If you’re anything like me then you’ll hand-craft your code to give you a fine-grained control over how things are done. Like a lot of geeks, I’m a bit of a code-snooper and the OCD side of me feels more than a little violated when I see the butt-ugly source code that is invariably generated by drag-and-drop WYSIWYG HTML editors.
I’m afraid I can’t remember who originally mooted this idea on Twitter a good while back: does having your HTML tag attributes in a consistent order give your webpage a smaller file size after it’s been compressed?
After thinking about it and playing around with some examples myself the other day I can confirm that it’s true. I’ve also found some corroboration from Google.
For me, the nadir of health and cooking occurred in 2009 when deep fried butter was on the menu at the Texas State Fair. This year, deep frying Guinness (other fried alcohol is available) appears to be a major attraction.
I used to think that the food seen at thisiswhyyourefat.com was a coronary waiting to happen and then the other week I saw this gem from Paula Deen (who apparently is no stranger to deep frying butter): deep fried cheesecake
I’m beginning to think that if you stop moving for too long in the Southern states of the USA that someone will deep fry you.
Yes, you read that correctly: I said recycle less.
At first glance you’d think that I’d turned my back on my usual green practices but you’d be wrong. When you start thinking about things throughout their lifecycle you start to realise that recycling should be your last resort.
I suggest expanding the basic green three Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recyle) to a full mantra along the lines of:
Initially reduce your consumption and then reduce what you throw away; reuse what you can then – and only then – should you recycle.
Producing recycled paper requires about 60 percent of the energy used to make paper from virgin wood pulp1 – but nevertheless, recycling still requires energy. On average, every family in the UK uses around 330 glass bottles and jars each year2. Recycling one bottle can save enough energy to power your television for 20 minutes but instead, why not try reusing bottles and jars to store homemade jams, pickles, preserves, beers or wines?
I’m not using the word “debt” in the traditional monetary sense here but in terms of global capacity. On Saturday we, as a planet, used up all of the resources that the Earth can produce and renew in one year. Saturday the 21st of August, 2010 is day 233 of the Gregorian calendar: we’re as near as damn it exactly two-thirds of the way through the year.
Or, to put it another way, we have half the time from between New Years Day 2010 and today to survive on absolutely nothing if we want to balance our books. Big ask isn’t it? Obviously an impossible one and a situation that is disastrously untenable.
The day that marks our passing into ecological debt is happening earlier each year.
The result is collapsing fisheries, diminishing forest cover, depletion of fresh water systems, and the build up of pollution and waste, which creates problems like global climate change.
But that was 2005 and there are now 400 million more bodies on the planet who all, ideally, need to be housed, clothed and fed.
I’m not advocating direct governmental intervention by way of putting sterliants in the water supply or anything like that for example but a scheme like Michael E. Arth’s Birth Credits certainly sounds like a viable option to me.
We didn’t quite have the Sigur Rós soundtrack or see things happening quite so fast last week when Juliet and I ventured down to Galloway Forest Park but we did have a blanket and a bottle of champagne which more than made up for it.
If you missed the Perseids, have a look at what you missed – handily condensed into just over one minute.
“Darker than a black steer’s tukhus on a moonless prarie night” - The Stranger, The Big Lebowski
Despite it’s size, Scotland is spoiled for areas of great beauty. Also, in the more remote parts, Scotland is also blessed with areas of great darkness.
One of only a handful of places on the planet that has been declared a Dark Sky Park by the International Dark-Sky Association is right here in Scotland: Galloway Forest Park which is where I’m heading to for a few days with Juliet by way of a surprise trip.
The Perseid meteor shower is due to peak over the next couple of nights and, unlike last year, the New Moon on August 10th makes for perfect conditions – I just hope that the clouds stay away.
A meteor shower is undoubtedly a dramatic occurrence but light pollution in towns and cities robs us of beautiful views every single night. Not only does night lighting confuse animals and wastes vast amounts of energy (and therefore money), it’s also being linked to various health problems.
We are under constant bombardment from messages telling us to save energy by the mantra of “reduce, reuse and recycle” but how often do you think of the non-tangible things like light?
Milky Way Galaxy appears over Ontario
Credit & Copyright: Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn (Weather and Sky Photography) Image used with kind permission.
Like a lot of geeks I eagerly sourced an early invite on Twitter and, once it arrived, signed in with great anticipation. After all, this was from Google and touted as being the end of spam email while also doubling as a tool for fantastically easy collaboration to allow me to leverage my synergies. Or something like that.
Except it wasn’t. The marketeers had over promised and the engineers under delivered. It quickly became apparent that this was no Maps or Docs which both went mainstream with very quick adoption by geeks and non-geeks alike.
It might have been an unfinished Beta release but the UI was bespoke, fiddly and confusing, the interaction almost unusably sluggish and the concept was never really explained concisely. Most people dabbled and then very quickly went back to their disparate email, instant messaging and wikis.
To tide me over after the end of the World Cup and before the start of the new domestic football seasons, I’ve been spending some time trying to put together teams of international legends of the game for my foosball table (which currently lives in the Whitespace office). The table is a Garlando with a 2-5-3 formation. I put a further restriction for my team selections by only picking one player per country.
“It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later”
- Alfred Holt, 1877 (Murphy’s Law)
The Deep Water Horizon disaster is undoubtably a catastrophic occurance. At the risk of sounding unpopular, it is also possibly a great opportunity. The first blowout of somewhere around 50,000 American offshore wells should force people – and governments – to have a long hard look at their priorities and energy usage.
For all of the bluster and ill-feeling directed toward BP, the USA has to face up to it’s massive reliance on oil. The upper estimate on the scale of the spill is 100,000 barrels of oil per day. The demand for oil in the USA in 2009 was just under 13,000 barrels of oil. Per minute. All that oil has to come from somewhere and attempting to reduce imports leaves only one option available.
The other day in the office we noticed that one of our servers was performing a little sluggishly. We rolled up our sleeves, fired up a terminal window and prepared to take a look under the hood.
There were a lot of database jobs backing up in the process list and this confused me – our connections are implemented as singleton classes and I was pretty sure that all of the queries had been examined with some EXPLAIN ANALYZE attention.
After some head-scratching I came up with this command line script that will list the five most CPU intensive SQL queries for the current user in the process list:
