It's getting crowded... welcome to my 3rd reader!

In a breath-taking development, this blog has increased its reader base by 50%. Yes, I now have THREE regular readers. The new subscriber shall remain anonmyous, but let's refer to him as "Monkey-Boy" for now. I look forward to his witty comments and informed opinion, as I hack away at the dross that makes up 95% of our culture.

This evening I shall touch briefly on 3 topical issues:

1) The Russell Brand / Jonathan Ross phone call to Andrew Sachs (read about it here if you haven't already done so). I'm disgusted by this, not just the fact that it was aired on the BBC, but the fact that some people could find such an escapade to be funny. Why do we pay over £100 every year to line the pockets of such big-headed idiots as Ross and Brand? Is this really the best they could do? Or were they both drunk / and or / high on drugs when they did it? I suggest that a satisfactory course of action would be for both the presenters to make sizeable donations to a charity of Mr Sachs' choice. I'd like to think that they might get sacked, but if they're the best, what kind of muppets would they be replaced with?!

2) The Credit Crunch: The Pound Shop on the London Road has gone bust. Now that IS worrying, especially as I was planning to do my Christmas shopping there. The Bed Centre on Queens Road has also closed, and some shops have started charging 5p for a plastic bag, should you wish to shun the recent social convention of walking around with your purchases on public display. The good news is that petrol is once again at an offordable price (94.9p a litre in Uckfield!), which means that the Bentley is out of the garage for the first time this year. Hurrah!

3) The Stamford Twenty/20 cricket matches. "It's not about the money" opined Kevin Pietersen, but as each of the players stands to make £550,000 for 4 hours' work, it's hard to imagine what else this cricket match might be about. Fair play, perhaps? Or avoiding "the crunch"?

Dell smell ! Or do they...?

In my role as Chief IT Monkey, yesterday I got to order a new Dell server to run ColdFusion 8. Buying hardware from a third party is always a bit of a tough decision for me, as I have a natural inclination towards building systems myself, so that I know exactly what's gone into each one. However, the nice thing about buying from Dell is that if the thing goes wrong, you can have an engineer on-site within a matter of hours. The other good thing is that from what I've seen, Dells don't go wrong very often!

The Dell website is a never-ending source of irritation. If the server isn't too busy, you can peruse a fine selection of machines, all at seemingly low prices. Take the basic T100 server that we bought yesterday - advertised as being "from £219". Click on "customise" - and the price starts to go up very, very quickly. Want a decent processor? Add £100. Want more than 1GB of RAM? That'll cost you. Want a floppy drive? Backup solution? Network card? Optical drive? By the time you've added everything you need, the price has gone up to £1,321 + VAT. This is true of all the Dell systems I've seen - by the time you've added the basics (like a processor, case, mouse, etc. - the bits that make it work), the price has trebled. They really ought to just say "from £800-odd" rather than the mis-leading £219 figure, which would pretty much just buy you an empty box with a 1-year warranty.

The server isn't too bad really, but I costed the parts and could have built it myself around £600 cheaper, minus the operating system. We stipulated that we need it here by the end of this week, and the official delivery date on the system is October 9th, so we might have cause for complaint unless they get a move on.

I managed to avoid the hard-sell from the Dell sales person, who was incredulous that I didn't want a RAID setup, or any backup software. "So... just the one hard disk? Are you sure, sir? If that disk should go wrong...". The trouble with RAID setups is that once they're installed and working, you forget about them. If one of the disks fails a year down the line, you'll have a hard job finding an exact replacement, as new disk models are coming out all the time. If you go RAID, make sure you buy a redundant hot-swap spare, and leave it inside the case - meaning you'll need to buy 3 hard disks as a minimum. We've opted for a 15k RPM SATA drive, which should shift the data at a fair rate of knots, and our in-house backup system provides entire disk images in case of failure. Let's hope Dell deliver a decent server!

