Recently been working on a proof of concept for using memcached to solve some of the challenges we face with our legacy system.
I’ve gone down the route of using Coolstack to get it all up and running as it’s very simple to maintain.
I’m currently experimenting with spymemcached as a Java client for communicating with the memcached server. It’s all looking good!
The Student Loans Company is possibly one of the most useless establishment that I have ever had the pain of having to communicate with.
I am now battling them due to a loan value being placed against a student loan account which had been completely cleared of any outstanding amount. The SLC claim that the money has been paid, the supposed receiver says no money was due or has been received – yet the whole the debt is being paid on a monthly basis when nothing is owed!
There is no choice in the matter because it comes out by PAYE and payroll won’t stop it until HMRC advise them to, which they won’t as the SLC says they are owed money – it is a horrendously inefficient and bordering on fraudulent system when it comes to mistakes being made by the SLC.
After numerous phonecalls, a letter was sent to the SLC, including all the requested information and we were assured it would be resolved. 1 week later we receive a standard letter response, with the issue not having been looked into.
We have replied once again and have now attempted to use the “official” complaints procedure to see how that goes, but seeing as it’s still internal to the SLC, I am not expecting a great response. Watch this space…
21 years after its initial launch, Red Dwarf is going to make a brand new appearance on our televisions once again.
Is this a good thing? Usually these types of projects spawn one of two things – a brilliant show, where it was like it never left us – or a shockingly bad attempt at bringing the show back to life. I am hoping that because it has the complete original cast, it will maintain the silly humour it had originally.
I’ve recently started playing with Aptana and RadRails under Windows, where I encountered a problem where Aptana wasn’t able to install gems, and it popped up the installation window each time I started Aptana. It is logged as a known issue but I wanted it working, so I persevered.
The upshot of it is, I looked at the Rails console within Aptana at what commands were being run. Most of the where, for example:
gem install rails -l
All I did, is take each of the commands run automatically from the console and removed the -l option:
gem install rails
Everything installed perfectly in no time at all, and it’s all now up and running!
I recently attempted to get media from my PC playing through my Xbox 360, to use it as a media centre, but quickly found that the Media Centre Extender on Windows Media Centre Edition and Vista, wasn’t allowing me to play DivX or Xvid encoded video clips.
As it turns out, you can’t actually do it through the Media Centre Extender, but you can get them to play through the Videos Share bit instead (a quick update is needed from Xbox Live – it should trigger when you first try to download the player). It’s obviously not as pretty as the Media Centre Extender, but it works perfectly well and that’s the most important thing.
I’m lead to believe that the reason for this is that the Xbox team have put support for playing these codecs in via their dash, but MCE doesn’t use any of this, as it is written by it’s own team as they are completely separate products.
Is it going to get fixed in the future? Apparantly not. Best start saving for a proper media centre pc!
This is a very quick run through on how to get a basic jquery thickbox (blackbox) popup working, containing an image, and is based on the official demo page. The actual thickbox demo page has more advanced options available and full documentation – this is intended for those who don’t wish to know the full ins and outs of the functionality, but just want it working! 
So let’s get started….
The first thing to do is download the latest version of jquery.
Next grab:
First, make sure the page you are trying to use the Thickbox on, has a valid DTD – it will not function correctly if you don’t. I as a rule, use the Strict DTD.
Next we include the javascript files we have downloaded, and the css file – taking note to replace the path and filenames if you downloaded the compressed versions:
<input type=”radio” name=”payRemainingBalance” value=”true” checked=”checked”/>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”javascript/jquery.1.6.4.pack.js“></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”javascript/thickbox-compressed.js“></script>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”css/thickbox.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />
Now that we have those included, we need to quickly edit thickbox.css, and tell it where to find the loadingAnimation.gif that we downloaded earlier. By default it looks for images/loadingAnimation.gif, so if this is where you’ve put it, you can ignore this step.
We should now be good to go, to try your thickbox out – there are a few ways to do this,the most common being from a text or image link, opening up the thickbox to contain an image, so we’ll use that as our example.
Text link:
<a href=”path-to-your/image.jpg” class=”thickbox”>Show Image</a>
Image link:
<a href=”path-to-your/image.jpg” class=”thickbox”><img src=”path-to-your/link-image.jpg” /></a>
The class=”thickbox” is the important bit, so make sure you’ve got that in there!
This should give you a working, (very) basic example of the thickbox. Once you’re happy with that, look at the rest of the examples, and you will find you can use it for various things, not just for showing pictures!
Posted a couple of weeks ago, is this “Shopping online for blind people” article on the BBC News Technology pages. As per usual, the BBC’s technology team have done some excellent research to use in this article.
The first site we see, confuse.com (not to be confused with confused.com – hah), is shown as a price comparison site….. which it blatantly isn’t. It’s an ad site, which has the same standard layout as all other ad sites, and if you click on any of the supposed comparison links, all you see is a page of adverts. Excellent work BBC.
Having had some proper developers come in and work on our code, it’s backed up my cosntant moaning that our code base is in a pretty bad state. Lots of duplication of code all over the place, and lots of pages across multiple sites, which could be common.
The other thing, which one of my developers claims to be very good at and knows almost all there is to know about it, is CSS.
The contractors however, have pointed out many many problems with our css, and have recommended resetting the styles on the sites, before doing anything. I don’t claim to be good at CSS, I know the basics but apart from that, I get my hands dirty with the backend code – so this link proved very useful and insightful when it was given to me. Explains style resets very well, and I now know what we need to do…. the question is will it ever happen?!
In the latest patch for Left 4 Dead, Valve have decided to fix the difficulty under Versus mode to Normal. I didn’t think much of this, having played on Expert and finding it ridiculously difficult, until I played it a few times.
What is now evident, is that people are just trying to rush through each level, instead of having to take it slow and steady and think about what they are doing.
Last night, 8 of us experienced gamers, on our own server, had to play it on Normal…. and it was boring. Too easy to fight off a rush of horde, too easy to kill Hunters, too easy to kill a Tank. Expert was too hard, Normal is too easy.
From the various threads I’ve read elsewhere it looks as if this is because people have been voting to change the difficulty mid-game – well here’s a novel idea – why not just disable that functionality?! Once a campaign has started, the difficulty can’t be changed. Let it be specified at the Lobby. That way all players know what they’re about to play. Don’t completely restrict the setting. I hate to think what an organised clan/team match will be like on Normal setting. It will be more like a sprint than a tactical team game.
Not sure that I would ever need this, however I would most certainly have liked to have been involved in creating it 
