Dave Russell

Laser refractive surgery (Lasik)

Dave — Fri, 21 May 2010 08:58:51 +0000

Do people still use these things?

Yesterday, after months of deliberation, investigation and hesitation I willingly allowed Dr John Hill, of the Dr Hill Eye Laser Centre, to perform laser refractive surgery (Lasik) on my less than perfect eyes which where -1.75 and astigmatic. (I say willingly because I had to sign a form just before the procedure that stated that I have asked all the right questions and understand what I was getting myself into. ) In less than 10 minutes both eyes had been fixed and I found myself back in the reception getting care instructions for my new eyes. I write this post less that 24 hours after the procedure and already my vision is on a par with what I had while wearing lenses.

Just for the record: I am an absolute girl scout and am not the bravest when it comes to needles and men in masks. I must admit I nearly fainted half way through as the thought of what was actually been done to me became a little over whelming. But honestly, the dentist is far worse and I experienced absolutely no pain. My vision was very smokey at first but but the evening was greatly improved and was even better this morning.

The procedure is not cheap (R15000), but having done it I would, without hesitation, recommend it to anyone.

AWB secretary-general looses the plot during interview

Dave — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:31:08 +0000

Seriously? I thought we were over this.

Unhinged: Surviving Joburg

Dave — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 05:59:39 +0000

A brilliant depiction of the vibe in JHB. I grew up there, and its all true. A place that draws you in with the promise of success. A place with as many opportunities as there are dangers.

Can’t wait to see it, read more here.

Fool climbs speaker stack at Kirstenbosch Goldfish concert

Dave — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:02:40 +0000

Using Javascript to validate South African ID Numbers

Dave — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:00:21 +0000

I have just finished a neat little client side ID number validation script that ensures that the ID number passed is:

Numeric,
is 13 Digits long,
has a valid date with the first 6 characters
and passes the Luhn algorithm test.

function ValidateIDnumber(idnumber) {

//1. numeric and 13 digits

if (isNaN(idnumber) || (idnumber.length != 13)) { return false; }

//2. first 6 numbers is a valid date

var tempDate = new Date(idnumber.substring(0, 2), idnumber.substring(2, 4) - 1, idnumber.substring(4, 6));

if (!((tempDate.getYear() == idnumber.substring(0, 2)) &amp;&amp; (tempDate.getMonth() == idnumber.substring(2, 4) - 1) &amp;&amp; (tempDate.getDate() == idnumber.substring(4, 6)))) { return false; }

//3. luhn formula

var tempTotal = 0; var checkSum = 0; var multiplier = 1;

for (var i = 0; i &lt; 13; ++i) {

tempTotal = parseInt(idnumber.charAt(i)) * multiplier;

if (tempTotal &gt; 9) { tempTotal = parseInt(tempTotal.toString().charAt(0)) + parseInt(tempTotal.toString().charAt(1)); }

checkSum = checkSum + tempTotal;

multiplier = (multiplier % 2 == 0) ? 1 : 2;

}

if ((checkSum % 10) == 0) { return true };

return false;

}

Selecting all today’s records

Dave — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:53:39 +0000

Dates can be difficult to work with especially when you are not interested in the time portion. So here’s a quick snippet that strips the time portion out of the equation, making it easy to get only today’s records (or any day for that matter).

SELECT Column1,Column2, Datestamp FROM tblExample

WHERE DATEADD(day, DATEDIFF(day, 0, GetDate()), 0) = DATEADD(day, DATEDIFF(day, 0, Datestamp), 0)

Fantastic use of pure css to create animation

Dave — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:20:14 +0000

I like to think I have a fairly good grip on CSS, but this takes it to another level:
Introducing the rolling coke can…

Consider yourself humbled.

Hitler finds out about the new iPad

Dave — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:34:52 +0000

I’m a day late with this, but it is pretty funny stuff.

There are loads of rip off ads and video around already – check out a classic on cherryflava.

I still want one though…

Making Magento catalog price rules stick.

Dave — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:20:00 +0000

Magento

I am involved in an ecommerce venture that uses magento commerce to manage sales. For months I have been bugged by the fact that catalog price rules do not stick – you run the rule from the admin system; all looks great on the site; discounts are applied, but a day later the rule has stopped working and has to be applied again. Very frustrating and not cool.

The good news is I have eventually found a fix to the problem. Basically you need to update near the bottom of the cron.php file to read as follows:

try {
Mage::getConfig()->init()->loadEventObservers(’crontab’);
Mage::app()->addEventArea(’crontab’);
Mage::dispatchEvent(’default’);
$ob = Mage::getModel(’catalogrule/observer’);
$ob->dailyCatalogUpdate(”0 1 * * *”);

Once this is in place you can browse the cron.php file directly and take a deep sigh of relief.

I am still skeptical whether or not the cron job that I set up is actually going to kick this off automatically. Time will tell. I see though that if it does not work, there are services out there that will run a page on your site at specified intervals.

Holding thumbs.

A really really flexible CSS layout

Dave — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:09:01 +0000

This is a really really flexible layout that does not make use of tables and can be used as either a 1,2 or 3 column layout by simply including or omitting the left and right columns. The content is king, so the content comes first in the html followed by the rest. The structure is controlled via CSS with a little bit of coolness added on thanks to jQuery.

The top banner code is there only to show what is possible, the reason I built this was to have one template that could handle any layout. The interesting thing about the top banner though is that there are two background images on top of each other which creates a lot or flexibility when it comes to banner imagery that overlaps the extents of the 960 by x height banner area.

I have used one jQuery plugin to force equal height columns (1kb) and made use of the cdn for the jquery source. So this should be really quick as well as flexible.

Demo