Myself, Coding, Ranting, and Madness

British EU Refurendum — Enfranchisment

Right.

Now that the polls are closed, we're all winding down from the saturation of EU referendum spiel: it's time for me to come out of the wood work and give an opinion on the matter. I'd like to take a slightly different tack to most peopleby discussing some of the legal scope of the vote today, and from there discuss what I feel was a flaw in the campaign setup, and make a case for why some of us should not have voted today.

Reith Lectures

Artist Grayson Perry presents the 2013 BBC Reith Lectures, titled “Playing to the Gallery”. The first programme will be available to download on Tuesday 15 October 2013.

Keeping the Blog Fast

Although I've dropped off the front page for any useful set of keywords in GoogleNow 11th for C++ for Physicists, I still take some amount of pride in this blog. Some of the content is even readable, and the underlying tech does seem to work.

Part of my guiding principles in the design of the blog has been to keep it really fast and really technical simple. I’ve discussed some of the server work I’ve done on this in previous posts. What I have been working on more recently is reducing what is being sent to the browser.

I'm Back...Maybe

So, I made the first post in nine months last week. I then went on to accidentally delete it whilst doing a bulk spam clean out, and had to reassemble it from snippets in my memory and a partial cached version.

It really doesn't feel like nine months to me — it was quite a busy time. I might be back now. I started writing all sort of things in the missing time, some of which may one day be publishable. In the meantime, some news.

The Zeno-Starbucks Problem

Although Starbucks only actually has ~800 stores in the uk, I seem to come across them more than one would expect. I've often wondered why, and this is my current theory:

Nyan

Lyrics to “Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!” (Janurary 2011 Momo Momo version) by daniwell. In these, find deeper meaning.

Backport

I'm pleased to report that I have finally moved all the content off the old blog onto this new platform.

Because of various format changes over the last three years, some of them may still not be rendering properly; I think I've already fixed the worst of the visual bugs, but there is a surprisingly large amount of data to sort through. There's also all the tags to reinstate; I'm hoping to be able to get this sorted out as a script at some point soon.

PHP FPM Configuation

Last week I talked for a long while about using PHP FPM to speed up the site, but avoided offering up any of the configurations files. The support for FPM and Apache is still a bit thin on the ground — niginx seems to have quite a lot of support and questions out their on this topic already. As such, I'm not entirely sure if I'm doing this the most efficient way, so don't take this as good support advice.

PHP Fast Process Manager

The design of Acorn and Mangler was aiming for light-weight and blisteringly fast — however, eventually you become limited by the tools that you're using. A good example of this is the standard LAMP stack that is ubiquitous in both smaller, and larger web environments.

The Underused Bits of ASCII

7-bit ASCII and it's mapping onto UTF-8 is one of the few nice things left in in the mess that is character encoding. The 128 possible values that ASCII are mainly use for the latin character set, ‘arabic’ numerals, and the common punctuation you see on a standard keyboard.