Monthly Archives: February 2005

Sunburn, Stage 2

General, Photos

Alistair Lattimore's Sunburnt Legs, Stage 2As you might or might not know, I went go karting last weekend and unfortunately had a severe misunderstanding with the sun.

Seven days have now passed and with loads of Aloe Vera and moisturiser, they are feeling considerably better; however definitely not healed.

The photo indicates that my legs are actually still very very red, however that is just contrasting with my normally white coloured skin. So in fact, the redness on my thigh is actually kind of ‘normal’, not quite but close in a sense.

The colour of my shins is now only pink instead of a strong red, which is fantastic and the pain of my shins is pretty much gone. I have managed full nights sleep for the last 3 nights in a row, which compared to last week of three hours per night, is fantastic. The sore bits now are just down my actual shin bone, which what the most severely burnt. I was expecting to have full leg length blisters, however I think that the Aloe and moisturiser must of saved that from happening as the only blisters that have appeared are very small ones.

By this time next weekend, it should have completely recovered; or I hope it has. Be interesting to see the difference in the colour in another seven days time.

Wedding Venue

Wedding

On Friday night, Claire and I travelled down to Brisbane again as we had an appointment with the wedding co-ordinator at Stamford Plaza. The meeting was pretty straight forward, we really just needed to confirm the area we wanted to actually get married in.

In the end, we decided the foyer of the Grand Ballroom would be fantastic. However, there is a small problem with that; it isn’t part of the package we had organised. So, we have booked one of the other rooms, as a safe guard. This is where it gets groovy, Alison (our funky co-ordinator) said she is happy to swap the rooms over closer to the date if the Grand Ballroom isn’t being used. She also said that it very rarely gets used on the day we’ll be getting married, so it is quite likely it will be available.

It doesn’t matter if we can’t, the booked room is awesome too; but the bling bling factor of the foyer/ballroom is definitely up there.
;)

ASP Error ‘0x80004005’

Database, Programming

I was given another strange error tonight and once again searched around for a quick solution but it didn’t present itself immediately. The error was given was:

  1. Error Type: (0x80004005)
  2. Unspecified error
  3. /aspfile.asp, line <linenumber>

I’m finding it increasingly frustrating that the error codes that ASP presents are far to broad. You get given an error and it can relate to one of 100 different things. At which point, you need to whittle down that list till you finally find one that roughly matches your scenario. I realise that the language is old and it isn’t as much of a problem these days, however if they know it errored and they can categorise the error into the 0x80004005 group, then they must of known exactly what the problem was. At which point, why not provide your developers a specific and useful error message; it would sure save them a lot of time.

Continuing on, in the end, the problem was caused by the name field I was updating, it was a reserved word. This brings me to my next point. You would think that when the person that created this Access database designd it (not me), that Access would have prompted him with a “This is a reserved word, you are not allowed to use it as either a table or field name”. Now, it might have presented him with it, clearly it wasn’t forceful enough as he named it with an invalid name regardless.

To give you an idea of what I was doing, here is a code snippet:

  1. sSQL = "SELECT * FROM [Position/Title] WHERE lcase(position) = '" & LCase(Request.Form("position")) & "'"

In this case, not only was his table name wrong (who uses slashes in names, really!), but the field “position” was the reserved word. To save renaming the field, as I didn’t want to change the database, you can wrap the field names in square brackets [ ].

Thankfully Access provided a way around the problem, which was simple and convenient. Now if only the error reporting was concise.

Go Karting

General, Photos

Alistair Lattimore's Sunburnt Legs, Stage 1Today, myself and some friends joined Andrew for a fun day organised by his works recreation club to go go-karting. The event was held at Kingston Park Raceway, which is about half way across the Logon Motorway.

The day started with our group of about 45 drivers being split up into three groups, I ended up in Group A. From here we did about 10 practice laps around their 1100m track to get to know it. This was directly followed by our initial qualifying which would place us into the grid for the first of our 4 races.

Qualifying went well and I ended up on the 4th row of the grid (position 7). From memory, my initial qualifying time was about 1m04s around their track, which wasn’t too bad. In Race 1, moved past 2 drivers in the race which was frustrating but it was the first time around the track with other drivers to overtake. Race 2, was done reverse grid on how you placed in Race 1; so if you finished first, you started at the rear of the grid. After the first race, my times around the track dropped considerably as I consistently drove under 1m00s unless held up by traffic, which I was pretty pleased about. Race 3 and 4 were also good, however I got tagged by a couple other drivers with was a little disruptive (causing me to spin), however was still lapping under 1m00s on the better laps and ended the day with a fastest lap time of about 0m58s.

The weather for the day was fine, which was excellent and about 26c. I didn’t get burnt from the first two races, however when I came off the track after the third, I just felt hot. Well in the time between the third and fourth race (~30-40 minutes), I went a very bright shade of red and I was severely burnt. I was so burnt, I ended up putting a jumper on, just so I wouldn’t get any more burnt on my arms, unfortunately for me, my legs copped a flogging.

Since I have returned, I’ve been lathering an Aloe Vera gel onto my legs as often as I can in a hope it will help ease the pain and burning as quickly as is possible. I guess the lesson from all this is that, even when it isn’t ‘hot’ – you can still get severely burnt; next time I’ll be sure to put sunscreen on.

ASP Error ‘80020009’

Database, Programming

Again today, I came across an error caused by an invalid date value. The error reported was:

  1. error '80020009'
  2. Exception occurred.
  3. /somefile.asp, line <number>

Went and googled again, this time it appeared as though the error was commonly caused by over-stepping the bounds of the resultset. For instance, pulling back 10 records by trying to read the 11th which doesn’t exist. Well that wasn’t the case for mine (once again), it was an invalid date format.

All I was doing, was displaying the date value. I wasn’t using it to do any calculations in either ASP or through SQL, so even it if was invalid, you would assume it would just ‘display it’ and be done with it.

For whatever reason, just trying to display a date of format ‘0000-01-04’ caused it to fall over. The solution of course, just correct the date value. Once again, lack of client and server side checking of user input bites you in the arse.