This should have been posted Friday evening. Some idiot (richrock) clicked the save button, and not the publish button. Silly billy.

Well, I would do if I wasn’t going to visit my girlfriend. She’s not been well. Ended up in hospital after the weekend, but that got sorted quickly. It was hard to see her like the way she was on monday, doped up with painkillers, in agony. Glad she slept ok. It’s hard having to work, when you know you’re loved one’s in hospital having a scan, and you don’t know anything about the results until the evening at visiting time. It was tough. Anyway, she’d come back home, but already getting similar pains to before. I’ll have to make sure she doesn’t overdo it.

Got some RAM for my PC today, plus a new power supply. The RAM is 2gb matched pair of Corsair DDR2 PC5400 667mhz XMS2, awesome RAM. Didn’t do much for Crysis, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. boosted from 25fps average to over 30! It even hits around 80fps in certain places. Halo varies, and can be up to 200fps.

Going to the farm. Not the funny farm, mind you. Going to get all this Joomla and E-Commerce out of my head. Enjoy your weekend people.

Strange bug found in Virtuemart 1.1 for Joomla - this crops up quite frequently too. Maybe they have nothing to say…

To relax in the evenings (when I get the chance) I like nothing better to listen to a few tunes from Emusic - I recently purchased (I subscribe - it’s a technicality) Tiesto’s ‘Parade Of The Athletes’ which is an awesome tune selection. Also obtained an excellent album called ‘Exploring The Tributaries’ by Vibrasphere. A fine mixture of ambient and trance which is at moments beautiful, other moments have you wishing you were on a dancefloor. A great album I’ve played pretty much solid since yesterday. Also, they have another album called ‘Archipelago’ which is probably more in the ambient vein, but these are two great albums worth a download from emusic.com.

I’m currently in the process of completing a site for another client, can’t really give details, but the deadline is tight. So that’s eaten a lot of personal time too. Again. Still it gets money into the business, and keeps me in a job.

My girlfriend’s gone through some troubles recently, requiring a hospital visit or two. It’s a delicate situation, and although we are looking at a drastic resolution to matters, we are also expectant of a God who heals. I myself am a testimony to this, as I was diagnosed with an infection in the ears which would have now left me deaf nearly 6 years ago. The fact I love music and can still listen to it is testimony enough to that same God. So, in one mind we are praying that God will heal, but if He decides not, then that is also a realistic viewpoint. I think that people can become misguided when prayers are offered for healing and none is received. I sincerely wished for healing during my severe headache phase (I used to get severe cluster headaches), and none was forthcoming. Was this a problem? No. Did it mean God doesn’t exist or that He didn’t care? No. To the contrary, God does care, and He did pull me through. Without healing the illness, but then if it was that easy, everyone would jump on the bandwagon.
God has plans and purposes beyond our reckoning. That much we know. I know this: God has me here, enduring my trials, enjoying life, and still feeling that this is the right place and right time for me.

Sorry about that, just a little rant about stuff. Anyway, I’ll post again soon.

BTW - All that about changing to Joomla. Not yet. Still working on it. However, Wordpress works fine for me. It also has a relatively small webserver footprint too.

Some things have gone well - the launch of the new Bromptons Auctioneers site went well. Just needs to be finished… An auction system would be good. That’s a bit of work.

Gaming nights on mondays are doing well too. Got a decent bunch of guys (and gals) joining us for LaN Se7eN, a weekly lan gaming session held at a youth centre. It’s great because it’s mostly team-based, great fun and something a lot of people don’t experience or appreciate. As much as AI can fool you in single-player gaming, playing against a character that is controlled by a free-thinking human makes a lot of difference.

Some things aren’t good. My babe’s still not well. Shame. In some respects, we’ll pull through. It’s things like this that can test a relationship, and make it stronger. These things can make you realise how much you do love someone. I hope there’s a light in this situation somewhere.

Like they said in M*A*S*H - ‘That is all’.

A major project is 50% out of the way. The other 50% is programming. People who know me know that I am not a programmer. Except with HTML, CSS, and a little Javascript. PHP, on the other hand, is new to me.

Hopefully I can relegate the project to at least 50% of my workload too. Then I can work on the next project to get it finished before the end of september.

My advice kids - don’t do drugs. And don’t become a web developer. (Or a games one at that either…)

Well. It’s true. Sometimes in the Web Developer’s world, the work will hardly flow. Other times, there’s not enough time. That’s where I’m at at this particular moment in time. Just trying to keep some semblance of a normal life, trying to do things to please my babe, keeping the flat tidy, just getting things done. I know things will get quieter. I’m already looking forwards to the next project, which is graphically different from a lot of the corporate stuff I’ve built recently. Can’t wait!

Got my new Antec 900 PC case a couple of days ago, plus the Zalman fan monitor. Great pieces of kit. For those interested in both - a word of warning. The Antec’s nice 120mm fans are controlled by little switches, and plugged into Molex sockets. You’ll either have to convert or change the fans. I plan on changing the fans. I’ll get the similar blue ones, plus a cool red 120mm for the CPU cooler. It’ll create a great red core with purple/blue transitional lighting out from there.
The case is great. It’s dropped about 4 degrees of both my CPU and overall case temp. Tonight I had to take the cover off to check something (I spent a couple of hours rewiring it with spiral wrap) and felt the cooler air in the PC! Awesome.

