Archives

I have been following courses for three years now. Within the last week or two I decided to start experimenting with PHP using my website as a guinea pig. I have already converted a few pages to PHP. Some of them use for each loops and others use the include functionality. My aim is to practice the skills that I have studied, within a production environment.

Some of the tasks are repetitive. This isn’t a bad thing. It builds habit and understanding. By doing something frequently enough the pattern gets burned into my subconscious. When that’s done I will spot errors automatically, and if I get an error message I will know what it means.

People who walk as much as me wear through shoes within a few months. The soles that were deep and ridged when new, become smooth as we walk, and wear away the soles. Usually I know that shoes are new, or that they need replacing the same way. They start to cause blisters, and I feel that stones are starting to be felt through the soles.

These shoes stand out from others because they are waterproof almost to the top of the shoe, so as long as lake waves are small you’re fine. I tried on the lake, but with a speed boat passing seconds before, I didn’t insist. I tested in the blue shower by the lake to see the result. They performed as expected.

Recently I learned that PHP has a built in server. You don’t need xampp or any of the other solutions. All you need is terminal open, have the current directory be the one with the PHP files you want to serve and type: “php -S localhost:8000”

This might sound obvious to some but it took years for me to come across this. When you have to install xampp or other solutions you need to dedicate HD space, run the servers and more.

Every Rocketdyne engine was fine tuned and perfected by hand, from plans, that were modified but not updated. This means that each engine was unique. It would take trial and error to build them again.

With GIT and other forms of version control the entire process could theoretically have been logged and preserved, not so, in this context. Interesting video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0

There are times when I listen to two or three hours of podcasts a day and I learn from them. I usually listen when I am cooking and when I am walking. For several weeks now I have hardly listened to any podcasts. This is for three reasons.

The first of these is that I spend two to four hours studying a day, so when I go for my walk I think I have listened to the point of saturation and now I’m ready for a change of ideas. Recently whilst walking I spent days reading Gulag by Anne Applebaum and I learned a lot about the Gulag, about its history, it’s pervasiveness in society and more. I also learned about some of the cruelties that people did not try to stop. Cruelties such as the mass rape of women on prisoner ships.

During a walk a few weeks ago I came across L’Harmonica pour les nuls, Harmonica for Dummies, so I picked up the book and within a day or two I had ordered a harmonica to learn the instrument. The harmonica is a small versatile instrument. that can be used to play a range of music.

The greatest advantage with harmonicas is that it fits within a pocket. It takes very little space and can theoretically be taken anywhere. Despite what I thought about harmonicas the book is quite big. It’s over 300 pages.

A few days ago I saw someone rollerblading along one of the local paths so it got me to think about this sport that we have forgotten about other the years. 20 years ago we used to rollerskate and rollerblade before discovering easier to do sports that didn’t require carrying a large bag and spare shoes.

Back in the day rollerblades had much smaller wheels and the main sport was to stay upright. Over two decades wheels have become bigger. Mine are 80mm and some can be up to 110 mm tall. The difference between the original wheels is that you couldn’t lean as much. With 80mm and especially with 110 mm wheels you can really carve.

Last night I watched a video about a visit to Perm36 but it covered just the trip. The video below is far more complete and informative. I am currently reading Gulag by Anne Applebaum, rather than The Gulag Archipelago, like she mentions. I started reading it decades ago but never finished it. I read A day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in a single day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgtjgPtGmx0

Reading Gulag, The Gulag Archipelago and other books helps give some context to what Soviet Russia was like. As I read Gulag by Applebaum I get the feeling that Soviet Russia was about enslaving people to make profit for some whilst everyone else suffers. From this perspective what the Soviet Union would morph into, at the end of the Soviet age would make more sense.

Today I see that there is a nice storm warning. Storm warnings, during a heatwave are nice because it means that despite the heats we will have a short fun reprieve. I hope for thunder and lightning. There is every chance that the anticipated storm will not happen. We can sit and hope. This type of storm brings with it a risk of hail.

The number of cases by district.

For a while I liked playing with VS Code but I grew tired of it because it autocompletes everything, to the extent that you end up deleting rather than writing code. For a while I was playing with Atom but Github have decided to retire that application so I decided to look for an alternative and that’s when I came across VIM once more.

Through modern eyes VIM looks like a simple, featureless app but if you dig beneath the surface then you see that it is a fully featured IDE, just waiting to be woken up, part by part.