Tom Clancy's Net Force: Night Moves

12:53.36 - Sunday 19th October 2003   (Link to This Entry)

Whoops, been a while since I stayed up that late. I picked up a copy of the above the other night and read meybe a dozen pages or so before I had to drop off but last night I continued and read about two thirds of the book, finally getting to sleep a little after 6am.

Set in 2011, the basic premise concerns a global threat in the shape of the world's first full-functioning Quantum Computer. It's a threat because it's in the hands of a madman (No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.) who's using to break crypto on... well just about anything, really - any computer system connected to the net seems to be fair game.

It's always a tricky subject, the future, and Clancy makes a couple of pitfalls (Concorde and House Prices spring to mind), but on the whole doesn't do too badly. There's some invented technology that you'd expect to find (3D 'HoloProj' screens, Tablet PCs) and some that are still missing (WallTV, Flying Cars, new modes of transport). Britain is in the Euro and baddies still buy Umberellas with firearms hidden in them, but on the whole it's a fairly believable vision of the world a few years from now.

Overall the book is quite good, it's not a gripping read (6 hour stint notwithstanding) but it's easy to keep going and not too tiring. As far as technological Goverment stories go, it's not quite in the same league as, say, Dean Koontz's "Dark Rivers of the Heart" but it manages to hold it's own.

So far I'll give it a 7/10 - the ending may bump it up a point but I doubt it.

ASP Calendar and Online Reservations

17:50.52 - Sunday 19th October 2003   (Link to This Entry)

Working again. This time I'm back on the restaurant website, working on the back-end administration area that will handle online reservation and meal thingies. The idea is that you can go on the website, book rooms for up to eight guests for X number of days, and if you want, you can specify lunch or dinner menus for any of your guests for any of those days. It's pretty cool.

I started by redoing my old Calendar page which basically calculates the start and end days of the month and creates the typical month-to-view calendar layout that you see everywhere. I have no idea why my original one was so complicated (it's very likely I didn't know what the hell I was doing) but the rewrite is much more efficient and works flawlessly - I'm pretty pleased with it.

I added the ability to click on any table cell and see/edit/add to the bookings that cover those dates - remember that you can stay for more that one night, and so clicking on the 26th, for example, not only shows bookings that start on the 26th, but also those that start prior to the 26th for multiple nights. No major problems encountered so far, so I must be doing OK. I've even colour-coded the table cells so that they reflect the most important item on there, so it looks pretty neat.