I passed my Zend PHP5 Certification exam today, which has been a long time coming; work and life always managed to get in the way of studying for and, crucially, booking the exam itself.

It was certainly more broad, less fiddly/fussy than the practice tests available on the Web, and thankfully with far fewer grammatical, spelling and, most annoyingly, syntactical errors.  Whilst the flaws of the exam are obvious (it often favours testing recall of function syntax, specific behaviour, obscure use cases, etc. over real-world problems and coding skill or elegance of solutions), I found it a highly positive experience to really get into some of the dark corners of the PHP manual; I feel I came away with a heightened understanding of the language in general and learnt a lot about the more advanced (and interesting) new techniques available.  Especially streams…that’s a funky set of functionality right there.

Maybe I’ll apply some of the techniques I learnt to this site, but first of all it needs a new design, which shouldn’t take too long now that I’ve found myself with a lot more ‘free’ time.

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So I need to update this thing to reflect new job, new gubbins and other shizzle.  The transient nature of our existence sadly ensures that my site is only “up to date” (gigantic quotation fingers) for a few weeks before I fall behind again, but such is life.  It’s difficult to work coding websites all day and gather the required energy for adjusting one’s personal site once the day is over…maybe I should code my personal web space into a Firefox extension, that would be different and fun.  Ok, maybe not for my “huge” (Richard Kiel doing quotation fingers) readership.

What with it being Autumn now, fruit is the word, and the word is fruit.  So I have been collecting elderberries, mulberries and blackberries for what seems like forever.  I’ve made a rather excellent elder & blackberry jam, and many assorted puddings with apples, pears, plums, blackberries and mulberries.  Although one of the dandelion wines (the rhubarb-bolstered one) became a casualty of over-enthusiastic hoovering on Maggie’s part, the more promising one is still aging nicely, and looking ludicrously alcoholic; it only really stopped fermenting about a month ago, which means it spent the best part of three months burbling away to itself.  I reckon it will be fantastic, and probably about 16% after I’ve topped it up to a full gallon.  It will be ready to try at christmas, although I shall endeavour to resist drinking much during the festive season, so that it can age a full year.

The next wine project is elderberry, and I expect this will come to fruition over the next two weeks – freeing up space for the next few, which need to be done in quick succession, as most fruit is on the way out:

• Rowanberry wine
• “Whitty Pear” (true service tree) wine/mead – this one will be special, if it works.  The tree is very rare.
• Mulberry mead
• Mint wine/mead

I’ll also be making some things (not wine or mead) with rosehips, and maybe haws, if I get a chance.

Anyway, here’s a poem by D.H. Lawrence that captures a lot of things rather splendidly…and makes me want to find some Medlars.

Medlars and Sorb-Apples

I love you, rotten,
Delicious rottenness.

I love to suck you out from your skins
So brown and soft and coming suave,
So morbid, as the Italians say.

What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour
Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay:
Stream within stream.

Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine
Or vulgar Marsala.

Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity
Soon in the pussyfoot West.

What is it?
What is it, in the grape turning raisin,
In the medlar, in the sorb-apple,
Wineskins of brown morbidity,
Autumnal excrementa;
What is it that reminds us of white gods?

Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels,
Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant
As if with sweat,
And drenched with mystery.

Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.
I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences,
Orphic, delicate
Dionysos of the Underworld.

A kiss, and a spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm of rupture,
Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning.
And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,
A new gasp of further isolation,
A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves.

Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone,
The fibres of the heart parting one after the other
And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, even more vividly embodied
Like a flame blown whiter and whiter
In a deeper and deeper darkness
Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.

So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples
The distilled essence of hell.
The exquisite odour of leave-taking.
Jamque vale!
Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell.

Each soul departing with its own isolation,
Strangest of all strange companions,
And best.

Medlars, sorb-apples,
More than sweet
Flux of autumn
Sucked out of your empty bladders.

And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala
So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its savour to yours,
Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell
And the ego sum of Dionysos
The somo io of perfect drunkenness
Intoxication of final loneliness.

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(in no particular order)

• walked over 20 miles around the peak district with a heavy rucksack
• drunk water out of a peat bog (it was orange and had interesting aquatic life)
• got drunk on a mixture of raspberry vodka, kirsch, grenadine and lemonade
• got sunburnt despite it being mostly overcast (idiot)
• drunk water from an awesomely clear (and very tasty) stream
• saw a UFO
• laughed at Richey for ending up with a reggae reggae face, reggae reggae trousers and reggae reggae sleeping bag.
• ate a lot of hobo’d food (mostly barbecued)
• got munched a lot by midges
• got woken up by the random clucking noises of grouse
• barbecued a chocolate brownie
• ran through acres of heather (more difficult than it sounds, especially when it’s uphill and you’re carrying a massive rucksack)
• listened to lots of Maudlin of the well, Kayo Dot, Ufomammut and the Beatles
• followed sheep around
• ate wild raspberries and cherries

Awesome

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Right, I haven’t blogged for ages so here’s the f’shizzle:

I recently moved from Edinburgh back down to Sheffield, staying at Richey’s while I started my job and found somewhere for me and the girly thing to live… I’m working for School Trends doing 2nd Line Web Technical Support, basically fixing stuff that the customers (mainly schools) have problems with, in managing their websites. What’s cool about it is I can try my hand at pretty much anything that helps to make the software or customer experience better, which is quite liberating, although the requirements of the position will relegate my coding explorations to only a few hours a week. I’m still ultimately aiming to be able to do Web App development, so any R&D or general developmental experience at School Trends will be great and I’ll jump on any chance to make their software better and help with redesigning the UI.

