Meshta Ankarith

Well, it’s been a while since I updated (not that there’s anything unusual about that).

It appears that my folks have found a house in Melbourne. It’s a designer house, full of cast iron and glass, but much smaller than where we are in Ballarat. Luckily, I’ll have a decently sized room. We’ll probably move in a couple of weeks from now. Eventually, I will move into my own place… when I can afford it. I guess that means it’s probably about time to look for a job.

The move also means that I can very soon say a not-so-fond farewell to Neighborhood [sic] Cable. They were so good in the beginning… why did they mess themselves up? Bring on the decent provider with decent download limits!

I’m planning a short trip to Sydney in the next couple of months to visit the Lord of the Rings exhibition at the PowerHouse Museum. I wish it was coming to Melbourne… it would be a lot kinder to the wallet.

I discovered two semi-dead pixels on my PowerBook today. Unfortunately, unlike the manufacturer of my other monitor, Apple don’t have a zero-dead-pixel policy, so I’ll just have to live with it. Luckily, it’s only that the blue and green subpixels in both are stuck on black. It would be really annoying if they were stuck on white.

I’ve been working on the new version 0.4 MA backend software the past few days. The more I dig into it, the more I realise how very bad the current version here (0.3.4) is. For instance, after adding a debug feature that monitors the number of database queries that are run in an execution, I found that a certain page used almost 150 queries. That is absolutely ridiculous, especially given that some investigation revealed that at least half of those queries retrieved the same information. There may be some caching provided by MySQL, but even still, it’s not a good thing. The modifications that I’ve made tonight have reduced that particular page’s query count from 150 to 7, losing absolutely no functionality or information. Dark Prince: you’ll be pleased to know that the wait will be worth it, and that you won’t have to deal with this chunky old version.

So there you go.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 13th, 2005 at 4:27 am and is filed under Geekery, Life updates, MA Engine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.