Shit

Tax returns are shit, I've decided.

Come tomorrow I shall be promptly de-registering as self employed after having just submitted (well almost) a tax return for gross annual earnings of ZERO pounds and ZERO pence.

What a fucking waste of time and all for the luxury of potentially being fined or dragged through court if I, in my flagrant disregard for the laws of this lovely land, have inadvertently made a bollocks of of the frickin thing.

Ohh well, I can only sit here and cross my fingers and hope that I'm not one of the unlucky percentage that actually get their forms checked over and that I will *get away with it*.

Christ, It's hard work being a honest citizen!

Pissing governments...

My Transatlantic Lover

So I've been blogging now for all of 3 weeks and I completely wasn't expecting anybody to read this diatribe at all. I didn't even think my work mates would find it mildly amusing...

HOWEVER; wading through the four visitors I've had, google analytics has revealed that I've had a visitor from Reston in Virginia.

Who are you mystery person? and did you find my blog interesting

Good Morning

So last night was Heidi's leaving do! good luck (riddance?) Heidi in Japan. Enjoy it as much as I'm enjoying my hangover. It's ace.

Here's to binge drinking

Mail Me Do!

So today, on of our servers wouldn't send emails from a registration form which lead to a few of us scratching our heads (non of us are linux nerds [appart from jim - a bit]).

After a bit of digging we remembered that the server relays it's mail through one of the windows workstations. Matt checked the mail root on this box to find that it was crammed full. The drop box had 11,000 unsent mails from the last two days. The bad mail folder wouldn't open.

So Matt started set about deleting the items from a command prompt... It's now been running for over two hours and no sign of easing up. We're guessing at a couple of million emails in there.

Maybe it'll be done by tomorrow morning

Still no internet

The internet at work is still Jaffed so for the last two days I've been using my K800i as a modem via the wonderful T-Mobile Web 'n' Walk plus which connects at a staggering 115Kbps (about 40KB/s download if i'm lucky) which beats the pants off our poxy broadband here at work(connects at 8Mbps and downloads at about 2KB/s. But hopefully that should all be changing next week when we get a second line installed.

So for now, I'm not doing much online (this blog is turning into a blog about not being able to style up this blog!) but I have got a couple of other things on the go.

inyerface theatre company
This website is a favour for some friends and I'm going to meet them soon to get phase 1 (news and performances sections) live while I work on phase 2 which will bring images to the site in the form of photo galleries.

Banana Cake...
... is the working name for a simple bug tracking app that I'm in the process of building.
This came about after my moan the other day that I was bored with work/the internet and so I decided to get off my arse and do something about it.

Banana Cake is about 15% done (in about 4hrs spread over 2 and a half evenings) so I'm hopeful I'll actually produce something before I lose steam (like I usually do). Once I've got it to a reasonable state I'm going to unleash it on my work colleagues where it will hopefully fill a gap in our infrastructure (have you ever tried setting up bugzilla, nightmare) and get some useful feedback for it.

I might even buy a domain for it and try and make something of it! But before any of that happens I've got my tax return to do before the end of the month... bloody inland revenue!

Firefox PHP Function search plugin

15/07/2008 : Updated the link to the plugin as we have moved offices. I might try and get a wordpress blog set up instead of this thing.

A while ago I was bored in the office so I decided to have a faff about for twenty minutes making something that might be useful to the folks I work with.

Most of the development work we do here at twentysix Leeds is done in .NET but most of us (everyone apart from the TD) are from a PHP background and while at one point it was my language of preference, the amount of .NET I have learnt recently has forced most of the PHP knowledge out the other ear! and this seems to be the situation for the other lads too. So I thought I'd do something about it and create a search plug-in for Firefox and IE7 that allowed us to search the on-line PHP docs directly from your browser.

So after having read a few articles I wrote the plug-in that is now available from this page, just click the search provider in Firefox (next to the search field) and then click ‘Add “PHP Function Search: By Greg Brant” ' and there you go.

I would apologies to IE users but I'm not going to because it's not my fault that it wont work for you guys. My original intention was that the plug-in would work for Firefox and IE after having read that they both support the OpenSearch format for search providers (Firefox also supports MozSearch plugins too). However; the PHP search only works with GET method forms and IE only supports search providers the use POST.

OK. so, this software (if you can in fact call a search provider software) is provided free of charge with no warranty of any kind what-so-ever! install it at your own risk. All copyrights remain with the owner and all the rest of it.

Damn Internet

So after my post last week about redesigning this blog the internet at work has been bloody slow so all I have managed to do is hack the template and change the background colour.

But I like it. One day I'll follow up what I say...

back to work

I'm back in work today after a long weekend (Friday to Tuesday) in the lakes with Gina and I'm feeling a little bit uninspired.

We had a team meating before lunch where a few of the guys recounted some notes on industry events they have attended recently and it made me realise that not so long ago I was interested and messed around with far mor than I do at the moment. Right now I just seem to be building .NET shopping cart after .NET shopping cart and I'm a bit bored with it so I've decided to start getting back into things, exploring bits and pieces around the web and making bits and pieces that are fun.

I think I'm going to start by (re-)designing this blog with a nice stylesheet and naybe a JPEG or two.

Lets see how it goes from there...