Bleak Economy

I am now in a permanent role at Mosaic in Brighton and I am not looking for employment opportunities.

Just a short note to give you more detail on my return to the United Kingdom in December 2008. I will be landing just before Christmas and be ready for a new role with an exciting company in the new year.

A quick run down about me follows:

• UK citizen so I can work for anyone
• Zend Certified PHP Engineer
• UK and Australian industry experience
• Worked with clients such as:
  • the Virgin Group of companies
  • Volkswagen (VW)
  • Nickelodeon
  • Merlin Entertainments Group (London Eye, Thorpe Park, etc.)
  • the Haymarket Magazine Group
• 4 years industry experience
  • http://www.wickedweb.co.uk
  • http://www.underwired.com
  • http://www.jellyfish.co.uk
  • http://www.go4.com.au
• 4 years freelance prior to that

Some sample URLs I have worked on include:

• http://www.thorpepark.com
• http://www.celsurplastics.com
• http://www.made.uk.com
• http://www.jamesmillard.co.uk
• http://www.salton.com.au
• http://www.advantechdesign.com.au
• http://www.syc.com.au
• http://www.osakacup.com
• http://www.go4.com.au

Skills include:

• PHP
• MySQL
• (X)HTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• AJAX
• Python and ASP.NET
• Linux, Windows and Mac
• Web Servers
• Domain Name Server
• DOS/Shell/Bash scripting

Plus training other staff and clients, attending and participating in client meetings and pitches, managing time and budget constraints, system and user documentation and general client assistance.

My resume is available online. I am now in a permanent role at Mosaic in Brighton and I am not looking for employment opportunities.

Al Duomo, Firenze

I have been travelling around Europe for the last month or so and I have been completely out of reach. Unfortunately it looks as though the solution I had implemented for code highlighting has died during this time,[FIXED] but I have also noticed that it is stripping backslashes which is affecting the code – especially the MS SQL import script I have supplied on one of my posts[FIXED]. It contains references to newline characters etc (n), which have been destroyed by the Wordpress plug in I am using called Sniplets.

My travels are going to continue so I am unsure when I will have this fixed again. Hopefully soon.

Brighton Pavilion

Marion and I were wed with a lovely ceremony on the 26th of July at the Brighton Pavilion in Brighton, England.

We are now travelling around western Europe and enjoying every moment of it even if we had to slum it in a Hilton in Innsbruck!

In other news I have now left my job at Wickedweb in Edenbridge, Kent and I will be moving to Auckland, New Zealand in October. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here in England and at Wickedweb, Underwired* & JellyFish Search Engine Marketing. I will certainly be back in the UK at some point in the future to catch up with friends down here and in Scotland.

Say you have a development environment setup using SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and your customer has a SQL Server 2000 database accessible only via ODBC and you can only run a DB import via a script. How would you do it? Easy you might think just run msdbdump.exe on the command line, well this isn’t MySQL so you are not so fortunate.

Backing up your DB is easy with SQL Server using the following commands:

But this just gives you a binary file that can be restored if you have access privileges to the live database for restoring. If you are in a shared hosting environment or one where the paranoid admins won’t give you remote desktop access and the only access you have is to run a PHP script to import the data and schema via SQL you will need to export the DB to T-SQL format.

Microsoft have a little program to perform this very function: Microsoft SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard 1.1 It is difficult to find on the web so I aim to save you the time I spent hunting for it. When you run the wizard make sure to set:

• Drop existing objects in script to false
• Schema qualify to false
• Script for target database to SQL Server 2000

It does seem to chew on the cud for quite some time so grab a beverage.

Now for the PHP portion of the process. So you have uploaded your lovely T-SQL dump file to a PHP accessible location on your webserver and now you are wondering how to get into your DB via ODBC. Well you will need a PHP script like the one I have supplied below.

A couple of the complexities to be aware of before you continue. It seems that the T-SQL dump file comes out as UTF16 and we need it in UTF8 so you will need to convert it to UTF8 before you can import. I used a neat little function available from Modular.org for this purpose. This may or may not meet your needs. If you need a more accurate conversion method then I recommend you start your search with the PHP module/function mbstring . T-SQL contains reference and keywords that ODBC/MS SQL cannot understand. I have included some regex to strip these out.

My script is by no means perfect or factored down so feel free to make suggestions or improvements.

I recently asked my girlfriend for her hand in marriage; she said yes! We are both very excited and have begun to make arrangements. No date has been set yet but we aim to walk down the aisle before the end of the year. As we are from different countries we have decided to hold a ceremony in each of our countries and England to involve all of our friends and family.

I am so pleased and happy and look forward to the good times to come in our shared future.

I have been a little slow to update my website of late due to a change of jobs and having recently moved house.

I am now working for WickedWeb (and have been since July), which is a web agency in the Kent countryside and with an office in London (Covent Garden). I am based in the Edenbridge office where I am a web developer working mainly in PHP with some ASP maintenance.

In the last month I moved to Brighton, which is an ok commute into work everyday and it is a nice location. Looking forward to the runs on the motorbike next summer!

I am now based in London and I am working for a company called underwired* based near Farringdon train station.

A few observations:

• The trains are slow, late, expensive and overcrowded
• Carrying a skateboard around town appears to be frowned upon
• The roads are rubbish, but entertaining on a motorbike
• They speak weirdly and sometimes smell funny

As some of you will know I have finished uni and now work as php developer for Go4 Multimedia and as such I am currently between houses and I do not have regular access to the net where I am staying.