We had a bit of a baby related scare this morning. So after a quick call to NHS Direct we rushed over to the Maternity unit at Heatherwood Hospital in Ascot.
The staff there were fantastic and quickly determined that baby was ok. They decided that to be on the safe side they would do another scan, and we were delighted to discover that it’s a girl!
There are also signs that the ‘Echogenic Bowel‘ which was detected at our 20 week scan is no longer there, good stuff. :)
There is something weird going on with PHP includes on a site which I’m working on. I’ve been trying to include a file which will change depending on where you are in the site, therefore the URL of the include is created by combining a number of variables and an existing string.
$page_audience = "5-9s";
$baseURL = "/mysite/";
include($baseURL."/Includes/inc_footer_".$page_audience.".php");
However, this simply does not work, it throws PHP errors all over the place. In the end I resorted to changing the ‘baseURL’ variable to an absolute file address.
$baseURL = "d:/Inetpub/wwwroot/mysite/";
Surely this isn’t necessary? Sure it works, but it’s a tad ugly. Do I simply have something wrong with my PHP installation on Windows, or am I missing something else?
Drew and I have been having some fun with session variables on PHP for Windows. Intermitent success would be a good description of the situation. Check out Drews post on the subject…
So, I finally got round to scrapping my old domain and shifting everything across to this site. I’ve spent what seems like hours, days and weeks re-designing my site over and over… finally settling on something which should be simple enough to evolve and grow with time.
It was quite a trip down memory lane to dig through all the old bits, deciding where they could logically sit within a new format. Looking back at what you have done in previous years really makes you realise how much you are able to seemingly expand your knowledge without realising.
A couple of years ago when I set up dovelop.com I had only just started to play with server side languages. I built dovelop using Dreamweaver MX, relying heavily on the built in ‘Server Behaviours’. Now I look back at the code with embarrassment, not quite able to believe that I thought what I had produced was in any way acceptable.
I guess that to the untrained eye it would have looked suitably complicated and clever, but now, with a better understanding of languages like ASP and PHP I can see why fellow developers like Drew McLellan are such advocates of hand written code.
In many ways it boils down to change. To write a snippet of code yourself, taking that extra time up front reaps benefits in the long run. You understand the code, then later you come back and change it for another purpose, understanding more and more as you go. Although tools like Dreamweaver are undoubtedly great for getting started, they hinder development if you rely on the ‘unchangeable’ built in behaviours.
I guess the theme here is change. Learn how to change things, change is good.
A few months back I bought a ‘network MP3 player’, my first purchase of this kind, the idea being that it would replace my old Yamaha multidisc CD player (Which regularly refuses to eject the CD tray completely, making nasty grinding noises as it does so).
The device that I opted for was the ‘Slim Devices‘ SLIMP3 Player. I placed my order through a UK distributor and within less than 2 days the unit arrived complete with appropriate cabling. Before running the 20 metre network cable from upstairs office to downstairs lounge I plugged the unit in for a quick test. Everything worked, the player connected to the network and detected the SlimServer (The PC on which I had installed the Server software).
Now, regardless of the fact that the unit, server software and customer service was stunning, there was one thing which was holding me back from being blown away by my little SLIMP3, I had to drill through one internal wall, out through an external wall down, and then back through the external wall again to get the network cable to the lounge. Now, I ‘could’ have set up a wireless LAN connection, but I didn’t. Now that the hard work is done I couldn’t live without my SLIMP3, and now I hear that they have released the ‘Squeezebox’, a SLIMP3 player with an integrated wireless LAN and standard Ethernet connection… bliss.
Now if I could just convince my wife that we need another network music player… :)
