Making your website work with Internet Explorer 8 (IE8)

OK probly well known by now. But if you’re site is ‘broken’ in IE8, you could try the following which tells IE8 to work liek IE7.

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />

It belongs in the document’s HEAD. More importantly it needs to be preferably at the top of the HEAD section before any css, linked files etc.

The rule of thumb is, that the IE 8 meta tag needs to be placed above any linked files.

Review: Michael McIntyre on his 2009 Tour @ Nottingham’s Trent FM Arena on the 26/09/2009.

Michael Mcintyre

Michael Mcintyre

Well, we went and seen Michael McIntyre on his 2009 Tour @ Nottingham’s Trent FM Arena on the 26/09/2009.

It was part of my wifes birthday present as she has always quite liked him I thought it would be a good surprise. I bought the tickets and booked hotel 2 weeks before it, and managed to not tell her untill the night before – I said ‘pack a bag’, still not telling her what for though – infact she never knew right up untill we walked into the Trent FM arena!

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Cuba! – 27th August 2009 to 11th September 2009

When: 27th Aug 2009 to 11th Sept 2009

Where: Cuba

Resort: Cayo Coco & Havana

Hotel: NH Krystal Laguna & NH Parque Central

Where We Went…

This was our second visit to Cuba; we previously had a holiday here at the same time in 2007.

In 2007 our holiday was purely to Cayo Coco and the NH Krystal Laguna, one of the excursions we took was an overnight trip to see the Tropicana Nightclub – which is still one of the most memorable night I can recall. It included a very rushed but great introduction to Havana and from that we decided that if we ever went back we would spend more time in Havana.

And so we come to 2009! And we found ourselves searching for a good value holiday and all avenues lead to Cuba! – Again! After that was decided – prices coming up for Sharm el Sheikh and so on were about £1000 more than Cuba – we quickly decided we would like to do a 2-center so we could spend time in Havana (there is so much that could be written about Havana but shall try to keep it limited to what we done!).

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Irish Vasectomy

After having their 11th child, an Irish couple decided that enough was enough, as they couldn’t afford a larger house. So the husband went to his doctor and told him that he and his wife didn’t want to have any more children.

The doctor told him there was a procedure called a vasectomy that would fix the problem but it was expensive. A less costly alternative was to go home, get a large firecracker, light it, put it in a beer can, then hold the can up to his ear and count to 10.

The husband  said to the doctor, “B’Jayzus, I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I don’t see how putting a firework in a beer can next to  my ear is going to help me with my problem.”

“Trust me, it  will do the job”, said the doctor.

So the man  went home, lit a firecracker and put it in a beer can. He held the can up to his ear and began to count:

“1, 2, 3, 4,  5,” at which point he paused, and placed the beer can between his legs so he could continue counting on his other hand.

Need help with scrabble/anagrams?

My wife and I regularly play Scrabble like many thousands (millions) of people do…

And if like me you hate getting beat all the time… I have recently created a simple tool that will take your letters and suggest words to you!

The words are based on the TWL06 word-list at moment… but may add additional dictionaries as time goes on.

So go and give my ‘scrabbler’ a go!

BMMs Scrabbler

BMM's Scrabbler

Session Handling in PHP

Traditionally HTTP is a stateless protocol. That is it is made up of requests and responses and there is no notion of a ‘persistent connection’. This means that there is no way to have consistency or personalisation on the web since there is no way of knowing whom the request came from.

There are 2 primary methods – regardless of platform – that are used as a work-around for this.

First is a cookie. A cookie is a text file that lives on the client’s computer that store values set by your application. In general the file can only be access by the website/domain that issued it. The main problem with cookies is that they are un-trusted. A malicious user could modify the data and cause you problems!

The second – and better – solution is sessions. Similar to cookies, but they reside on the server, and cannot be directly modified by the client. When sessions are used, a cookie is still issued, but this simply holds the ‘session id’. This session id is generally sent by any request after it is created by the app including actions such as form submission. This ‘session id’ is a link to either a file or record on the server – depending how they are stored.

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