By the looks of things there is a bug in the Planet software that HantsLUG is using. I’ve just been tidying up my posts to ensure that my HTML is correct. The fact that each individual entry is then stitched together left me with a few teething problems unfortunately.
Anyway, all is now working fine, but in the process I had to escape some sections of quoted HTML. This left me with a whole load of < and > characters converted to < and > entries in there. This is fine except when it occurs in the title line of the RSS feed that Planet works with. In this case the first & of the escape secuence is escaped itself, so you end up with < and > actually showing up in the text because the first & has been replaced by & (and you should see how this entry looks in raw HTML!).
Daft subject? Maybe, but one more reason why Windows is clearly not ready for the desktop yet! I’ve spent good chunk of today trying to install 3 Hewlett Packard network printers onto a Windows XP Professional installation. This is a clean install of the OS, so shouldn’t be far away from pristine condition.
It should be easy, especially with the Install Network Printer Wizard that HP provide. This scans the network to identify any printers available and will then configure and install all the necessary settings. Well it will if it doesn’t get to the last stage and then decide that it has an unknown error and back out the whole operation. This happens every single time it is used on all three network printers.
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Yesterday I got a lovely letter through from the Inland Revenue regarding my PAYE and NIC contributions and talking about ways and means to avoid ‘recovery proceedings’. This worried me a little to say the least so I phoned them up to find out what was going on. The person at the other end of the phone started asking about how I filed my P35 and when, so it was on to the accountants next. This resulted in a bit of slightly frustrated explanation from the accountants.
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I’ve just had a bit of fun hunting around to remind my self of this very handy URL for working with the Firefox configuration, so thought I’d post it here so I can access it easily. – about:config – just type that into the location and off you go. I’d post it as a link, but it doesn’t work when I do that 
Actually this gives me a good idea. I have a whole raft of text documents sitting around waiting for me to experiment with a Wiki for long enough to define a structure and migrate them into it for reference. Blosxom could actually act as either a very quick and handy stop-gap or possibly a excellent alternative to this! Since it basically works by turning a directory structure of .txt documents into a Blog all I need to do is categorise the .txt files into directories and add a first line matching a subject and Blosxom will handle the rest.
OK, just need about and hour spare an I can do that 
OK, I succumbed and did the Which dot dot dot? quizes. Not sure about some of the results though!
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I’ve been clearing a few things out of the study over the past few days, well study may be a bit of a grand name for it, but I tend to use it rather than office. There’s two reasons for that, firstly there’s the fact that I can’t have a dedicated office for work at home otherwise it is liable for business taxes. Secondly there’s the practical reason that it hasn’t always been an office and isn’t really one now – there’s way too many non-work bits in there. Books of all sorts (sailing, photography, cetaceans, fiction, etc., not just computing), and lots of old retro computing bits (more magazines as well as the machines and software).
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My first ever computer was a ZX81 bought for me on my 13th birthday. I never upgraded it in any form and only ever had the tapes that came with the computer (so none of the dreaded ‘RAM pack wobbles’ for me!). I had that machine for about a year before selling it and having a painful time without a computer whilst waiting for my Spectrum to arrive. The only thing my ZX81 ever got used for was writing my own programs or typing in listings from magazines. While I was waiting for my Spectrum I wrote a Pacman style game for it, and since I didn’t have any manuals for it yet I used the list of commands on the back of the brochure and listings in Your Computer magazine to work out what the commands did and their syntax (needless to say it didn’t work right away!). All that programming was great fun and probably most of what I used my computers for. I did have a good number of games for my Spectrum too (obviously!), but programming was always more fun.
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Last year while I was working on the sailing club work party to get the compound ready for the cruisers to lay-up ashore somebodies rudder managed to separate into two pieces as I was carrying it. Unfortunately the steel toe capped boots that I had been wearing had seriously leaky soles to them, and since it was raining and there were plenty of puddles around I had decided to swap them for my sailing boots in the interest of keeping my feet dry. Even more unfortunately my big toe was in the exact spot the heavy bit of the rudder had chosen to land.
Now, about a year on and the black area of my nail has just about gone, so in commemoration of the event I decided that it would be fitting to shut my thumb in the car door (OK, I didn’t decide, it just happened while I wasn’t concentrating!). Hopefully it won’t be another year before the black bit in my thumb goes. So long as I can tie up my shoe laces more easily pretty soon I will be happy – for now all I can say is ‘ouch’!
Just noted this link Windows Vista product editions revealed on the ALUG list. Is it wishful thinking that this is likely to cause enough confusion and dissatisfaction for people to start looking more seriously at the alternatives to Windows on the desktop?
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It’s been a long while since I’ve managed to do any decent sailing, and a quick jaunt down harbour and back doesn’t constitute a major outing, but yesterdays did have its compensations. About half way down the channel between Tudor and Salterns I noticed the telltale signs of seals basking on the mudbank on the Farlington Marshes side of the channel. I did do a double take, because although I have seen seal heads in the water and heard of seals in the area I have only seen them in this manner up on the Isle of Mull and on the Moray Firth. The shape, though, is quite distinctive once you’ve tuned into it – much like the sight of dolphins swimming becomes something you pattern match automatically once you’ve done it a few times Anyway, these three looked like parents and a juvenile, and stayed there basking in their ‘banana bow’ position while we punched the tide past them and down past Sword Point. As we got further way they could easily have been mistaken for six large gulls since the tide covered the lower middle section of them leaving just the head and tail sticking out at each end.
So not only nice to be out on the water, but a pleasant surprise in the wildlife watching department too
OK, so this is my first blog entry. I’ve just thrown together a very quick Blosxom based weblog system. It looks quite nice and suits my way of thinking, and should even integrate very nicely with the other scripts I am using and hope to develop
All things being well I should add a few entries here once in a while, although past records may well indicate that it will die a horrible death due to neglect 
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