|Absolute Value|

Oyster……

The next best thing from London Underground. Put your tickets on this credit card sized electronic RFID tagged piece of plastic and you are set. Top it up with cash and you can travel pay as you go style.

The one “agreement” is that you have to touch in and touch out every station that you use otherwise for pay as you go customers you are charged a higher rate.

So last night we came back from Victora and were walking out the station when Sarah wanted to check her Oyster Card balance. She walked over to the machine and it said there was an incomplete journey recorded on her card. No problems, off to the counter to have it sorted out.

I gave the card to the LU employee (read as Servant of Satan) and he looks at us and says: “You have to take this to a tube station to sort it ou.” I couldn’t believe it. I am standing at Ealing Broadway, where not 1 but 2 tube lines depart, where they can top up my card, sell me tickets for the tube but according to this wanker, it isn’t a tube station. I was polite and told him about the two tube lines not 50 metres to his left. That was when he got sarcastic and I lost my temper.

How did it end? I walked off with nothing solved. So a big F You to London Underground for once again showing its abilities to piss off customers. The most expensive undergroud system in the world that is only ever running at a proper capacity 22% of the time. Well done!

Firefishy put me onto this link today. It is the epitome of the phrase “What comes around, goes around.” Or in this case, “Turn that horrible ringtone off you wanker!”

Bloody frog.

Clicky

With iTunes going to be supporting podcasts in it’s next version (4.9), iTuners (heh, I thought that one up all by myself ) will be able to browse directories such as iPodder.org as well as podcasts that have been registered by Apple themselves. This will really bring podcasting to the masses.

So as an editor to some nodes on the iPodder.org directory and iPodder.org being a decentralized structure, I host OPML files for the directory. Every hour or half-hour iPodder.org pulls my files, checks for updates and updates the directory if necessary. However, applications such as iPodder and most other podcasting applications allow their users to browse the directory directly, which means that whenever a user opens their podcasting client and browses to the nodes I manage, I take a bandwidth hit.

My concerns revolve around whether iTunes will be doing the same. If iTunes allows users to browse directories directly will the browsing take place on their servers with a periodically updated offline copy or will it be a real time browse? I seriously hope that they will host an offline copy of the directories or the day iTunes releases; I will unfortunately have to stop hosting my nodes.

As iTunes 4.9 must be close to completion, they must have done some testing. Therefore some traffic is going to have taken place against my server by iTunes. So a quick look in my access_log reveals this:

17.201.36.13 - - [23/Jun/2005:10:35:04 +0000] “GET /opml/technology.opml HTTP/1.1″ 200 12677 “-” “iTunes/4.9 (Macintosh; N; PPC)”

As you can see, iTunes 4.9 is requesting the files. There are multiple entries going back some time and disturbingly, the entries are from different IP addresses and different IP address ranges. This does not make me feel too happy.

Is there anyone who can confirm how iTunes will be browsing the directories?

Even though this man just died, I find his job title + name an amusing phrase. Did he ever consider this before he joined up? And they put him in charge as a guiding light for others? Something is definitely wrong here.
Clicky

I love error messages. Especially interesting ones. Like this one I came across today while trying to debug a web application. Makes development interesting.
Clicky

If there is someone in the world who definitely should not be driving it is this woman. Not so much dangerous as stupid.
Clicky

Can anyone with Microsoft Access 2000 abilities with specific regards to a form’s build in recordset and recordsource properties help me? Please…. pretty please. I am halfway through the 3rd day of trying to track down a bug in some code and I am about to throw my computer at the closest staff member.

***UPDATE***

OK, I found the problem. It was a stupid little issue. If you change the recordsource of an Access form, it calls a Requery on the form. But it calls TWO Requeries. One before the actual property is changed and then another after the property has changed. But of course this is not mentioned anywhere. The help documentation mentions that the requery is called but fails to mention that two requeries are called. Grrrrr. Access is the bane of my existence.