This morning’s gripe is something that really gets on my tits, but has properly bitten me on the arse this morning: different formatting of code.

In my code, I use real-tab (0x09) characters for indentation of 8 spaces apiece, using Unix linefeeds (0x0a). Simple enough, since I occasionally do hotfixes on code and doing it in Unix editors makes life a hell of a lot easier. That’s fine. The issue comes when a client is using their own cocktail of every bloody style under the sun – in this particular case I’ve been asked to merge in some of my own changes in a hurry, and I find that not only has the client been using incorrect tab style (4-space indentation, proper space chars as well) he’s also saved the whole sodding source tree in a mix of CRLF and LF. This now means I have a nightmare diffing it to find out what conflicts there are, since everything conflicts.

THERE IS A CODE STYLE GUIDE THERE FOR A REASON. PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME GET THE KNIVES AND CUT YOU. PLEASE.

Time for me to write a Polystyle rule for it, which will hopefully fix the situation enough for me to meet deadline in an hour.

ICANN’s approved the regional gTLD .asia by the looks of things – there’s a couple of news reports here and here. The contract’s not been finalised yet (with bits of information still being passed to-and-fro) but registration is expected to commence within 9 months.

Slackware 11 has been released (announcement here). If you’re after the ISOs, go here for BitTorrent details.

We’ve just had an interesting half hour. The BBC digital television feed (both Freeview and Sky) regional opt-out looked to have failed, so for the past half hour of regional TV programmes here in Yorkshire we’ve had the picture of InsideOut London and the sound of InsideOut Yorkshire. Of special note were the bits on skin cancer where the fisherman was handling a crab, and the warning against too much sun on the beaches showing a very dreary muddy lake.

They’re so good – time was that they’d bother to monitor and say something during the break between programmes, but not this time.

I purchased the French maps for my PDA’s install of Tomtom last night, and left it downloading overnight. Turns out it requires 350M of space, which means the damn thing won’t fit onto the existing Tomtom SD card nor in the internal memory of the device. The details in Palm’s own knowledgebase neatly steps around giving me a clear answer as to whether I can use a 2GB card, and time is ticking.

Meantime, most of the online retailers I’ve tried for it are stiffing on postage or can’t deliver before Friday which cuts it a little fine for me. Looks like a trip to CCL may be in order. I’ll have a wander round Leeds too and see what I can find. Come to think of it, I only really need a gig one but it’d be nice to have the extra space if it’s going to be a matter of pennies; after all, one day I’ll need to put the Australian maps on there!

Update: Palm Support have been nice and proactive, and say yes I can use 2gig cards in the Palm TX. So it’s off to CCL I go o/

I wrote this morning that IBM (well, Lenovo) were meant to be sending a new HD for my laptop: they didn’t show up and the earliest they can promise me a call back is tomorrow morning so that’s getting escalated to a complaints department. This’ll be the second time they’ve screwed up a support ticket – the first time being when they “forgot” to screw the keyboard in when replacing the motherboard.

I also wrote that I was going to get some peace, which was really famous last words since I ended up telling someone how to configure sendmail (and how long is it since I last touched that – 7 years?) and then implementing something else quickly. So although I crossed the major hurdle with SOAP and PHP (ie. it connected to the service) I didn’t really get any ‘useful’ queries done.

So, to cut a long story short, I’m back at $contract tomorrow without a laptop, and trying to work out what Lenovo are going to do about it.

Still, at least the organ’s been picked up – it’s gone to a collector in Wales who has another one of the same brand and model that’s knackered. I’m glad it’s gone to someone who’ll appreciate it.

After planet.uknot.org seems to have stopped updating for the past week or so and goddamnit I need my fix, I set up my own installation and it’s up and working at planet2.uknot.org. Enjoy!

<%image(20060722-ripedev.jpg|120|97|)%>I’m not sure if any other PHP developers are getting this, but it’s got to the stage where I’m getting 3 or 4 calls a day from agencies asking if I’m available for urgent PHP dev and project management work. I think it must be the time of year – projects overdue, everyone on holiday, people moving jobs, etc. Today was the first Saturday in a while where I’ve had calls, and there were three (all I suspect for the same role): I think I’m pretty much booked up to the end of the year now, too bad ‘cos the role sounded tasty.

Trouble is there’s too many bedroom coders out there – teenage youths who learned PHP4 while sitting in their bedrooms, doing their own homepage and thinking that they’ve got sound commercial experience because they did a five-page website for their Dad’s best mate. It’s just the same as perl was in 1997 when kids were leaving before their A-levels for a dotcom which went tits-up in 5 months, and stuffing their University careers: those chaps are now working in MacDonalds, in a salary ceiling, or have retrained.

So, comedy moments in CV triage:

• We came across one candidate a fortnight ago who’d actually invented his own language (written in PHP!), but didn’t know how to write advanced stuff; oh, and he’d been at University from 2003 to 1996.
• The bloke who wrote his CV in colour and put a background on it and had company logos and everything – how cute!
• More annoying than comedy, but the lad who’d signed up with us and was going to start, then phoned to tell us he wasn’t starting a few days before he was due to begin – we reckon he’d only done it to get a better salary out of his current employer.

Nothing, however, beats the lad whom I had joining me once at a former employer: CV checked out, passed the tech test, references were academia but that’s not unusual. He started, and in the first day it became apparent that he couldn’t code at all – after a bit of digging it dawned that he’d taken his technical test on the phone and he’d been Googling (or whatever search engine was around then) for answers – and the test code he’d sent us had been done by his mate. Don’t try this at home kids.

(Apropos of which, if you’re a PHP developer who wants work in Leeds, my current contract are looking for a full-time junior developer to start asap – drop me a line, preferably with a chunk of PHP5 code you’ve written and a small database schema you’ve done so I can gauge what stage you’re at).

Bother – my IBM T42p laptop is once again exhibiting random seizures and screen corruption (the same thing it went in for at the end of May) – this after sweating over someone else’s server with disk corruption too. Seems to be the weather for things going titsup – maybe fans working overtime and stuff causing problems.

I hope Lenovo actually fix it this time – I’m starting to lose faith in their service procedures.

Mr Sinclair’s got a new product: the A-bike (official Flash-ridden site here). Wouldn’t mind a try on one of those – hopefully do better on that than on my ill-fated aluminium scooter which I used to fall off regularly.

I still want a C5.

The whole web2.0 thing (rounded corners, mirrored logos, silly names, gratuitous use of AJAX) is just so 1999 it hurts – there was a good article on ZDnet this morning about it. Don’t get me wrong, some stuff’s quite neat (such as the squurl.com domain name digger), it’s just I have a seriously big sense of deja-vu. I did find this very amusing though.

In other news freedb.org is closing down. That’s quite sad, really.

Hmph. I think my subconscious is telling me something about this code I’m maintaining…

[joel@azura cortina]$ svn vommit
Unknown command: ‘vommit’

*sigh*.

Today, the board which Neil fitted last night threw an utter spaz (serves us right for trusting a part from PC World). Thus, I am in Docklands having driven 250 miles, I have replaced the server, and I am about to drive 250 miles back up north then do a full day’s work. That’ll mean that by the end of tomorrow I’ll have had a total of 5 hours’ sleep over 72 hours.

I’m getting too old for this lark.

Um, yeah.

/dev/hdd1 has gone 49710 days without being checked, check forced.

I’d better back that up, then.

I’m still on the lookout for PHP beautification stuff, and came across phpCodeBeautifier. What utter bollocks – it’s only available for Windows it seems, at least the site doesn’t mention anything about ELF versions and refuses to run the binary under Linux. How bloody useless is that…