“Medieval, Total War” is the latest drain on my time. The PC game is fantastic. A quick rundown: take control of a medieval faction and try to conquer the whole of Europe. Gameplay is like a cross between Risk and Sim City for the strategic Europe-wide map part, and then you get to control your …
My band (Frankensteinway) is in its first music video. Not one with the highest production values, granted, but I’ve managed to get hold of a couple of screenshots: Myself (left) and Jason: Mark (left) and me:
A pretty good week for the team. We’ve gotten rid of Beattie and bought Roonie instead (definitely a bargain), and dumped Queudrue as he didn’t seem to be getting us many points and now Rio Ferdinand is in at the back. This gave us a few points in the Arsenal/Man Utd match last weekend, although …
Having just come back from a trip to Landmark Trust’s ‘Gothic Temple’ in Stowe I can absolutely recommend it. Staying in a temple in the middle of dozens of acres of National Trust grounds is fantastic. The temple has a triangular footprint wrapped around the central circular (domed) space with turrets at each corner of …
Having come up against the extremely poor performance of using TRUNCATE instead of DELETE on MySQL InnoDB tables (see previous post MySQL Truncate slow performance problems) I thought I better come up with a solution that didn’t mean leaving a table to clear for an hour. The solution is to use a combination of SHOW …
Something that I’ve had problems with using MySQL/PHP is the limitation of only being able to run one line of SQL at a time. Using something such as Microsoft SQL Server it’s possible to write multiple lines of SQL and run it all in a single database call. Until stored procedures (in MySQL 5) are …
I’ve been learning more about MySQL lately and particularly optimising SQL queries on large tables. Large, in this case, being at the moment hundreds of thousands of rows but soon to be millions. One of the problems I’ve had is that MySQL sometimes decides not to use an index even when a handy one seems …
It’s hard not to know about Yo Sushi, the ‘famous’ conveyor belt sushi restaurant, but what’s not so well known is that the idea is almost a direct import from Japan where such restaurants are more common. Gili Gulu is another along the same vein in central London just off the main stretch between Leicester …
Another one of those ‘I wish PHP 5 did this…’ moments has occurred to me with class constants. The addition of constants is good but the problem is when it comes to subclassing. The code on the PHP 5 site: class Foo { const constant = “constant”; } echo “Foo::constant = ” . Foo::constant . …