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Sunday 6th November 2011
£19.66
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A walk around Nicky Nook. M**** receiving phone call regarding her grandmother. Fill in the blanks. I know what you're thinking - "What's £19.66 about?" That's how much money Mark Short owes me.
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Thursday 10th November 2011
Compression, transmission
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Blimey - why didn't I do this ages and ages ago? Do what, you may well ask. Well, I've had friends politely point out that it takes a very looooooooong time to download pictures from my web-site. Pin-pointing the exact cause of delay was trivial, but I just never got around to it. Okay, so . . . you got a picture to download, which could vary in size from under 1MB up to 6MB (possibly more). I think my upload rate is about 1Mb/s. So, in ideal conditions a 1MB picture would take about 8 seconds (remembering there are 8 bits in a byte) to upload. So, let's shift the pictures to a web hosting company, who promise super fast upload/download rates. Okay, done (well, actually more like 'in the process of doing'). Hmmmm, but to re-size that 6MB picture takes a lot of memory, more than my web-hosting company are willing to provide (the limit is 64MB, which isn't enough). So, we reduce very slightly the quality of the pictures, such that the loss of quality is almost imperceptible but the size of the images is considerably reduced. Suddenly, the maximum size of an image is just over 1MB, so we're looking at 10 seconds, say, to upload the largest image. But then, what's this - why is it still taking so long? Hmmmmm. Turns out that stupid little table displaying 'hits' for the image displayed was taking a long time to generate. So, turn it off, try again. And suddenly . . . it all seems uncannily fast. There's still a long way to go yet, but I'm happy. Check it out yourself, if you're bothered. Try clicking on an image and see if it seems any better.
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Friday 11th November 2011
Jefferson
and it continues . . . Found loads of bugs in the main PHP script for this sorry excuse for a web-log. Bugs corrected. All these 'bugs' relate to thumbnails and, in particular, those shown when viewing images. The aim . . . to speed things up, reduce (or get rid of) PHP warnings and errors.
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Sunday 13th November 2011
Limestones, willow and stuff
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Thursday 17th November 2011
While Daphne's French is poor she is desperate for help but won't take any coaching
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Found an odd Wikipedia article here. Difficult to read a page like that. Words per line is too much. I think I've been distracted there. I was just looking for an interesting title for this blog entry. So yeah . . . I'm not even sure why I began this entry. Oh, it'll come back to me . . . Dumped all the photos from our 10-week holiday. Oh, there are two things: why on earth are all these UNISON people striking on 30th November (can someone explain?)? And does anyone want 50GB of web space for £2/month?
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Saturday 19th November 2011
Grasmere
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Friday 25th November 2011
Last days of the hideous carpet
   
I'm sure I've done this before - pictures of this hideous carpet in our front room. Anyway, it's out tomorrow. I've been spending the last few evenings painting door frames, banisters and various bits of wood in preparation for the new carpet. Blah, blah, blah. Sick (almost literally) of the smell of noxious paint fumes and white spirit. Urgh.
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Sunday 27th November 2011
Rationalist philosophers from France and England had an enormous impact during the 18th century
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