libertus

Who’da thought that a single Tweet would have such impact?

During an IM chat with Daniel White he showed me his astonishing 3D Mandelbulb work. I asked if I could tweet about it and he agreed. Little did he know that this would lead to his website being Slashdotted and his work picked up by New Scientist!

Well deserved recognition for a true genius and nice guy.

Now here’s something every diver should have – the Diving Almanac & Yearbook by Jeffrey J. Gallant, published by Porbeagle Press.

I have the 2007 edition and it’s brill! Chock-full of useful information about diving, and refreshingly for an American publication, covers an impressive proportion of the entire planet. Europe, for instance!

Excellent value at £11 for 550 pages. I’ll post an extensive review soon.

On time and on budget, I am delighted to announce that beta-testing has started for the new product and technologies I have been working on for the last 18 months.

Please take a look at the Dive Buzz, especially if you are a diver! There’s nothing else quite like it out there on the internet. I know because I’ve looked.

Also on show for the first time is Brykxâ„¢, a new technology for bringing the web to the people. “Semantic mark-up blocks for in-line editing. The web² usability solution for accessible websites.”

I logged my first dive for the third time today. I’ve paid £3.95 for one month in which time I can log as many dives, write as many stories and make as many changes as I please.

Now that Zeitgeist has been released on WPPlugins.org, its page here has been set aside for the release manual and discussion. This post contains the contents and comments from the pre-release page.

Continue reading ‘Zeitgeist (Pre-release)’ »

I have released a spam-fighting plugin for WordPress, based on Akismet over at WPPlugins.org.

“Smiley” Peformance Monitor plugin for WordPress

As there have been reports of dramatic slow-downs after upgrading to WordPress 2.0.4, and my blog is still running 2.0.3, naturally I wish to investigate these reports prior to upgrading. I could wait for the WordPress developers to do this, but I’m impatient. WordPress 2.0.4 contains a critical security fix that I wish to apply, among others. I don’t want to sacrifice performance for a tiny amount of extra safety.

I previously investigated the memory use of WordPress 2.0.2. I shall build upon that work to introduce execution timestamps and database queries into the performance graph. I shall then directly compare the performance of 2.0.3 and 2.0.4 on the same dataset – my blog, of course!

Continue reading ‘Investigating WordPress 2.0.4 Performance’ »

Today I launched a plugin for WordPress 2 to provide fine-grained and broad-brush access control over your posts, using the existing password-protection system, custom post meta-data and options.

The availability of Access Control plugin for WordPress was first made public by way of this post on the wp-hackers mailing list.

Automatically Backup All Wordpress Databases On A Server by Niklas Lindblad.

I’m a sensitive soul with computers. Whilst I appreciate the incredible power and capacity that modern computers provide, I cannot help but remember those hazy days during my youth when I learned how to program. My first computer was modest by today’s standards – a Sinclair ZX81 with 8Kb of ROM (including a built-in BASIC interpreter) and 1Kb of RAM. That was enough for some but I didn’t really get started until I had 16Kb of RAM. That was enough for me and my skills at the time. I proceeded to write computer games.

WordPress is a personal publishing system designed to work on modern servers. Servers are enormous. The server that hosts this blog has 125,000 times more RAM than my first computer. My blog may use only 8MB, a limit enforced by the programming language that the blog uses; PHP.

So how does WordPress fill this tiny pocket of the big machine? Today I’m looking at the memory footprint of WordPress 2.0.2. How efficiently does WordPress use its most precious resource?

Continue reading ‘Memory Usage in WordPress 2.0.2’ »