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. .

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.

Multiple-step Operation Generated Errors

Database, Programming

While working on some ASP today, someone reported that a page used for editing contact details was generating the following error:

  1. Microsoft Cursor Engine error '80040e21'
  2. Multiple-step operation generated errors. Check each status value.

I googled it and found some possible causes how none of them seemed to match what I was looking for. When I checked PostgreSQL for that particular item, I found that there was a date field which had the value ‘0000-12-24’ in it. I would have thought that PostgreSQL would have errored when someone tried to insert that date, however it would appear it didn’t.

The solution was simple, change the year field back to what it should have been and it was all fine. Just goes to show that you should never trust what a user enters into the system; more checking is required even on a simple thing like a date.

Form Validation, Part 1

Programming

Quite some time ago, I started wondering about a nice way to do server side form validation. After pondering about what sort of features I wanted, I started to write them down on paper.

These were the features that I came up with:

  • Visual clues that something is in error (background colour/border/..)
  • Various data types for input boxes (int/float/string/alpha/..)
  • Data type restrictions within a data type (min-value/max-value for an int for instance)
  • To generate a list of validation errors and prompts after submitting
  • Different submission requirements for different fields (mandatory/optional)

With that in mind, I started writing it in ASP Classic as a learning tool. I’ll post the Class as a file to download and some explanations of it shortly.

Baby Jade

General, Photos

On Sunday 6th February at ~11.40am Jade Ellousie Salisbury was Christened. Claire and I took the trip to Toowoomba for the occasion!

It was held at Saint Lukes church at about 11.15am, however given there were other parents with kids coming, it started a little late. Everything went smoothly and their little bloke Fletcher, thought the alter was just fantasic, couldn’t keep away from it!

Once it all got underway, there was a little bit of the standard church stuff and then the christening. Baby Jade was very well behaved and didn’t put up much of a fight at all, which was a kind gesture from her I think.

While Rachel, Stuart, Fletcher and the Minister were up on the blessing area, I was in charge of taking some photos for them. Not sure how that is going to go just yet, but we’ll see soon enough.