dtgreenwood.com

Hello folks, hope you are all well. I thought I’d drop a quick line to get my fix before I go away. I’m going to Hungary to help with the restoration of Kanaan House as a women’s refuge in Papa, Hungary. My Mum’s been out twice already and has had a fantastic time. This time, me, Claire, Steve and Chris are going along to lend a hand as well. I’m really looking forward to getting into some more sunshine and helping with a worthwhile cause. I’m hoping that some good will come of my abstinence from getting a job until the end of the trip.

There’s a big problem with alcohol abuse in Hungary with the official statistic running at 50% but more realistically figure apparently being 70%, as well as an officially unrecognised abuse of women at around 1 in 5. I hope that this project will help to raise awareness of this problem to a wider audience. Hopefully when I get back I will have more information about this and will be able to provide more accurate statistics. That said, whatever the actual statistic Kanaan house is the first Hungarian refuge and hopefully not the last.

Right then, time for final checks before getting ready to set off for Luton. The car journey is going to be a squeeze. I’m not sure that there will be chance to give an update whilst in Hungary but if I do get chance I’ll take it. Hopefully we’ll also have some pictures for you and my Flickr accounts upload limit will have reset by the time I’m back so I can put them up :).

This is the first of hopefully more than one food blog entry and today I’m going to talk you through making a Chocolate Flake Cake.

Ingredients Needed:
Bases:

• 100g/4oz plain chocolate
• 100g/4oz butter
• 3 tablespoons golden syrup
• 100g/4oz icing sugar, sifted
• 175g/6oz cornflakes

Filling and decoration:

• 300ml/1/2pint whipping cream
• 225g/8oz(1/2lb) strawberries, halved
• 6-8 milk chocolate flakes

First off grease two 17.5cm/7inch shallow cake tins butter or margarine will do fine.

Place the chocolate in a pan with the butter and syrup and heat very gently until the chocolate has melted. Stir in the sugar and cornflakes and mix well. You could also at this point put some grated orange rind in to give chocolate orange but we didn’t bother. It doesn’t need it if you ask me.

Next, divide the mixture between the prepared tins, press lightly with a spoon and chill in the fridge until the chocolate has set again.

After the chocolate has set and you have two round chocolate cornflakes discs turn them out carefully onto a board. Whip the cream and pipe or spoon equally onto both bases. Hold onto your best looking strawberries for the top of the cake and put the rest onto one base. Place second base onto the base with your strawberries and cream on, decorate top with flakes and strawberries. As this has fresh cream in it is important to eat it within a maximum of two days of making. That’s assuming it lasts two hours.

You should end up with something like this:

Today has been a fun day apart from me being stressed for a reason I can’t figure out. My younger sister Kara came over this morning from staying at her Dad and Nana’s house over this week as Mum is away and we started making the Strawberry flake cake I mentioned in a previous entry. We’ve taken picture and I’ll be putting up my first food blog entry very soon. We’ve left the bases to chill over night and will be finishing it tommorow morning.

Tonight Kara, Claire and me went to Clifton Moore in York to watch Monter House which was suprisingly good. Kara certainly seemed to enjoy it but was a bit scared. She’s now fast asleep in the spare bed in my room. Such is having a younger sister.

Kara’s going back to her Nana’s house tommorow morning and me and Claire are going to travel upto the lake district to see Mum and Steve. Some people have commented on the fact that it’s a bit wierd going to see them on thier honeymoon but what the hey! As Mum said “It’s just a holiday”. So we’re going up tomorrow for lunch time and are coming back Saturday with them. I reckon they just need help bringing stuff back, as it was a struggle getting thier stuff in the car on the way there!

Anyway, bed time now. Night

Following up from my last post as I promised some pictures.

Here is a picture of the hog roast. I don’t think this picture does it justice, I hope someone has a picture half way through it being eaten, then you’ll see it in all it’s glory.

