Fantata

Sunday, 30 November 2008

A first for me

I got called a Paki last night outside a bar in Hampshire. To give some context, I'm a middle-class white man from Norfolk.

I didn't really know how to react. Me and my mate George (also white) were just baffled to be honest, as we walked outside the bar for a smoke and the ignorant scum-boy started to quiz us - "not being funny mate, but does your uncle own a corner shop?". No, not being funny, thats the single part of your sentence that made any sense.

Racial inaccuracies aside, I would have genuinely liked to have known what reason he thought he had for instigating confrontation from a distance of 10 yards purely based on someones skin pigmentation. Unfortunately, I judged that this particular chap and his gang of giggling fuckwits weren't really up for some analysis of the issues at hand, or really a friendly chat.

I'm lucky, I don't really witness racism that often, and when I do it's usually in the form of ignorant old men in pubs who have never left Norfolk, and are scared by anything remotely unusual ("sponge pudding, on a Wednesday?! you're starting to make me uncomfortable Mary."). I've certainly never been on the receiving end of it, and I can tell you I didn't much enjoy it.

I really would have loved to be equipped enough physically (or have useful fighting super-powers) to have taken him on and tried to find out exactly how the crazy fuckers mind works. But I'm not, so we took the moral high ground and walked off, a bit confused as to what had just happened.

Friday, 28 November 2008

New UK VAT Calculation - 17.5% to 15%

This is as much for my memory as anything else, but I'm sure there are one or two of you out there having to tweak a load of code for the VAT change (Thanks Darling).

Old Calc = Gross * 7 / 47 = VAT amount
New Clac = Gross * 3 / 23 = VAT amount

Tuesday, 2 September 2008

Google Chrome is here!

The new browser from google is here...if you have a Windows PC running XP SP2 or higher.
A Mac and Linux version on the way soon. Boo you Google :(

If you have a smelly Windows PC, you can download it here

Monday, 1 September 2008

DIE, DIE...

...IE6! For you have long been the bain of my life.

I wish that I could turn my back on IE6, as most web dev's do. I'm pleased there's lots of chatter at the minute about stopping support for it.

I like this a lot The Ultimate way to stop supporting IE6 and clearly web professionals are pretty much in agreement.

But sadly for me, and a lot of transactional sites, we simply cannot afford to be turning away customers, and yes, I do appreciate some people have computers so old that they can't upgrade. It's easy to say they SHOULD, but people have different priorities and means in life.

I checked our logs today and a massive 46% of our traffic is IE6 - although people do suggest that a lot of bots use the IE6 agent, so I need to have a look at that, because 46% is depressingly high.

I long for the day I can stop hacking my lovely designs about. I'm off to dance around a burning big blue e.

Start and stop mysql on OSX

If you want to start MySql in Leopard, you need to call the startup item directly from the command line:

sudo /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM start

And to stop it:

sudo /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM stop

Monday, 11 August 2008

Extract a specific file from tar archive

If gzipped, first run gunzip {filename}.tar.gz Then...

tar --extract --file={filename}.tar {file(s) to extract}

HOW TO: list files within a gzipped tar

tar -tzf file.tar.gz

-t: lists files
-f: instructs tar to deal with the following filename (file.tar.gz)
-z: informs tar that the it's dealing with a gzip file (-j if it's bzip2)