Server issues

Due to damnable server issues, I'm currently not receiving any emails with a "philtanner.com" domain suffix. This applies to me and the rest of the family too.

I'm trying to resolve the issue at the moment, but I have no idea how long it might take, so in the mean time, if you need to get in contact with any of us, replace the "@philtanner.com" with "@p4tg.com" which we are receiving without any issues.

Fortunately, the web services don't (currently) appear to be affected by this problem.

Login issues

We've had a few issues logging in recently on our home laptop, weirdly enough our other PC's and my work PC all work fine - but I thought other people may be suffering the same issues - so best to fix.

The error was down to Coldfusion and PHP talking to each other, trying to have a centralised authentification. Managed to get it working just lovely last night and went to bed happy... Only to find when I tried this morning I was getting an ugly ColdFusion error.

Works out it was fine while you were logged in, but as soon as your session had expired, it died, horribly, trying to convert a null value into a boolean ;) Oh well. Fixed now.

Let me know if you get any more issues with it.

Scooby Doo

I've been lax on making cakes so far this year... In fact, I think I've only done the one... *ponder* No, two. Valentines & Katiyas birthday. The Valentines cake was a bit of a write off, I tried for a Sacha Torte - not all that great - hence the lack of a page for it. Anyways, I was promised a repeat order for Ilona's birthday, but her wicked father completely forgot... So he requested one for his other daughters birthday (in late October) and duely borrowed all the cake books to see if she could see one she wanted. Needless to say for a young girl, she couldn't. Then declared that she wanted the "Scooby Doo" cake... But when he showed her the Scooby cake in the book, she declared that wasn't the one she wanted, she wanted the one she'd seen in the supermarket :P So, another lack of cake order.

But with Halloween approaching, and such a lack of sweetness so far this year, I decided to give it a go anyway, and besides, if I got it wrong, it wouldn't matter :D This was, after all, the first time I'd tried to make instantly recognisable characters out of icing on such a small scale - and to be fair, I'm glad he didn't order it, because I'm really not all that happy with the results. But here it is for anyone that's interested... Oh, it's a chocolate orange cake - with chocolate orange buttercream icing - which Sue says has too much orange ;)

The wishlist functionality is now in what I guess you could call "Open Beta", in that it's available for anyone to use, and if you find any bugs in it, lemme know & I'll endeavour to fix them... But as that's the state of all my site, you could say it's in it's release state too. Whichever makes you feel most fluffy I guess :D

Phil

Sleeping Beauty

My daugher's fifth birthday, and she got to choose her cake. She went for 'Sleeping Beauty', in chocolate, with added chocolate... To be honest, I think her mother had a small influence there :D

It was all going really well until I thought that her facial features needed a little more definition - she went from sleeping peacefully to becoming 'Sleeping Harlot' - but fortunately Katiya didn't notice ;)

Redevelopment of the wishlists and new Beta testing section created...

Ok, user authentification re-write is almost complete (check the forum for more information on this), and the Wish List functionality has been rewritten and is into beta testing. It's a LOT more user-friendly (if you're used to using Windows, that is :D) than its previous incarnation, and a lot more free form. You can use it purely as a place to link to all your other wish-lists, if you so choose.

If you want to try it out you need to join the Beta testing "programme", then you need to be registered on PhilTanner.com and logged in to your account, and then join the Phil Tanner Website - Beta testers group. It's as easy as that :D

Phil

New functionality added to the forums - Album!

There's new functionality been added to the forums to allow you to upload photographs, pictures and stuff... Feel free to use it ;)

That's all, it's a nice short one today :P

Small problem with Forum functions.

Small technical error. Sorry, file got wiped. Need to see if I can find a backup anywhere. Arse.

Sorry guys, RSS'll be down for a while

Forum posts now on the homepage...

The forums have become such a success with the people who are using them that I've decided to put a last of the last 10 posts onto the homepage. This should allow other people to see the fun that's being had in there, and come along and join in :D

No no, really :P

Additionally, the Forum RSS feed is also available by SOAP now, for you to write your own applications, should you wish. Email me for more information...

Phil.

RSS Feeds for the Forum!

Ok, you might've noticed all the little orange XML icons that've appeared on the forum today...

They link to an RSS feed for this forum - what they watch depends on where you clicked it :D

If you click one of the ones in the top right corner of the page, it will link you to a feed that watches that page for any new posts, so if you do it on a normal post page, it will just watch that one topic for replies (or edits).

