The Grax Domain

27 Apr 2007 Running water but through the wrong end

A poem relative to the recent event that happened to me this week.

Running water, but through the wrong end
Flowing through me like tainted wine.
The treats that pass my lips
Have no time to be processed,
Rush through on the gravy train,
Feeling their shapes.

Imodium's all gone but it no work.
Imodium has never failed before. Why now? Why...

Insides gargle like the toilet that I am bound to.

Sleep. A chance to sleep, maybe to rid my troubles.
It works with sea-sickness.
Sleep is good.
Sleep is not enough this time.
It was wishful thinking anyway. Long shot at best. I had nothing else to do.

My sphincter can't take much more dry paper.

Night time. The time. All or nothing. Relentless assault.
Water rushing out with a roar of stink
Unprocessed raisins squeeze thought the ring.
Something burns but I smell no smoke.
There is no fire. Oh God why is there no fire?

I weep with a pain that mere lower-middle class men shouldn't have to tolerate.
Swollen to double its size to try and block the passage.
Need relief. Desperate times.
Petroleum jelly.
Soothness and cool.

Three hours of sleep. This has to end now.

More Imodium, more supplies. It will not fail me.
The gargling beast inside kicks up a fuss.
One more squirt. I throw more ammo inside.
It will not fail me.
It will not!

...

Wait, how long has it been?
6 hours? Oh cool, it must have worked.
Glad that's over.
But I shall never forget.

Running water, but through the wrong end
Flowing through me like tainted wine.

This has been a poem about the two days of diarrhoea I had this week.

Thank you.

20 Apr 2007 First week in Oxford

How's it going? I've had my first week in Oxford and so far so good.

For those who don't know what's going on in my life I was offered a new job in Oxford. It promised me a decent advancement in my career (read that however you wish) and I took it. I handed in my noticed in my old job a month ago and, although they were sad to see me go, they wished me well. Standard issue stuff; pub lunch, gift, card, cake, hand shakes, and so on. Still I am going to miss all the people downstairs...

I wonder if they've found my replacement yet.

So back to my new job in Oxford. From now on I am no longer a web developer by profession; henceforth I am focusing my skills upon Flash and Actionscript to develop games. Finally, a chance for me to pull my finger out of my ass and do some Flash games. Plus the company is brand new, so we've gotta make everything from scratch, which is good for me as I likes making things from scratch.

The guys at work are nice enough, not really had a chance to get to know them in great detail as we're focusing on work. The only real except is my boss. The weekend I moved into my new house in Oxford he invited me out to a mini pub crawl across Cowley Road to get me familiar with the area. This is quite odd for me; a boss man being friendly and social? But still I went, had a few drinks with him, chatted, and found out he's a pretty nice guy. And I'm not just saying that because my boss is probably reading this entry.

It seems to be the norm, being very friendly and social in Oxford, not like it was back in Andover. The night I moved to my new house my housemate invited me to the pub, paid for all my drinks (as I was short on cash at the time), and even paid for my takeaway (again, short on cash). The new house has two students and a hippy librarian and they have a student, laid back attitude to life, which suits me perfectly. Not sure if I like being the oldest in the house though....

So yeah first week in Oxford is good. Nice job, nice people, nice house, en suite, what more is needed?

Well I needs an Internet connection. It's been a week since I've been able to play Second Life.

Um yeah.... Second Life... That'd probably justify another article.

9 Apr 2007 Psychic blessings for the Oxford move

I'm thinking that everything is going to be A-OK when I move to my new bungalow in Oxford.

My mum helped me move the majority of my stuff from my old room in Andover to the new room in Oxford. After the packing and drive I showed her around the house then showed her all the inside. Her response was...

"Oh my God I saw this house in my dream! All these rooms are exactly the same as the one in my dream! I can't believe I dreamt this. I thought it was me and your step-dad moving to the house, but now I know it's was you Grax!"

She spent the rest of the day feeling all giddy and happy knowing that her son will be living in the house that she dreamt of.

So there you go. An omen from my psychic mummy that all will be well.

6 Apr 2007 Mambo CMS review

Mambo is the biggest pile of shit I have ever come across. It is difficult to use, even harder to work with, incredibly rigid, not standard compliant, the list goes on. It angers my blood! It's made my life a little less enjoyable to live. It ruined my last relationship with my ex-girlfriend¹! I wish I never met Mambo version 4.53.

GRAX RATING: 0/5

I suppose you'll be wanting a bit more than the summary. Let me explain.

Mambo is an open-source CMS that allows people to easily manage any part of their website without in-depth knowledge of web programming skills. The idea is you install all the necessary files and database on your server, then using the admin system you populate the site with content, choose a layout and you're done. It's suppose to be quick and simple.

This sounded very appealing because it would be great to give to clients who wanted to change every aspect of their website but are not IT literate. One of the advantages is that it is completely free to use due to some open-source rules, so people can modify any part of the Mambo system to work any way they wish. Indeed there are many plug-in modules made by the community to do many different and wonderfully usefully things.

The version I tested out was version 4.53 because it was recommended to be the most stable, even more stable than the latest version that was released (something like 4.62).

Let me list all the things wrong with Mambo, in no particular order...

Not W3C Standards Compliant
Mambo does not follow these standards. Run the validation test and see the huge list of errors that follows.

Uses TABLE tags for web layout
There is virtually no use of CSS to generate it's layout. You're practically stuck with the layout format you're given. Not given much room to flex those creative muscles. And I'm sure many web programmers out there will understand how much of a pain in the ass it is to try and modify anything in tables.

It's HUGE
You have to install hundreds upon hundreds of files on your server to use Mambo, not to mention the database filled with a couple dozen tables with a few hundred plus records. Websites are meant to be small and streamline, not a huge lummox. The end result; a website that runs very slowly even with a broadband connect. Which also leads to the next point...

It's a nightmare to debug
I kid you not; there is thousands upon thousands of lines of code. PHP classes and functions from one file that call functions from a different class from a different file in a different directory. You'll be spending a good couple of hours searching in this labyrinth trying to figure out how one of the Mambo pages worth. Before you even try to tackle the bug you're fixing.

Some of the files are practically empty and seem to serve no useful purpose
'nuff said.

Poor use of JavaScript
I'll ignore the fact that it has embedded JavaScript code within the web pages for now, the biggest sin that Mambo commits is using JavaScript to actually make some parts of the website functional. Namely on one part of the Mambo website it used JavaScript to act like a hyperlink... rather than using the actual Anchor tag as a hyper link... So if you have no JavaScript enabled you're kinda stuck.

Admin - Mambo is NOT very intuitive
To create a new page in its own menu category one has to create the new category area, then has to create the static page, then has to link the page to the right menu, then has to make sure the menu is linked ot the right module. I'm IT literate and it took me a while to get use to this pattern.

Admin - Cannot copy and paste bulk text from MS Word into the admin area unless it's IE
So if you're trying to create a new page in any other browser (apart from IE) and you wish to copy and paste a lot of text from a Word document to the text area, it pops up with an message saying "No no no , you can't do that bub. That would be too easy." and then ignores you. How effing random and annoying is that??

The Admin navigation intially broke in IE7
This has been recently fix

It make me groan with dread every time the subject of Mambo comes up in conversation...

Mambo is the biggest pile of shit I have ever come across. It is difficult to use, even harder to work with, incredibly rigid, not standard compliant, the list goes on. It angers my blood! It's made my life a little less enjoyable to live. It ruined my last relationship with my ex-girlfriend¹! I wish I never met Mambo version 4.53.

GRAX RATING: 0/5


¹ - Not really. But it might as well have, it's so bad.