Blag o' dkam

I’ve discovered YouTube play lists, so I put together a bunch of clips from Sam Harris. Sam is the author of End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.

These are some pretty cool machines. The first one is a Valmet ( a Finnish brand ) shows an attachment for clearing trees — seems like a really effective piece of hardware. The second clip shows a machine I think was invented in Finland, then bought by John Deer. It shows a very similar machine but has replaced the tracks with 6 legs. Apparently legs don’t rip the soil up as much, meaning forests recover faster.

And the walking version…

Another in my series of fighting windmills. This is an email I sent to Origin. Didn’t get a reply.

Hi there,
I noticed on our bill you list total energy used in kWh — I was wondering why you do this, rather than simply measure kilojoules (kJ)? As 1 Watt is 1 Joule per second, our bill of 17.2 kWh means we used 17.2 kilojoules per second, for an hour during the last 3 months. Instead of the rate we used energy, wouldn’t it be simpler to just state the energy used — in this case 61,920 kJ?
Cheers,
Dan

I added fragment caching to Booko the other day. I’ve added caching to four sections, the Recent Searchs, Most Popular, Shopping Cart and the section which displays the prices of a book.

Now, instead of calculating the most popular books every time someone views a page, we look to see if that part of the site has been created recently — if it has, use it again. The Shopping cart is another good example — it only changes when you add or remove a book from it. Now Booko avoids having to calculate the cost of your shopping trolley at all shops every time you view a page — it regenerates that part of the page only when you add or remove a book.

Kinda wishing I’d bench marked it before and after. I think it’s faster now — but that’s because I’m looking for it. It feels snappier. Anyway — let me know what you think, faster or slower?

Nothing like a good Might Boosh crimp to get you going.

Great stuff.

I’ve updated Booko’s cart feature. You now get a link to Amazon ( com or co.uk ) which will prompt you to add multiple items to your Amazon cart and set me as the Associate. Should make buying a bunch of items way easier. Now I just need to figure out how to do the same thing with Fishpond.

Also, fixed a bug with a shop’s scrapping code.

Title says it all. Read the sad details here. Like the previous post about this except the parents are being charged.

It’s amazing that Faith is seen as a positive trait for people to have. “I don’t need evidence, I’ve got Faith!”. Resolving conflict when one side has “Faith” is difficult or impossible because they don’t care about rational argument. That’s the point of faith – belief with out proof. Or more cynically, belief despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Interesting article about book prices in Australia. Basically, we’re being screwed over by the Brits.

Yummy!