If you click it on the page before hand (the forum list, with all the topics listed) it will watch all of those topics for replies / edits, and will also watch out for any new topics that might appear.

The one on the top right of the homepage for the forums (http://www.philtanner.com/forum/) will watch everything. Anytime anything new gets added anywhere to the forum, you'll be alerted :D

If you don't know what an RSS feed is, then find out more by looking in my advice section, on this topic: http://mud.philtanner.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=219#219

For obvious reasons any new posts in areas which you have to subscribe to (I'm talking about the "Over 18's" section here - unless we add some more later on!) will not show you their content. This is to stop you being bombarded with alerts on topics you might not be comfortable with. It will tell you that a new post has been made however, so you can go and view it if you want to... But that's entirely up to you :P

More funky features

Not only do we now have fully featured forums that you can all scribble your measly $0.02 worth in, there's now a chatroom too. The chat functionality does however need you to have Java installed, and depending on whether you installed it before Microsoft had a hissy-fit and refused to include it on Windows by default, you might need to install it.

When you visit http://www.philtanner.com/chat.cfm, you should either see a large white square appear (which will turn into the chat window when it gets a moment :P) or a piece of text that tells you that you need Java and a link where you can download it from. If you see the text, you haven't got Java & thus need to install it - it's as simple as that! Once installed, Java should appear as an icon in your system try (thing with the clock in it, bottom right of your screen) as a blue coffee mug with red steam rising from it. If you don't have that, there's a good chance you don't have Java installed, but go try anyways :P

On another subject, the transfer of files to my new hard drive is now complete, and I believe that I've repointed all the links to my new device. The files have been deleted from my old drive, so if you come across any broken links or images, do let me know - they shouldn't be there :D

Possible outages upcoming

Got myself a new external USB HDD last week, upgrading from an 80Gb to 300Gb drive :D. The old 80Gb will become the backup drive, and the 300Gb will take over the day-to-day serving of photographs, storing my music, install files and so forth. As part of this process, I'll be moving the files between the two HDD's over the next couple of days, and as such you may notice the occasional broken image, "file not found" error and such like. These should be fixed within 2 or 3 minutes however, so if you come back later and it's still broken, please let me know - as it's obviously a section I've overlooked :P

As part of this process, I've put a new conversation thread in the Important Information section of the forums (see previous RSS post), which you should be able to post any messages about missing pages, or general queries about the process to.

Sorry for any inconvience caused....

Forums

Ok, so after a quiet bedding in period, Sue and I have finally managed to get around to organising the forums on PhilTanner.com. I notice that some of you have already spotted the link in the main navigation and created yourselves a user (gratz Ray ;)), but for anyone else out there who's interested, or wants to make any comments, come join the fun :P

You can post your views on all manner of things here:
http://www.philtanner.com/phpBB2/
And I know it's not a very friendly URL, but I will probably move it to /forums/ or suchlike in the near future :D (The phpBB2 link will still work tho, don't worry ;)).

Welcome Archer

Just a quick note to say welcome to Archer William Tanner, who was born today (19th December, 2005) weighing 2.590Kg (5lb 11.5oz to you heathens!).

You can find out more about him on his website:
http://www.philtanner.com/archer

Enzo Ferrari

Another birthday, another cake. A work colleague of mine (this time) has a Hubby whose birthday is ridiculously late in December (although nowt as late as Archers!) who wanted a yellow Ferrari Enzo for a present... So she asked me to make a cake for him.

Now, my knowledge of cars is about as comprehensive as my knowledge of horses (see my attempt at a horses head for more info), but I think this came out better in the end, perhaps because I spent a while finding a whole load of Enzo images on Google before starting work on it.

Before you shoot me down in flames, the yellow was her choice, not mine ;) It's shiny because it has several layers of confectioners varnish on it, to make it look more like a car, and the cake was yet another chocolate sponge with chocolate butter icing. Do these people have no imagination? :P

While I was making the cake, I thought it might be nice to do a step by step walk-through of how I went about creating it, which you can see here, but be warned, there's LOTS of images, so it may take quite a while to load...

Yet more things on my site, you lucky people!

Yet more goodies for you registered people. I keep being asked for the location of various files (VNC, Sygate etc) that I have stashed on my machine for easy access. No one seemed able to remember the (what I thought was a) very easily memorable location, so I spent a couple of minutes tweaking my Music search to create a new Download search page, which works in an almost identical fashion.

You should be able to find what you're looking for in there now anyways. Any issues or problems, let me know, as per usual ;)

Phil.

