. the disk had run out of space (this happens from time to time, as Exchange tends to generate fairly copious transaction logs). Anyway, it turns out that the logs were being written something like every five minutes. The mail server had been down the whole weekend, I think possibly because I accidentally left open relay enabled on our SMTP server (doh!). For those of you who don’t know what that means, basically any old spammer could use our server to send junk e-mail. Not good. The server had a huge load of about 15,000 emails to get through! It could take a while to sort that one out (it wasn’t exactly going through them at a rate of knots when I left work this evening…)

Then, one of my colleagues had a problem connecting to Oracle from Java. Now, I have to say, the Oracle OCI driver is the work of the Devil himself. If the Oracle JDBC drivers and the version of the .dlls in the Oracle Home don’t match EXACTLY — you’re screwed. I’ve had so many problems with it recently, it’s unbelievable. I think my colleague spent the entire day trying to get one flippin’ thing to work! Grrr.

On the positive side… the internet at home hasn’t been working since last Thursday. (No, that’s not the positive side, the positive bit is coming…) I couldn’t figure out why, so I raised a support call. Nothing much was happening with that, so on a whim I decided to see if I could ping our server at work (I needed the IP address today so I was just about able to remember it). It went through OK! Which was good, because it proved to me that it was just DNS that wasn’t working… I was able to SSH on to work, grab the IP addresses of a DNS server, and “BAM!” (as Elzar might say) — I was rolling.

Aaaaanyway. Sorry for the rather techy note of this post, I just had to get that lot off my chest! Fortunately, getting the internet back has put me in a good mood 🙂

… so, I decided to finish off my previous blog post. Huzzah!

In that post, I talked about mentioning to you some of the blogs I read on a regular basis. I’m not thinking about the blogs of people I know, or of people who have very popular blogs, I’m more thinking about blogs I’ve just stumbled across on the net which I’ve found interesting enough to add to my blog reader.

• Custardy: This person (pseudonym ‘custard’) was a science / physics teacher in a school, and is now doing a theology course (training to become a minister). He often has some interesting things to say about the Bible (some recent posts have been about Proverbs and Job, for example).
• Simon Cozens’ Blog: Simon used to be a professional programmer / techie (I found the website by searching for some techie thing on Google), and is now a missionary. Often has some interesting ideas on the church, theology, and technology (there’s a nice mix for you!)
• The Cartoon Church Blog: The Cartoon Church is a website written by a guy called Dave Walker, who draws some very funny cartoons about church life (funnily enough). The blog sometimes contains cartoons, sometimes thought-provoking stuff, and sometimes other random stuff. It’s a bit of a mixed bag in other words, but I like it, particularly the cartoons!
• Geofftech’s iBlog: Geoff is a guy who used to live in the UK, but recently (well, about nine months ago) moved out to the USA. He regularly blogs about the differences between the UK and the USA, which I’ve found fascinating so far. I actually found the website by searching for information on the London Underground – he’s the former world record for travelling (with a friend) to all the tube stations in one day in the shortest time.

So, there you have it… what blogs are you people reading?

Sorry for not updating very much recently… not very much has happened! This evening we went round to Wivenhoe to go to the chippie with Alex and Elisa. That was a really nice evening 🙂

Um, apart from that not much has gone on really… I actually wanted to post up about ‘blogrolls’. I got around to wondering what blogs people were currently reading, and I thought I’d start the ball rolling by talking about a few of the blogs I read.

However, then I realised that it was actually quite late, and I should probably get to bed. So, I’ll update with the rest of this post soon, in the meantime feel free to leave comments with any blog recommendations 🙂

I came across a blog today called “Behind the Sofa”, which is (and I quote): “… a collaborative blog dedicated the the long-running British science fiction show ‘Doctor Who’”. Not just Doctor Who though, it includes Sarah Jane (which I only heard about from Alex yesterday) and Torchwood.

Why am I mentioning this? Well, I think they have a very similar opinion to me on the subject of Torchwood 😉

Speaking of which, I haven’t watched the finale yet (it’s on tonight at 9pm) but last week’s episode (“Combat”) was pretty good. Apart from being a total rip-off of “Fight Club”, that is. Hopefully this bodes well for the finale….

Just a quick update. I’ve actually managed to update the About section of this blog! I know that hardly anyone actually ever reads it, but at least it’s up to date now…

Update: I have also fixed the email script to deal with Email Injection. Not that I was really having problems with it, but you never know!

So, I thought I’d better just post up a with what we’ve been doing this Christmas 🙂

On Christmas Day, Phil and I went to my parents for the service in the morning, and then stayed until boxing day. It was a really nice family time, there were a few people we hadn’t seen there in a while so that was good! On boxing day, we came back home and stayed overnight. Then, on Wednesday we went down to stay with Phil’s parents.

The train journey down was pretty bad actually – the train was absolutely full due to a cancellation, so we had to stand all the way from Colchester to Liverpool Street. Ah well, c’est la vie! On Wednesday evening, we went to the pub with a couple of Phi’s friends from home. On Thursday we didn’t do very much all day really! On Friday evening, we went to the Novello Theatre in Aldwych to see “Much Ado About Nothing”. I have to admit that I couldn’t follow all the dialogue (‘Much Ado’ was never one of the plays I had to study at school), but it was very enjoyable nonetheless, and really funny in parts. Tamsin Grieg was in it, and I thought she did really well! It was a completely different character to any of the things I’ve seen her in before (she usually seems to play someone slightly absent minded and / or scatty), but I think she pulled it off very well indeed. I’d certainly recommend any Shakespeare / Theatre fans to go and see it, I’m not sure when it’s running until though!

Anyway. That’s all in terms of news of the week… I suppose I ought to mention what we got for Christmas though!

We got a whole range of things. We got a bread bin, a calendar, a couple of books, lots of chocolate / other foodstuffs, and a couple of CDs. Plus a few other bits and pieces.

I bought Paul McCartney’s oratorio “Ecce Cor Meum” (Behold My Heart) for Phil. It’s actually a really lovely piece – I was much impressed with it! I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it’s a really lovely piece of music.

And… I don’t think I have any other reviews to put up here, so that’s it from me!