andrew-kirkpatrick

If you are migrating from a single instance of Drupal to a multi-site installation, you may encounter a problem or two along the way in terms of certain things breaking as they aren't where they used to be. Since Drupal is almost solely reliant upon the database during it's bootstrap process, more often than not if something is misconfigured you can end up with the white screen of death (which neither PHP or Apache will be able to pick up)

Theme fixing... (http://drupal.org/node/200774)

UPDATE system SET status=1 WHERE name = 'garland';

So after a hectic month of moving stuff down, waiting for stuff to arrive, building heck-knows how much Ikea furniture, waiting for various maintenance repairs and filling out endless forms... I'm back in London. I would say I feel relieved but I just feel tired more than anything! It is nice to be back though, if just for the next few years. If anything the best part is having a job that is challenging and interesting again, which I never thought I'd say...

It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings.

If you see this thrown at the E_STRICT level by PHP, then you need to let PHP know which timezone the server is currently running in, by either running the following function in PHP:

date_default_timezone_set('Europe/London');

... where Europe/London is a supported timezone or setting it in php.ini:

date.timezone = "Europe/London"

Well, since I managed to leave my side-lights on this morning and my car battery is flat, whilst I wait for the AA man to come and save me I figured I'd have a few seconds spare... which seems to be rather rare these days, for some unknown reason. I think relocating and changing jobs yet again is proving to be the killer here, although there are a fair variety of other things. I can't wait until I'm down in London again, doing the things I enjoy, and not having to worry about anything or anyone.

I seem to be spending most of my time at the moment reading course material or books, revising for exams, taking exams or generally focusing on professional development. Whilst when I started this it all seemed like a good idea, I do wonder if I'm starting to get a bit lost in it... I mean for example I've still not gotten round to building a template for my own website yet (although I did at least manage to composition it in Illustrator)

So, after a long-winded upheaval back to the Midlands from London after all the problems surrounding my accomodation (and somewhat unhappiness at Imperial College London for the way my project was handled and subsequently cancelled) I ended up working for The Open University. I'd been interested in the institution for a while, and nearly landed a job doing ColdFusion development there instead of going to London in the first place!

I've got a lot of things to think about at the moment, mostly not for the better. Apart from my career, 2009 has been pretty tough with certain things happening and not happening, but it'll sort itself out, I hope. For now I've got to take the 1st of my Adobe Certified Expert exam passes (Dreamweaver) as a step forward, and keep at it with everything else right now. I just hope that it is worth some of the sacrifice, because right now it sure doesn't feel like it...

If you want to manipulate a Number Object (variable) to a specific precision or to fixed decimal places, instead of manipulating the Number itself you can use the Number Class conversion Methods such as toFixed and toPrecision and cast the String Objects they return back to Number Objects:

pi = Number(Math.PI.toFixed(2));
trace(pi); // 3.14

Not a replacement for a dedicated rounding function for mathematical formulae, but a handy shortcut to output rounded Numbers in a DataProvider for example.

Something that has bugged me a few times, but I needed to figure out this time, as a Flash beginner, is that because everything is an object (and thus an instance of a class, including primatives) you more often than not (unless using primitives/statics) bind everything because you're always passing variables by reference.

I've been thinking over the last couple days, no idea why really (although somewhat spurred on by a look at the Meridian Audio website) but I started to think about the quality of the music that I listen to. Being quite interested in home cinema (and more recently in audiophile equipment) I realised when I got my latest Sony F3000 amplifier and Monitor Audio Monitor 3 speakers that I was starting to reach the point whereby spending more on kit was useless.