Horses head - without the Godfather implications!

A work colleague of Sue's had heard about my awesome(!) skills in the cake making department, and her daughters birthday was coming up, so she asked Sue if I could make a cake for her. "Of course!", we said, "why not?" may even have passed our lips. Hmmm.

So anyways, I go through the multitude of cakes books now at my disposal, and I find all of the horsey cakes I can. There's a relief of a unicorn prancing, and nice little 3D pony stable, a story book with a horse painted onto the pages, in short all the variations of horsey style things you can imagine. But wait, our customer has been unfaithful! Sue returns from work with the cake books, and a print out from some other cake shop of a horses head, saying "Can we have something like that please?". I mean... That's just dirty ;)

Anyways, I had some contract work on at the same time, so it was kind of like trying to fit all my normal life, plus working weekends & evenings, as well as making this cake into the 24 hours in a day. Let me tell you, I was knackered by the end of it all!

So, this is the final result... I'm not as happy with this as I could have been. It just didn't "work". I think half the problem is my total lack of experience with horses... I can't remember ever being really close to one, if I was, I wasn't terribly interested. I must admit that (contrary to what appears to be the rest of the human race) I find them ugly great hulking beasts and don't understand the attraction of them. As a result, horsey suffered. His ear gives him the look & feel of Dobbin the donkey, and unfortunately the nose (especially from front on) has a distinct resemblance to a kangeroo.

So, all in all. Not one of my best cakes. Sorry Lydia, I did try, but I hope you like it :S

Cake was a chocolate sponge with chocolate butter icing, by request ;)

Another bug consigned to the sin-bin

Ok, there was a small problem with the music list that I had developed (see the post dated 14th Oct...) which, once again, only reared it's ugly head when Sue tried using the damned thing! She must think I'm useless - she always finds bugs in my systems that I'm sure weren't there when I gave them to her to test ;)

Anyways, the bug revolved around music tracks (or artists or albumn names) that contained parentheses (brackets to you non-programmers) but it should have been fixed now. Do let me know if there's any other issues that you come across...

Phil.

iTunes eat your heart out!

I've added a section for registered users where you can search my MP3 collection for any tracks you might be looking for. Obviously I won't be sharing them with you, as that would be entirely illegal, and as you all know, that's something that's totally against my nature ;)

There's a good 10Gb odd of MP3's in there, and my taste is somewhat... eclectic shall we say, so there should be something for everyone.

Have a good weekend, I know I will - I got me a new Xbox game... Kingdom under Fire - Heroes. Roll on the battlefield... ;)

Phil.

Castle Ilona

Having talked about my cakes to many people at fencing, and pointed them at this website, one of them (Ray Munn) made the mistake of showing the website to his daughter. She took a shine to the Faerie Tale Castle cake, insisting that it was hers, and that was what she was going to have as her birthday cake. At which point he decided that he couldn't possibly disappoint her and he'd have to get me to make a cake for him. So I took the cake books in to fencing one week and we finally settled on this castle cake, after MUCH deliberation!

Anyways, coz it was for Ilona's 5th birthday party, there was really only one choice when it came to the cake colouring for a young girl. The sponge was left as a plain maderia sponge mix, with enough red food colouring to turn it into a bright, Barbie doll, pink. The buttercream icing inside was made up with lots of Strawberry flavour Nesquick, again to turn it a lovely shade of pink, and to give it that wonderfully sickly "starwberry" flavour which kids love so much. Personally I'm not sure I can think of anything that tastes less like strawberries than that, but who am I to judge?

For those of you who keep asking about timings and costs, here's a brief breakdown of how long it took, what I did:

• Monday 18:30-20:30 : Coloured the sugarpaste fondant (ready to roll icing to you & me)
• Tuesday 18:45-22:30 : Mixed cakes & baked, while cooking made up the buttercream icing
• Wednesday 18:30-20:30 : Cut the cakes and made the base mountain. Covered in sugarpaste.
• Friday 19:00-22:30 : Made the castle & covered in sugarpaste. Glued and attached the turrets. Added the grass to the mountain base.
• Saturday 09:30-11:30 : Rolled out the rooves for the turrets and attached them. Made and stuck the flowers to the mountain. Shaded the mountain with icing sugar for the highlights and black dusting powder for the shadows and pathway. Attached the name over the castle doorway.

