lazygnome - A big jumble of words

My Rant

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:42:03 +0000

It's been ages since I last did anything here. And I find that I have little time for blog updating.

That said, I've started a new site over here myrant.net.

It's not to replace this site, more of a quick place for me to keep my semi-rants that are longer than twitter can cope with.

My intention is that anybody can register and post their rants, though I've not had any takers yet.

Peace out!

Brand new specs

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:06:38 +0000

It's hard to believe, but it's been 2 years since I 1st donned these prescription specs.

Now, I have a new prescription and 2 new pairs of glasses. Having a deeper frame will allow me to start using them for night time driving.

I took a photo, I look fat:

~~No photo just yet, but~~ here's an image for the time being:

Snow in Malvern, who'd have thunk it?

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:19:03 +0000

As I haven't posted anything here for a while, why not enjoy some wintery photos from my flickr account.

I think that my fave has to be:

Police car slides into Great Malvern Post Office

Select the last word in a string with MySQL

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:53:21 +0000

Following on from last month's Select the 1st letter of the last word in MySQL, I then needed a way to select the last word from string (or column).

SELECT REVERSE(LEFT(REVERSE('Iain Cuthbertson'), LOCATE(' ', REVERSE('Iain Cuthbertson')) -1));

Now I can sort rows by surname when the full name is in just one cell!

Fixing Ordered Lists in IE6

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:29:07 +0000

IE6, oh how you destroy my will to code.

1st Problem:
List item numbers dissapear in IE6.

Solution:

ol { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
ol li { margin: 0 2em 0 2.5em; padding: 0 }

2nd Problem:
List item numbers are all set to 1.

Solution:

ol li { zoom: 0; }

Select the 1st letter of the last word in MySQL

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:45:15 +0000

I recently had a need to select the 1st letter of the last word in a stored field.
This is my 10min stumbling result:

select SUBSTRING(REVERSE('Iain Cuthbertson'), LOCATE(' ', REVERSE('Iain Cuthbertson')) - 1, 1) as result;

MySQL only code I'm afraid folks.

the experiment

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:30:32 +0000

I've mentioned this on Facebook and Twitter, I guess I should say something here as well.

Every now and then, I forget to shave. Sometimes I can forget to shave for several weeks in a row.

The most recent forgetting to shave lasted 4-5 weeks!
In an effort to look a little more human, I made the effort to shave on Sunday morning.

It's not that often that you get to try out a selection of different facial hair styles, so I took the chance to play around:

Click for the full series!

Note to self

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:09:52 +0000

Create amazing new blog with symfony.
Measure and cost tiling area around bath so a proper shower can be fitted.
Figure out where workstation will go in own bedroom if 2nd bedroom is to be sub-let.

With regard to blog: what to do with old entries? allow commenting? look for a designer?

Trim whitespace from the beging and end of a string in javascript

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 12:33:03 +0000

var elm = document.getElementById('foo');
elm.value = elm.value.replace(/(^\s+|\s+$)/g, '');

Sorting arrays of SimpleXML objects

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 17:55:47 +0000

This is how I've tackeled the problem of changing the order of some SimpleXML objects.

Adding an attribute to the top level of an object can add as the position reference.
So Passing an array of SimpleXML objects to the following function will return the same array of objects, but reordered by the $key attribute.

[Edited 26th Feb 2008]

See PHP.net SimpleXML for the dataset used.

Adding 'pos="#"' to each element will allow for reordering.

An example usage would be:

$sorted_xml = xmlSort($xml->movie, 'pos');