Road Works Ahead

This weblog —and indeed this site— will probably be a lot quieter (than it already has been) for the foreseeable future, as I deal with some personal issues that command my attention IRL.

When I’m done with that, I’ll have to reassess just how much time and energy I want to continue devoting to my “life in the digital plane”, so from now on all bets are off as far as this space is concerned.

All in all, I may keep posting a bit here or even become a lot more prolific at it, I may turn to write about purely tech stuff, I may turn into a duck or a sea-bass, or I may just drop off the map silently.

Life’s just full of sneaky little surprises, isn’t it? (The bastard!)

Lesson Of The Day

Today’s lesson is manyfold:

1. Devel::Size is your friend;
2. Maintaining state across runs of a program is good unless said state is able to keep getting bigger because of circumstances beyond your control;
3. In which case it is a very good idea to keep checking it for size and pruning it whenever you have to…
4. Especially if you launch many many copies of said program in parallel.

Got all that? Good! :-)

T-minus 3 days

The time is almost upon us. Battlestar Galactica’s third season (of the new series) starts this friday and I’ve just managed to watch the last episode of the previous season, plus the webisodes that are already out there.

If you’ve fallen behind, you can catch up to the story so far before plunging in to the good stuff ahead.

Let’s blow out some toasters!

The Search is on, powered by KinoSearch

In between the “real” coding I did this weekend, I found a bit of time to finally hack on this site’s search and now, lo and behold! you have a search box on the sidebar. Yay!

The search is powered by KinoSearch (a system I had already talked about previously) and I must say I’m as impressed now as I was when I first tried it out.

Not only is it fast, but it is also ridiculously easy to work with. I still want to add a few functionalities to the site and I expect each new addition to take all of oh… 10 minutes or so to be hooked up to the search function. :-)

True, it takes up a bit of disk space but then “disk space is cheap” and you do get your space’s worth with stuff like lightning fast searching with highlighting. And no, you don’t feel the speed all that much, but that’s entirely my plugin’s code fault. It still needs a bit of love before it responds as it should.

Now let’s see how it holds up to the test of real-world usage. I’m pretty confident it will do nicely.

Loose weight they say…

“You should loose weight” they say. “It’ll be good for you!” they say. “You’ll thank yourself later” they say. “It’s the healthy thing to do” they say.

And sou you do it and you keep on doing it even a little bit beyond that. And then you’re in tip top shape.

And then you have to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe because your clothes don’t freaking fit you anymore. Argh!

Not that I have anything against new clothes (I don’t have anything special for them either) but the shopping… Actually going out to stores, trying out clothes, marking up all the changes that need to be done, having to go back and get them after the changes have been done and trying them out again…

D4 p41|\|!