This year we have our own christmas tree for the first time – it looks amazing and I love it!! Here it is to get you in the mood:
From left to right: banana loaf, mince pies, more mince pies, gingerbread in a jar, mincemeat pasty thing. Not in the shot is the curry I also assembled for tomorrow night as I have friends coming over and I’ll be rushing in late.
I’ll post some recipes in the coming days, but for now here’s some closeups:
The mince pies are just about cool enough to pop into the freezer now – like I’m a domestic goddess or something! For more Christmas recipes check out Elizabeth’s blog.
Well, I’ve got the prize in question, Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle, which actually looks really good. Its a book that has come at a good time for me – I’m at a point where I can write a website in my sleep, but understand where the weak points are that might cause it to crumble under load is a whole new chapter.
Also included in the package were a set of trading cards from Zend Con ’07 (here’s the flickr set), with Cal’s one autographed! Finally, and possibly most excitingly, I got an elePHPant! Here he is meeting tux:
Have a look at the other photos tagged with elephpant on flickr too!
SELECT *
FROM table1 t1
LEFT JOIN table2 t2 ON (t1.col_a = t2.col_a)
So far, so good, right? In this particular instance though I wanted to filter my results on a particular criteria so I added something like:
SELECT *
FROM table1 t1
LEFT JOIN table2 t2 ON (t1.col_a = t2.col_a)
WHERE t2.col_b <> 42
This is where it all started to go a bit weird. I wanted all the rows from the first table, plus anything from the second table that matched but didn’t have col_b equal to 42 (this is a rather contrived example I know but my real-world example was so complicated I’d still be explaining it if I started). The syntax above was causing a problem in the case that there was a single matching row in the second table which matched the criteria in the where clause. In this instance, the entry from the first table would appear once, and then immediately get filtered out by the constraint in the where clause.
What I actually needed to do was filter the second table before the join happens. So here’s the syntax:
SELECT *
FROM table1 t1
LEFT JOIN table2 t2 ON (t1.col_a = t2.col_a AND t2.col_b <> 42)
It turns out that you can use the ON clause when you join to include anything that you would usually put in a where clause to restrict the rows on the table that is being joined. Hope this makes sense and is useful to someone, add your comments if you have any!
Actually I wonder if Cal knows what he is taking on here, he’s going to have his hands full trying to keep these four ladies under control :) He’s also running a competition – an elephpant for the best question asked in the IRC channel while the ‘cast is happening … I really want one of these critters so if you have any question suggestions then please pop them in the comments for me.
Its at 6PM CT which I think its midnight here in GMT (or UTC). You can listen live by dialling a toll-free number, only available from within the US however Skype’s documentation seems to think I can call a US toll-free number over skype from here in the UK so this will hopefully prove to allow access for anyone outside the US who would like to listen. Very importantly there will also be a real-time interaction with the #phpwomen channel on irc.freenode.net so drop in if you’d like to. If you’re new to IRC then find instructions on the IRC primer I wrote for PHPWomen. Hope to see some new faces joining us on this one!
The first thing we did was ring a locksmith and get the locks changed. Probably an unneccessary expense but we’d completed on the house and bought the contents at short notice so it seemed prudent. Since we’d taken out house insurance with the mortgage we were happily covered from day one without having to mess about with any more paperwork.
We didn’t expect to be buying the house contents, and we certainly didn’t expect to get as much as we did. Although we don’t have a lot of furniture we had too much to fit into a house that was already full of a dining table, a king size bed, a king size wardrobe (its big anyway), a single bed, another triple wardrobe, a dresser, the entire contents of a kitchen … you get the picture (and remember those wardrobes were full of clothes!). We spent four or five days with all our stuff stacked in the front room and no idea how to solve the jigsaw puzzle of unfolding everything out into the house.
We held the housewarming 5 weeks after moving in and I think the house looked its best that day. We’d had the roof and guttering mended and patched up, and we’d chopped the weeds back to a manageable height (short enough to stand the barbecue on top anyway). Lots of friends joined us and almost unanimously described the house as “having potential” – by the end of the day we were wondering whether everyone thought we were mad.
Since then we’ve become an auntie and uncle which is fun, and we’ve had a lot more building work done in the house. There was no central heating so that has been added, and the boiler moved out of the living room (we think that room may have been the kitchen at one time, its not as random as it seems). In addition we’ve had the whole house rewired. Both these jobs have been disruptive, destructive and very messy!! Having not changed the bag in our vacuum cleaner for about three years, we’re now on our fourth bag in six months, that statistic goes some way to describing how much mess we’ve dealt with. When we first bought the house and I blogged about it with some photos, someone who had been here said to me “what doesn’t come across in the photos is the DIRT”! The only way to describe how filthy this place was when we bought it, and then again when we had the heating done, and then again when we had the wiring done, is to say that its the only time I’ve blown my nose and observed that my snot has changed colour…
Today the house is a bit of a disaster. Its clean (we had visitors earlier) but every single room has at least one hole in the wall/floor/coving/all of the above. There are floorboards damaged in quite a few places and lots of disused sockets and switches hanging about the place. It looks a LOT worse than it did for the housewarming but strangely I feel a lot better. Less than a year ago I blogged about pulling out of a second house sale and I was feeling really low about it. 12 months on and we’ve bought a much nicer (and bigger) place, paid 10% deposit and fees, had the roof sorted, survived the trauma of having the place flooded, put in central heating and had the place rewired. I really feel, despite the mess that we’ve done really well to get this far. And now, the workmen are gone, and we can make the place our own. We can start decorating and putting up shelves in our lovely deep alcoves. We can choose new floors to replace the ones that got damaged. Perhaps over the winter I’ll find time to sew the bedroom curtains I bought the material for in about July.
The plan for now though is to start repairing and sorting everything out. We’re starting with what will be a little study – mostly so we can practise on it before moving into more high-profile rooms. We’ll then decorate the living room and replace the (currently missing) floors in the hall and living room. That’ll take us well into the new year and will still be lots more holes to repair and fill … so here’s hoping for many more happy half house-years to come!
There is even a a photo of me – thanks Sebastian :)
My talk was “Source Control Saves Lives”, a primer on what source control and why you should use it, with a definite subversion twist because that’s what I know the most about and I’m not a fan of talking about stuff I don’t know about! For posterity, here are the slides – I haven’t done any presentations for years and I couldn’t remember how to work powerpoint svn_saves_lives.ppt
I borrowed Kevin’s mac and downloaded the demo of iWork. Its a 30 day trial and after its expired I can still use it as a player. Which is excellent as using the mac remote in the talk worked really well and got around the awkward layout of the room I was allocated.
The event as a whole was fabulous – I met some amazing new people and have a stack of business cards of people to email and catch up with. I don’t have my own cards which is proving really awkward at this kind of event, perhaps I will get some in the future when I’m attending something like this since they’re not expensive. The new contacts I made could turn out to be really interesting in a whole load of ways – and the free beer and chatter with like-minded people was very welcome as well. Talking over experiences and projects with others has left me refreshed and inspired, in a way I didn’t expect. What more could a girl want?
Bar Camp Leeds is this weekend, Saturday 17th November 2007, and its wildly oversubscribed. I know a few people who were hoping to go and haven’t been able to get places. At the time of writing, I’m still planning to speak but there’s less than 48 hours to go and I haven’t got further than deciding I may speak about source control, and subversion specifically. The nerves are starting to kick in …