Just for a sense of scale, the cake ended up at almost exactly a foot cubed (yes I know it's on a round base, but it was 12" in diameter, and 12" high, so I needed a 12" cubed box! :P)

Wishlist update

I realised that once you marked something as bought for somebody else, that was it, gone. If you ticked the box by accident there was no way to say "Oops, I didn't mean that!" and the item disappeared off that persons list completely. So now, at the bottom of every persons wishlist is a list of all the items you have previously marked as bought (no matter who they were for). The items will stay there until the owner of the list deletes the item from their wishlist (which they will hopefully do once they receive the item!) or you tick the box to say you haven't actually bought it, at which point it disappears from your "bought list" and re-appears on the persons wish list. Simple as that really ;)

Wishlist update

I've added a checkbox to the title of your wishlist edit page, which allows you to show which items have already been marked as having been bought. If you tick this box any items which have been bought by somebody will be highlighted in grey and a present image () will appear above the reordering buttons. Hovering your mouse over this will show you who purchased the item for you (as it happens, doing this brought up a bug which I wasn't aware of at the time, but has been fixed now... It was saying that the person whose wishlist you were looking at was buying the items you marked as bought - duh!).

I'm not sure how useful this feature is, or indeed if it's wanted. But Amazon do it, so I figure that there must be a demand for the information, but just in case it'll spoil it all for you, and you like the surprise, the checkbox is not ticked by default ;)

Wishlist update

Ok, so I showed the wishlist code to Sue last night, who was not impressed with the UI... It was officially Not Very User Friendly^tm and so she said that it didn't do the job.  We had a small clash of ideas (she wanted to click on one item to edit it, I insisted that you needed to be able to edit multiple items at the same time) and so I've come up with a slightly prettier solution, which is all very nice and works just as well as the old one, but appears to be far more User Friendly, IMHO anyways...

But that should now be it on the tinkering side of things, unless somebody has other ideas about what's required....

]]> http://mud.philtanner.com/wishlist.cfm phil.rss@philtanner.com (Phil Tanner) http://www.philtanner.com/wishlist.cfm 05 Sep 2005 15:22:34 GMT PhilTanner.com - RSS Date: 05 Sep 2005

I finally got annoyed enough with Amazon not allowing you to add items from other websites to your wishlist that I had to build my own wishlist code. As such, anyone with a PhilTanner.com user account (i.e. that have requested to view our photos) has been given a wish list, and can view other peoples wish lists.

Once you've logged in you should now see a Wishlist link in the navigation menu at the top of the screen, which you can click on. By default it will take you to your own wish list (so you can add some items to your account), or you can click on the peoples names down the left hand side to see their wish lists if you want to buy something for them!

If you can think of anything that is missing from the wish lists (I only recently realised that I was missing quantity for instance!) please let me know and I'll see what I can do to add it :D

Ah, so it all finally becomes clear.  NTL were not looking at the eBay URL he had originally said. Instead, eBay were talking about the files which I was saving to my machine in order to get the data out of the auctions.  I saved a copy of the HTML'd auction files so I could suck the data out, and eBay had presumed that I was using those pages for phishing purposes...  So I've removed those files, and everyone seems happy.

So I guess I could re-instate my code, but move the storage area of the eBay auctions out of the webroot, or password protect it or something, but that's something for another time I guess ;)

I was busily uploading a 55Mb file to the server today when all of a sudden it just dropped off the internet without a trace. Somewhat confused I tried hunting around for the problem, but when you can't SSH onto the box, telnet to it, or even get a ping response, there's only so much you can do, which is pretty much nothing ;)

So Sue offers to have a look at the server when she gets home, and try to reboot it, which is very brave, considering it's a Linux box these days! But when she gets home, there's a voice mail on the telephone from NTL, saying something about eBay having complained and hosting of websites and thus our account has been shut down due to breach of contract under the "acceptable use" clause(!)

I ring the number they left, and spoke to a very nice bloke, who says that he's had an email from eBay complaining about my site illegally accessing eBay, and sending out phishing (my words, not his) scam emails; saying that I was sending emails out to people, pretending to be from eBay, directing them to my site which I had made to look as if it was eBay itself. Do you think my site resembles eBay? Me neither ;)

Anyways, the reason this has come about is because I have been working on a sniping tool for my own usage. So my server has been making http requests to eBay to get some auction details, stripping out the HTML to get at the data, and then attempting to log in as me to place a bid on an item. For testing purposes I was limiting the bid to £0.01, which is what may have given the game away somewhat ;) But there was never any emails sent out to anyone, and my website doesn't even pretend to look like eBay anyway - except for the small logo which I've put up the top there... and that's clearly stamped over the top of!

