Alex I know everything's transient, but transient's ok. For now... (Heading home against the commuters' flow) 1 week ago
Do you ever have one of those days when everything's happening so fast it's impossible to take enough mental notes to remember something for later? I've been having one of those days weeks months, and things are showing little sign of slowing down any time in the near future.
This week, I have mainly been updating vast swathes of webpages on UPSU's democracy, get involved and media pages; trying to do some housework in the form of the mass mails, some code changes, and a couple of news articles; attending the UPSU AGM (where was everybody?); trying to convince a stack of people that they *really* need to be a bit more open and honest about a situation which might or might not be building into a bigger situation*; and hearing how another situation which might have become a *really* big situation has been peacefully resolved (until the next time it happens, of course).
Meanwhile, in pixel-land, my notes pages are rapidly filling up with “blog entries I must do” notes, and the UPSU bugs list seems to be getting longer at the same speed my ever-increasing to-do list does now thanks to an upgrade to our database, plus Mike Cooter and Fraggy have just about finished the last ever issue of Pugwash (for this year, of course).
In amongst all this I'm trying to find a flat for next year. I went to see a lovely place today which looks beeyoooteeful. It's a bit small, and my bedroom wouldn't be big enough to kiss a cat in, let alone swing one. There's also a table and chairs which look suspiciously like they've been “acquired” from the Union, but I'll deal with that if and when I move in.
Still, it's all good fun. I worked a total of 32 hours in the first two days of this week, and my arms didn't drop off, so at least what my mum always told me – something about hard work not killing me – wasn't a lie after all. Dread to think how much caffeine and nicotine I took in during that period, though…..
Hope you're all having fun out there, and don't have nightmares :o)
Posted by Alex on Fri 11th May 2007
You know those days where you get comfy on the sofa and just, well, vegetate? I tend to do something similar at work – I just park up at the desk and start working through my Never Ending To Do List (TM). Ok, so it's not as relaxing, but I guess it helps to get things done.
Anyway, today started out with my first SAGA meeting. Not the over-50's holiday and insurance company, but the University's Students' Academic and General Affairs committee, which (according to the Uni website – I'm not claiming to know anything about anything here, naturally…) is the Board of Governors' main way of getting feedback on the matters that are affecting the students of Portsmouth, through the Union's Sabbatical officers.
SAGA also makes sure that the information fed back to them via. the Sabbs is properly listened to and actioned. To save me rambling even more than usual, you can find out more from this page on the interweb.
So why have I been annoying people then? Well, after coming back from SAGA with a long list of Really Important Things That I Must Do Right Now If Not Sooner, I had to go round trying to track down the various bits of information to complete these odd jobs.
Of course, pretty much everyone I asked was also up to their collective eyeballs in their own workloads, so I ended up feeling like I was going in circles and annoying people on the way, so my mantra for the next couple of days is going to have to be “stop being so bloody annoying”, otherwise I think I may lose my kneecaps…
Posted by Alex on Wed 9th May 2007
A quick festive Happy Christmas (or, if Christmas isn't something you celebrate, happy holidays) message from me. I'm sitting at the parents' house in Kent drinking tea and wandering around the vast expanse that is Flickrdotcom.
Of course, that means I'm bored. Very bored. I'm supposed to be off to a party in Essex later this evening, but having a shaved head and – rightly or wrongly – believing that my stubbly features could pass for “fashionable”, I don't have any getting ready to do beyond the usual shower, brushing of teeth and selection of clean underkeks.
So, I've been playing about with UPSU.net, but now I'm running out of “little things” to do – I've already sent out a mass mail saying nothing more than Happy Xmas (but it's quite pretty anyway), I've re-jigged the URLs to peoples' profiles (e.g. “upsu.net/people/alexh”) and squashed some bugs that have shown up from the fix, managed to separate the profile template from the forums template (when you viewed your profile, your page was using the same stylesheet as the forums, which was something I needed to change so I can start thinking about polishing up the user profiles pages soon), and posted some tumbleweed-attracting twaddle on the forums, also about me being bored. I think there's a common theme here…
I've got a couple of little tweaks … ok, major changes, to make to the news system, including some magic with image handling and simplifying/tidying up the layouts, but for now I'm off to plan what toys I'm going to buy for the Nano I'm hoping Santa's dropped into the Apple store to collect for me (I'll be writing a furious letter if he hasn't…).
