Rick Hurst Web Developer in Bristol, UK

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Month: September 2006

Caffe Gusto goes up in my estimation again

with the free muffin with my coffee this morning. Still the only cafe I have found on park street, bristol with free, reliable, in-house wifi. Mind you i’ve only tried a couple so far…

archived comments

Tried the watershed, no VPN access, or the Blue Juice Bar?

Dave Irwin 2006-09-07 18:57:09

yep – i’ve tried the watershed, but is it open at 8am? Blue Juice bar I haven’t tried though – where’s that to then?

Rick 2006-09-07 19:19:51

ubuntu on HP nx6110

I needed to reinstall windows on my work laptop as it was getting a bit sketchy and unreliable in that undefinable way, so I took the opportunity to repartition the disk and set it up as a dual boot machine, with ubuntu. I created a primary 15gb partition for windows and installed win xp in the usual way, then used the partitioning tools in ubuntu to create a 15gb partition for data (Ext3 to be shared between windows and linux, by installing these ext3 drivers in windows), and a 6gb partion for the ubuntu install. It all went fine, but the wireless card isn’t recognised by ubuntu. I’ve looked into it – apparently I can get it working using some windows driver voodoo that goes by the name of ndiswrapper. I haven’t tested how/if ubuntu handles sleep and dual monitors yet, but will do at some point.

archived comments

Did you ever get the Wi-Fi card to work?

Thanks!

Aris 2007-05-14 19:41:42

Yes I did, or rather I got someone else to get it to work – they had to download some firmware I think? I suspect a more recent version of ubuntu might make this easier as it allows you to install proprietary drivers, and the network select dailogue thing is working

Rick 2007-05-14 20:07:39

Frameworks make you forget

I’ve recently being doing a bit of “old school” web development, manually creating HTML forms and (classic ASP) scripts to validate and process the forms. I was surprised at how much I have forgotten of my basic HTML, since I have been using a framework (namely archetypes in plone) to do all the form generation, validation and processing for the last couple of years. I even had to go and view some source code on another site to remind me of the correct syntax for an HTML select element (form drop-down).

Whilst doing things manually is very laborious, it does give me a feeling of control back, and I am confident about debugging and modification in a way that I miss when relying on a framework. Wouldn’t want to go back to this form of development for any large projects though!

cheap powerbook battery

I threw this question out on the underscore mailing list today (typos corrected – at least you can do that with blog posts):-

i’m gutted that my powerbook battery isn’t eligible for replacement due to the recent recall, as i’m only getting about an hour out of now, so looking for a cheap replacement. Looking on ebay there are two cheapskate options :-

1. supposedly genuine apple batteries, coming from china
2. non-apple batteries

anybody had any good/ bad experiences with either of these options? anyone been stung for import duty with stuff coming from china? anyone lost any body parts to an exploding battery?

I was then pointed in the direction of coconut battery, a handy little app for analysing your battery. It shoes that mine has about 40% of the capacity that it had when it was new – translates to about an hour of use on a full charge. So it it obviously needs replacing – anyone out there able to recommend or warn me off the cheap batteries I found on ebay, as opposed to forking up twice the price for a genuine replacement from apple?

archived comments

Have you found a battery?? And where??

Christian Berggren 2007-10-15 08:21:26

Yes, I bought one off ebay in the end- an unused orginal

Rick 2007-10-15 08:26:54

IE7 plays peekaboo to a new level

The first site i’ve had to fix for Internet Explorer 7 is our very own www.netsightmcc.co.uk (Netsight Metropolitan Colocation Centre – the website for our Bristol datacentre). It appeared that in IE7 RC1, none of the content of anything other than the homepage was visible. We were only alerted to this by a potential customer phoning up for more information, which the site seemed to be lacking.

The reason for this appeared to be an even more aggressive version of the so-called peekaboo bug found in IE6, although this site works fine in IE6. By applying a (hack) of a 1% height to a div that contained the missing content, it now appears to be working OK in IE7 RC1. I haven’t filtered this hack out into an IE7 specific stylesheet yet, but will if I spot any undesired side effects. Maybe there’s a better way of fixing this? Time will tell, or maybe a stranger will.