radiac.net

This weekend it was the Great British Cheese Festival, right here in Cheltenham, just a 5 minute walk away from my house.

It was awesome. There were hundreds of cheeses, loads of free samples, and I even bought a few. Nat and Simon came up from Oxford, and they left with several large bags full of cheese - very sensible. I was rather miserly and boring, and, thinking of my waist, I just went for a couple of blue cheeses. I wish now that I'd bought more and varied cheeses - there were some really crazy things there, including horseradish cheese, ginger cheese, even stilton ice cream! But sadly I only bought three; the awesome Blue Wensleydale has already disappeared and I am sure that the Stiltons will not be far behind. And I still wish that I'd bought that chocolate fondue; Amazon, if you're reading, please stock it so I can add it to my wish list ;)

Alas, the weekend is over now, and that means back to work. But today, I shall do it while eating Stilton.

So I've just been to the hospital to see someone about my ongoing nose problem. For those who haven't been following my diary as closely as they should, I've had a partially blocked nose for as long as I can remember, and with it a poor sense of taste and smell, sleep apnoea, and all sorts of joyous things relating to those, such as tiredness, lack of concentration, even weight gain - yes, I reckon I can blame all my problems on my nose ;)

I started seeing doctors about it a couple of years ago, and they got hooked up on the fact that I suffer from hayfever so kept prescribing me anti-histamines and sprays, none of which did any good. Eventually I made it to see a consultant's nurse, who looked up my nose and told me absolutely nothing new. And then prescribed me an expensive version of exactly the same thing that hadn't been working for the past 2 years.

Anyway, today I visited Cheltenham General Hospital, although I didn't see Leela - she was locked away making chemotherapy bags. I went straight in and saw a registrar (not a nurse, woo!), and he actually examined me! Hurrah! After he had prodded and poked, he sprayed anaesthetic up my nose and stuck a fibre optic camera down my nostril. I have to tell you, that felt pretty weird.

And the diagnosis? Adenoids. Hah! Thats what I diagnosed myself with about a year ago, but the 3 doctors and the nurse said "No no, it can't be that, you're too old", even though I told them I'd been suffering from it since I was about 5. To be accurate it's my adenoids and turbinates, so I'll have to go in for a general anaesthetic, and they'll scrape and burn away all of the bad bits. Mmm, sounds like fun. I'm hoping they'll take out my tonsils while they're at it, those suckers have been nothing but trouble. There'll be a few months waiting list, but then it's a non-emergency op, so you'd expect that. Just as long as the hospital doesn't get shut down in the meantime.

I like the people up here in Cheltenham. The doctor said he'd also like an allergy test done, but there was none of the "sure, we'll put you on the waiting list and you can come back soon" that I had in Cornwall - 5 minutes later I was having my blood taken. And when he heard that I snored, gasped and spluttered in my sleep, he said he'd book me in for a sleep test too. That should be fun.

I am totally getting my money's worth out of my taxes. Oh, wait, I haven't paid any yet. Awesome.

No updates for a while, so I thought I'd just write a quick one. Drove up to Newcastle for Meri and Elly's wedding last weekend - it was an excellent wedding, and there are many photos on Flickr (although most of the ones of me are of me stuffing my face). I haven't finished my cheese from the cheese festival yet, although I attacked Simon and Nat's cheese last week when I went over to Oxford for their cheese and wine party, which was an excellent cheese and wine party, even though I didn't drink any of the wine.

Hmm, what else? Apart from that I've pretty much just been working flat out, late nights and early mornings and all that. Nearly on top of the immediate work-load; the CMS has been working for the past few days, but in my hurry I've bodged the framework, and it has turned into an ugly hack so needs rewriting. This time in PHP 5 - sure, PHP 4 may be more widely adopted, but that's like saying Valve should design HL2 to run best on a P2-233 with an 8MB onboard graphics card. PHP 4 really sucks.

Think that's about all, apart from to say happy birthday to my great aunt, even though she will never read this because she doesn't have a computer. Hmm. I should send a card.

Some people have contacted me because they've been getting spam from addresses at radiac.net. To those of you who have been polite, thank you for letting me know, and to those of you coming here to complain, please let me explain.

As far as I know, this has nothing to do with me. This has happened to me before, and also to other domains I run and people I know. A spammer picks a domain, puts random words at the front, and then puts that in the from field. The actual spams are not coming from me or any of my servers; they appear to be originating from some kind of botnet, with source IPs in .cz, .pl and .ca to name a few.

And to those of you who still feel the need to whine, I'm pretty sure that this is affecting me far more than you. I've seen my average spam count go up by ~40,000/day this week from mails bouncing and being refused by mailservers around the world. And remember, it could just as easily be me getting spam from your e-mail address.

If you want to do something, tough. Get a better spam filter, or read my open letter to whoever buys from spam and send it on :)

While I've been practicing semantic markup for years, today was the first time that I've needed to break an ordered list halfway through. I will illustrate with an example:

1. One

Subtitle
2. Two
3. Three

This was easy in the good old days of tables, frames and marquees; just add a start value to the second ol and away you go. However, that attribute was deprecated in HTML 4, and the CSS replacement doesn't work in most browsers. It's now actually impossible to implement a broken ol in HTML 4 Strict.

That sucks.

I wish to complain. After a little googling, it appears that I'm late to the party, as ever - people haves been complaining for years. But the amazing thing is that everyone is just complaining, and nobody has a workable solution.

The subtitle describes points two and three, so semantically it cannot go into list item 2. You could argue that I should format my list as follows:

1. One
2. Subtitle
   1. Two
   2. Three

However, among other things, that breaks the link between the printed document and the web-based version. Suddenly all references to point 3 now refer to a completely separate and unrelated point. This is not a solution.

The question is "Are the numbers at the start of each list item sematic or presentational?" - W3C say presentational, but they are wrong. There is nothing presentational about needing to refer to other points - if I didn't need to number them, I could use an unordered list.

It really does seem to be a step in the wrong direction to add a number in a span to the start of each list item. Has anyone found a better solution?

Once again, I've put up the annual halloween decorations. To any new visitors who may have happened upon my site and were expecting something slightly more sane, the design will return to normal tomorrow - and to those of you reading my RSS feed, have a look at it while you can! Then leave me a comment ;)