I originally blogged about this on my other site lazygnome.net but that was simply a quick place to record it. I present to you a very quick and handy way of replicating PHP’s trim() function in JS: function ws_trim(value) { return value.replace(/(^s+|s+$)/g, ''); } There it is, simple and usable. I don’t claim to be original with this code. I’m sure that others have done exactly the same themselves. But it surprises me that JS doesn’t come with such a text manipulation method by default.

Installed Ubuntu 10.04 from ISO onto a blank virtual box machine. All worked well for a while, until I recently did an aptitude safe-upgrade. The next time I booted the system, mysql failed to start and refused to do so when I issued: sudo service mysql start It would just hang there. Tracked the issue down to this bug. How I maged to get it to work: In a terminal:

Just a quicky… Using the guide from here, I’ve managed to use the ’net connection of my Nexus One with my Eee PC running Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Speed tests… Nexus One using Wi-Fi and home cable: Nexus One using 3G in the Telford & Wrekin region:

The documentation on http://prototypejs.org/api/element/writeAttribute is a wee bit scarce. So here’s a quick one on usage. To add an attribute: $('foo').writeAttribute('title', 'bar'); To remove an attribute: $('foo').writeAttribute('title', null); To enable all disabled form elements (in a form with the id ‘container’): $('container').select('[disabled="disabled"]').each(function(e) { $(e).writeAttribute('disabled', null); });

The MySQL PASSWORD() function has started giving a different value on a client’s live server compared to local development servers. This has resulted in end users not being able to log in when PASSWORD()` is used to compare the stored and entered passwords. Why this has happened I have no idea. Any thoughts? dev mysql> SELECT PASSWORD('foobar'); +-------------------------------------------+ | PASSWORD('foobar') | +-------------------------------------------+ | *9B500343BC52E2911172EB52AE5CF4847604C6E5 | +-------------------------------------------+ 1 row in set (0.

When something really note worthy happens, I usually don’t go longer than a few days without knowing. But, for some reason, I just learnt about something that happened 19 March 2008. Only by reading this comic in this book did I learn of Arther C. Clarke’s passing. This is particularly shocking as Arthur C. Clarke was the main author of the books I read in my childhood. You’d have thought that it would have been bigger news.

This is on myrant.net rather than my other blog on lazygnome.net as it wasn’t as quick and easy as I’d have liked to set up. So, in a way, a very tiny rant with a lot of helpful content (I hope). Inspiration for this article came from following Popey’s setup instructions with Ubuntu 9.10 alpha. Download Ubuntu 9.10 32bit desktop ISO: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download a) if you have an external CD drive, burn the ISO to a CD.

[this is a bit of a random rant, excuse me whilst I ramble] Every year, the sale of fireworks seems to come earlier and earlier. In the UK, we used to use them on the 5th November (or the closest weekend). Now they seem to be in use from the 30th October to mid November. And then over the whole Christmas period. When in the right hands, they can be great fun.

Finding a needle in a haystack is a wonderful bit of symbolism and I welcome its use in many situations. It’s just the implementation of that symbolism that needs to be standardised. For forgetting the order in which a function expects variables to be passed in is tedious. In PHP, for example, there are some very useful functions: in_array() and str_pos() to name but two. Usage is in_array($needle, $haystack) and makes sense as you want to check that the needle is in the haystack.

Strictly Come Dancing has never been the sort of programme to hold my attention. But whilst I’m keeping my darling girlfriend company, I seem to be distracted from my laptop by the show. The audience annoys me with their reaction to the judges. Bruce annoys me for having lost it years ago. But everybody else annoys me for humouring the old fool. Yes, I’m getting old.