Flipflops.org

I’ve recently joined the Devon Artist Network. This ties in with Devon Art Week in September, when I am creating a site specific Installation in Tiverton Museum.

I’ve just been awarded a small bursary towards costs, but am currently seeking further funding. If you are interested in contributing towards the project, please contact me.

Check out my page…

I’ve just spent the morning battling with a piece of code that that pulls about 7000 rows from join over 5 tables, does a bit of post processing and then exports it as a .csv file with about 15 columns.

I hunted down all the bugs until everything worked fine, the script would run and the windows alert box would pop up asking if I wanted to save or open the file, so far so good.

But then try and open the file in Excel and bang:

SYLK: File format is not valid

What the hell does this mean? I spent hours tweaking and adjusting, looking at the file in editplus and OpenOffice - looking for some kind of error to do with un-escaped characters… nothing, not a peep.

As a final last ditch attempt, before I pulled all my hair out, I typed the Excel error message into Google… guess what:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323626
“SYLK: File format is not valid” error message when you open file

SYMPTOMS

When you try to open a text file or a comma-separated variable (CSV) file, you may receive the following error message:
SYLK: File format is not valid
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CAUSE

This problem occurs when you open a text file or CSV file and the first two characters of the file are the uppercase letters “I” and “D”. For example, the text file may contain the following text:

ID, STATUS
123, open
456, closed

Note This problem does not occur if the first two letters are lowercase “i” and “d”.

How daft is that.

I’m putting together a quick table to compare the online payment processing options available at the moment. At work clients are always asking us to recomend a company or coming to us wanting to use scary providers they found on the internet, and based in places like Nigeria.

There are only so many numbers you can keep track of, so I’ve started putting together a quick reference. This is aimed fair and square at smaller sites where people are dipping their toes into the bright new frontier of e-commerce. I have tried to pick the starter package where possible.

Please contact me with to recommend providers, share your experiences or get me to add companies to this very short list.

I wrote this as a response to a post on this blog - it has a lot of useful links and it also got me thinking.

I’ve been a full time PHP developer for 3 years now (ASP prior to that) - over the past few months I’ve been learning and writing a couple of sites in Cake.

MVC is quite a different way of working to the way most PHP things seem to have been built (and the way I have built my projects) - but when you persevere and everything falls into place you don’t want to go back.

I find myself constantly checking to see if the work I’ve done so far in Cake is up to the point where I can stop using our current CMS framework at work and move to a Cake based system - unfortunately it isn’t quite there - but it will be soo, and I can’t wait.

Personally the hardest thing I have found is the transition to getting query results as quite complex arrays rather than the simple flat results that you get from mysql_fetch_array.

The one thing that I have found invaluble (when dealing with multi table relationships) as an aid is to simply pr() the variable holding my results array into the view I’m working on so I can see the paths I need to follow to the data I want.

Background

At Christmas I installed Ubuntu 6.1 on an old Advent 7002 Laptop that I had lying around the house. My only Linux experience prior to this was on web servers - which are rather business like, and more importantly you just go clicking around to see what happens… anyway I was very pleasantly suprised. The only problem I had was in getting it to recognise my wireless USB thing (edimax), and this is one of the main reasons for the great taste test.

The other reason was that although Ubuntu looked great, the laptop always felt a tad underpowered and anyway my fidling basically buggered it up.

Aims

I want a laptop that can live down the side of the sofa. Its main purpose will be to get on the internet as fast as possible.

The candidates

I did a little bit of research and thought that I’d like to try a really minimal install, but in the end the iso discs I burned were:

• Puppy 2.15ce
• Gentoo 2006.1
• Mandriva Spring 2007

Before each install I wiped and re-partitioned the laptop.

Puppy

The install was pretty quick and painless, the desktop looked good and it had all the applications that I wanted.

I got very close, but in the end failed to get my wireless gizmo working, but am not entirely sure why.

Gentoo

I had high hopes for Gentoo, the install seemed to be going well and suddenly I was dumped at a command promt and was expected to type in order to continue.

My other laptop wasn’t handy so I had no way of looking at the install documentation. Anyway the idea of this test is that everything just works.

Null points.

Mandriva

I burned this on a whim as it wasn’t really what I was looking for, but I saw there was a new release and thought what the hell.

The install was relatively fast and straightforward, I plugged in my wireless thingy, dug out my WEP key and I was on the internet. The desktop looks good, menus are fine - everything is where I can find it. From pressing the power key to surfing the web in under 2 minutes isn’t bad.

Conclusions

I much prefer Puppy and Mandriva to Ubuntu - they seem much faster. At the moment I’ll stick with Mandriva, but I’m definately going to give Puppy another go when I get a bit more au fait with the whole Linux thing.

Afterword

The whole exercise is a bit moot at the moment as the keyboard has 3 keys dead. I took it apart but couldn’t fix it. Try typing .org without a g.

Currently seeking a replacement keyboard for an Advent 7002.