I feel corrupt. Well not literally but in a fashion. Its just that in the current fever of lottery tickets where everyone is trying to win the $90 million with syndicates I cant bear to let a list go by without my name on it. Its how I imagine dirty politics to work. Everyone pitches in money to assassinate someone or help a candidate and if your name isnt on every single list then you are not rewarded at the end.

Except in this case I cant bear to have someone I know win who was in a syndicate that I could have entered and watch them live the high life. I cant wait till someone wins and life can go back to normal without having to spread around $20 every time some list floats past.

Published on Monday 29th June 2009

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Some of you may have seen the "Bacon Explosion" which has been kicking around the web for a few months now. The moment I saw it I knew I had to make one. Yesterday I finally got around to doing it. The only difference I did was cooking it in the oven on a low heat for several hours rather then in a smoker, and I used my own BBQ sauce which I made a few weeks ago to go with some baked ribs.

The result? Not bad at all. Its rather like a meatloaf but with the outside somewhat sweet and the inside salty. Would I make it again? Yes I would.

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Published on Sunday 28th June 2009

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You know what I recon is the single best thing about internet banking? Not the convenience. Not the speed. No. What is the single greatest thing is when you transfer money between accounts and it asks you to enter a reason for the transfer. Why is this so good? Its because whatever you write in there appears on your bank statement the next month.

Consequently my account statements are filled with comments like the following.

"Wot up holmes?"
"Gimme some cervesa"
"Fo shizzle ma nizzle"
"Whoever holds this paper owns my soul"

So amusing when I think that the bank is printing it and mailing it to me.

Published on Tuesday 23rd June 2009

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Warning, seriously nerdy stuff follows.

Well the unthinkable happened to me last night. MySQL ran out of steam and couldnt cope with what I was asking it to do. Wait.. thats not quite fair or accurate. What I should say is that MySQL with MyISAM tables ran out of steam and couldnt cope with what I was asking it to do. Rather annoying actually because I do like the fulltext indexes that MyISAM provides. Easy to set up, easy to query and pretty effective and fast. Unfortunatly the table I was working on has a lot of reads and writes to it. The constant table locking for each insert made selects unresponsive for a lot of the time. Not exactly ideal. I did consider moving data around and have duplicate tables. One for reading and the other for writing, but quickly discarded this idea. So I bit the bullet and converted it over to InnoDB.

Suprisingly it was very easy and performance is much better. Updates and reads now occur at the same time and everyone is none the wiser. However it did mean I lost my fulltext indexes. I am still debating on how I am going to solve this issue. Either I will stick the data into another simplified table which can contain the fulltext index OR I will plug in some other indexing technology like Sphinx or something.

Published on Friday 19th June 2009

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Just found this while testing http://www.bing.com/ and thought I should preserve it here to be dammed sure I can find if when I want it.

If the relationship is clearly "is-a", I use inheritance. If it is more like "can-be", I use interfaces. Eg, TextBox "is-a" Control, ArrayList "can-be" enumerated (so it implements IEnumerable).

Published on Thursday 04th June 2009

Comments (2)