ElePHPant Haven

A recent picture of you and 15 interesting facts about yourself

Uploading this picture took a lot more effort than it should have. Turns out PHP was only accepting files up to 2M in size and total post of 8M. Was just a little too small ;)

The photo was taken 51 weeks ago from tomorrow at my ball. This is the most dressed up any of you are likely to see me, unless I get married and get dressed up for that.

The person I was dancing with was picked for me, since the only person my age I would have been comfortable taking couldn't fly up due to other commitments.

It's 2253 and I'm bored, so I figured I'll jump on the bandwagon and do this "30 Days of Me" blog challenge thingy. Posts should be going live at 0900 each day, starting on Thursday.

This pops up every so often on #silverstripe. Is it possible to use sapphire without the CMS?

(For those that don't know, sapphire is the PHP5 framework that SilverStripe runs on. You can get it on its lonesome from svn at http://svn.silverstripe.com/open/modules/sapphire/. At the time of writing, branches/2.4 is the "stable" branch. trunk may be rather borked at the moment)

While the answer is rather simple, yes, actually explaining how to do it is a bit more complicated. Luckily, I've recently done this, to an extent. While I can't share the specifics about it (with regards to the site, yay for NDAs!), I can explain how to do it now, with sample code.

Every so often, there's a SEO competition run by someone. Basically, they take a random word and SEO companies have to try to have the top hit for that word in Google at the end of the competition. Or something like that.

This time, the word's QuadraCentifiable. Three days ago, there where no hits for it at all. Now there are some. The main way to get high ranks for a word like QuadraCentifiable is to get lots of inbound links containing it. So here's another one.

I'm used to my friends and Twitter expecting me to not have a life, but now IRC is joining in as well. I've been known to hang around in #silverstripe on FreeNode with the handle simon_w, where I seem to end up helping people fix things as well as making out with the VCS bot (CIA-xx, the xx keeps changing) and annoying Australians (I'm allowed some fun, right?). This happened on Saturday night as I was playing some StarCraft 2 (I've got two guess passes somewhere if you'd like one. I've also got two WoW guest passes):

[20:24:19]  <iRogue> ss23: tends to be pretty dead here in teh
weekend - might have more luck getting a response on monday
[20:24:45]  <ss23> Damn :<
[20:25:15]  <ss23> Silly SS developers that have lives... 
[20:25:21]  <iRogue> :P
[20:25:25]  <ss23> I would've at least expected simon_w to be here!

I then talk, and get (as a response to me being there):

[20:27:05]  <ss23> Ha, I knew it :P

The full chat logs are available here, since ss-log was actually running at the time.

This was on my iPad, it's by Pete:

I like to type on my new iPad. I wish that I had one, but I don't. this makes me sad, but not too sad, because I have Jesus in my heart. I don't know why I am speaking as I type. Does it come with proper word processing software, mr simon?

• Functions, not just methods
• semi-colons
• #defines
• Closures
• The ability to make it look like you're using a dragon
• Automatic type casting
• printf() style output
• SIGSEGV
• pointers
• operator overloading (I want - to mean + dammit!)
• The ability to shoot myself in the foot
• Compiler specific language implementations (Does it get executed right to left, or left to right? Neither!)
• Minimum size only for data types (64 bit short? Don't mind if I do)
• globals

Or, why you should get one. Sure it has great things like a decent keyboard in portrait

Landscape and portrait support in most apps

Support for iPhone apps in either 2x

Or 1x

A browser that looks like a computer's

Maps, that Google can't do properly

Genius for apps (as of yesterday)

I turn 19 in this many weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds. Currently, I couldn't care less. Why should that state of mind change? Why should I care, at all, about entering some new inconsistent period of time?

I took a hiatus from church at the start of the year for a couple of months (until midway through April if I remember correctly). Reflecting on that period, it actually resulted in a higher proportion of Sundays that I actually enjoyed.

Now, I don't really see a point in going to church. As I'm on sound most of the time (rostered on every second week, plus the cover/filler guy and I get special events too), I can't really get into the praise and enjoy it. I have to try and restrain myself from being moved too much by the sermon, so I'm not incapacitated for the praise after the sermon.

I can partake in personal praise from my bedroom (in fact, I do that must of the time. iTunes is great) and get sermons I can take the time to enjoy and think over from podcasts.

Next, people will probably mention the social aspect, and coming together to be part of the community.

Let's see how that falls apart. In a normal service, I arrive sometime between 1630 and 1800. I pick a seat and wait for the service to start. If I'm lucky, a couple of people will have greeted me, with a potential conversation with Byrce before the service starts. If I'm not, I'll get a few waved greetings and nothing else.

During the service, I sit alone. I'm usually sitting before anyone else is, so it's their choice.

After the service, I used to try hanging around until the end so that people I would like to talk to weren't otherwise engaged. This got interpreted as me wanting a ride home. Go figure. So Matthew and Christian chat for a bit, with maybe one or two others, then I go home. Community fail.

These means the main reason I continue going to church is to do sound. Mainly because there's no one else willing. Seriously, this is the roster for June->September. Weeks I'm rostered on are green. Positions I'm rostered on or covered for are red.

I have a new shiny. It is called Shiny. That is all.

Making facebook better is really easy. Edit your hosts file with your favourite editor with root access (like sudo pico! (start the holy war!)) and add:

60.234.72.4	www.facebook.com
60.234.72.4	api.facebook.com
60.234.72.4	facebook.com

For non-windows computers, your hosts file is /etc/hosts. For windows computers, you're screwed anyway, so too bad. Try this though.

I've finally gotten around to making my URL shortener database driven, rather than mod_rewrite and mod_php driven. Next thing I need to do is add some stat whoring, but that can wait.

It's such a basic implementation, that I used cat and echo to open source the code and one SHOW CREATE TABLE query for the schema. Complete source code, including the database schema, is available here.

Thanks to this article, I will be upgrading this box to PHP 5.3.2 from 5.2.6, about nowish. This means things might break. Fun times!