First entry of the new year. So Happy New Year everyone, and I hope this works without any bugs relating to the year roll-over.

More errors than I would like. As I am not at home, I will wait until Sunday evening, or the next week to sort them out.

First day back at work... got in on time... and it hasn't been as bad as it could have been ;)

Over Christmas/New Years I listened to book 1 of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time on audio book. I have since been (and currently still am) listening to book 2.

Got the day off work today to go to an IT educational trade show, called BETT. I am there now, on a pblic terminal. I have gathered many many sweets/chocolates and a few leaflets, so far a good day. Plus I have discovered that adding entries in IE somehow is broken, whereas Mozilla works fine, so I will fix this entry when I get home. Weird, the php should be browser agnostic!! This perhaps explains why the new years change over was surprisingly buggy for me. I was on IE at the time, and thought the problem was with the year change over, whereas it is now obvious that it was due to IE - though of course, that is probably just another type of bug in my php code.

17:20 Fixed today's entry, not sure what the php bug is.

Weekend was spent visiting sister and nephew. I had a great time. He has a few more words in his vocabulary, and is such a friendly, cute, well behaved little boy, always running to mommy or daddy to give them a hug.

Fixed an insane IE/php bug in my weblog today. The php code sets a form button to one of two possible values, and the layout of the code is approx:


This worked fine from Mozilla, but it seems IE actually put the newline character in the start of the value, and then sent this through the php causing it not to properly 'see' the correct value.

Course bookings for this term's student training programme opened today, and so far 6 courses are full.

Just because several people have asked about my plans this weekend, and gotten confused, i will outline them here, and then point any puzzled people here to read it.

• Friday evening: in London with Birkbeck MSc friends, pub and resturant.
• Friday night: sleep over in Surrey with one of above.
• Saturday: spent in Surrey with former-work friends, party.
• Saturday night: sleep over with one of above.
• Sunday: wake up very late and go home at some point.

First training session of the term starts today.. Using Windows 2000, I'm sure it will be great fun for me. My Friday+Weekend meet-ups were enjoyable.. giving me the energy to cope once again with a week of tedium.

For work I have been upgrading training material from Office 2000 to Office XP. Yesterday I was told that we'll be skipping XP and going straight on to Office 2003. Still.. they pay me for my time, so the waste is theirs, not mine.

I have started putting together a list of components to make a home-made PVR using MythTV. I will probably document the entire process on a new page, and refer to it from the weblog. Or just 'blog it and then compile it into a report afterwards.

Saturday was a tiring day.. spent mostly out and about in London with friends. And then Sunday was spent messing around with php/mySQL on some dedicated server. Progress was made.. but it was slow. Still.. today has been a fairly light day to make up for the busy weekend, just working on some Mac 'Keychain' docs.

Got a new combined ADSL Router/802.11g Wireless Access Point a few days ago (Netgear DG834G - 54 Mbps Wireless ADSL Firewall Router), and spent the past 2 evenings trying to configure it to work as I want. However so far I have had no success.

For a start I can not seem to get my linux box to communicate with it unless it has the same ip as my previous router, regardless of how I edit the linux box's network settings. This means I need to leave the router as X.Y.Z.105 - and this works.. in that all directly connected computers operate. However the wireless does not. The wireless worked perfectly however when the router was X.Y.Z.104 - which frankly should not make any difference to the wireless settings.

I updated the dhcp software for linux overnight, and hope this evening's tests will see the router working as X.Y.Z.104 - fingers crossed.

I'm on the 5th book of the Wheel of Time series, Fires in heaven, audio book of course.. I'm too cheap to buy all 10+ books, and I can listen to audiobook at work where I couldn't be reading the book. It's amazing how I can actually work at the same time.