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• For anyone with Mario Kart Wii, my friend code is: 3609-3218-8554 – add me, I’ll go easy on you, I promise! #

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For those who don’t know, my Astra was attacked in Donegal at the end of July.  Woke up to the damage on the Saturday morning. The windscreen was fixed for just the £60 excess on the Monday (apparently these guys don’t do weekends).  The Garda were nice but never inspired much hope of catching anyone and were ultimately useless.  Anyway, having left work I finally got around to shopping around for estimates and thought I’d share my experience for anyone else looking to get a car repaired in the Belfast area.

My Experience

I actually got one from Bodytech Collision Repair in Carrickfergus a few weeks ago, because they seem to be the only car body repair outfit open on a Saturday morning.  They came in at £666 + VAT which was £783.31 to you and me. They seemed very professional (nice modern office, ample parking, full-time receptionist) despite the out of date web site which still reports an operation in the Village area of Belfast (I think they said that branch just closed in March or April, though don’t quote me on that).

I would have probably just gone with that, since getting another estimate outside of office hours was so bloody difficult; I could tell people over the phone what it needed (a new tailgate) but they all wanted to see for themselves. Since I knew I’d have 2 weeks between jobs coming up I thought I’d wait though, and I’m glad I did (so far).

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A while back I posted a request for help tracking down a cheap replacement battery for my Acer Aspire 5003 laptop (thanks for the overwhelming response on that!) and eventually ordered one from a site called PortableParts.co.uk. I’d never heard of them before and, in common with the other shops selling the battery I needed below the £45 mark, the site, while perfectly usable, didn’t look overly impressive.

I Googled about for a few reviews and found nothing so I’m recounting my experience here in the hope it helps someone else (this is not a recommendation for or against, just my experience. I accept no liability for anything whatsoever).

As I mentioned, I ordered the replacement battery from PortableParts.co.uk. They were among the cheapest and out of those selling for under £40 they had the best site (and a phone number, which I foolishly never checked out) which made them seem more legitimate (whether that’s true or not is not for me to say).  For those of you who haven’t been following my twitter tweets, I ordered the battery just before midnight on Thursday 7th August. To my delight, the postie delivered it on the Saturday morning – to Northern Ireland no less. Better still I fired it in, charged it up and it seems to hold a longer charge than the original battery ever did (though as the original struggled to make it through a 2 hour lecture, I suppose that’s not setting the bar very high).

Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know that my experience with Portable Parts was very postive. Delivery was fast and to date the battery I have is working fine and I’m delighted to have a truly portable computer once again.  I didn’t try the phone number to make sure it was real or anything, but thankfully that’s because I never had cause to.  Might be worth giving them a ring to see how easy they are to get hold of before ordering anything, but I got what I ordered quickly and at a good price (£38.98 after a 10% discount).

• 35.4% of grades awarded to Northern Irish students were As, compared to the UK-wide figure of 25.9%, but sure lets go comprehensive anyway! #
• oops – that A-level results link… http://tinyurl.com/5tcwgo #
• Need a cheap (<£20) PAYG/SIM-only mobile deal that includes data use. Anyone any ideas? #
• Just realised I’ll miss 1 (or 2) WCQ matches because I’l be in London with my new job. What sort of induction starts on a Wednesday anyway?! #
• Android SDK hits 0.9 – screenshots at Engadget http://tinyurl.com/6lk3jh #
• Off to Glasgow for the match against the Jocks. GREEN AND WHITE ARMY!! #

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• Ordered a new laptop battery (£40) from PortableParts.co.uk – bad decision? http://tinyurl.com/6sym3a #
• Laptop battery’s just arrived from PortableParts. Quick delivery; hopefully that’s a good sign. #
• Why is IE so shite? How difficult is this.parentNode.parentNode ?!?! #
• New Blog Post: Solved: IE event – #
• Balls. Can’t use speech marks in Wordpress titles. And double-tweet: WTF? Solution to previous IE niggles: http://tinyurl.com/nerd090808 #
• Can’t believe nobody’s posted the Caramac “Ya great wet lettuce” ad on YouTube. Anyone else remember it? #
• Does a twitter sms update come outa my free txts on Orange or do they let on the UK no. is ‘international’ like the scammers at T-mobile … #
• Orange = scum. 20p to text twitter’s UK num, even though I’ve 299 free messages. Networks in this country piss me off! International my ass! #
• If I ever actually did BBQs I’d want one of these: http://tinyurl.com/5zwxa7 #
• Vista is SERIOUSLY shite. Fuckin piece of shit falls over every times it SMELLS an AVI!! #
• Got my first Plus.net referral recently. 25p a month off – I’m rich!! http://tinyurl.com/56kz4h #
• Hating Barracuda. I’ll have to wait til I get home to see Twitters “important changes to our SMS service”. http://tinyurl.com/6y6a69 #
• Found out why my SMS to Twitter cost me 20p (international rate). Apparently 07624 was a Manx Telecom number. FAIL! #
• For anyone else behind Bastardcuda, twitter is no longer SENDING SMS to users outside US/Canada/India. U can still send them at 20p/txt. #
• Orange just sent an automated ack. to my query about the Twitter SMS no. sent 3 days ago telling me they’ll be in touch soon. Too late! #