Spiritually, things have been difficult of late. Pressures of work have taken their toll. The work I do doesn’t allow much in the way of reflection or free thinking, so I have to dedicate time to the things of God. Which I haven’t much. Plus there’s something else to mention, but it’s not going on here until I’ve mentioned and discussed with my babe first. I’ll get there. I’m on the winning side. Not that I’m bragging. Look it up in the Bible. The devil did it. He loses. Jesus wins.

Finally, I’ll post up some pics in the next few days of my PC, and the restored Parker 25 fountain pen. A pen that’s older than me!

Well, all the best intentions in the world never always get fulfilled… In many respects, being busy at work as a Web Dev has taken it’s toll. All the pressures of life seem to have weighed against me. I will continue the Joomla documentation at some point. I’ve been taking advantage of the system in the latest site build, reducing the chances of the end user borking it and making it so simple it will make people wonder why they paid us in the first place. Also, got the go-ahead on the first e-commerce site! Yay!

My babe’s ill at the mo, so that’s been pretty tough, just learning to deal with all the stuff around caring for someone else, even though you’re not physically there. I feel good in the respect of the information passed between us, but I still have that feeling I could have done more.

I’ve ordered a new PC case, plus a luxury of a fan controller. The case is an Antec 900, and the fan controller is a Zalman MFC-2. Both are awesome bits of kit, and I can’t wait to get them. I did receive some Akasa SATA cables, and also an Akasa cable management kit. That’ll take care of the 3 hard drives I have in my PC.

Now, to fix the recurrent boot issue…

NOTE - this applies to the Joomla 1.0.x series, as I am not actively developing on 1.5 yet.

This will be a short series of tips and tricks to help optimise Joomla for various applications. The first tip is this:
Modify. Careful planning and execution can lead to a site that is set apart from the generic ‘copied the template, changed the images’ type of site. There will probably always be a difference between graphics and programming, and you can nearly always tell the programmer’s sites - they are poor in graphical terms. But this should not always be the case. I am fortunate enough to have a graphics guy who does the hard creative side, I just sit there and make the site work. Like this morning, I have edited the mod_login.php to reflect the design of the site, not to just put the module in there. It is already unique, and I haven’t even applied CSS styling to it yet! So look at the module code when you’re developing those templates, think about what it would look like if for example, Login and register were on the same line, or reversed…

Next: Actual code examples - a modified Login Form for Joomla

Well, finally, the weekend is here. I’m sitting here in front of my PC, listening to some mixes by Jonah and Gabriel, you can check em out at http://stickybeatz.com/wordpress/ for the awesome funky/tech/house mixes they post online. My favourite at the moment is Stickybeatz Volume four, about 37 minutes in. There’s an awesome tune that still gives me goosepimples!
Anyway, the babe came over tonight, we watched some Simpsons, had dinner together, and just talked about a few things I’m not going to type here. That was cool, great even. Got to go and photograph some hedgehogs tomorrow afternoon, but before that, my favourite weekend activity (church excepted) - Mountain Biking!! There should be a group of us, so that will be good. It’ll be good for me if this blooming headache goes away!
The nervous thing is that I’m meeting the girlfriend’s parents this weekend. That could be interesting, and we’ll see what happens. My parents seem to have taken to my babe, and they ask after her, how she’s doing. They’ll probably get her something for her birthday no doubt. It’s something of an occasion for me to have a girlfriend, so I’m sure they’ll do something. No worries if they don’t, but that’s my personal hunch. If my parents are reading this, don’t stress about that last part!!
Today in work was cool, just trying to figure out some custom code to do dynamic dropdown searches on specific table entries in MySQL. What do you mean that’s easy? Try that with someone who’s had to do a ‘Teach Yourself PHP in 24Hours!” in order to figure this out. One day I’m sure I’ll be figured out for a sham. I’m not a trained Web Developer, but I’ve self-taught myself what I needed to know. It’ll be interesting meeting one of our clients soon - he’s a Linux user! Hurrah! My first real contact with another human who uses Linux. Although he was surprised that I use it for a desktop environment - he asked me if I did everything on the command line!! I said I do a fair bit there, but also a fair proportion graphically. That’s the beauty of Linux, especially Ubuntu - you can choose to do things the graphical way, or dive into the machine and command line it all the way.
Anyway, my beer’s finished, and I’m going to bed.

I’m out of the office tomorrow. Giving my first training session for the Joomla Content Management System tomorrow. Got to give four hours worth of presentation and activity to a small group, with a booklet I devised based around their site. Woah…

It’s been nearly three weeks of prep work on the manual alone, and also providing activities that will teach a certain level of self-sustainability to their website’s administration. It’s a bit of a bugbear with Content Management, it terms of trying to keep as much user friendliness as possible with what are potentially large and complex systems. The latest 1.5rc of Joomla is certainly a step in the right direction as regards to the back-end administration of the site, but it does mean I’ll have to write a new set of documentation!

Still, all going well, we will have achieved a major objective in our business, that is to provide quality CMS websites and also associated site-specific training and documentation, all in a single package. Did I mention we also do domains and web hosting too?