libertus

It’s the end of my third week doing “It’s a Diet Thing”, photos here. Slightly higher alcohol consumption this week but I defend that on the basis that I attended a beer festival on Saturday! Check out the shit I eat at work, though. BMI is stable at around 23.5.

Continuing to photograph all (or virtually all) my calorific intake. Week 2 has been much better with both alcohol and sugar consumption reduced. Wii Fit says my BMI is ideal at 23.5.

What a simple idea – photograph one’s calorific intake. Here’s my first week. Slightly embarrassing. I’ve already taken steps to reduce my alcohol consumption.

I completed Super Mario Galaxy this weekend, not in the purist sense of doing absolutely everything, but in the normal sense of having helped Mario to beat Bowser and rescue Princess Peach.

Awesome game. 9½ out of 10.

My friends know that I’m a bit of a political geek and like to keep abreast of what our elected representatives are doing, so I follow the Official Reports of the UK Parliaments with an almost religious fervour, although I’ve been a bit lazy recently and just been watching the BBC Parliament channel.

I’m also a huge fan of theyworkforyou.com, a volunteer-run website which republishes the Official Reports of the House of Commons, House of Lords and the Northern Ireland Assembly in a far friendlier form than the “official” sites, with the added bonus of public commentary and statistical analysis of the MP’s performance.

Missing from theyworkforyou.com is the Official Report of the Scottish Parliament, all the more sorely missing due to the now very interesting constitution of that body with its minority SNP government. Republishing an official record is no easy task, for a number of reasons that I’ll go into later, but I know for sure that I have all the requisite skills and tools to do it.

I’ve had this project on the back-burner for some months now and since I’m starting a new job soon, any spare time I might have to work on hobby projects is going to vanish.

So here I go. I don’t need to get it perfect – just far enough along so that someone else can pick up and complete the task.
Continue reading ‘Scraping the Scottish Parliament Official Record’ »

“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’ »

Or, in this particular case, a futile attempt at outright deception.

Menu and plugin tweaks indeed! If I believed that, I might never have noticed the ever-so-vital change to line 364 of admin-functions.php.

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

A thought inspired by this message on the wp-hackers mailing list by Mike Purvis, and The Cathedral and The Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond, a few chapters of which I read recently for the first time. Lesson 9 sprang to mind. Then this did. An old defeat.

Continue reading ‘Rewrite Rule Management, or “How To Blow Your Mind With PHP Arrays (or Objects, If You’re Wierd)”’ »