Archive for September, 2004

…it’s because God is angry with you…

Tuesday, September 28th, 2004

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.

…and dream of HTML

Sunday, September 26th, 2004

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…

Morris dancer bikers and homeless ninja superheroes

Thursday, September 23rd, 2004

I just finished a bit of a Charles de Lint binge

P Vs P

Thursday, September 23rd, 2004

We finally got round to sending off an application to register Caitlin at the high school we want to send her to.
It’s expensive, but I really want her to be able to go. It

busy busy…

Thursday, September 23rd, 2004

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…..

Random pic time!

Thursday, September 23rd, 2004

…because there’s never enough pet photos on the internet.
(Though again, these aren’t actually mine)

Meet Jet! –





…and Rosie! –



nothing…

Tuesday, September 21st, 2004

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.

Why are ravens so wussy?

Sunday, September 19th, 2004

Ok, so I’ve pretty much always known that a flock of crows is known as a murder of crows, as odd as it sounds the first time, it makes a certain amount of sense. Crows being scavengers and considered to be carrion birds, a gathering of them might well be a murder, or at least because of a murder.

Now I know that crows and ravens are not the same thing (Apart from when you’re talking about crow in the general sense of any member of the genus corvus) but I really don’t think I could probably tell the difference, although ravens are supposed to be larger, so I guess if I saw a really big crow I might call it a raven.
But anyways, like I said – they’re different, if not by much. So I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that a different term is used when referring to a flock of ravens.
What I do have trouble dealing with, is the name that they do get – an unkindness.
An UNKINDNESS?? What sort of wussy, half-hearted, non-committal name is that?
They’re Ravens. You don’t get a bird more sinister, evil – signifying or just plain creepy than a raven.
It wasn’t a crow tap, tapping on the chamber door was it?
And whilst people don’t always hate and fear the raven, they’re pretty much all in awe of it, whether it be as bringer of omens, source of wisdom, messenger of gods, or favourite form for many gods benevolent, malevolent or merely impudent.
So why does a flock of ravens, get such a wussy name?
Do ravens gather, watching on with grim purpose in their evil little eyes that send shivers up your spine, whenever someone insults your mother, or short changes you?
Or do a flock of ravens perched in a tree, croacking and cawing at you as you pass, nervously trying to avoid their attention mean that before this day is done, somehow whom thou holdest most dear, shalt stubbest their toe most bloodily?!

I can’t help thinking that someone was having a joke, and it just kind of stuck.

But then that seems to be par for the course when it comes to naming congregations of birds – if this page is anything to go by.
Who comes up with some of these? How many are really traditional collective nouns, and how many did someone just make up because that particular bird didn’t have one yet, and they thought it should?
I can’t help thinking that a flamboyance of flamingos falls into the later category.

habit forming…

Saturday, September 18th, 2004

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

If unsure, use s or es!

Thursday, September 16th, 2004

I’ve seen some pretty bad abuses of the English language before…including the depressingly common affectation “virii” when referring to multiple viruses.
Some people guilty of this affectation will defend it to the bitter end, claiming that that’s the proper Latin pluralisation, and citing other English examples. This topic has been debated elsewhere plenty of times, so in short.

  1. Viruses is the plural of virus.
  2. Virii is not a word in any language, past or present.
  3. The Latin word for Virus did not have a separate plural form.
  4. The English plural of Cactus is Cactuses (look it up), with Cacti being an acceptable alternative (note the single i)
  5. The English plural of Octopus is Octopuses, with Octopi being an acceptable alternative. (Again, note the single i).
  6. Viri is not an acceptable plural of Virus either

So having got that out of the way – the newest and most ridiculous (that’s ridiculous with an i, not an e) bastardisation of our language just showed its ugly face in a comment on Slashdot – “Scenarii” – apparently as a plural form of scenario. I have no idea what went through the mind of the author prior to posting it, but I can’t figure out why anyone would decide that replacing a final syllable with a double i would make an acceptable plural…almost every English word is pluralised by adding s, or es to the end. Even those that that aren’t pluralised that way eventually end up adopting that form as acceptable (like the abovementioned cactuses and octopuses) .

So to summarise – if you are ever unsure how to pluralise an English word, just add -s if the word ends in a non s sound, and -es if it already ends in an s.

If you follow that rule, you might be wrong occasionally, but if anyone even notices, they’re likely to either assume it was just a typo, or politely correct you, understanding how easy it is to make a simple mistake like that.
If however, when confronted with a confusing multiplicity that you just have to form a word for, you think – “I know, I’ll just drop the last syllable and add an i, because that’s how they do it in Latin, so it’ll make me look real smart. Or maybe I’ll add two, and then I’ll look twice as smart!” – then you are doomed to make yourself actually look twice as stupid instead. Rather than politely correct you, people are likely to look at you as if you’re some kind of moron who can’t even find the “s” key on their keyboard.
So repeat after me – “when unsure, add -s or -es!”