A while back I read George R R Martin’s A game of thrones and have recently started on it again in Audio book form. I had forgotten just how good it is, it’s well written, very mature and gripping. I found myself really liking some characters but hating others, it’s great how even the best and most noble of characters have flaws of their own, it’s so much more real. A word of warning, it can be very hard to keep track of the characters sometimes (there are so many). Now, onto book 2…

Today my Dad and I cycled to Ystragunlais (or however it’s spelt) and then back again. 18.14 miles (there and back). 18.14 miles of hill and gravity, it was a lot of work and I’m now a little worn out. Tomorrow I’ll be going for a bike ride to my Gran’s, that’s 1 mile there. No doubt my average speed will be insanely high compared to what it was today.

I can near enough touch type with the Colmak keyboard and my typing speed is still rising, I’ll have a review of it soonish. WoA starts on Saturday and I’m looking forwards to it, I may be doing a podcast again

So WoA has moved onto it’s next phase and I’m now the only one running it. This it appears is a good thing as the turn took a very short amount of time and we are returning to 1 week turns. I’ve cut out a large amount of the math and uneeded rules so it’s much easier to understand and so far everybody likes it

I also got a new t-shirt today, it cost me 1 pound 80.

My day involved a bike ride against such strong wind that I came up with the brilliant idea of turning the bike around and peddling backwards! Sadly this meant I simply fell off as I do not have a BMX, that, or I was not peddling backwards fast enough. I was told that I had to phone the dole people and so thought “oh yay”. I saw Jon and Sam and went home.

Orca, it’s something that myself and Pete have been planning, we are hoping to make some money from it too which will be handy. It’s rather similar to something called Twitter, it just has a lot more in the way of features. I figured I’d list them here so you can see for yourself. Alpha means it will be ready for the Alpha release and Beta for the Beta.

So, that is what I spend my time coding when it’s not WoA and until we get a client.

Sunday was my last Sunday at Portsmouth for a while and everybody thus said goodbye to me. I was invited around the Mitchell’s for lunch, I find it fitting that the first time I was at Eastney I was invited back for lunch to theirs and now the last time I am there as a student I still am. I stayed there all day which was really nice. After the evening service myself, Lorna, Hannah and Dan went to the Hackers (we were just going to wait for Dan to collect his things but it spiraled).

I will miss Eastney but I also plan to visit next year but I may well be visiting Portsmouth before then! Boagworld is a rather popular web design and development podcast. They had a competition to win a ticket to dConstruct (a web design conference) and I won one of the tickets. They are worth a good amount of money but it is in Brighton on the 5th of September. I am looking at staying with someone nearby that won’t mind me leaving early and returning late.

I’m back home and until SLD can get some income going I am on the dole and looking for a job to tide me over until we can. I am enjoying being back home already though the water does taste a little funny.

Owing to my bad looks, borderline Aspergers, Dyslexia and general abnormality, the time required to reach my current level of proficiency may be more, it may be less or you may be so alike me that you match me second for second in your progression.

So I switched to Colemak as a keyboard layout a few days ago. So far it is going better than Dvorak, it’s a lot more similar to Qwerty than Dvorak is and I think this is helping me a little. I am already at a similar stage to where I was with Dvorak, I can’t touch type yet but I can type fairly fast compared to a couple of days ago.

Pete has done the same as me but must switch back to Qwerty when at work. He says it was confusing at first but it is getting easier to switch over each day. But enough about Pete, he’s really not that cool. I cannot yet touch type but I am finding that I touch type a word every now and again.

I’ve been taking daily bike rides along the seaside and it’s really nice, I am looking forwards to coming back home and seeing all my family again.

For a while I’ve been slowly working (slow because I nap a lot) on a new version of World of Arl. WoA as a whole has been going for some time, several years now. Over time it has become more complicated and time consuming for all involved. I am largely to blame and as a result, about 3/4 of the way through it’s current lifetime interest started to wane. The good news is that every single person has said that the new set of rules are better in every way.

The feedback so far has been very positive (it contrasts nicely with all the criticisms about my bodily odor) and people are suddenly much more eager to play and create teams. In under 24 hours of accepting cultures, I’ve had 8 submitted, typically a total of 20 to 30 are submitted so this is a good sign.

Of course, with a new ruleset I decided to improve the design of the site, a lot. The design has actually been called good by real people. I’m thinking that I’ll be altering the blog so that it matches the main site. But I have more news! Aside from all the napping, eating of kievs, watching Stargate SG-1, more napping and the WoA redesign I’ve actually been doing something like work. I’ve been working on a program for myself and Pete that if it works will be really cool, chillier even than the response people give me when I greet them when I cycle by. It’s something like twitter but with somewhat more features.

Tomorrow I’ll give a review of the Colemak keyboard layout.

A while ago I swapped to Dvorak, I have since then mostly had to look at the keyboard to type. I have felt less RSI and despite the lack of touch typing, I can type at a similar rate to qwerty! Pete showed me the Colemak keyboard and since installing it last night I seem to be several days ahead of where I was with dvorak. It’s a lot more similar to Qwerty and so easier to learn for Qwerty users. I will keep you abreast of my constantly warping opinion.

I have recently noticed that my spots have begun to recede and I think that the cause is ketchup or more likely something in ketchup.