No pictures of the spread I’m afraid so I’ll just give you some other images.
The wedding cake that mum made and Claire made the flowers for.
Me Looking smug?
Me and Claire
Mum and Steve

Congratulations to my mum and Steve on their wedding yesterday. The day was absolutely fantastic and went perfectly. The happy couple are honeymooning in the peak district for a week, I hope they have a fantastic time.

Well, since I last posted last Sunday, we’ve had one hectic week. It’s been none stop planning for the wedding, our house has been crazy. Mum made her wedding cake (pictures to come), Claire made the flowers for it and it was absolutely fantastic. The reception was a big hit with all who attended, there was no shortage food as mum, myself, Claire, my brother James and Rose (Steve’s Mum) have been busy cooking and ordering a massive selection of food and desserts. My mums strawberry flake cake is so good!! (Me Claire and Kara, my little sister might be making on later in the week, so pictures and maybe a food blog entry to follow). If I have a picture of the spread then I’ll get that up too, it was absolutely fantastic. To top all that there was a hog roast. Yes an entire pig was roasted on site and served straight from the pig, it has to be the best way to eat pork EVER! The crackling was the best I’ve ever had, the meat from any part of the pig was just perfect… *drool*.

Over the weekend my auntie Wendy and my cousins Steph, Chris and his girlfriend Jess have been staying with us and it’s been a great laugh. We all watched twisted horror film Hostel and I must say, despite Wendy telling me the plot and everything that happened in so much detail I felt I’d seen it before, I really enjoyed it. It was certainly an experience. I’m not sure if it beats Hard Candy for making you want to not watch but it was still very good.

In other news, my graphics card has finally given up the ghost. It was a lovely little NVidia GeForce 4200Ti a card that has done me extremely well and has run everything that I’ve thrown at it without any modifications including Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One. I’m currently borrowing Sam’s ATi Radeon 9800 Pro, which in some bizarre twist doesn’t seem to like my system at all and give me four large vertical bars around 3cm thick on the screen. Gutting. This is not good because I’m broke as anything. To solve this I’ve resorted to using remote desktop in windows to log into my machine upstairs from my mum’s computer downstairs. Ho hum, no gaming for me I guess.

Tonight me and Claire are going to our friend Joe’s BBQ for what promises to be a great night as always at Joe’s. Have I mentioned that I do so love a good BBQ?

I’d like to shout out to Steve Metcalf one of my many (read: few) readers who enjoys my not so daily ramblings. I have however been told off by Steven for what he describes as ‘too much computer crap’, on my blog. Sorry Steven, I’ll try to be more considerate to my none computer literate friends in future… Maybe. On the bright side, Steven did say that I’d “changed his browsing life forever” with my recommendation of switching to Firefox, good for you Steve, spread the good word.

Well Saturday night’s birthday celebration for Laurens birthday was a real laugh. There was plenty of awesome bbq food and plenty of beer. Thanks Steve and James for keeping me ‘topped’ up. After the bbq the rest of the gang went off to The Matrix(formally known as Sly’s Nightclub) for some fun. Hope you had a great time guys!

Yesterday afternoon me and Claire went for a picnic, part of Claire’s “get Greeny out of the house” scheme and we had a lovely time. We went to Studley Royal which is always a nice place to visit when the sun is shining, I’ve spent many a fun time down there with my mum and my brothers chucking bread at to the ducks.

Today me and Claire went to Harrogate to look for some shoes for Claire for the wedding on Saturday. My theory on shopping is that men and women should shop separately. Here’s why. Women are more than happy to gun around from shop to shop and sometimes back again to find what they want. Men like to wander around looking in shops to find something they want whilst taking short detours into computer and gadget shops. Whenever a (straight)couple go shopping it’s always the same old story, the man walks around behind the women trying his best to look interested and failing miserably, then, when the women asks his opinion and he gives it, it’s wrong. Also when the women queue to try something on, the men all find the closest place to sit and all end up huddled together like hunted Gazelle, just waiting for their other half to come and drag them around more shops. Also, women will argue but they are messy! Claire took me into New Look in the Victoria Shopping Centre and … Well, I just wish I’d taken a picture. Shoes, clothes, bags, underwear all over the floor. You’d be forgiven for thinking that they’d just had a film style mad rush!

