wade womersley leeds based web developer

It’s cute, it has to be posted:

Google has a great feature called Google Suggest, if you didn’t know, it’s where as you enter a search term, it provides a dropdown of things you may be searching for – kind of like auto-complete. It is a really useful feature as often people do search for almost exactly the same string.

Sometimes however, the suggestions may not be quite what you expected. For example, maybe you’re searching for “do gypsies have big eyelashes”, so you start to type “do g” and Google suggests:

An important question no doubt, but maybe not what you wanted to know right now.

There’s more after the jump.

Next year me, Jared, my mother and my sister are supposed to be going to see Jared’s mother for a week (in the states) then driving down to Florida and staying there for a week. That way the parents get to meet and then we get some sun and fun in Florida…

…I say supposed to however as I just found out about the Oasis of the Seas. Royal Carribean’s newest cruise liner; and now all I want to do is take another 2 week cruise around the caribbean…well maybe a week so we can still go to see Jared’s mother for a week. This ship is just insane, forget Central Park, NYC, try Central Park, OotS – a fully irrigated, open, real foliage park at sea.

And it doesn’t just stop there, directly below this park, there’s a 2 level shopping mall. Then at the back of the ship is an AquaTheatre – kind of like Sea World has – except there’s also a childrens carousel there too. There’s also a moving bar that goes between the 3 floors of the royal promenade (not sure how that’s gonna feel when you’re tipsy.)

And like the other ships, there’s a theatre, pools, climbing wall, several places to eat etc.

It’s the addition of the park, the increased shopping area, the AquaTheatre and the size that makes this ship just so awe-inspiring though (the park alone is the size of a football pitch.)  It’s 220,000 tonnes, can have 5,400 passengers, is 360 metres long (1,181 feet), width of 47 metres (154 feet).

Looking for cheap flights to Florida so you can enjoy this fabulous cruise ship?
Check out ebookers for flights to Fort Lauderdale, Florida

We have Eurotrash, the Japanese have a whole collection of random TV shows, most recently is Ancient Dogoo Girl who’s magical breasts are the source of her power (and yet somehow this promo is still SFW, barely.)

InnoISAM is what I need, a happy medium between InnoDB and MyISAM. I need the speed of inserts of InnoDB with the speed of selects of MyISAM – no HEAP will not work because the JOIN that I do results in the HEAP table being converted into MyISAM. You get two tables that deal with 2 extreme’s but not good happy medium table.

Monday also became MarketDefender day today, a website I don’t like working on because the work I do on it involves working with a payment gateway – something I have never enjoyed but roped myself into technically before I even started working at StickyEyes. The reason for this being my CV states I have worked with payment gateways in the past, so lucky me gets to work on them more now! It’s one of those websites where you hope it will end, but it never does, like cancer, but maybe not quite so severe or deadly.

Oh yeah, Dan broke more things today However today he also fixed a few things too so equilibrium returned; until tomorrow.

After work, it was straight to the gym, working on my chest again with a new programme that was done for me on Saturday; it aches a LOT so it’s great! Certainly doing the right thing as there’s no injury, just a lot of muscle fatigue. He put me on a system that involves doing some bench presses and lifts, pull-ups and then finishing off with reducing sets of chest curls so by the end of it, lifting 7kg feels like a tonne. Pyramid sets I think they’re called, would be upside down though as you start with a high weight and work down…I don’t always get the naming conventions used for weight training. If anyone is interested in some new ideas for the gym, I’d be happy to give you a few ideas from what I’ve been told.

Over the weekend I went to see District 9 at the cinema. It’s a neat idea for a film, rather than do the now over-used shaky camera a la Cloverfield or a full on documentary style movie; District 9 takes on a mixed approach and does it extremely well – think the War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938. The film starts out with interviews of people discussing the main character after all the events had happened (that the film shows) – of course they say it in such an ambiguous way that it gives nothing away about the film coming other than “some guy did something unexpected but we don’t blame him.”

Throughout the film you get short documentary clips that cut down towards the action climax and then peak at the end again so you notice them but they really do add to the film.

It’s a film I’d highly recommend seeing, even for none sci-fi fans because it “feels real” – as much as a film can like this – it’s guaranteed to pull you in and get your emotions flowing.