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A couple of weeks ago v1.0 of my ICanHasCheezburger Windows Sidebar Gadget for Vista stopped working. The reason is that ICanHasCheezburger changed the URL of their RSS feed which the gadet uses to get its data.

v1.0.1 uses the new URL and normal service is resumed.

… it bloody-well is! This post was very nearly “Things that piss me off 5: Internet Explorer” (that one may yet come) but I thought a more descriptive title would help more people struggling with the same problem to find it.

Anyway: background.  I am writing a new feature for a Content Management System to allow users to upload files. With a simple bit of javascript I added a “+” button to allow them to add new rows to the form, allowing them to upload multiple files. It looks a bit like this:

Screenshot of Upload Images feature

Anyway, it would obviously be nice to allow the user to remove a row if they’ve added one or two too many. The obvious solution seems to be to add a “-”  button beside each. Easy, right?

Unfortunately Internet Explorer, as per usual, ballses everything up. Because each – button is created dynamically I have to add an EventListener using JavaScript code. No problem so far. That event listener is a simple, one-line:

this.parentNode.parentNode.removeChild(this.parentNode);

As each row (the label, field itself (including button) and “-” link) is inside a div, the above code should remove that div and therefore remove the row. And it does… in Firefox. Try it in Internet Explorer and you get a message telling you “Error: ‘this.parentNode.parentNode’ is null or not an object”.

Whhhaaa?!

Don’t you just hate when you can easily find something your code claims it can’t? Am I the only one who screams “It’s right f**king there!!” at my monitor? In this case, the problem seems to boil down to IE’s supid, proprietary, fucked up way of attaching Event listeners. When you use Mozillas the W3C standard addEventListener method to attach a listener to an event, “this” in the event handler refers to the object which the event is called on. Obvious, yes?  However when you use IE’s attachEvent instead, IE doesn’t seem to act in the same way. Apparently, instead, IE sets “this” in an event handler to the window object instead of the calling/event object! Another good job from Micro$oft!

Apparently it’s can be overcome, but that involves a lot of code and I refuse in principle to do that much inelegant hacking for something so simple. It’s much easier (and principled) to do this:

Not really a long-term solution, but bloody satisfying nonetheless.

Some of you may have noticed the above message appearing where my recent posts should have been for the last week or two.  It turns out the “Post-Plugin Library missing” message can be fixed by downloading the latest copy of the Post-Plugin Library (shocking, I know).

I can’t remember if I upgraded Wordpress or the Recent Posts plugin or both, but I’m guessing it was an upgrade to the Recent Post plugin that caused the problem. The new version requires a “Post-Plugin library” (written by the same guy).

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I’m looking for anyone with tips about cheap laptop battery retailers.

My laptop (an Acer Aspire 5003 wlmi) battery packed in ages ago and it’s a pain in the arse having a laptop that has to be plugged in.  The laptop was only £400 so it would seem a bit of a waste to spend too much on a new battery.

I could get one for about £35-£40 from a few different places but most of them look a little bit shakey (and many are the same site with different names).

So does anyone have any experiences with any of the following:

• au-battery.com (£38.71)
  
• global-stores.co.uk (£38.99)
  
• newdigistore.com / laptopbatteryshop.org
  
• powertoolbattery.co.uk
• PortableParts.co.uk (£42.98)
• An Amazon Seller (£44.37)

or anywhere else where I can pick up a cheap battery for the aforementioned Acer Aspire 5003 wlmi laptop?

Update: I’ve ordered from PortableParts.co.uk after finding a voucher code for 10% off everything, so it was £38.98 delivered (hopefully). Will report back if/when it arrives.