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I've been staying at Claires house for the last couple of days as it is Jenny, Claire's housemates birthday today. Happy Birthday Jenny Yesterday me and Claire decided to rent a video and ended up renting Keeping Mum with Rowan Atkinson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith and Patrick Swayze. I wasn't as good as… ok, it wasn't good. However I did find a bargain to rival all bargains. I picked up the first season of Dark Angel which was meant to be 49.99 for 24.99. Bargain I couldn't resist. Got to the till and wham, it's reduced further to 16.99. OMG, that's a bargain!! So now i'm lazing in bed watching the first episodes of Dark Angel. When Claire gets back she's bringing me a nice sandwich. Ahh the easy life.

I've just recently been asked to help develop a website for a local band in Ripon, Toyshelf by a guy who lives in Ripon and also goes to Hull University, Jonathon Sterling.

PHP ftw I stated… denied, Johnny is using ASP. So being one who always likes to broaden his knowledge and horizons, I accepted and now need to start looking into some ASP dev. This means making use of IIS and possibly MSSQL which also means making use of Microsoft Server 2003. This isn't the huge problem it might have been seeing as I can get a free copy from the University. The problem is setting it up on my machine! Do I partition, use VMWare?

Anyway, it's something to keep me busy when I get back down to some programming on sat. Anyway, I'm goin to carry on reading my second book since been home, Terry Prattchets Pyramids, very good book indeed.

Whilst on my XHTML travels I've been looking for a way to emulate the target attribute that can be used on on links (<a>) and it appears that there isn't one. Drat. After I chuntered a little bit about not being able to open my links in another window I read an article which summed up why this is so.

Opening a new browser window is a function of a browser and not of a document and is therefore a user accessibility issue. It's reasoned by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) that it should be upto the user if a link is to be opened in a new window and not the designer, this is of particular relevance to none windowing browsers such as lynx and aural browsers. So after thinking about it, I now agree entirly, go the internet!

I've been at home for the past few days and after doing a small peice of programming and trying to play WoW on the family PC and failing to achieve a frame rate > 20fps I gave up and have been reading. I've read Terry Prattchets Discworld Novel Equel Rites and it's very good. It's now the forth Discworld book I've read and I'm going to start another tommorow. Which for me is not normal.

The last few days have been utter bliss! Late nights, late mornings, losts of coding and game playing. I've been converting my website over to xhtml strict as I thought this would be a better way to learn xhtml than to just start a fresh. Xhtml itself isn't the problem its the frmatting of it with CSS that gives me a headache, luckily I've not run in to to many problems that couldn't be fixed with a quick google search.

During my testing I downloaded Opera and must say I'm pretty impressed, it's light, clean and seems stable. I might make the switch over and even use its in-built email and irc clients too.

I'm about to go home so I've packed up my website onto my usb pen drive, downloaded and installed a usb device ftp program and installed PHPEdit onto it aswell so I can do some programming at home too, great stuff.

All thats left to do now is play some WoW untill Claire gets here for some lunch, toodles!

Im currently in the welly club in hull where me, sam,adam,phil,claireand kwame thought the funky alternative end of year ball was taking place, oh how wrong we were. Seems were attending an 80s disco. I suppose it could have been worse , we could have gone to another gay disco!

I had my final year project demonstration today with Dr. Wang and Prof. Brookes and it went really well. I gave an informal demonstration of my products features and faults (only one fault) and they asked me questions about implementation scenarios which was a good area to talk about for me (hopefully). Once it was all done we also had a little chat which made me feel better about the whole thing. So all in all the presentation was in my opinion a success. However it is only 5% of my overall final year project grade and the major marks (80%) are in the report.

Whilst getting prepped for my presentation I borrowed Adam, my housemates' laptop. I installed the latest MySQL (5) on it and it was so simple. The Guys at MySQL have been working hard to create a set of tools that make the configuration, adminsistration and use of the database as uefficiant as possible and by jove I think they've done it. Anyone who has installed MySQL in the past will remember the MySQLAdmin tool it came bundled with and will know it's utter pants. The new set of tools are brilliant, they do anything you could want and have a great feel to the interface which can make all the difference when your "trying to fix a database you just broke(tm)". So overall i'm pretty impressed by it all. For anyone interested more details and screenshots can be seen here, in particular the MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser software are pretty good as is the system tray monitor that comes bundled with it. Check it out!

