fornax.net

Life has lost all meaning! Okay, well, perhaps it's not that bad. But as just about everyone that has at some stage visited me knows, the local Chinese takeaway, Wing Lee, is the best Chinese ever. Ever.

But they have closed! Well, they are under new management, and are in the middle of re-furbishing the place, so that's the same thing, really. I mean, they will open again, but will it ever be the same? What to do? *sob*

I was just asked how to debug PHP, using Zend Studio, but for a CLI PHP script, as opposed to a normal web-based PHP script. (Web based debugging is easy - fire up Zend Studio, load up Firefox with the Zend Toolbar installed, and hit "Debug".)

To be honest, debugging your CLI PHP scripts is almost as easy! All you need to do is launch your PHP script from a simple bash script, that does a little bit of simple magic for you:

#!/bin/sh
export \
QUERY_STRING=\
"start_debug=1&debug_port=10000&debug_host=IP&debug_stop=1"
/path/to/php -q /path/to/script.php

Just replace IP with your IP address (be it 127.0.0.1, or whatever), launch Zend, and start debugging. Easy!

UPDATE: Zend have similar info on their site these days...

Perfect timing! I was discussing Monkey with David and Kathryn at the exhibition on Sunday, and now he's back!

Had another busy weekend, which was good. I not only went to see the China: The Three Emperors exhibition at the Royal Academy, thanks to Kathryn who scored free tickets, I also managed to get out with my camera. On the way to the local supermarket, I saw an old bird's nest in a tree, and at that very moment, a 747 flew right behind it. I stood in the cold for about half an hour trying to get the same shot later on, but of course, the aircraft weren't having any of that. Still, I think this one came out okay, given it's my first time out with an SLR in a long time. Practice makes perfect, or at least helps with the kaizen (according to Anil's word of the day).

In the same day as The Times reports on a row over potential spin by the Home Office when reporting statistics (again), I notice this gem:

Although The Times survey is not representative, it is a significant attempt to gauge the views of a large number of Liberal Democrat members.

Right. Statistics is a science, you know. If it's not a representative survey, why bother mentioning it? If the survey proves nothing, why not simply write a straight forward opinion piece, about the authors' views about Mr. Huhne's chances of becoming the Liberal Democrats' front man, instead of trying to pretend there's some kind of factual basis for this opinion?

Sometimes I think that newspapers should be peer-reviewed. Maybe we can convince The Times to pay all of its staff to simply write all their articles in Wikinews, and then we can take it from there?

The headphones on my mp3 player have bought it. There's something loose around the point where the cable joins the plug. I've survived for a few days, by pulling on the cable hanging out from my bag whenever it sounds funny, but, of course, this has only made things worse, and now it's pretty much all over.

I've bought some new ones from eBay, but they haven't arrived yet. This means I am now transit music deficient. While I like TMBG, I'm not sure that I want to sing them in my head for the entire trip home. Unfortunately, someone put one of their songs in my head...

It completely slipped my mind last week, until I was talking with David on the weekend; Friday was my 2 year anniversary of coming to the UK. When did that happen?

I think that the main thing that's been getting me down recently is a lack of achievement. There's so many things that I want to do, but, as always, never enough time to do them. This isn't helped by the fact that one of the things I always want to do is to kick back and relax. I never regret doing that when I do, because it's important to me to do it, but it does cut into the time I have for doing things.

However, today I felt like I got lots done. I've finally finished watching three different anime series, I went out to see The Schweppes Photographic Portrait Prize 2005, at the National Portrait Gallery with David, and I bought a camera bag for new camera. Okay, it's not heaps, but it's a good start on my list of things that need doing.

Now all I need to do is get the photo gallery up and running again, put all of my old photos back in, and then take the camera out and start adding content again...

So, I've been in a funk recently, and people have been annoying me. Especially when they email me, and I can't even come close to understanding what they want. It's hard not to send a very un-diplomatic response.

Fortunately, Rob at work sent me a handy little guide on how to ensure that your responses are always polite. Genius!

Just the other day I was commenting that the Home Secretary, Mr. Clarke, must be astoundingly stupid. Apparently, he needs a panel of experts to look at why the public don't believe the Home Office's crime statistics, despite the fact that it's blindingly obvious that the Home Office is doing everything it possibly can to "reduce" crime by playing with the numbers.

When you combine that with the fact that we learn today that the Home Office is completely incapable of keeping their accounts in order, you have to wonder how much time and money Mr. Clarke will be wasting with his panel, when the answer is staring him in the face. If only he'd open his eyes and look.