Good tidings

Much has happened since I last blogged. (This is a very predictable consequence of not blogging for three weeks, but it still seemed like a good opener.)

Two weekends ago I was busy scrambling to do my last piece of coursework for the term, having neglected it for the previous four or five weeks. Somewhat to my surprise, I finished it at a reasonable time the night before it was due. I felt slightly guilty, annoyed even, at this because it gives me no motivation to start my next piece of coursework any sooner than a day or two in advance, since "I've done it before." I almost wish I'd got burned this time, just to get some sense knocked into me. (Next one's due at the end of the second week back of the ridiculously-early-starting term. After three exams that week. What do you mean, have I started it yet?)

The coursework (as previously mentioned) was to do with database design, including global constraints and some queries. Half of it was in SQL using Oracle, and the other half was exactly the same as the first half, but using Tutorial D and Rel. Tutorial D is an attempt to be what SQL is not: a database query language that is totally derived from relational algebra in the "pure" sense.

This is the first year that it's been taught at Warwick, because this is the first year that one of the authors has been teaching at Warwick; and long may it continue. I found it a hell of a lot faster to complete that section of the coursework (with 100% marks) than the Oracle section, even starting from just the very basic principles at 9pm. I think this is because SQL is more intuitive (easy to pick up when starting with no knowledge) but Tutorial D is more logical (far less need to look up every little thing because it all derives naturally from the base relational algebra). Oh, and it does global constraints well too. Huzzah!

Other than that, in the past three weeks Kevin and I went down to Essex for a few days to see The Producers with his parents. Since I had something I needed to work on and the rest of my holiday break is promising to be rather hectic, I had a brainwave and excavated my ancient laptop (I've had it 7 years, and it wasn't new then). On went Python and Apache, and my 16MB RAM laptop coped surprisingly well under the circumstances, though my script did take several seconds to run as opposed to the "as fast as it can be output to the screen" that I'm used to.

Kevin and I also went to Homebase last weekend to purchase a Christmas tree. It is now fully assembled (I'm not used to Christmas trees which one has to assemble) and with twinkling lights artfully arranged to hide the fact that there are far too few of them for a 6ft tree.

We voluntarily went to Homebase! We must be getting old.

Not a lunatic asylum

In the midst of all the hectic Christmas shopping (now completed, hoping everything is delivered on time) I found a fun toy that I bought so that Kevin and I could play with it. It's called the Bedlam cube and is a 3D "slot-the-pieces-together" kind of puzzle.

The complete Bedlam cube comprises 13 distinctly-shaped pieces, and (allegedly!) has over 19,000 different solutions. The aim is to take the pieces out of the box, and then put them back in again.

Despite expectations, this is rather difficult.

Luckily, before I tipped all the pieces out onto the floor after opening it, Kevin had the genius idea of taking the pieces out one by one and photographing each intervening step. Hence we can actually fit everything back in the box when need be without being a super-genius :-)

They're excellent fun, if rather frustrating at times. I'd say buy one now for Christmas, only they're all sold out...

position:relative; the cause of all my woes

I've had a few CSS niggles since I redesigned bent back tulips earlier this year. One of the major ones was a baffling and infuriating insistence on the part of IE to magically vanish any elements that I'd floated within the body of my blogposts. So that's: half my comments form, the fields on my contact form, the <h3> post title, and any floated images at the side. How wonderful.

The interim solution was use of the * html hack to remove all the float declarations just for IE. A few weeks ago I got annoyed enough to try and track down the root of the problem, and to my surprise found that removing the redundant position: relative from the containing div.blogbody made all my floated elements come rushing back again.

This was quite an annoying bug for me, and I couldn't find anything about it by Googling, so I've put up a page with test cases in the vain hope that someone else will someday find it useful.

The other major niggle was only resolved today — my fixed "bent back tulips" heading which links back to the front page. What it was supposed to do, due to the wonders of z-index (and now does) is to stay where it is on the top-left corner of the screen and have the sidebar boxes float over it as they scroll. (Sorry, not you, IE; that's what happens when you don't support position: fixed.)

What was happening when I designed it was that the sidebar boxes were going behind the heading, which made it impossible to click on the sidebar links since there was a large 250x150px link to the front page on top of them. It was only happening in Opera though (Firefox had the expected behaviour), so I nervously let it go and stopped thinking about it.