Bowls update

Just to keep you updated with what I've been up to, I'm happy to report that I've had a very successful and enjoyable summer of bowls. Despite all this manky weather (which I think was more gloom than rain, as the number of cancelled games was actually very low), I've had a great time. It's been the first season since 2001 that I haven't changed my bowls halfway through (usually out of boredom and/or frustration), and the results speak for themselves. I promised myself in April that I'd play a whole season with the same set of bowls, and see what happens - as it turns out, I've won two club competitions at Lindfield, had a Middleton Cup trial and five Home Counties games for Sussex, won Division 2 of the Brighton League, won Lindfield's Australian Pairs tournament, and lost by 1 shot on an extra end in the Tom Francis Cup final. Along the way I've beaten some of the top players in the county, which is particularly satisfying.
My final competitive tally for the season is: played 72, won 50, drew 1, lost 21.
I'm happy with that :)
After a 2-day off season, I'm now bowling indoors, and start the serious stuff this weekend, with a county trial at Newhaven. Phew! I need a holiday.

Smoothie again

For both my regular readers, you'll remember that I raved and waxed lyrical about the joys of the Kenwood Smoothie Junior. That is, until it broke last week. I've used it so much since I bought it, that I've worn it out. I considered sending it back, or claiming under the guarantee, but I've been fundamentally annoyed with it for some time, because it's so darn hard to clean. Separating the jug from the base requires almost super-human strength, and the tap clogs up within days of use.

So, cue a trip to Haywards Heath's finest shops (apologies for the sarcasm). After examining several possible replacements, I found the Kenwood "Smoothie 2 Go" in Sainsbury's. This cheaper solution has one massive advantage over traditional blenders and smoothie makers - it unscrews at the base by default. Meaning, you don't need to rely on soaking and toothbrushes to clean the blades - the blade section screws directly into the shatter-proof travel mug each time you make a smoothie, so the blades will get a clean on a daily basis. I used it for the first time this morning, and was impressed by the build quality, and the quiet operation. The motor is less powerful than the Junior model, but due to the smaller jug size, it doesn't feel like anything's missing. The fact that you get two travel mugs, both with lids, means you can whip up a smoothie and drink it "on the go" - ideal for busy executives (and me).

The Black Seeds

A friend of a friend of a friend recommended a New Zealand reggae band called The Black Seeds. I was a bit dubious at first, but I can honestly say that they're fantastic. They toured the UK a couple of months ago, and sadly their Brighton gig at the Komedia was cancelled at the last minute.

Anyway, check out my favourite song!

De-mystifying SQL Update Triggers

I've been looking at the murky world of SQL Server 2000 Update triggers recently, and none of it's as straightforward as I'd imagined. There seems to be unnecessary confusion around the columns_updated() function, which is all explained brilliantly in this article. I realised where I was going wrong with my user update trigger - because the user table had so many columns, the standard "catch-all" function to see if anything had changed, only referenced the first eight columns of the table. This all runs at single bit level, so 8 pieces of data is all that will be calculated in a single reference to the columns_updated() function. Therefore this is fine for a database table with up to eight columns:

IF (substring(columns_updated(), 1, 1)) > 0
-- Do stuff...

However I needed four of these statements to include all the user columns:

IF (substring(columns_updated(), 1, 1)) > 0 OR (substring(columns_updated(), 2, 1)) > 0 OR (substring(columns_updated(), 3, 1)) > 0 OR (substring(columns_updated(), 4, 1)) > 0
-- Something has changed, therefore update the record...

Rather laborious, but preferable to checking each column's status separately. Do read the article, it's quite excellent, hats off to Andy Warren.

Auto-suggest without ColdFusion 8

I've been Googling on auto-suggest frameworks in ColdFusion, and EVERYONE assumes that you're using CF8. If you're maintaining an old site, and don't have the luxury of CF8, I can recommend this list of auto-suggest frameworks.

I had a good look at "mgBox", which is neat, but the data source aspect is a bit on the annoying side, being rather too verbose to seem elegant. I much prefer "Wick", which is easy to customise, and just uses a plain Javascript file as its data source. It only took a couple of hours to get it working with the .js file being generated from a SQL query via ColdFusion. All rather impressive! If you've seen any other frameworks that you like, then let me know.