Well yesterday was interesting.

We went to visit my Nana and also some retired friends and had some interesting conversations about computers.

My Nana was talking about how at the doctor’s surgery she was told to go sign in on a touch screen computer thing by the receptionist after she had already been confused about which desk to approach. How ridiculous, why not just take the details from her verbally? My Nana has never used a computer in her life; prefers the cashier’s desk to a cash machine and won’t use direct debit as she prefers to pay at the post office. Whilst I would doubtlessly find signing in at the doctor at a computer very convenient we really must not assume that everyone in society would feel the same!

Later she was talking about BT. She was complaining that intermittently when phoning a relative a voice comes on the phone saying “You have dialled the wrong code”. After hearing her elaborate on this over the course of the morning it became clear that she believes that the voice is not a recorded one but is a human being who is paid to intercept her phone call at random times. Bless her, it seems almost implausible but then why should she expect any different? Again, it is a welcome reminder that not everyone has grown up with technology.

Finally, when at our retired friends I volunteered to have a look at his computer. He had been using a very dated laptop on dial-up for a long time but, without consulting me as he would not want to impose, decided to take the plunge and buy a new desktop PC. He walked away with a machine that has a good processor but a meagre 512MB RAM with, guess what, Windows Vista pre-installed. Oh dear. 512MB RAM is fine for XP … but for Vista?

This however was just the beginning. The desktop was absolutely full of shortcut icons for Napster, Internet services etc. Great – the first thing I do with these is uninstall/delete but if you are not a tech savvy person you are going to leave them forever as you think that deleting a shortcut deletes the program and you do not know whether deleting an unknown program will break your machine.

Loads of crap seemed to run at startup and something was thrashing the hard drive constantly meaning the machine ran like a dog. It was not the anti virus, it did not seem to be the defrag program on schedule, it should not have been paging RAM at that point so God only knows! The point was that his brand new spanky machine ran as slow as his archaic old laptop and used more electricity so what was the point?

Finally, the point of my looking at his machine was that his Internet had broken. He had paid some guy, at a fair price, to sort it out but for some reason it had stopped working again.

I ended up concluding that I needed to re-install the speedtouch modem software. I put in the disc, it fired up we went through all the routines and followed the printed instructions on the disc about removing the Vista driver first. Well after about an hour of scratching my head I realised that the installer was installing the Windows XP driver! To install the Vista one I had to browse the CD and install it manually – but this was not documented as far as I could see!!! How on earth could my friend have ever figured this out for himself?

If you bought a TV but could only watch half the channels on it you would take it back wouldn’t you? Why not do the same with a PC? If manufacturers and suppliers want the benefits of mainstream revenues then they should offer mainstream support. It is an absolute disgrace that between the supplier and his broadband provider he ended up having to pay for someone to come out to help him and then had to embarrassedly ask for help off a friend.

Vendors: sort your act out, make sure your crap works, stop wasting my time and stop making me subsidise your inability to give your customers what they need.

Sorry for the blurry photograph – it was hard for me to make the camera auto-focus on something so small.

Whilst gardening today I was tidying up and lifted a rock up. Underneath I found a couple of clumps of little white eggs and some sort of lava curled up in a lump of mud – aw, sweet!

I felt mean disturbing them so the rock’s gone back down and I will leave them until spring. I’m not sure what they are – I wonder if they’re woodlice as there were a few inactive ones under there.

In the bottom left of the photo that white thing in the mud is the lava; the other white bits are eggs.

Here’s what’s currently growing on our allotment:

1. Slug-eaten swedes
2. Swiss rainbow chard
3. Late and not too optimistic marrows
4. The summer’s lettuces run to seed
5. Really tall swiss chard
6. Cabbages, albeit caterpillar eaten
7. Brussel sprouts
8. Worryingly autumnal looking privet
9. Wild brambles at the end of the garden

Stuff we have had but maybe didn’t mention:

1. New potatoes
2. Broad beans
3. Peas
4. Radishes
5. Lots of lettuce and rocket
6. Biiig marrow
7. A solitary head of broccoli

So whilst some things are a bit ‘odd’ (e.g. the tall cabbages or the too-late marrows) I would say it has been a good year.

I’ve been a bit child-like with some of it – e.g. the caterpillars eating all my cabbages fascinated rather than appalled me. Once the novelty wears off I will no doubt be less tolerant.