Yesterday was an interesting day. I got to church and broke the right ear rest on my very expensive (£1.99) sunglasses. It turned out however that I could still wear them after I sanded down the tear using my bike repair kit. This meant I still looked fashionable which, as you all know, is really important to me. Last week I found I had a drinking problem as I spilt water down myself (water bottle leaks a little when you stop drinking which then leaks onto you next time you use it), I have since been working hard and the drinking problem is mostly gone as was the eating disorder where I couldn’t relocate peas into my mouth (cavernous though it is).

After lunch we went to the beach, Lorna went for a paddle but didn’t wear shoes so asked if I’d carry her back up the (rocky) beach as I was there. I of course agreed even though I didn’t have shoes myself. My weight plus Lorna’s weight sometimes on just one foot (i.e. as I was moving the other) meant that I got a cut on my foot but it was just a small one. Morale of the story is that fun though it is to give piggyback rides to people on the beach, it’s best if you have shoes on or it’s a sandy beach.

Today I collected my silver award for being a totally cool and good looking course rep, I then went to Wilkos and got some new sunglasses that are quite honestly, not as cool as my two other pairs. Both of my other pairs are broken, one as you know lost it’s right ear rest while the other lost it’s left and then it’s right when I ripped it off. A bit of sanding and some blutacky stuff and I have some nose glasses that don’t fall off even when I dance. It took a bit of work to get the tac just right but I’ve done it. I’ll give further updates on just how much cooler I look in these as I get the results, I will be measuring the coolness by the number of young ladies that don’t know me yet throw themselves at me. Everything so far has scored a 0 but I’m still hopeful!

I have found that I have a weak or borderline form of Asperger syndrome (which apparently is not a valid spelling of the word). This would explain my complete lack of empathy and near lack of social graces. It also explains why I am so very very good looking, though maybe that’s just my imagination.

Anybody that’s in some way connected to web development or databases has likely heard of MySQL. It’s a free database system, any host that supports databases supports MySQL (that I’ve seen, I’m sure there are exceptions). It’s a good system but if you want to use it commercially I believe you need to pay them money, I don’t know if this is still the case but it used to be.

I have now been pointed at PostgreSQL. It’s license is not even half a page long and it basically says “do with as you will, just don’t say you made it or try to sue us”. It’s apparently faster than MySQL (not normally an issue but it might be for something that myself and Pete do soon) and in my experience, a real pain to get running on the Mac. Yet I really like it because it either offers more features than MySQL or it’s just a lot easier to learn about those features because they have really good documentation.

So here’s how I got it running on my Mac.

Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) comes with PHP5 installed, using MAMP I run a MySQL database on my Mac for web development fun. Of course, that is MySQL, not PostgreSQL. So, firstly I needed to install PostgreSQL and in all honesty, it took me several tries to find the correct download from the infinite typewriters that make up the web.

After much searching, downloading, typing into the terminal, confusion and cans of carbonated drink; I finally arrived at this site, Postgreformac.com. I downloaded the Unified installer and then installed it from the “server” installer which put everything I need on the system. Setting up the databases was a bit confusing at first but nothing a little default settings couldn’t solve. Of course, I also wanted the PostgreSQL version of PhpMyAdmin, this was not hard to find and is called PhpPgAdmin.

As PHP requires a plugin to run PG queries I had to run my PHP scripts from my MAMP server rather than my default one as it had the plugin that my normal one did not. I put the PhpPgAdmin on and it started to tell me that I was not allowed to login to my database. It turns out that the default usernames or a blank password (I had all of them, though I’d never do this on an actual server) were a bad idea. I edited the relevant file “/classes/Misc.php” to fix the problem, I simply commented out the relevant lines around line 313.

And then it all worked! A bit of googling soon revealed how to write PHP that actually connected to it and I was set.

I have now completed uni and I’m quite happy about it, mostly because I can now start learning some new stuff. I find it ironic that now I am leaving uni, I’m spending all my programming time learning a new database language and poking around with a new programming language. My exact adventures with regards to these languages will have to await another post, I have more interesting (for most people at least) happenings to tell about.

I got my report handed in, it was 80% code which makes me think the report was a big waste of time. I spent nearly two days at Sam’s house where we helped each other get through the ordeal of printing reports and posters and a lead of boring stuff. As I’d used Sam’s printer I owed him dinner and we went to the thatched house on thursday where we had a nice time talking about all things geek. While there I found that I am now known to all the staff, that Dan reads my blog and that cleaning coleslaw off your bike helmet isn’t actually that hard.

On the thursday I also got an early night and thus did not attend the student awards dinner. This meant that I was unable to be there to collect my award for being a course rep. I’ll be popping into the student union on Monday to correct this mistake. Project day itself was a lot more naff than I expected. A total of two non-students came to talk to me but both were really interesting people and though the project itself was of no real interest to them, it had to tackle similar problems to what they’d had to tackle or will have to tackle.

Today I started learning the new Database language and was unhappy with Siteground’s unwillingness to provide a way for me to run a Python system on a shared hosting account. If I go into Python then I’ll unlikely be doing it on a Siteground server. I’ll be telling more about Python another day. I also started teaching Leanne a little HMTL and CSS, the uni course decided that such technologies were unimportant and only flash was needed to make websites