Lester's Rants

Created by: Administrator, 15 June 2011
Last modified: 28 February 2025

Dispite the distractions ... progress is being made

By Lester Caine
19 June 2025

It is almost 11 months since I moved into the flat and finally there is progress on solving the problem of no pressure on the hot water. Now I just need to get the go ahead on converting the loft space into a railway room and small workshop. I've put down some flooring where the 1980's roof trusses are supported by the kitchen and bathroom walls, but to expand the area to perhaps 6 meters square I will need to add some more substantial joists which only need to span 3 meters from the…

One man's "terrorist" ... just fighting for justice?

By Lester Caine
7 June 2025

Just been reading Jeremy Bowen's report on the BBC New site re Palestine. It prompted me to put a comment in as it just flags up the injustice that many people in the world today have to put up with. I pushed the following as a 'Have your say' message, and am copying it here mainly for my own reference. 50e18d8f-b60b-46f5-bcf7-c3220dc24a51

"The one thing that I am seein…

Making good progress but not without problems

By Lester Caine
9 May 2025

After a number of false starts I now have a copy of the bitweaver code base which has a namespace setup that works for me, but is probably not 'right' for such services as composer. There is still some work to do and while 'traits' could have been useful, the idea of converting hundreds of possibly single line functions into classes just does not make sense to me. I've ended up with an extension for Smarty5 with all of the functions and modifiers managed through that but I…

Touch wood, I'm on a roll ... key elements are working on PHP8.4

By Lester Caine
4 May 2025

I was begining to get flustrated as when I changed things everything stopped working again, but over the last few days which have been broken up with things like a visit to the GWR Festival of Steam on Saturday and a Dolls house show in Churchdown on Sunday. Obviously getting my mind off the software side was the right thing to be doing and this morning I took stock of where I am and things are looking good. The bitweaver framework is fairly stable, and I now have a copy of phpgedview running…

Busy couple of weeks ...

By Lester Caine
1 May 2025

Been a while since I last posted, and while there are lots of things to rant about, the main problem is with my own head and getting around my own prejudices. I never did get into 'namespaces' when they were first introduced to PHP, and even today one of my main third party libraries, ADOdb, still does not have one set, but the other key library, smarty, does and this was causing a little difficulty. In Smarty5 everything has been converted to classes, although I do not see the advant…