Peterbe.com

Today I'm leaving for China, Fujian province. I'm going to stay in China till early next year. This is a kung fu training holiday with my club

I'm back on the 3rd of Jan and won't be posting much to my site but do expect some really exciting photos in the near future!

Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year!!

Do you love Emacs (or Jed) and you have a Palm PDA or a Treo 650 or something else cool that runs Palm OS; then you're in luck: install pssh

pssh is a SSH client for Palm OS that makes it possible to log in to a server running a SSH daemon and obviously the server will have Emacs.

Haven't had the time to install it myself yet but I will I hope. The only problem for me is that I don't have a WiFi card for my Treo so I'll have to try this stuff via GPRS which sucks.

FogGreek is putting together some sort of management training course and Joel has put up a reading list for the course. They're all either technical computer or modern management books that new-age web entrepreneurs should read.

Of all those books I've only read five but I recognize almost half of them.

Here are the ones I've read:

It's a shame they've missed out on Maverick! (or at least The Seven Day Weekend) by Ricardo Semler but it pleases me that he skipped the micro$oft propaganda book Joel on software

Since I always forget how to do this and have to reside to testing back and forth or to open a book I will now post an example patch that alters a table; correctly. Perhaps this is done differently in Oracle, MySQL, etc. but in PostgreSQL 7.4 you can't add a new column and set its default and constraints in the same command. You have to do that separately for it to work and most likely you'll have to run a normal update once the column has been added.

Just doing:

ALTER TABLE users ADD mobile VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '';

...won't work and you'll get an error.

Is this geeky, trendy or just practical?

"Well, as soon as I saw the Mac SE case, I realized that this one had the most potential. So this weekend, I bought a few things at Home Depot and got started making my Apple-powered, wireless, portable toilet paper dispenser

the iWipe."

I don't really need a toilet paper holder but we do need a spice rack/shelve in the kitchen and I have an old medium towered PC box that one might turn into something. Perhaps a rectangular flower pot?

I stumbled across this at work the yesterday and I'm still not sure what it should be. This is how I found it written by our Britain-born client:

If your e-mail address or mobile number have changed since the last time, please let us know.

Does that sound right? Or more important, is it correct even if it doesn't sound right? How about:

If your e-mail address or mobile number has changed since the last time, please let us know.

It could be that both e-mail address and mobile number are now different. Therefore both of these things have changed. However, it's unlikely in general that either change. It's then also extremely unlikely that both have changed. In most cases, if there is a change, there is only one change.

I just finished reading DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith to learn more about how to use the DOM (Document Object Model) to manipulate web content with JavaScript. The book teaches you how to write JavaScripts to create, change and animate content with scripts using document.createElement and stuff. The book starts with refresher on JavaScript which I must confess to reading much faster than I'm able to. However, it did explain the importance of declaring variables with var and why it matters well.

After chapter 4, you've been taught more or less everything there is to know about the DOM and the rest of the book is just big and explained exercises that iterate the importance of separating Structure (XHTML), Presentation (CSS), Behaviour (JavaScript) with examples and code from all three disciplines. By the way, don't worry when I say "exercises". You can read the book in the bath tub without having to do step-by-step exercises; Jeremy does all of that for you in the book.

When I can't remember the URL site I just search for it quickly in Firefox which is quicker than trying to remember the address. Today I needed to go to "Google Groups"n:http://groups.google.com/ but couldn't remember the address, so I searched for it on Google

Guess which site came up first?! Not Google, but their main competitor Yahoo! I guess this just gives Google more kudos because their indexes aren't tainted in their favour.

I love del.icio.us and use it on a daily basis. Today I had a quick look at the source code (HTML source) of the posting page and found a very funny style tag:

<div style="clear:both; height:1px; 
font-size:0; line-height:0; ie-sucks:yes"></div>

This is only funny if you're a web developer. Keep up the good work del.icio.us people!

Had a quick play with Yahoo!'s Inbound Links API today. You use their web services API to check which other URLs a URL is linked to from. This can come in handy if you want to know which other sites make a link to your article. Googleblog is using this (obviously not by using the Yahoo! API); look at this blog post for example and scroll to the end of the text.

The inspiration came from Fredrik Lundh's term extraction example that I'm actually now use in a production site. So I basically took Fredriks code and modified it for Inbound Links.