I’ve worked out what the problem is. I run MySQL 5.0.21 on my localhost for development and my web sites server runs MySQL 3.23.58. Until now this hasn’t been a problem. But when uploading my new and improved SQL statements to my web site it goes boom!

I think it’s a compatability issue. The older version doesn’t seem to like the fact that I’m creating a seperate query and returning it as a column. This is annoying. If anyone knows of a way to reproduce the output of
Code:
SELECT distinct a.articleid, a.articleauthorid, a.articletitle, a.articlecontent, a.articledate, a.articleenclosuretitle, a.articleenclosureuri, a.articleenclosurelength, u.userid, u.username, u.userstatus, (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM comments WHERE comments.articleid = a.articleid) AS articlecomments FROM comments c, articles a, users u WHERE a.articleauthorid = u.userid to be compatable with older verions of MySQL please, please, please, please(enough?) tell me!!

Other than that, everything is good. The BBQ last night was fantastic, BBQ steak tastes so good. Anyway, must dash, me and Claire are off to a BBQ (again, woohoo) for our friends Steven and Lauren’s birthdays. Happy Birthday guys!!

I’ve been playing with my SQL queries all day and things were going great. I managed to get a couple of my pages from 54 SQL queries (n+2) down to just 4.
I had a really super sexy piece of SQL which looked like this:
Code:
SELECT distinct a.articleid, a.articleauthorid, a.articletitle, a.articlecontent, a.articledate, a.articleenclosuretitle, a.articleenclosureuri, a.articleenclosurelength, u.userid, u.username, u.userstatus, (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM comments WHERE comments.articleid = a.articleid)AS articlecomments FROM comments c, articles a, users u WHERE a.articleauthorid = u.userid AND u.userid = ‘.$userid.’ ORDER BY articledate DESC LIMIT 0,3; which did everything I wanted, got the article, its author details and had a colmun on the end indicating how many comments it had.

Untill…

I uploaded it to my web site from my local machine and it all went bang!! This shouldn’t happen, although there is a difference in the version of MySQL, my computer is running 3.23.49 and my web sites server is running 3.23.58.

I’m very unhappy about this but on the bright side, Claire is here to pick me up and we’re going for a BBQ at her house, woo. Cyas.

Today is a slow day. It’s a good job the weather is nice out or I’d be in a right mood. The one thing that’s worse than a slow day is a slow rainy day. Ho hum.

I’ve done a few things on my admin panel. Whenever an article is posted an update ping is sent to a service of your choice. I might write a simple guide on how to do this as most of the instructions I found were quite hard to follow.

I was thinking about writing about lots of little things like that as there’s been many times when I’ve not been able to find the information I want and have had to combine the advice of several sources just to figure it out. o hum, that’s half the fun right?

Anyway, here goes, am about to test out the xml-rpc ping to my technorati profile, lets hope neither this site nor Technoratis goes boom!

I’m not entirely sure if anyone is noticing as I know that 80% of my readers (4/5) use rss to read my blog (*wave*) but more progress is being made. I’ve finished the article archive on the left, added article category support, improved the article stats and user profile page. The more I use PHP, the more I love it.

I’ve also fixed the rss feeds as I’d forgot to update the code when I changed the database column names. I’m slowly moving towards a multi user piece of software. Next major task is to implement admin controls on user accounts and have different user privileges. I’ve got a fairly good idea of how I’m going to do this but it still seems like a long slog. Never mind, it’ll be worth it. Especially after a recent hoo ha on digg (Here) about some guy hacking an account a member has been selling on ebay I’m going to be sure to create a password protected account settings panel. As Digg should have