Well wtbw has been pestering me to update again. Pahhh! :P Of course the whole reason why I haven't been updating is that I haven't really had anything to post about. Nothing of the scale of "Access Sucks" like my last post, at least ;)
Anyway, I've made a couple of changes to this site since I last posted. They're all in the Comments page, namely that the name you enter will now be remembered with a little cookie for 365 days and clicking a 'reply' link will populate the "Title" field with "Re: <title of post you're replying to>". I was getting fed up with typing it all the time so as usual the only reason for me coding something is pure laziness on my part.
Had a thoroughly enjoyable trip to Cardiff yesterday to see a certain Matthew, Hannah & Beca. Can't say we got up to much, because we didn't, really; we just walked around Cardiff for a while then eventually ended up in McDonalds on the consensus of "it's cold". So of course to remedy this "cold" issue the others ordered milkshakes (no doubt cold - Matthew was attempting to warm his up to make it drinkable) while I settled with a McFlurry (very definitely cold) due to the not-liking-milk thing I have. I explained this as "if we have these really cold things then we'll go outside and be comparitively warm". I don't think it worked. We ended up freezing anyway. The train journey home was... interesting... though. It was one of those ever-exciting trains where the front carriages go to one place and the rear ones go somewhere else. I had no idea where either parts were going nor where they were splitting so I just sat there hoping they'd go their separate ways after I got off. Luckily they did and it seems they split just after getting to Pontypridd so I got home without hassle.
I've solved the problem with MS Access sucking the eggs out of the proverbial chickens, however - download a copy of MySQL 5.0 (which has support for the primary/foreign key constraints that we need) and install it on my MP3 player. I can then just run MySQL on any machine I need to run it on and get access to a database system that is somewhat useful.
SonicStage - the software that I'd refer to as Sony's answer to Apple's iTunes were it not for the fact that SonicStage has been around a few years longer than iTunes - has, therefore, replaced MS Access as my software pet hate. After concluding that the selection of music on my MP3 player is godawful on the trip to Cardiff yesterday I decided that today I'd crack open SonicStage and add a few bits and remove a few bits. SonicStage took it upon itself to immediately crash and blank the track database of the player, thus rendering every track on the thing impotent. This irked me a bit, but it just meant that I had to re-convert and re-transfer everything I wanted on it. Took me about 3 hours but I do now have a music selection which doesn't suck and won't cause me to be constantly skipping tracks :D
I tried out Zend Development Environment 5 after Neowin had an article mentioning that it had been released and concluded that while the featureset might be very very nice, the fact that it was VERY VERY slow on my computer far outweighed those features. It's a shame but I can't live with a program that takes 2 seconds to switch tabs and gives me 500ms typing lag. It's like I'm using it via RDC on a 56k line. It's awful. Apparently other people haven't had such problems, but I haven't been able to sort it. Anyway, no application should be that slow on an AMD AthlonXP 2600+ system with 1GB RAM, so it's just being left alone and I'm back to using ZDE4.
I think that'll do for now. wtbw can make up anything else ;)