However, Firefox 1.5 exhibited the same behaviour as Opera, so I concluded it must be the correct behaviour produced by fixing some bug in FF 1.0.x. (To be honest, I had originally doubted that it was just a weird Opera bug, but that seemed the easiest thing to believe.) I set about trying to pin it down and kill it dead.

After a frustrating time of fiddling with z-indexes (z-indicies?) I concluded that both Opera and Firefox were ignoring my z-index values! What was one to do?

Well, one could read the spec, and pay attention to that bit where it says: "Applies to: positioned elements". Gah. Still, slipping in a position: relative in the right place solved the problem and made things sane again.

What the hell is it with position: relative? It seems to be the ultimate weird hack; doesn't do anything on its own but causes all manner of strange side-effects.

I ran out of Ms

My new best friend

Presents are in, families visited, and Christmas is over. Well, not that we've actually eaten all the Christmas food, or taken down the tree, or cleared much of the rubbish, or posted any Thank You letters, but nevertheless Christmas is finished. Kaput. Gone for another year. The holiday time is over. Yes, it is. I know it's still December.

(This is me trying to convince myself that the time has come to start my holiday work/revision.)

I have joined the elite clique (comprising most of the world, apparently) whose members are given socks for Christmas. It wasn't that surprising given that I've been moaning about my toes turning to ice when waiting at cold bus stops of a morning, despite the tights (under trousers), cotton socks and thick men's socks (Kevin's) that I habitually wear in the winter. Hopefully some nice 100% wool socks will help...

I actually found my Dad's Christmas present in August by chance, browsing in Ottakars when they had a 75% off sale. I found a set of Spike Milligan audiobooks, comprising three of his books and read by him. Wait, not only read by him, but signed by him. Limited edition, 28 of 2000. A shrinkwrapped Spike Milligan signature, for only £15. Oh, and three audiobooks, of course.

The most annoying thing was not being able to blog about it until now :-)

My main present this year came from Kevin — a pick-your-own digital camera voucher (ie. I could choose a digital camera costing about £X, and Kevin would pay for it). It was really the entry-level cameras I was looking at, since a) digital cameras are expensive beasties, and b) I'm not the world's greatest nor most enthusiastic photographer, so I was pretty much looking for something "point and click"-y; fool-proof.

One of the reasons that I've never bought a digital camera (until now) is that I resent having to pay £100 for the very cheapest, most basic model that, in my inexpert hands, isn't really going to produce very good results. And until you start paying about double that, almost every camera on the market has only a 3x optical zoom, which is alright, but not great. However, with my nice Christmas present £X voucher, I could pay some towards it and get a rather decent camera that's good enough to make up for my failings.

The first camera I started lusting after was the Fuji FinePix S3500, a lovely compact camera for under £150 and with a 6x optical zoom. Perfect! Unfortunately, as I found out when I started hunting for one online, it's an end-of-line model, and as such, no one sells it any more. (Except for Tesco, at a stupendously marked-up price.)

I then decided that whatever camera I bought would have a good deal more than 3x zoom, since I've often found that to be a limiting factor when borrowing Kevin's camera. Within a few minutes I found myself drooling over Fuji's S5600, with 10x zoom! Checking out the prices online revealed that, alas, the cheapest price from companies I had heard of were from Currys/Dixons/PC World. (Also Jessops, to be fair, but their in-store price was £56 more, and I wanted to go and buy one as soon as possible.) Could I bear the shame and indignity of buying a semi-serious camera from Currys or PC World?

I could and I did. We headed out to a retail park with one of each, and started hunting. To my consternation, Currys didn't have the camera I wanted, but did have the S3500 (the end-of-line one) for only £99! Sweet bargainy goodness! Unfortunately (grrr) we were told that they didn't have any in stock, and couldn't sell me the display model since they didn't even have a box for it. Oh well.

Heading next door to PC World revealed the same conundrum (camera for £99, none in stock, can't sell us the display model), but they did have the S5600 that I had previously decided to buy.

Reader, I bought it. I spent all of last night playing with it, and exclaiming at the resonably good shots that my pointing and clicking produced, and today Kevin and I drove to Warwick university to wander around the lakes (which we discovered were mostly frozen over) and take pretty pictures in the remains of the snow. The results of today are on Flickr now. (Unfortunately I only had the memory card that came with the camera (16MB), so had to reduce the resolution down to 640x480 to fit more than 100 frames on the card. A 256MB card should be arriving soon :-) )