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So I’ve been going on about it for a little while - the fact that I had to either buy or make a cable to run from the megasquirt ECU to the Relay/breakout box. I was hoping to buy a cable from the states, since it would have included all the wiring I needed, shielded runs for the required wires, and save a lot of time. Since the two different companies in the states I’ve attempted to contact won’t reply to my emails, and there’s noone else to buy one from, I decided to take on the task of making my own.

I’m completely and utterly blown away after last night! I’ve been a fan of The Cat Empire ever since they started releasing tracks - their first album has been one of my favourites of all time. An amazingly energy-filled performance that lasted for two hours, and had the whole crowd screaming for more.

Every song they played was amazing, never the same as the “album version” - which is a great thing - with lots of improvisation, solos, and playing between the band members. With nine members on the stage, and two guests last night, it’s certainly a performance well worth seeing if they are in your area. Words can’t describe how fun it was!

More than kiki’s aparrently!

“Hot town, summer in the city Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty Been down, isn’t it a pity Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city…”_

One of my favourite songs of all time, just cruisy music coming from the time of the Vietnam war, it was the first thing that came to mind when I went for a smoke break today. It’s getting to that time of year that you’re wishing that air conditioned pants were an option for popular fashion. Summer last year was a soaking wet humidity fest, and this year it’s already working on showing us how bad it can be.

There are a variety of styles of programming, just like doing anything in this life. You can plan down to the nth degree, making sure that from the start, you know all the possible outcomes of each step in the program. This is how mission-critical programmers work, such as people designing software for NASA or anything that’s life-threatening. You can start a step back, with an algorithm, adding code and testing it as you go, and generally making things work, not knowing every possible outcome, but for generalities the code will work. Recent articles and past experience using their products have shown that this is how many major software developers, including Microsoft work. Then again, you could just throw code at an idea until you get something working, which will break often, requiring constant rewrites until it’s usable.

Desk. That object in front of, many of us perform our daily worship of the gods of capitalism. We work, we study, we relax. The desks I have available to me on my overnight shifts are small, barely room for my work needs and nothing more. Somehow I squeeze my laptop on there, allowing me to keep myself occupied and awake. If it were any smaller, there would not be room for many normal people to sit, while keeping useful storage space in the drawer below. Me, I’m over two meters tall, so any semblence of comfort, let alone ergonomics is destroyed by both my size and the desk’s lack of. Attempting to sit with my legs under the desk would require either dropping my seat to the lowest height setting, or me constantly knocking my knees on the fittings underneath.

As you may have read in my previous post, I’ve installed PHP5 on my laptop. It’s running windows, but don’t hold that against it - it’s still running Apache as the httpd. I’ve heard some good things and some bad things about the latest incarnation of the PHP scripting language - most of the bad things are the fact that they’ve changed the language so much that many people are going to have to entirely re-write their applications. This is a problem, but hopefully only a relatively short-term one - except for the fact that it’s still VERY hard to find any hosting companies that supply servers with PHP5 installed and usable, since most people are still looking for good old PHP4 servers.

Well, there goes that idea. I was going to start work on something like a mini phpMyAdmin for SQLite, but it doesn’t support quite a few things that a project like this would require. I don’t know if it’s possible to pull the information from the database engine itself, but things like table lists and so forth aren’t part of the function list like in the MySQL functions available through PHP. What a pity – some of those functions are really quite powerful, though generally only useful for administration tools.

A busker playing the trumpet, offers to let a passer-by his drum. The man, accepts, beating the drum to his own tune, a melody that while out of synch with the trumpet player, seems to fit. The soulful tunes of the trumpet echo throughout the mall, and the slap of hand on drum bounces from the walls. I wander past, the drummer dances, the trumpet player continues his tune, and people watch as they pass.

Yahoo! I’m officially bored out of my skull. I’ve read pretty much all the interesting parts (and the rest) of the PHP manual that I’ve got on my laptop, I’ve played a bunch of games of Pinball, Minesweeper and Solitaire (I know I’ll only get frustrated with FreeCell) and I’ve done little coding projects on everything I can think of, other than just throwing data in and out of SQLite. I know I could probably start on the solitaire game I’ve been telling myself I would code up for a while, but you know what? I really can’t be bothered right now 🙂