Category Archives: Techie


Zip all changed files

March 28, 2006 – 1:58 pm

Calling all server admins
Our server admin was off today and I had to set a site live. We have a dategrep.py script that lists all changed files since a certain date so that those files can then be ftp’d to the live server. This seemed far too tedious for me so I re-wrote the dategrep.py […]

By philroche | Also posted in General, python | Comments (0)

ASPX craziness

March 21, 2006 – 6:49 pm

There I was hammering away, well in the zone writing a pretty beefy login system in C# when all of a sudden all the pages stopped working. I was running the application on my own machine so I tried to debug by setting a breakpoint and attaching the aspnet worker process. Nope just output […]

By philroche | Also posted in General, c# | Comments (1)

XSLT output CDATA sections

February 16, 2006 – 10:39 am

I was transforming some xml to xml another format and some of the text nodes could potentially contained invalid characters, so placing them in CDATA sections would be wise. I tried the following -
[code lang=”xml”]

…….

< ![CDATA[

]]>

[/code]
which of course did not work and resulted in what you see below. I knew this would happen but […]

By philroche | Comments (6)

ValueError: bad marshal data

February 15, 2006 – 7:26 pm

Very strange error happened today - I was running a few python scripts I was writing when I suddenly started getting a “ValueError: bad marshal data” error .

It was due to libxml2 but I didn’t know why. I deleted the “C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages\libxml2.pyc” and the “C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages\libxml2.pyo” file which solved the problem. No idea why as the error […]

By philroche | Comments (0)

Viking Textorizer

February 15, 2006 – 11:11 am

Textorizer is a tool that was linked to on Digg. It converts an image to SVG but the lines in the image are replaced with text that the user supplies. I tried it out with the viking head image and the words “philroche”, “philip”, “roche” and it out put an svg file which I […]

By philroche | Also posted in General | Comments (0)

CD image files from the Microsoft Download Center

February 10, 2006 – 8:20 am

Security and critical updates are available on ISO-9660 CD image files from the Microsoft Download Center
Security and critical updates are available on ISO-9660 CD image files from the Microsoft Download Center
As my mum is on dial up and I now have 2Mb ADSL, these isos will be invaluable when setting up her new computer.

By philroche | Also posted in General | Comments (0)

Python Publisher Posted Vars

February 1, 2006 – 11:13 pm

I was trying to get all of the variables posted to a python script added to a dictionary and was trying
[code lang=”python”]
form = cgi.FieldStorage()
[/code]
but it seems that you cannot use FieldStorage when using the publisher handler in mod_python. As the request variable req is always available, use the following.
[code lang=”python”]
[…]

By philroche | Comments (1)

What’s my bloody session ID

January 16, 2006 – 10:56 pm

While having a wander over at xulplanet.com I stumbled across the Cookie Manager Interface (Interface to the Gecko engine that is).
We have a simple HTML page in work that we use to emulate Payment Service Providers[PSP] (like Paypal or SecureTrading). It’s a right pain to test as we have to edit the page each […]

By philroche | Also posted in General | Comments (0)

Mono XSP 404

December 16, 2005 – 12:37 pm

Arghh!!!
I worked form home yesterday as I had the plumber round power flushing the central heating system. I spent most of the day trying to get mono xsp working (on Ubuntu on my ibook) which I did and all the sample .net applications were working great.
I came in to work today to show my […]

By philroche | Comments (0)

What a pillock

December 13, 2005 – 9:27 am

Damn Dan Brown and his “The DaVinci code“. This morning I started to get an earlier train as they have changed the timetable, meaning it is dark when I get to Abergele. With it being dark and the fact that I was so engrossed in my book, I missed my stop. I jumped out of […]

By philroche | Also posted in General | Comments (0)