Outdoor space is also definitely good for the mind. I find myself going out there to do a two minute job and then getting completely side tracked with nothing in particular just because it’s nice to be wandering around outside. There aren’t many times that I feel as though I have time to savour things but out there I do.

We got our shed delivered by the nice people at Swann Timber, St Georges Road – Hull.

It is 10′ by 6′, made from hard wood with bolt fixings for a little extra.

It feels like quite a landmark – and looking at these photographs almost exactly 12 months after we moved in I think that we should be quite pleased with how far we have come.

I was speaking to the guy from Swann Timber about sheds and he said that prices haven’t gone up in about 15 years – sounds like a good time to buy a shed me thinks. He wasn’t too surprised or concerned that searching for them the Internet yields no results – they advertise in the Hull Colour Pages but unlike yell.com it looks like they don’t understand how search engines work – look how many results for ‘swann’ there are on their site in Google.

Anyway, they don’t care as most of their trade is by word of mouth. If you want their number it is: 01482 229992.

When I grow up I want to be a cat, or at least a cat as comfy as this one.

I was speaking to good friend the other day and he was surprised to learn that I use Linux instead of Microsoft Windows. Given that he is doing some IT training at the moment it is a bit of a shame as he didn’t appear to regard Linux as viable alternative.

I have been using various flavours (distributions/distros) of Linux since about 2003. These have included Novell’s Suse and the Redhat sponsored Fedora.

If you are new to Linux you could think of the flavours of Linux as different versions of the Microsoft operating system – e.g. 98, ME, 2000, XP but that isn’t correct because each of those is an upgrade to the previous. It is better to think of a Linux distribution as an operating system in its own right, and it could replace whatever version of windows you currently have installed.

Anyway, enough of that – the point of this entry was to tell about a recent upgrade which I did.

For the last 6 months I have been using Ubuntu version 7.04 which was codenamed Feisty Fawn. It was the most user friendly o/s I had ever used. Well last night I fired up Ubuntu’s version of Windows Update and it told me that version 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon was available. Upgrading your entire o/s is generally risky, however I decided to give it a go and I’m glad I did – it went perfectly.

The files which needed to upgrade were downloaded in about an hour (1.6GB) and the upgrade itself took a further hour. But it just worked, I am quite amazed. Can you imagine upgrading XP to vista over the Internet and it not costing you a penny? No… neither can I!

So, thanks to the efforts of volunteers across the globe I have a totally free operating system that has all the shiny aspects of Vista installed over and evening without having to lose any my files. Great!

I have been using Xdebug for a while now during development of my PHP projects.

The feature that I have found most useful is its ability to create cachegrind files which can then be interpreted by tools such as KCacheGrind.

Cachegrind files contain all the function calls made in you PHP application – this can contain invaluable information which can help you streamline parts of your code which are unnecessarily wasteful. As an object-oriented programmer you sometimes get your head up in the clouds and need a bump down to earth as to how your code is going to perform in real life, kcachegrind helped me to identify some hard to find bottlenecks in my code.

Oh, and did I mention that it automatically dumps pretty stack traces?

Way back in August it was the Beached Festival. We had been looking forward to it all year, well since the previous August in fact. We were all booked in with the nice people at The Bramblewick Guest House in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.

Then, as luck would have it, the morning after our arrival I was covered in Chicken Pox – clearly I was in the 1% of the adult population that did not get it as a child. We explained the situation to Martha and despite the short notice and so forth she didn’t take any money for the nights which we skipped and waved us off on our way.

So, we resolved to try to resurrect our missed holiday. This we did last week – we spent 3 lovely nights bed and breakfast. The breakfast was huge, the owners were as friendly as we thought they were before – and very accommodating in helping us make the most of our time in Scarborough.

There ain’t a right lot else to say – we were blessed with the weather so had a fantastic few days and cannot wait to go back.

Oh and at the recommendation of a friend I have signed up at Trip Advisor.

Sadly, on Saturday 13th October 2007 one of our guinea pigs – Teabag – died. He was only a 2 year old so had plenty of years left in him. I think that if we knew a month ago what we know now then we might have been able to save him so I’m writing up our experiences here so that it might help someone else.