The new abode will be in Ranmoor, which is particularly poncey – as is the flat It’s about 45-55min walk out of town, from what I can tell – which isn’t quite as close as I originally wanted but it’s an awesome area and the flat is seriously phat. It’s really hard to get decent flats in nice areas much closer to town. Hopefully I should have all my junk moved up from dearest mama’s by early January too.

This site hasn’t had much done on it at all recently besides finally fix the menu to a point where I’m actually rather pleased with it; I am however getting a lot more confident with PHP & MySQL so it should take less time to roll out things that I want put on the site. The quote generator test I did worked fine, which means that the random image generator will take only about 5min to do, given that the code is quite basic and pretty much the same thing. The main thing I will be working on before both of those are live is the login system, I need it to be as close to the LoginView .NET control as I can get it in terms of functionality. SEO is also a priority; I really need to get my Google listing sorted. Hopefully by the time I’ve got somewhere with those I’ll have some more content (I know, it’s crazy talk…actual content on my site!), and then I’ll probably do that AJAXy Photo viewer along with some Semantic Web stuff.

Edit:

Little did I know that being entirely responsible for the development of a CMS, as well as most technical support issues for over 200 customers, would completely demolish my appetite for spending time developing this site.  A few months ago, one of the Mozilla developers blogged about losing his interest in developing Firefox extensions due to spending most of his working day hacking on the ‘fox.  I totally empathise with this, although I don’t plan on giving up on this site just yet.  So:

• Photos will happen eventually, although I’ll probably grab someone else’s viewer code and customise it a little.
• Login system has been dropped as it was rather ambitious and probably would not have been used much anyway.
• Changes to the design are now mainly restricted to CSS bug fixing.  If/when I get bored of the design, I will either make gradual changes or, if I want a fairly substantial change, will just pick a nice WP template.
• I can’t be bothered to make this site work in IE6, I spend enough time doing that at work.  Anything to hasten it’s demise…
• The GridView tutorial won’t be happening – I’m not in possession of it, I’ve tried numerous times to get my hands on it in some form but to no avail.  It is a pity as I spent ages on it and it would have been a great addition to the site, along with a good way to reacquaint myself with .NET, but ‘s been quite a while so I’ll just let it go now.  I have some other things in the pipeline to help flesh out the Downloads page.

—————-
Listening to: Kayo Dot – The Antique

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Ok…so I’ve been rather silent here. I’m still alive, currently living in Edinburgh with my new lady (who is the best thing to happen to me in a very long time). The MSc and DoD (Dissertation of D0000000m) have ended and I am sans job. I’m involved in a concerted effort to get a position in web development as I’d like to work in an area that

• I’ve always been fascinated by
• I actually enjoy
• Isn’t science (I’m fed up with research after the DoD and want to see what else there is)

The site has come along a great deal since I last wrote something here, with eleventy billion bug fixes and extra features, and some actual design work has happened to ensure that it doesn’t look like a pile of junk. It’s far from finished – I have several little bits yet to do, along with the mildly irritating task of getting it to look nice in the abomination that is IE6. In fact I would have done the IE6 testing already if M$ hadn’t made it impossible to run it in Vista; as it is, I have to install 1.5+Gb of virtual OS (XP SP2) to get anywhere near IE6. So I’ve decided not to bother and to gopher the prettiest Linux ever (Kubuntu) and WINE instead. After these job applications. Job > IE6 compatibility.

Anyway, here are the main recent improvements to the site:

• Cool PHP breadcrumbs script added to generate crumbs from directory structure
• Even cooler browser-specific, dynamic PHP generated CSS and JS files – this was a lot easier than I thought it would be to implement. I’m sure this puts a hefty load on the server, but I can’t see it causing any problems, unless I start getting lots more hits.
• Tutorial for my scrollable, sortable table – hopefully *fingers crossed* I can get my GridView tutorial up here too. I also have some Perl scripts to put up, just data juggling stuff but some budding computational chemist out there might find them of use
• Clicky-sprouty hidden JS divs for code and suchlike – sadly not yet working in Opera, but that’s not so bad (sorry, Opera users)
• Vastly improved menu
• Much better Smarty code, making it far easier to change (and add) pages to the site
• Smarty templates seamlessly hooked into blog files through some carefully placed PHP includes – again a lot easier to do than I anticipated
• Nicely formatted CV page that kicks the bottom of my existing CV – I will back-port the changes to the document version shortly and put it up here for download
• Contact page that works and works well, I’m sure the JS validation script can be improved but it’ll do for the moment.

The WordPress update to 2.3 didn’t work (both 1-click & manual) so I’ll stick with 2.2.1 until I figure a workaround (probably best backing up, deleting and re-installing). More to come.

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Is a bit of a mad month so far.  My MSc dissertation at Eli Lilly is starting to come together, which means it’s starting to get hectic as I’m trying to make sure I write things up as the results appear.  I’ve started applying for jobs too, anywhere and everywhere so who knows where I will end up.  I’m just getting to know this area so it would be nice to stay here, or go back to Sheffield which I really enjoyed.

Just done some more work on the site, the development version now has a fully functioning AJAX throbber which I will be utilising in my AJAX picture viewer.  I hope to get the first (quite limited) version of the site up and running this week.

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