Yearly Archives: 2007

Crap summer?

Everybody seems to be going on how this summer has just been crap, and for those who are still living in temporary accommodation after the flood it must be, however:
In June, Heather and I got married and had perfect weather all day. Our honeymoon in Sorrento was in the 30’s everyday.
We went to Kew Gardens, where it was lovely except for a small thunderstorm.
Heather sang at Bury St Edmunds, St Edmundsbury Cathedral where I sat in the sun for hours and had a great time at the Greene King Brewery.
We took Sasha and Rhys to Whipsnade Zoo, which was also a hot day, followed by me going to watch Arsenal on the Sunday which again was a fine day.
We went to Clumber Park this weekend, and yep that was a great day too.
So whilst it might have been a bit rubbish whilst I’ve been sat behind my desk, on the days we’ve made plans to go out it’s been wonderful.

Name checked on the F-Secure blog

Have you recently had an email which looked like this?
f-secure-virus-email
If so delete it straight away. As per usual the give aways are the fact that you’ve joined something that you never visted.
I got something similar this morning, and was sure I had read about this on the F-Secure blog. Checking their site I was right, so I emailed them the one I got as the details were different to those listed. Now the site is kindly name checking me.

Thanks to ‘ew’ and Ryan
for updates on the subjects used.

Google Calendar sync’d to your mobile

Last year I started using Google Calendar to manage my few events which I had. The only problem was that it was almost impossible to update whilst on the move. However Google XHTML’d the site and shrank it down a bit and allowed you to view it on you’re phone’s browser. But I was still missing the key bit. The entries weren’t appearing in my in-built calendar. I started to look into the Google Calendar API, and found it a nightmare. There were so many different methods depending if the event was all-day, just for an hour or repeating every year, so I gave up. However recently I’ve discovered GooSync, they allow your Google Calendar to talk over SyncML. This means that any events I add to the phone are added to Google and vice-versa. The free service allows 30 days of events to be sync’d with your main calendar. The premium version gives you a full year, plus the ability to sync extra calendars including those “shared” calendars. This means that I now have the full Arsenal fixture list on my phone, which is helpfully updated after each cup draw and ammended why Sky change the kick off time. It should work on almost any phone that was launched in the last two years and I would recommend you trying it, even if it’s the free version.

Orange telling the odd fib

Wandering past the Orange Shop this lunch time I saw this in the window, an advert for the Motorola F3. A pay-as-go phone which costs only £10. But something didn’t seem right, so I took a photo. On the left is the photo, on the right is the offical press photo direct from Motorola.
F3 Orange F3 Motorola
Well the image on the left has a nice orange tree on the screen, yet the one on the right looks like a digital calculator. Maybe the press image is showing the screensaver, but no that is the actuall display. It’s the main reason why the phone is only £10! You can read more about the phone here on GSMArena.

PHP Question – Removing tags and content

This is mainly out there to those who code in php.
At the moment LibDemBlogs, strips out all formatting from blog posts, mainly to ensure that cut-off <b> tags don’t end up bolding everything, but also it puts each post on a equal platform.
However over time I’ve noticed an increase use in the <strike> tag. This tag strikes through text and is normally used to later correct a mistake, or imply someone might not be telling the truth. But as LDBlogs removes the formatting, it makes for an odd read.
So I’m trying to completly remove everything between the tags, Google and even myself believe that this should work
$post = preg_replace('/<strike>([^>]*)<\/strike>/i', '', $post);
However LDBlogs is still showing the deleted text. Any other ideas?

Fixed! The code was working, just happened that the bit of the WordPress RSS feeds I was reading had already removed the tags and other stuff, reading the <content:encoded> gives me the original text.

11 hours and 607 pages later

Harry Potter This morning at 6.30 I headed down to Asda, knowing that if I went via Amazon the postman would only be arriving by now and also for only a fiver I was getting a much better deal.
Now if by this point you don’t realise that I’m talking about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, where have you been.
As this was the last book I was sure the spoilers would appear as soon as possible, so I put myself into a media blackout. The mobile was left upstairs, the TV was unplugged and the local newspaper was still in the door. Even the trip to the supermarket involved a silent car journey and fingers in my ears.
So why all the fuss? I only started reading Potter in 2001 after book 4 came out. Bored one day at uni I stole a copy of book one, the following day book two and by the fifth day all four were finished.
The books aren’t bad, a bit repetitive but I was hooked. So every time a new book came out I got it straight away. However this time I went for no stop reading.
The final book is a good read, it only drags a bit near the middle. Tales of good vs evil, right vs wrong and of course the predictable plot lines.
Now I could spoil it for you by saying how it end, so here it goes

well.

if you can still get a copy for a fiver it’s worth it. £8.99 at a push but not the £17.99 it says inside the cover. And whilst were there Bloomsbury were saying that it’s worth it, yet book 6 has the same number of pages and is a quid cheaper and 5 had almost 200 more pages! With sales in the millions surely some economies of sale could be reached in reducing the costs?
7 out of 10