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One of the traditions of celebrating the New Year (besides getting drunk and making a fool of yourself) are of course the resolutions for the next twelve months. So here are mine: loose weight as a rule this always have to come first and I don’t want to be the one breaking it. As I think I am eating healthy enough and I am probably not going to be able to change much of it this has to be achieved with more exercise, so more cycling and the gym. I will also reduce the amount of alcohol I consume. ...

The Sonar 2009 - krass.com pages are up. This is probably the last time I do this, as it is just too much work and nobody else is helping me with the wiki. Sonar is doing a special offer of 125 EUR for the general pass for the three days. The normal price is 140, which is the same as last year. Maybe they realize that they can’t raise it every year. Some of the parties were very empty last year.

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. ...