All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

Sunburn, Stage 3

General, Photos

Alistair Lattimore's Sunburnt Legs, Stage 3As you have probably guessed, I got sunburnt while go karting with one of my older brothers and some friends about 2 weeks ago. Well after considerable pain initially, utilising gallons of aloe vera and moisturiser, I am very happy they have recovered to a semi normal state.

In the last two weeks, I have gone from white to a bright red, to tiny blisters and then pealing. The pealing has just about finished now. It now doesn’t hurt to walk back to my car of in the afternoon sun, yippee! The colour in my legs now is my normal ‘white tan’, on top of my ‘pink’ skin. Some people just weren’t meant to have a tan – I’m one of them.

Lets hope it doesn’t happen again any time soon.

ASP isNumeric

Programming

You would assume that the isNumeric fucntion would return a false value if you passed it an alphanumeric string. However, after checking through some things; it appears that it considers 6,6 as an numeric value.

In this instance, the value is coming from a query string so you would assume that the variable sub-type would be a string. If you test that using the VarType function, it does indeed return a value of 8 (indicating VBString as the sub-type), yet some how it is also numeric.

The only way I can see that this is logical, is that it might be allowing the comma through based on the premise that it is a valid currency formatting character, such as $123,456.78. The Microsoft documentation for isNumeric indicates that it will allow a period (.) through, however mentions nothing about a comma at all.

A simple code example:

  1. Dim sValue
  2. sValue = 6
  3. Response.Write isNumeric(sValue) ' prints True
  4. sValue = 6.0
  5. Response.Write isNumeric(sValue) ' prints True
  6. sValue = "6,6"
  7. Response.Write isNumeric(sValue) ' prints True
  8. sValue = "6, 6"
  9. Response.Write isNumeric(sValue) ' prints False

If it is allowing the comma through for currency reasons then I would consider the function to be flawed. A comma isn’t part of a number system, it is part of a currency system which changes from country to country. Further to that point, if isNumeric considers “6,6” to be a number, then you should also be allowed to cast it into a numeric type (from the variable sub-type VBString) into an integer for instance.

More ASP Error ‘80020009’

Database, Programming

Again today, working in ASP backing onto Oracle I had another 80020009 error. As I previously stated, the error code was as follows:

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

This time I immediately went to solve the problem based on my previous solution. As it turned out, the date was incorrect. Once corrected however, the error did not go away. I preceded to set the date field back to NULL and then back to a valid date; which was being stored in dd/mm/yyyy format, still nothing.

At this point I started hunting down the possible cause. I couldn’t display the date in that field at all through ASP, yet the same field in different tuples were just fine. I could use an isNull() on the date and it reported that there was in fact ‘something’ in the field. If I tried a Len(), I would get an error. The sub-type of the field in the recordset reported by VarType() for all other tuples was in fact 7 (VBDate), however the one in error was a 9 (VBObject).

At this point I was wondering whether Oracle had some how managed to store a damaged date, so I wrote a small query using SQL to do a comparison on the field against SYSDATE:

  1. SELECT completeddate,
  2. CASE
  3. WHEN (completeddate > SYSDATE) THEN
  4. 'TRUE'
  5. ELSE
  6. 'FALSE'
  7. END as FutureEvent
  8. FROM tblevents
  9. WHERE eventid = 49401;

As expected, Oracle returned the correct values in every case. Which left me with no place to really go forward from here. To put the web application back into a working state, I used the VarType of the field to test whether I should or shouldn’t attempt to display the value; dirty hack but a working solution for the moment.

This leads me to believe, that some how ASP/ADO/something is some how reporting/munging the value of that field for some reason. I still don’t quite know how or why; all I know at this point is that it is frustrating and consumed my time on something that should have otherwise worked perfectly.

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.
;)