The Zvon Character Search is one of those really useful geek sites that I can never remember the name of, or the address of. Okay, so it’s not going to be of interest to many people, but if you ever code xml it might just be of use as it gives the codes for entitys.
Hopefully now I’ll have a good way to track it down everytime I need it 😀
A bit of a geeky blog this one. Today I’ve been researching Upload components for ASP to use in the project I’m working on at the moment. Ideally I want one that does the following:
I had a quick discussion on BNM about this, and also consulted 15 Seconds.
I decided to try ASPUpload first, as this was recommended both by BNM and by an ex-colleague of mine. I got this working pretty quickly, but it doesn’t seem to be able to present me with the Mime Type (i.e. image/gif etc) and so isn’t very useful for handling different kinds of binary data. I know that I could code around this issue, but I’d rather it did it all for me really.
My next thought was to try SA File Up, a product I’ve used many times before. Unfortunately their evaluation copy expires on 1 May 2001, that’s 2 days ago – helpful.
Attempt 3 was ABCUpload. On the plus side, this is a free product. This took a bit longer to get to work, as the help documents are not as comprehensive as ASPUpload. Hidden, on the Object Reference page I found the property I was looking for – MIMEType. Woohoo! But alas, it only seems to be able to work out the Mime Types for images so, PDFs etc are out of the question. And more annoying still, it won’t even upload the damn things. Bah!
Attempt number 4. The last of the BNM recommendations. Dundas Upload. Another free offering. The examples don’t seem to cover saving to a database, but a more thorough hunt through the documentation found it hidden away. This component has a ContentType property, and seems to insert pdfs, excel spreadsheets as well, so we might just have found our answer. Hurrah!
*Coff* Well, as well as the local elections yesterday, there was also an election in Hartlepool for their new town mayor. The winner was H’Angus the Monkey, the Hartepool United Football Club mascot… Read more.
Well, to celebrate my 30th birthday Rich and I went to La Fourchette, a French restaurant on Western Road. To be honest this wasn’t originally my first choice of restaurant, but my first choices were not open on a Monday – bah!
Anyway, we went and for the first hour or so there were only 4 of us there – the other couple were celebrating their 2nd wedding anniversary. There is a lot of choice on the menu, and there was also a whole blackboard full of sea food – yum. We made our orders and sat drinking our way through a nice bottle of red wine, when there was suddenly a lot of screaming and crying going on. It seems that one of the front room staff had cut herself with a chefs knife and severed a vein or artery or something – sufficient to cause a lot of bleeding anyway. One of the other diners had just finished her refresher course with St John’s Ambulance and so went and attended to the girl in the kitchen before sending her off to the hospital to be sorted out properly. The panic over, we went back to drinking and were shortly served our starters. These were good, and my scallops with bacon were truly wonderful. Our main courses were both good, although I think Rich’s roasted Red Mullet was a tastier choice than my pan fried Sea Bass. As it was my birthday, we also had desserts – my choice was cheese and a really good selection there was too, whilst Rich had the sorbet.
So, despite it not being my first choice to start with, I’m pretty sure I’ll visit again as I was really, really impressed with the selection of dishes available – especially the fish choices.
So, on Easter Sunday, a group of tall Elvises took to the streets of Brighton. Yesterday I put the photos up and this has led to a discussion of what the plural of Elvis is. Suggestions so far are Elvii, Elvises, Elveses and Elvis impersonators. Now I think the last one is a bit of a cheat and an avoidance of the real problem… Any suggestions?
Paul told us on Saturday that they’d received a letter from Center Parcs telling them that our weekend break was cancelled. Not a great surprise really, but good to have it confirmed.
We went out for some beers last night, and didn’t get around to eating anything until 10.30. By this time our favourite fish and chip shop had closed. So, we decided to try Uncle Sams burger place. I should have read the description on the board better, but I didn’t and so was a bit surprised when I got home to discover that my Veggie Samwich was a bread cake, 2 slices of cheese and some salad – and that was all, nothing burger shaped. I won’t be ordering that again :-(.
It’s strange, we hadn’t been to the cinema in ages, and have been twice this week. We went to see Ice Age on Sunday with Susie, and then to see Bend It Like Beckham last night.
Ice Age is pretty amusing, an animated tale about a group of animals who are trying to return a baby to its “herd” (yes, a little bit Jungle Book). There are some really amusing bits, and it isn’t just for children.
Bend It Like Beckham is a great film, about two 18 year old girls who are both football mad. One is an asian girl who wants to play football like Beckham despite her families protests and their expectations for her. The other is a white girl whose Mother just wants her to be a “normal girl”, and not spend all her time practising football.
I got sent some e-mail spam today, not altogether unusual, but this was a scam spam. The basic details are that it is sent from a DR. SAM BASHIRU (Director, ECO Bank Plc) basically telling me that a JAMES AKMEH died over a year ago in a ghastly air crash and had in his bank account at the time US$21.6M. The email wanted me to pose as a next-of-kin to James Akmeh and in doing so I would give my account details and 30% of the money would be mine, 5% would pay joint expenses and 65% would go to the originators of the transaction. All they needed from me would be my bank account details, and personal telephone/fax details. Tempting. Not!
I did a bit of research, and of course found it noted on several websites – some of the details were changed but the format were the same (Scam o Rama, Tanko Zuba). I also decided to do a search on a few of the other details, like Eco Bank. There is no Eco Bank (and google helpfully points to several scam sites when I search for it) but there does appear to be an EcoBank (although I can’t seem to get a response from their website at the moment). The email is sent by a sam_bash2000@yahoo.com – sounds like a good, solid email address then! I just wonder how many poor unsuspecting people actually do give their details out.