Hope you all have a ridiculously fattening Crimbo, and a great Noo Year. I'll probably write some more twaddle on here at some point, but if you're still around to read it, I'd really advise getting some more interesting things to do with your hols… ;o)
/al
Posted by Alex on Sun 24th December 2006
I've just spotted a fairly major bug in my code, which seems to be affecting certain URLs on UPSU.net.
I reckon I can have it fixed for 5am, but I'm not 100% sure…
Sorry!
—
Update: 05:39 – it's fixed, with knobs on. Panic over, normality returns to the streets of Portsmouth. Small babies smile again. The sun's out, birds sing in the trees.
Or not – y'know, whatever…
Posted by Alex on Fri 17th November 2006
While I wait for my bedtime cup of hot chocolate to cool down (and yes, that really is the time), I just wanted to jot down a couple of little changes that almost no-one will notice, even fewer people will use, and that I'm fairly proud of regardless.
Goddamn I need to get me a life… Or take up knitting or something… ;o)
Buenos noches darlings! /al
Posted by Alex on Fri 10th November 2006
I know I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm getting bored of having a spam-bot trying to advertise websites offering videos and images of a certain, ahem, “type” of kinky activity. What's even worse is it seems to be happening more on one of my blog entries than anywhere else on the site – is it something I'm writing about? Something in my side bar's “about me” text? Whatever it is, I seem to be attracting this kinky, apparently Russian computer to my blog.
Still, it's nice to know someone's reading… ;o)
Anyway, as of tonight, I've finally got round to enforcing the no BB code and HTML rule in website comments – comments with some types of web address in them, or some types of BB code, will come back with an error message and explain what you're doing wrong (it's unlikely you'll accidentally put these codes into your comment, so most people should never see this error).
Some HTML and BB code won't trigger the spam filter – just the key words that seem to be turning up in all the spam bot posts, but I'll tweak this as and when things change – that way, we're not being too draconian with our rules, so pretty much all normal comments will still work, but my new best mate the Russian Spam-Bot (TM?) won't be able to tell us all what a wonderful website it's got to tell us about.
Anyway, if you're trying to post a comment on UPSU and come up against problems, please let me know here and I'll take a look into it. Promise :)
Right, I'm off to watch Hell's Kitchen USA (yup, it's a quiet night in… How sad…) and try and figure out how the hell I'm going to put my 120Gb hard disk in my MacBook Pro without deleting all my docs… It's going to be a late night.
Have a good weekend and wrap up warm, kids ;o) /al
Posted by Alex on Sat 4th November 2006
So the NUS Registration system has been online for about a week. 301 people have registered or updated their accounts, but naturally there have been a couple teething troubles which I'm working through now.
I currently can't reproduce a problem where some people are saying they're unable to enter any sign in names at all that are allowed, so I'm at a bit of a loss to suggest what they should do, or where to look in the code. Fingers crossed it's PEBKAC, but it'll probably be something horrifically complex knowing my luck ;o)
It looks like the cause of this is the registration system losing track of their account ID somewhere in the registration process. Again, this is probably something horrifically complex, but it's very odd that their ID – which should be set in their user cookie when they sign in (which they have to do to upgrade an existing account) is suddenly unavailable. I can only assume (at his point) that they are being signed out at some point during the registration process.
The two problems are a bit odd, but hopefully we'll get around them. If you've been affected by these problems, or any other with the registration process, I'm very sorry – please post a comment below detailing what's gone wrong. I won't publish them, but I will look into them (so please leave a contact e-mail address), or you can e-mail us the normal way from this webpage.
Posted by Alex on Thu 7th September 2006
Let's see if the multiple-entries-on-one-day code is working shall we?
Posted by Alex on Mon 12th June 2006
I'm still having problems working out why only admins can post comments. It also seems that the person who wrote the commenting system (which is part of an open source project) is stumped by this problem.
The comments system is a very important one in my eyes because it means everyone can voice their opinion on a subject on the same page, instead of talking about it in the forums (although there's a good argument that drawing people into the forums isn't such a bad thing, either).
Mind you, I *think* I've just found out what might be wrong here, so I'm off to try a few things over a cup of tea… Update: didn't work – bugger!
Posted by Alex on Thu 2nd February 2006