Month: January 2009

It’s that time of year again

A few years ago now four of us decided that we’d get to together for a weekend of chatting and drinking. Now as all of us are married its awkward but Nick and I had an idea. We have a boat so why not go to the boat and do it there.

For a couple of years we did it at Upton upon Severn when the boat was moored at the marina there. However we got a bit bored with the River Severn, the scenery is not particularily exciting and really apart from Worcester or Gloucester or Tewkesbury there isn’t really anywhere to go for a weekend. Add to that the lack of moorings on the river and its habit of flooding and you can understand why we moved it. We headed north a couple of years ago, and boy are we glad we did because we got out of Upton before it flooded. Although I think we will all miss the really good pubs and Pundit’s Indian Restaurant.

So the boat is now moored at Market Drayton and this coming weekend we’re going there for our second Market Drayton Pub Crawl. Nick and I are heading up on Friday night and on Saturday morning we’re taking the boat out for a quick run and a pumpout and a new gas bottle and refilling its water tank. We’ve also got a new fridge which we want to check will work with the Batteries and inverter set up we currently have. Then round about opening time Neil and Jon will be joining us and we’ll probably head off to The Talbot for a couple of beers and lunch (they did very good pies last year) and then’ll we’ll wander off into town, probably spending some time at the Red Lion which does a very good pint of Salopian Shropshire Gold.

We’ll fit a curry into the evening somewhere and wander back to the boat for coffee and more chat before collapsing into bed.

Sunday morning will be lazy before a breakfasty brunchy thing and then we’ll all head off home.

Pub Night

Pub Night is a website that I set up for a group of friends who go out drinking once a week in Cheltenham. We’ve been doing it for years and a few years ago now Nick and I came up with the idea of building a website for it. I went for a Wiki based site but because we wanted “standard” information for each pub I built a rather large extension for it which basically allows us to use Data pages to hold the information on the pub and then for each pub we have a simple page which contains some tags which allow us to display the information in a controlled format.

Pub Night is primarily based in Cheltenham but has details on some pubs outside of the town, primarily in Gloucester,  London,  Upton upon Severn and Market Drayton.

There is also a sub group of Pub Night called Out Of Town Pub Night Group (or OOTPNG for short) which once a month goes to a good pub within a reasonable driving distance of town. The venues and drivers and approximate dates had been decided and I went to load them into the system so I could put up a page with the 2009 locations. That is where the problems began. The code that drives pub night talks directly to the database behind the wiki which means that information on pubs normally comes out in the order the pubs were added into the database. To support the new page I added two new fields to the data set – nextvisit and driver. But I wanted to sort the information on the nextdate. So I’ve had to go in a recode how the “where” part of the extension works so that rather than just trawling through the pubs in turn and if they match the criteria displaying the information I now go through the pubs once and grab a “sort” field from the data (if specified) and then I sort the list of pubs on that and then process each one in turn to get the information. Sounds easy doesn’t it?

Well it is when you are dealing with text fields because you can simply build the array with the Digraph and the “sort” field and then use the php functions asort and arsort. Date fields are another matter entirely. Pub Night stores its dates in dd/mm/yyyy format which do not sort. PHP has a strtotime function which converts “human” date formats into unix timestamps. Those we can sort easily so problem solved. Afraid not because strtotime doesn’t like dd/mm/yyyy. So I had to us the php mktime function to parse the PN date format into something I could then pass into strtotime to get the timestamp and now its all working.

Now all I have to do is fix the problem with null dates which upset it (silently, they just spew errors into the error log!)

Eli Stone

When Eli Stone first aired on Sci-Fi neither Kathy or I really showed any interest in it for some reason or another, maybe we weren’t in the mood or something else was on TV at the same time.

But this past week Sci-Fi has been re-running Series One as a precursor to airing Series Two which starts next week and we’ve been watching it and I have to say that its actually quite good and I think that the person who decided to commission the series went out on a bit of a limb. Its whole premise is different and the show is quite light hearted in places with some wonderful lines and nice little set pieces but at the same time it actually can be quite serious.

I have been doing other things too, no honestly I have

I’ve finally properly released my Last.FM Widgets Plugin for WordPress which is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time and I’m going to try to actively develop it because there are a few things that I had to fudge to get it working properly which could do with tidying up.

I’ve also been coding more bits of the Canalplan integration project and I’m hoping to get some of that released into the wild soon but some of that depends on Nick and his changes to his Database structures.

I’ve upgraded the Pub Night Council Web Site to the latest version of the Wikimedia software. This meant revisiting the code that drives all the added functionality because of the way Wikimedia changed how the parser has to be called which really wasn’t helpful but hopefully they wont change it again.