DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

I finally started work on this a week ago (Christmas Eve), and am making fairly rapid progress. Milestones to date:

24 Dec: Started Work
26 Dec: Finished mapping major relationships between DVD Profiler skin HTML and DVD Profiler’s generated HTML for display. 1900 lines of code were needed to do this.
27 Dec: Documented work, and perfomed further investigation into some corner cases.
29 Dec: Factored out some shared code – now ‘only’ 1500 lines.
31 Dec: First successful generation of complete standalone HTML file.

Shortly before Xmas I received a copy of Maxim. Having now got round to opening it up, I find that it’s the Feb 2006 issue. December I get. January would also be understandable, since that’s the main month the issue will actually be on sale.

Febuary?

I learnt HTML by reading the HTML specification.
I learnt CSS by reading the CSS specification.
I read the XSLT and XPath specifications, and got nothing more than a headache.

HTML is big on the web.
CSS is big on the web.
XSLT and XPath are not. Now I know why.

Happy Holidays (especially to these lucky snowmen!)

As compiled by disasters expert Professor Bill McGuire of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre for Channel 4 News

1. Gulf stream collapse – probable.
2. Flu pandemic – certain.
3. South east flood defence failure – possible.
4. Sea-level rise – probable.
5. Major Thames Valley windstorm – probable.
6. Strategic earthquake – probable.
7. Climate-perturbing volcanic eruption – certain.
8. South coast tsunami – possible.
9. Sellafield explosion and fall-out – possible.
10. Terrorist detonation of 1kt nuclear device in London – possible.

A south coast tsunami? 2 nuclear disasters? Major flooding of London? Someone’s after some publicity methinks…

Via Gawker

Anyone else see anything unnatural there?

Good? Bad? Love to know what you think.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sarah Zapolsky was checking in for a flight to Italy when she discovered her 9-month-old son’s name was on the United States’ “no-fly” list of suspected terrorists.

“We pointed down to the stroller, and he sat there and gurgled,” Zapolsky said, recalling the incident at Dulles International Airport outside Washington in July. “The desk agent started laughing. … She couldn’t print us out a boarding pass because he’s on the no-fly list.”

Zapolsky, who did not want her son’s name made public, said she was initially amused by the mix-up. “But when I found out you can’t actually get off the list, I started to get a bit annoyed.”

Yahoo News

I’ve only just recovered (although I did work Wednesday 6am-2pm, party 9pm-3am, and work again Thursday from 6am-2pm, all without any sleep).

On the way to Eros Nightclub, the coach had to stop at Harold Hill to pick up more partygoers (turned out to be only 1 person from that store!). Whilst we were waiting, some kids set a car on fire in the alley opposite. 6 fire engines came to put it out. Must have been a slow night or something for the fire department.

Once there a good time was had by almost everyone I know. Bala didn’t drink, and had a miserable time. Not sure why he went. Babu and Annaliese also didn’t drink, but seemed to have a fairly good time. Leanne and Emily were both sick and couldn’t make it – Emily had been really looking foward to it as well.

Stewart and Sid bought me some £15 drink whose name I can’t remember comprised of various shots (Silver something). It had a nasty kickback, although I think that was idea.

Becky was completely mashed all night, and kept grabbing me and dragging me places (she’s bigger than me!). Being the life/soul of the party is a side of Becky I’ve not seen before. Someone else having a great time was Scott – he had boys and girls after him all night!

Fairly predictably, just about everyone made an effort to look good (working in a burger resturant limits your normal options). Sid, Helen, Rachel and Kirsty especially.

Mo who finds everything funny anyway, was often in hysterics – sometimes for good reason (Tom asking Kirsty for her phone number, getting it and then watching her snog some other guy for the rest of the night), sometimes for no reason whatsoever (me giving Rachel a friendly kiss). Mickey was often the cause – he spent half the night on the slots, and half the night trying to dance with girls who rapidly moved away.

Some pics stolen from the nightclub website below. I know at least one non-nightclub-staff person was taking photos, so I might have some more in a couple of days.

Annaliese, Dan and Allison

Becky and someone I don’t know

Tanveer and Tom

Bala, Me (I think!), Scott, Mo and Helen

Becky surrounded by lots of random other people

There’s a stock shortage at work, because the main stock distribution centre is located 400yds from the fire. The entire UK is being supplied from 2 secondary warehouses, which are struggling to keep up. Deliverys are being capped, non-food items aren’t being delivered (cups, napkins etc), East Finchley (Head Office) have set up a ‘crisis centre’.

I also heard today from one of the delivery drivers, that the roof fell in on one of his mates in the canteen Sunday morning after the blast, so I don’t expect things to get back to normal very soon.

Oh yeah, and my boss’s boss’s boss is dropping by on Sunday morning to ‘have a chat’. Sunday mornings we struggle due to lack of staff, so this really isn’t going to help.

I’m currently in the early stages of a minor redesign for DougWeb. IE6 is holding me back with a collection of bugs I’ve never seen before, and hope never to see again once I’ve figured out the cause. Normally IE bugs take the form of let’s put this in a weird place. This can be dealt with by telling IE something ‘wrong’ that happens to create the intended effect. But not this time. A partial list of problems I’m encountering include:

1. Content not showing until you scroll past it, and back.
2. Backgrounds showing behind text, but not in the gaps between paragraphs
3. Any attempt to change the styling on a link when hovering over it, currently results in the entire page contents shifting down about 20,000px.

An example of the current IE crazyness is included below. Neither Firefox, Opera, Safari or Konquerer do anything remotely like this. But that’s not exactly a surprise…

At the beginning of the year, I had about 180 unwatched DVDs. I now have a mere 12 unwatched, despite buying 159 more so far this year. That’s pretty much a title/day despite the fact that an ever-growing percentage of my collection is comprised of multi-disc TV sets. It’s a sad fact that I watch more TV-on-DVD than TV-on-TV.

I’ve got copies of GTA San Andreas, Doom III, Quake IV and Civilisation IV all waiting for me to finish my backlog of DVDs. If I started a multi-week game of Civilisation before finishing my unwatched DVD pile, it’d probably double in size…

So – do you enjoy porn, or do you think that it’s bad?

How many of these images look pornographic to you?