So I explained to nice blokey at NTL that it was a personal site for me to check eBay from my own website, and that it was not for anyone else - and that it was password protected anyways. He said that he'd checked the URL (which was correct, BTW) and that he could see the results. This worried me somewhat, as the site is username / password protected, and the content you can see is based on who you are. If he could see the eBay area without a username, then it was distinctly possible he'd be able to see some other areas of the site I'd really rather other people didn't see (hence why they're hidden until you log in :P). I think what he meant was that he'd just seen a username and password box to log in, which he guessed was where I was asking for peoples eBay username and password, which is just bizarre ;)

Anyways, he turned my connection back on if I said I would remove that area of my website. Which I've done. So arse. Never did crack the whole eBay login / cookie issue, but if anyone wants any eBay ColdFusion code, just ask ;)

Julie (another work colleague) asked me to make a cake for her bit of totties birthday. I agreed before realising that it would be a football one. Anyone that knows me will know my feelings towards the "beautiful game"... But it was going to be a challenge, so I agreed to do it anyway ;)

Sue was not impressed with the texture of the cake, saying that it was extremely bumpy, which was what I was after, as I was trying to make the cake appear to be a football field, which (certainly from my school days) was always somewhat bumpy. The plaque was done using modelling icing, rolled out over cardboard, trimmed to a circular shape and then holes cut out of the red icing. Into the holes I then inserted yellow icing before painting the red colouring over it to give the design.

The cake is a very plain madeira sponge, with strawberry jam and vanilla buttercream filling. For the vanilla flavouring I used some of the wonderful flavourings which my mother brought back from Grenada for me - which gave the icing a wonderful taste. An unfortunate side effect was that the icing took on a (very) light coffee colour rather than the standard cream colour of buttercream icing, but I think the sacrifice was worth it ;)

Ok, I didn't like that one at all. It really just didn't work for me, so I've gone for a design inspired (stolen to be frank) from Alfons Mucha. I like this one far more, maybe enough for it to last another few years until the next revamp :P

You can, however, see the other versions still here:

• Version 1
• Version 2
• Version 3

I've finally gotten around to tarting up the website a little, given it a spring clean as it were... Now all I need to do next is make it W3C compatible, and update the content. w00t!

Yes, I've entered into the wonderful world of RSS feeds. Although there's a very good chance that it'll go the same way as the Weblog and I'll never get around to updating it, but you never know your luck ;)

And yes, I know, the cake entries are before I created the RSS feed, but that's the kind of reverse time engineering that I'm brilliant at :D

Another year, another birthday. Katiya went through all of the cake books I have, and settled on this one for whatever reason four year olds have for making decisions. It's not even pink, so I have no idea why she went for this one :P

Sue wanted a "chocolate, more chocolate with extra chocolate" cake for her birthday, but what with it being so close to both Kyles and Katiyas birthdays we decided that it would probably be a case of cake overload. As such we skipped Sues birthday cake altogether (a travesty I know), so Katiyas cake became a chocolate cake with chocolate butter cream icing. I crushed a large bag of Malteasers and added them to the cake mix before baking, thinking it would add a nice texture to it, but unfortunately it made no appreciable difference to it. So I won't bother doing that again...

Before you ask, the swirled icing on the floor was meant to resemble magical smoke curling across the workroom floor...

A friend in the office (Helen) was getting married and a friend of her parents was organised to do her wedding cake. Helen et al had the same problem that Sue and I faced however, in that no one in her family really likes fruit cake, so she asked her to also make a sponge cake which they could cut and hand out to the guests on the day. Unfortunately the lady in question had to fly off to Jamaica for a family emergency and couldn't then do the sponge cake (which obviously had to be left to the last minute to avoid it going stale).

In somewhat of a quandry, Helen asked me if I could do the sponge cake for her. This is it ;). The brief was somewhat woolly (as I'm sure Helen had far more important matters on her mind at the time, with the wedding only two weeks away!), but we settled on having a fairly plain sponge cake, with sugar flowers to match into her bouquet of ivory roses and lilac freesias. I think the roses are a little too cream to be called ivory, but other than that I was fairly happy with the outcome, I just hope it lives up to the day now.

The cake was a plain madeira sponge with butter cream icing in the middle. I then covered the cake in apricot glaze, marzipan and icing (to try to match it in to a traditional wedding cake as much as possible ;)).

Just for a sense of scale, the board is 14" (35.5 cm) square...