The lesser mabinogion

or at least that’s apparently how a workmate explained thunder to his very young child….heh. Poor kid is going to be diving under a desk any time the weather turns bad…(you don’t even want to know about the explanation for hail)
Anyway, that was completely irrellevant and has nothing to do with what I was going to say, it’s just that there’s a fairly impressive thunder storm going on right now that made me think of it.

I’ve been poking at the CSFG site a bit more, mostly from the point of view of attempting to understand its inner workings a bit better. I’ve still got my problem with images, but I noticed I’m not alone as some has posted the exact same problem on their forums. I added a “me too”, so hopefully I’ll find enlightenment sooner or later. (I’m not sure if the problem is a design flaw, or a lack of understanding on my part – or both).

Apart from that I’ve also been playing with a PHP Accelerator, called PHP Accelerator (I’m glad I’m not the only one who finds it impossible to come up with interesting names…heh).
Before installing it, running apachebench on the CSFG front page resulted in scores of 0.65 pages per second with caching disabled, 1.44 with view caching enabled, and 2.28 with all caching and template compiling turned on.
That’s fairly slow, but bearable. The server’s pretty pathetic, and none of the sites I plan to use it for are high volume. And it’s a few times faster than I could ever get Plone working on the same machine…

However, with PHP Accelerator properly installed, those numbers go to 0.93 pages per second with no caching, 2.82 pages per second with view caching only, and 7.58 pages per second with all caching and templated compiling.

A 230% improvement is definitely nothing to be sneezed at, and 7.5 pages per second is pretty good for a PHP application on that box – Gallery only manages about 2.5, and it’s a much simpler application.

between the fact that I’ve been pretty much up to my neck in web application stuff at work lately (usually I do the business logic side of things, but for this project I’m doing the lot), and I just spent the entire weekend working on the new CSFG website, I’m pretty much living and breathing HTML now…

I’m making progress with the CSFG site (preview at csfg.stuartherring.com), I’ve sorted out the overall design (pretty much based on the old one, but modernised and made consistent and XHTML + CSS compliant) and structure, and have ported across about half of the content (There’s a lot more on that site than it first appears – all sorts of things buried deep), now I’m basically just writing templates for stuff that needs it and tweaking existing ones where necesary. I had hoped to knock it over this weekend, but it looks like it’ll be next weekend before I manage that. Still have to do the Anthology pages and other CSFG Publishing stuff, as well as the member articles.
And right now I’m fighting with the getting news items with images to display right – mostly because of the way I set up the ez Publish instance in the first place, but oh well.

Anyway, as a result, not much else happening…hmmm…was gonna call Mum & Dad this weekend….forgot. maybe I’ll call during the week.
hmmm…that’s right, I bought a scratchy today…I wonder if there’s anything on it?………nope!, didn’t think so…heh
well, that’s enough rambling…off to bed…

I’ve been fairly busy the last week or so. Last Wednesday I was suddenly given a fairly high profile project that I’d been told a few times I wasn’t going to have to worry about, and it needed to be done by Monday.
But despite the stress and frustration that comes from a tight deadline, working through the weekend, and battling with tools who’s reliability is inversely proportional to the urgency of the task, I have actually rather enjoyed myself.
It’s always kind of good to be able to take something fairly well defined from nothing through to completion, and the deadline helps keep me motivated. So I’ve managed to find myself working at pretty much 99% for a change, leaving me feeling kind of drained, but relatively content at the end of each day. Instead of just drained….
I think I’ve identified a way to improve the way I work when I go back to my less urgent stuff too, so I’ll see how that works out…..

It seems that I just don’t have anything I want to say these days….
Or if I do think of something, the thought of actually sitting down and typing it out seems like such a waste of time that I could be not doing something else in….
Hopefully I’ll pull myself out of it soon enough, but in the mean time, talk amongst your selves.
Or self, as is probably more accurate.

Buying orchestral music could become a dangerous addiction….
The CDs are only $10 each, so it’s far too easy to accidently walk out with 3 or 4 of them…

I picked up three today…Vivaldi (Cello concertos), Grieg (Peer Gynt and a couple of other pieces), and Brahms (Symphony number 4 and a couple of others).

The Grieg is good, like I expected it to be..though it’s sit and listen to music rather than background music. I also recognised one of the pieces in the second Peer Gynt suite – Solveig’s Song – that Chalice had a version of on their Chronicals of Dysphoria album. I guess I’d noticed that the music and lyrics were credited to Grieg & Isben, but it never really sank in..heh.

I’m currently listening to the Vivaldi as I type this…I don’t think I could ever get tired of Vivaldi’s concertos, they’re excellent for background music. Not intrusive enough to distrupt your concentration, but never boring or tiring, so it’s equally enjoyable to give them your full attention.
I haven’t listened to the Brahms yet..but I think I’m going to put the Vivaldi on repeat and go and have a bath….
hmmm…either that or Nightwish….hmmm…..Vivaldi or Nightwish, only the most important decisions here….heh