Sweet error message that made me smile
Firefox 3 crashed on me for the first time today (thanks Sharepoint!). Their error message when they couldn’t reopen my tabs made me smile:Published in Other stuff on Friday, August 21st, 2009
Other stuff
Published in Other stuff on Friday, August 21st, 2009
Snowy London Underground sign
It’s a snowy day in London today. Apparently the most snow London’s seen in 20 years. It’s definitely the most snow I’ve ever seen. I was covered in snow and looking like a big white yeti by the time I got to the station this morning. I’ve been keeping an eye on the Transport for London [...]Published in Other stuff on Monday, February 2nd, 2009
Goodbye 2008. Hello 2009
Wow, it’s January 18th already. I feel like I’ve really hit the ground running. Everyone else who did their new years post did them two weeks ago but I really wanted to write down what I’d achieved in 2008 and what I wanted to achieve in 2009 to give myself something to look at in [...]Published in Other stuff on Sunday, January 18th, 2009
Big (non-technical) Helen news
This is a tech blog but I just wanted to share a little bit of big Helen-life news with the friends of mine who read it. Joe, my boyfriend of four years, proposed to me on Friday night very romantically on the London eye and I said yes (of course!). I’ve been grinning like mad [...]Published in Other stuff on Sunday, November 30th, 2008
Decommissioning pixel origami feed
I’m going to decommission the old pixel origami feed. Could anyone still using it please switch to http://feeds.feedburner.com/helephant instead? I was hoping this would be seamless but I messed up switching the pixel origami feed over to the helephant feed so it’s now pointing to the real feed url instead. This should work fine (and I’m [...]Published in Other stuff on Sunday, November 16th, 2008
How does Jeff Atwood update so often?
It’s been a little quiet around here the last few weeks. Partly because preparing the javascript talk for Barry’s user group made me need a little rest from javascript and partly because I’ve been on holiday in Australia (home) enjoying the sun. The best thing to happen while I was away was the ASP.NET guys announcing [...]Published in Other stuff on Monday, October 13th, 2008
Creatures Adventures looking for a good home
This is mainly a post for the siners who get this blog syndicated. I found a copy of Creatures Adventures (I don’t think I even ever installed it) and thought rather than send it to the local charity shop one of you might have always wanted a copy but never was able to get hold [...]Published in Other stuff on Saturday, May 24th, 2008
Importing contacts into gmail from Thunderbird and Yahoo mail
The first thing I wanted to try as part of my using gmail as my mail client experiment was importing all my contacts, half from Thunderbird and half from Yahoo mail. Gmail supports importing comma separated (CSV) lists and both Thunderbird and yahoo mail support exporting in that format so it’s pretty straight forward. I’ve just [...]Published in Other stuff on Friday, April 25th, 2008
Helephant.com to PixelOrigami back to Helephant.com
So I tried out the PixelOrigami thing for a while but I just didn’t like it as much as my helephant.com domain. I decided a while back that the inactivity of my personal blog meant that it was really time to shut it down. So I’ve decided to make helephant.com my webdev website and leave my [...]Published in Other stuff on Saturday, August 4th, 2007
RSS feed is back
Oops. I did something not very intelligent with the updates to the site I did about a week ago and deleted the ashx handler that powers my RSS feed. I didn’t even realise until I logged into feedburner and saw about a week of empty stats. Anyway, the feed should be working 100% now. Let me [...]Published in Other stuff on Sunday, May 13th, 2007
Too busy to blog
I never realised how time consuming writing up blog entries can be. I’ve been writing up my experiences creating classes in Flash and I think it’s taken me longer to figure out how to explain it than it did to originally write the code. I’ve been sitting here for over an hour thinking about a [...]Published in Other stuff on Friday, March 30th, 2007
I've moved my techblog
I decided a while back that I’d both move my techblog to a new domain and port my blog scripts to ASP.NET 2.0 and today finally it’s been done! I’m a little sad to see the content go from my old domain but I think that it’s going to be more flexible for my evil [...]Published in Other stuff on Sunday, January 14th, 2007
Not quite as clever as I thought
I felt so smart keeping my USB drive on my key ring until today when I was ready to go home and I couldn’t find my keys anywhere! I searched everywhere and was contemplating busing home and waiting for Joe to get home so I could get into the house when my workmate, Dave, found [...]Published in Other stuff on Friday, August 18th, 2006
Having fun is motivating
I’ve recently discovered the blog of a guy called Jim Whittle who’s the recruitment guy at the company where I work. He’s only posted two articles so far but he’s a great story teller and I particularly enjoyed an entry he posted about having passion for what you do. On a similar sort of topic I [...]Published in Other stuff on Saturday, April 29th, 2006
Fixed site problem with loading article pages
Eep! I found out about a bug in my URL rewriting rules that made the article pages redirect to the main page of my site. I’ve just fixed that up. Sorry for any inconvenience that caused! I only realised it yesterday and it took me a while to track down because I couldn’t even think of [...]Published in Other stuff on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006
RSS feed tweaked
I am so sorry to anyone who had to deal with my awful RSS feed minus line breaks for the past few weeks. I made a change to it a week or two ago to make it full text because of a comment someone left on my blog but I somehow forgot to add the [...]Published in Other stuff on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006
Beating the scum of the earth comment spammers
Believe it or not comment spam has recently become a problem on my tiny little tech blog sitting in the outskirts of the internet. Over the last month or two (as my life has been unbelievably busy) I’ve watched the comment spammers/scripts slowly figure out how my webforms work and yesterday when I woke up [...]Published in Other stuff on Saturday, May 14th, 2005
RIP: my work computer
My work computer died today. I didn’t lose any data, but it’s just inconvenient because I’m trying to get this site I’ve been working on finished before I go on holidays next Friday and the deadline is tight as it is. Anyway, my amusement of today, apart from the thrill of installing my development tools back [...]Published in Other stuff on Thursday, December 9th, 2004
Sometimes I like being the end user
I take much comfort in the thought that I’m not stupid: our office phone system is just poorly designed. ;)Published in Other stuff on Tuesday, December 7th, 2004
Must be getting old..
You know I just realised I don’t really need to write my own blog software. I’ve done news scripts before, I wouldn’t really be learning anything new. The world already has a 1:3 blog software to web developer ratio. I can think of things that will be much more interesting and rewarding to do with [...]Published in Other stuff on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004
Webstats are bad for the soul
I caved in and did some serious webmaster ego stroking today when I went into my website control panel and had a look at the stats for my techblog. :) Well it would have been ego stroking if it hadn’t been for the fact that about half hits on the site were from my IPs [...]Published in Other stuff on Thursday, October 21st, 2004
Setting up custom 404 pages on apache
Quick note to self how-to after helping Pez out.. Enabling htaccess on apache: 1. Open httpd.conf (in <apache_dir>/conf directory) 2. Find the <directory> for the directory you want to change it in 3. Change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All (or one of the other options) There’’s a good tutorial on the Apache site with much more detail.Published in Other stuff on Monday, September 20th, 2004
Welcome to Helen's techblog – the ugliest page on the internet
So I’m finally going to do what I’ve been talking about for almost as long as I’ve been making webpages and that’s create a space where I can talk about them endlessly and store the useful bits of information I aquire. Yes it’s one of the ugliest pages I have unleashed on the internet since [...]Published in Other stuff on Thursday, August 26th, 2004