In my quest to try out new things and make my rented virtual server run a bit smoother I tried two (for me) new tools: memcached: I never had a need to use it, because at work we just do websites which nobody looks at. We could really have used this at guideguide, where we basically used mysql to cache some often used data which didn’t work too well. Installation was very easy on CentOS and mediawiki and Django have direct support for memcached. I just had to enable it and change the code for api.bicingwatch.com to make use of the cache. ...

View Larger Map Another lunchtime restaurant review. I ventured over the Gran Via again on the look out for a new restaurant choice for our lunches at work. Paris Condal is a small restaurant with an attached snack bar. They got pictures of some food in the window, which usually puts me off, but I had a good experience in Andorra so I went in anyway. The restaurant has maybe ten tables and smoking is allowed. I don’t understand why anyone would have smokers in a restaurant, but there you go. The bathrooms are dirty like a dark corner in Raval. ...

This weekend I moved more websites away from my old dedicated server. The site of my girlfriend moved from mediawiki to a blogger.com account. Our family website is now a planet running on the new virtual server. And today I moved http://krass.com/ also to the virtual server. This turned out to be a major hassle, because the mediawiki version was pretty old and the mysql server changed from 4.1 to 5.0. As usual with these things I run into charset troubles. After playing for ages with various combinations of iconv and mysqldump I gave up and put a ‘SET names latin1’ after the connect in the mediawiki code. This is obviously not a good solution, but I can’t be bothered at the moment. ...

Last week Cat had the brilliant idea to go snowboarding in Andorra for the weekend. The snow conditions were just turning right and the Grand Valira snow resort was opening the lifts for the first time this year. So we booked a car, hotel and the ski passes and left for Andorra on Friday evening. To our surprise it was a very quick trip because there was not a single traffic jam. ...

My new computer has finally arrived and last weekend I had time to put it together. With the Fedora 10 release this week I should be having a good time now. Here is what I got: Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe AMD 790FX / SB600 4GB RAM AMD Phenom X4 9350e Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate 2 * Western Digital Caviar WD10EADS 1TB a couple of new Papst fans I tried to order things which save a little bit of power and are easier to cool so I can run them quieter. I also decided on a ATI graphics card because they are releasing information about their hardware and are not stuck in the past like Nvidia. ...