Categories
Personal

Awfy Nice People

My sister works in a hospital and was really keent o get a pair of Crocs Shoes before going off on holiday on Saturday. I tried a few places online but all were sold out of the size, colour and style she wanted. I eventually ordered from (bizzarre name) Fat Shoes Day. They emailed me to say that they aslo didn’t have them in stock and wouldn’t have in time, so my sister decided on another colour. Given the short time I didn’t think I’d get them in time, but I phoend them up and, since they’re based in Edinburgh and I work there, they hand delivered them this afternoon! how’s that for service. So shout it loud – buy your crocs from FatShoesDay (and while you’re at it, aks them why the strange domain name!)

Categories
Movies Personal

Film Review: The Flying Scotsman

Things can be a bit random at my office sometimes. I was sitting at my desk about quarter to five when one of my bosses came in. the film festival is on in Edinburgh at the moment and i was asked to go to one of the local cinemas and meet our in-house photographer with our camera. except it turned out he couldn’t make it so yours truly was a papperazi for an hour.

I had no clue what the film was or what it was about, i just kept taking photos. I did recognise Billy Boyd, of Lord of the Rings fame. and one of the guys from the TV series Absolutely. Moray Hinter, who was ither Mr Don or Mr George. Anyway, after snapping away for a while thing quietened down a bit so I went inside to see the film, having been given a ticket.

It’s the first film I have seen in a long time where I wasn’t disappointed. Granted. I knew nothing about it going in, but it totally delivered. it was very believable and I really connected with the characters. There was emotion. but bot melodrama. The film is the story of Graeme Obree. who broke world records on a bike made partly from a washing machine. There is a lot more to it than that but I won’t say more because I think the less you know the story the better. if I have any good photos of the event I may post them

Categories
Fun

Captain Kirk always did fancy himself too much!

Captain Kirk's so in love with himself!

Categories
Blogging

Photoblogging on the run

Categories
Blogging

Blogging on the Bus

So I’m typing this on my new phone on the bus. I may even have another go posting a picture I take with this beast.

Categories
Fun technical

I might have to put this on a t-shirt

cartoon

Categories
Gadgets

New Phone

After two years with my Sony Ericsson Z600 I’ve finally upgraded.  My new phone is a T-Mobile MDA Vario, so I’ll have to merge my “phone stuff” and “pocket pc” threads to tell you of my experiences.  So far I’m loving it, and it’s not to embarassing to carry around with me and use as a phone – it’s tiny really, but a fully functional (so far) pocket PC.  Woohoo!

Categories
Personal

The first record I ever bought

Yes, they used to produce music on these big black disc things:

Photo of

. . .My embarrassing first ever record.

Categories
technical

Indexing services and PHP

I’ve just been setting up a site search on a whindows server and decided to use an indexing services search. I had no idea it was so complex. It took me ages to work things out, although I’m neither a windows guru nor a php expert.

Writing php to query indexing services is not particularly complex with the sample from the page above, but there were several things that weren’t mentioned there:

  • you need a version of PHP higher than 4.3.10, because of a problem with com objects in that version
  • you need to persuade indexing services to index php pages

Most of our PHP pages were just html pages with a .php extension, to keep all of the extensions the same. The proplem was that indexing services wouldn’t index them because it didn’t know what they were. You can get the service to index documents with unknown extensions, but then it won’t scan them for metadata (including the page titles, which was my major worry). I searched for hours before I found a solution

All you need is to download a program called filtreg.exe from Microsoft. It’s part of the Microsoft Windows SDK (a hefty download for a tiny wee program). The you run that on the server with the following command line:

filtreg .php .htm

This not only makes .php a “known” file extension, but then makes indexing services threat the php pages the same way it treats html pages.

Categories
Movies

Toast

I’m a big fan of toast, and a friend of mine has recently created a short film about Toast which is well worth seeing. Hopefully it will be getting some festival releases soon.