Towards the end of September Vicky noticed that Teabag’s front teeth weren’t filing evenly. They weren’t filing horizontally, but were probably about 10-20 degrees off. We decided to monitor him in case he managed to sort them himself. He didn’t sort it and we saw that he wasn’t eating at which point we took him to the vet. This was mistake number 1 – if your guinea pig’s teeth aren’t filing evenly take them to a vet for an opinion without delaying.

The vet clipped his teeth and sent us home saying that he should start eating again. The idea being that the uneven filing meant he couldn’t gnaw properly, so with his gnashers straightened up he’d have no problems.

He didn’t pick up, he seemed to be around his food bowl and made all the right excited noises at veggie time but if you really watched him closely he was nosing around in the food bowl but never actually really eating anything. Vicky then came home one day and found that under his chin the fur was all matted and wet. She took him straight to vet.

The vet said that he’d become weak and that was why he wasn’t eating. He couldn’t see anything wrong with his front teeth. On his back teeth he could see some spurs but wasn’t unduly concerned. He gave us some liquid food to feed him through a syringe into his mouth to build his strength up.

After a few days on the liquid food (boy was it a struggle to feed him that stuff!) he seemed to have started eating again, particularly at veggie time, so we took him off the liquid food as that was a really stressful experience for him. By the end of the week however he was drooling under his chin again so we took him back to the vet.

The vet admitted him, sedated him and worked on his back teeth to file down the spurs. We collected him the same day, he seemed groggy from the anaesthetic but the vet said he should come round if we kept him warm overnight.

The next day, Saturday 13th he was still huddled in his blanket. He didn’t look to have moved much overnight and kept struggling to move himself with his rear legs. We fed him liquid food early in the morning and we gave him a syringe of water. We came back later to feed him, he still wasn’t really responding and sadly he inhaled some of his liquid food and it suffocated him.

All in all it was very sad, so here is a summary of what we’d do differently:

1. Don’t hesitate at any stage – if it looks like a problem then it probably is and Mother Nature can’t always sort it out herself.
2. If your guinea pig isn’t improving a day of two after the vet visit get back in touch with them.
3. The vet didn’t tell us this, but someone else pointed out that water would be more important than syringe feeding liquid food. Plus that would give the option of feeding sugar water to help keep energy up.
4. Anecdotal evidence suggests your guinea pig is unlikely to survive an anaesthetic. If your vet will keep your piggie in for a night afterwards to monitor them then that would be best – Teabag would have been in better hands at the vet’s than ours on the Saturday although the outcome would have been the same.

It’s a little bit belated, however The Floating Frog have launched L. R. Series – our first online shop.

The brief was to create an online presence for L. R. Series’ land rover parts business with integrated checkout and live payment processing. Due to their existing eBay presence Paypal Payments Pro was the prefered payment gateway.

Integrating Paypal wasn’t as simple as I had expected it to be. Firstly there was a requirement from Paypal that you offer their Paypal Express Checkout in addition to their live card payment option. This to me was a crap requirement – but because Paypal are a cheaper gateway in reality you are paying them by giving them free advertising on your website as well as helping them gain a stranglehold on the market ahead of the likes of google.

There was then confusion on my part over which system we were integrating with – it turned out that the USA and UK systems were completely separate, and that the UK one had been bought from Verisign. Support for the UK product wasn’t brilliant, particularly as it was all based in the USA plus the documentation seemed to only reference the UK docs as a footnote.

The USA system has a fantastic test environment where you can create your own test accounts etc, the UK one has only a selection of pre-defined accounts. This became a problem when we needed to test with non-ASCII characters – e.g. European customers with accents in their names. I contacted Paypal asking if they had a demo account with such characters – they didn’t and nor were they willing/able to create one so our poor European customers had garbled text in their address labels for a time.

… oh, and did I mention that behaviour differs between the live and test systems – e.g. during express checkout the redirect back to your site passes ‘payerid’ in test; ‘PayerID’ in live. Great fun.

Anyway, we got there in the end. Paypal is the first payment gateway I have integrated with and my first impressions aren’t great, however we have now overcome the hurdles so we know exactly what to do next time.

I would like to try something like Google Checkout on my next project if they don’t already have an encumbent supplier, or ideally use their own merchant account with their bank if they can afford the transaction costs.