Buy the District 9 Official Soundtrack

I don’t know what to say other than, it has to be read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Balls

My Balls (オレたま, Ore Tama^?) is a Japanese manga written by Shigemitsu Harada

The fate of the world rests in one man’s testicles. In a freak sealing accident, the Queen of Terror is sealed into Satou Kohta’s testicles…

Ah Friday’s, it’s always a good day in the office, everyone (at least in the dev team) know it’s Friday, and most weeks, Dan’s behaviour is a tell tale sign. Friday also means pub lunch day, something to look forward to…usually – however today was a sad day, our usual pub, the Wellington, let us all down. The waiting time for our fries was going to be at least 45 minutes, and I do mean just fries, chips, potato cuts, whatever you want to call them. It was almost enough to ruin the day, almost! However the pint went down well and I watched a bit of Bruno which helped…but still, no fries… Dan decided that to entertain himself (I can only assume it was due to the lack of fries on the couch of happiness*) he’d take Ben’s cigarettes off him and not give them back, and then hide them in the office allowing an honest “I don’t have them” statement. Deep down, Ben was happy about this, he said he wasn’t, but he did it with a smile

Now the important rant is over, databases! We have a collective big one so to speak, it’s huge (for what it stores.) We’ve known all along a lot of data is pointlessly duplicated and indeed some of it is pointless (invalid); however the extent of that was found out today – an estimate anyway. I wrote a script to de-dupe one of our tables, a table that contains hundreds of millions of rows, at the moment, we stand to loose 1,000,000 rows that are completely useless. We also have almost 16,000,000 rows that are duplicates and can be removed and that’s before the data is normalised (the normalisation process is affecting about 16% of the data [yes really, 16% of hundreds of millions]). Once that is done, I am anticipating the duplicate row count to go up to more like 25-30 million. The best thing about all of this though, was the resulting conversation, the same conversation half of the dev team have pretty much weekly that begins with one member saying “We only have that much data because we’re storing it wrong” – you know who you are! It then moves into sharding (nothing to do with a toilet) and archiving. Dan also broke one of our jobs even more than he did yesterday but that’s a daily expected situation so isn’t worth more than this one sentence.

And because it’s Friday, here’s a cat, thanks to icanhascheezburger.com

*the couch of happiness is opposite the couch of joy in the pub. Not that it helps you in any way for me to drag your eyes down here to know that, but now you do and can scroll back up, more confused than you already were.

Today’s work was a standard day, well except for the morning, actually no, that was a standard morning too, things didn’t work too well, they needed fixing, during which there were random jokes at Ben’s expense due to his pure love of graphs. With some help from Remo (my team manager) though, we did manage to work out some confusing MySQL queries – which as always, were actually remarkably simple, but until you see it, it’s harder than Michael Jackson visiting a pre-school (did I say this blog was probably bad for kids, fans of MJ and anyone who gets offended too easily?)

One thing I am still happy about today though is the re-write of our current tools into a tidier, faster, more usable fashion. I got more code nailed down today and the big jobs still work on a “insert only” principle with the database: there’s only one select at the start then the rest of the script does a few big inserts to do all it needs to do – and it still provides us with all the data we need for post-processing and lovely graphs (all for you Ben, all for you!)

In other news, I’ve been working for a client on RentACoder recently that has been superb for two reasons:

1) He always is clear about his needs with great spec docs, even down to the tables in MySQL to use;
2) He pays well, repeatedly.

However…the two recent jobs with him are not so smooth, I’m still not sure if it’s just me being overly blonde or he thinks I know the system far better than I do based on what I’ve worked on so far. But these two jobs are pretty much not moving as I allocated time for them tonight only to start work on them both and stop 1 hour later after spending most of that hour trying to understand both jobs. In the end though, even if the specs are lacking, I’ve only got myself to blame, I keenly accepted the jobs before checking the spec and now I’m confused and obliged to do them at a time that doesn’t suite me. Once again a case of “do as I say, not as I do” – many people will attest to my emphatic desire for very detailed spec documents before starting a job.

…but never go to the gym without some kind of energy source. A piece of advice I keep meaning to pay attention to but it’s a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” I got home from work, had a drink of juice, quickly ate a Snickers then straight off to the gym to do some light cardio followed by some heavy weights – which felt great in that gym pain kind of way – only to finish and start to feel really sick as I had a shower as my body desperately tried to find an energy source, failed, and so decided to moan at me like a child who you just tried to persuade to eat mushy peas only to regret it when your favorite shirt took on the texture and colour of said peas (no, I didn’t throw up, just felt like I was going to.)

The bright side of this is when I got home, I had some protein, informed my other half of my hunger situation and am now currently waiting for dinner to be cooked for me which I can’t wait for.

Oh and the new underwear got lots of attention in the changing rooms, lots of staring, that little bit of extra information is just for you Dan

And just for you Ben, here’s a graph showing my hunger level vs the average rainfall in Timbuktu vs the age of a random panda.

PHP and Serializing…don’t try and store the result in a plain text file, there’s just a chance you may end up storing NUL so when you go to read a line, you’ll end up only reading part of it (the serialized object had a stack trace in it from an exception.)

Incidentally, don’t try and debug code that works – it’s always a good idea to read the code that is storing the data you think is wrong before trying to debug the output, I couldn’t work out why I wasn’t logging somethin only for certain exceptions, then eventually I checked the logging line and realised, for that particular exception I had decided to do a manual log entry rather than throw and catch an exception.

And now here’s a cat:

Courtesy of ICanHazCheezburger