On another note I recieved the new Gnarls Barkley album, St. Elsewhere and it's fantastic, my favourite track is track 8, Just A Thought. It's simple fantastic, buy it!

This weekend I've managed to watch seven movies. I do love movies.

So this weekend I've seen

• The Man
• King Kong
• The Marksman
• The Final Cut
• Lord Of War
• Serenity
• Mission Impossible:III

I enjoyed all of them apart from King Kong which I thought was not very exciting. Jack Black and Naomi Watts both put in great performances but I was just left dissapointed by the general story. A dissapointing 6/10.

The Man is a really funny about a man in the wrong place at the wrong time and stars Samuel L Jackson and Eugene Levy, who I thought both are really funny. Samuel L Jackson playing yet another street wise badass is always great stuff. 7/10 For this one.

The marksman was a pretty good film and has some good action sequences. However I wasn't convinced that Wesley Snipes was the best actor for the role, not upto his usual standard that's for sure. 6/10.

I suggest everyone who likes Robin Williams more sinister side such as the one shown in One Hour Photo, should see The Final Cut. It's a futuristic story in which Alan W. Hakman (Williams) is a cutter, a proffesion which requires you to edit down footage of a persons life for the purpose of viewing it a funeral service but ofcourse whilst looking for the good, there's some quite disturbing stuff. A great film, Robin Williams plays a troubled character brilliantly once again 9/10

Lord of war whilst being a clever film in some ways is just too predictable in others. The twist at the end was just pants and just left me feeling… well, nothing. Ethen Hawke could have done with a bigger part giving the film a bit more of a build up to the end. 6/10.

Serenity is an awsome film with some great moments and some much needed humour. It was funnier than I thought it would be but it pulled it off nicely. Its based on the sci-fi series Firefly which I might have to look into as I'm sure there's lots more about the characters in the series that we missed in the film. The last 30 mins is when the action starts, 8/10.

I went to see MI:III with Claire, Sam, Adam and Paul and wasn't disapointed. Simon Pegg makes a welcome comical relief apperance and Lawrance Fishburn also has a part… but not a great one in my opinion. A Great film all in all and I would suggest seeing it at the cinema as nothing beats the experience. 9/10

Given more time and inclination I would've written better reviews of the films but hey, you want to know more, rent the films. I'm all filmed out now so I'm going to go to bed.

Ok, the features I was going on about during the easter holidays are done. I can now share with you all the following features

• BBCode Enabled Blog Posts &amp; Comments
• Enhanced RSS Feeds
• A Fully Functioning Blog Archive System
• A Blog Stats System, Might add more to this.
• A Blog Search

I've been working on these mostly for my own amusement but also to gain more experiance in creating functional php websites.
I would really like everyone who reads this blog to pass comment on these items I've been working on with any critisms or encouragement on the features made or ones that could be made. One day I'll stop bothering people… maybe

I've been chilling out and coding some more on the site, yes kids, today I've been playing with the wonders that are CSS and XML/CSS. I now have formatted RSS feeds when they're viewed in a browser instead of an aggregator(here). I know, nothing revolutionary but hey, it's all part of my plan to convert my site to entirly CSS formatted and controlled and I'm taking baby steps.

I also managed to fix a bug when if you view the comments feed (here) without specifying a post id it displays all comments as it should, however it wasn't showing the article titles, all fixed now, woo.

Am I a really sad person for tinkering with my website so much?

So, my last exam was yesterday and I'm not feeling too good about it, it was my Software Engineering exam and it was the toughest exam I've ever had. Not only were the questions hard to answer but they were also hard to read. Doh! Anyway I'm not one to worry about things that have already been done so it's time to enjoy my free time while the livings good. So i've decided to kick back and take things easy until I go back home, so it's lots of internet, gaming, internet gaming, tv, music and movies, woo.

Speaking of internet I'm plugging once again the Internet Radio station RadioRSP. Check the schedule for the shows, my favorite is the Ollie C Show on a wednesday night, great fun. The Rock show on Thursdays with Johnny Boy is wicked and the Friday Night combo with Ollie S looks like it's going to also be pretty good. So if your looking for some fun and freedom from your music collection check out RadioRSP. Appologies for the amateur part but it is what it is