DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

The last batch of MS security updates, updated the Microsoft XML libraries (MSXML). In fixing whatever security flaw they found, they broke DVDFolks usage of them. Since I’m not even close to being an expert on MSXML (my usage of it was copy/pasted from somewhere several years ago) I’ve fixed DVDFolks by simply not using it anymore.

Internally, DVDFolks constructs the XML to be passed to DVD Profiler as a single long line of text. At the end of processing, this is displayed to the user. Since a single long line of text doesn’t look very nice, DVDFolks used MSXML to prettify the text displayed – e.g.

<a><b><c>foo</c></b></a>  //xml as constructed by DVDFolks

<a>
  <b>
    <c>foo</c>   //xml made pretty for the screen
  </b>
</a>

By disabling MSXML, DVDFolks is left with the single long line – just as effective, just not as pretty.

Was about to get on Metropolitan line train from Liverpool Street this morning when I saw the car had a pigeon in it. Took me a moment to understand that I really was seeing a pigeon inside the tube.

I hate pigeons (especially ones that are liable to start getting confused when they can’t find their way out of a moving train), so I moved down the platform and got into the next car.

Weird.

Personal
1) Release DVD Profiler Companion 0.35

Work
1) Finish tweaking design of new-look e-shop.
2) Add checking of membership information to ‘members-discount-checkout’ for said e-shop.
3) Work out how exactly how I’m going to implement a ‘Student Learning Zone’ thats been in low-level planning (’we want’) for 18 months by mid-November (project budget = £0).
4) Start implementing what I planned in (3).

I want a car. I ordered a car.

I want to live in London, so I can spend less time travelling to work, and spend less money travelling to work.

I don’t have enough money to do both.

So I cancelled my car last week. Having done hours of research on the car I want, had refresher driving lessons, and having waited a very long 10 weeks after ordering it I told the dealer I don’t want it anymore.

Except I do want it. I just want a flat in London even more. Sigh.

Last week, I started my new job. Not as soon as I’d have liked, but better late than never!

My 1st week went like this:

Monday: Started at 10am, got introduced to about 30 people. Promptly forgot the names of 25 of them. Was given a quick overview of the website, and the back-end processes, and left to it. Discovered that my department consists of 2 men (my boss’s boss who has his own office, and myself) and 11 women. The male/female ratio in my old job was pretty much the reverse.

Tuesday: Had a couple of one-to-one meetings with people telling me what they do. This allowed me to remember 2 more names. Started work sanitising navigation on the site. Shared a tube train part of the way home with a colleague, which allowed us to get to know each other a lot better.

Wednesday: Couple more one-to-one meetings, and meeting a couple of people who had been off Monday and Tuesday. Found the most recent invoice for web hosting services, and had to read it twice because of the outrageous prices being charged.

Thursday: Another meeting, another name. Got throughly fed up with the CMS software being used. Every change must be pushed live afterwards, but if you look at the preview and want to change something, you either have to publish->quickly edit the screwed up page or delete the pending change competely and start over with the currently published page. Got shown the fire exits.

Friday: Finished sanitising the navigation, started looking into options for online payment processing and went out drinking with 7 of my female colleagues and an ex-colleague of theirs (also female). Not been alone with that many merry ladies before. Left most of them in the pub around 8.30, but not before (personally) drinking a bottle’s-worth of overpriced wine. I now know them a whole lot better than I did before. Tried to take a photo before I left, but the flash on my mobile is apparently useless. The pic below has been heavily processed from the original 3 megapixel image, and is the best I can make it!