2012 New Year's Resolutions

2012 New Year's Resolutions

It is that time of the year again where I make up stuff to ignore for the following twelve months. Last year I didn’t do it, but this year I will give it another try. I has been pointed out that these kind of resolutions doesn’t really fit into the agile way of making decisions that I do subscribe to in my professional life. I will again try to make follow up posts to check how I am doing during the year and possibly adjust the goals. ...

2 January 2012 · 2 min · Christof Damian

Calm

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1 September 2011 · 1 min · Christof Damian
Test Ride Triumph Tiger 800 XC

Test Ride Triumph Tiger 800 XC

I had my test ride of a 800XC today. I took it on my usual routes through Barcelona and Collserola. I must say it is a very nice bike. Compared to my current more agricultural Yamaha XV 1600 (picture of my bike fully packed) the motor feels like an electric drive and it handles like my mountain bike. The motor is quite boring in a good way, but missing the kick of my current one. While the handling is really appreciated, the Yamaha really doesn’t like corners. Ideally you drive up to a corner and find someone to lift it and turn it around. It also loves to follow any lines on the road and kills your behind with any bump, while the XC ignores all of this very nicely. ...

22 July 2011 · 2 min · Christof Damian
International PHP Conference 2011 Spring Edition impressions

International PHP Conference 2011 Spring Edition impressions

I planned to post this a lot earlier, but I wanted to do the presentation at Softonic first and I am also very lazy. My employer was so nice to send a colleague and me to the International PHP Conference 2011 Spring Edition in Berlin this year. It was a three day conference. There also was one day of workshops, which we skipped. We also skipped most of the keynotes, because most of them were in German and didn’t seem very useful. ...

7 July 2011 · 3 min · Christof Damian

sphinx search config scripts

I just finished converting the bikesoup search to use the sphinx search engine instead of a simple doctrine fulltext search with filters. One thing I found helpful are sphinx config scripts. Instead of hard-coding the configuration you can use any scripting language to produce the sphinx configuration. They just have to start with #! and sphinx will execute them and use the output as the configuration. This is the simplified version of my main config file /etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf: ...

13 February 2011 · 1 min · Christof Damian