24/09/2007 - Monday

I've just finished watching the full series of Taken which has been showing on the Sci-Fi channel for the past 10 weeks. The series started off a little slowly as it advanced from the 1940's up to 2003 (I think), but once it hit the more modern times it picked up speed and got a bit more interesting. I thought it was a good series and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys sci-fi shows, although I can see that not everyone would be able to get into the series (my mother for example).

23/09/2007 - Sunday

Today I took part in the Hovis London Freewheel cycling event. I found a small advert for it on the tfl website at the beginning of the month and it looked like it would be fun, so I told my family and got them to register as well. My mother, sister, and her boyfriend joined me on the 14km car-free route that took us from London Bridge to St James Park (and back again) along The Thames.

The ride itself was enjoyable as we were surrounded by the other 38,000 people that registered. Even though there were a lot of people there, we still managed to travel at a decent speed and did half of the route in roughly an hour, and around the same time coming back.

There was a festival going on at St James Park which involved music and entertainment which consisted of people juggling, bmx stunt shows, and childrens bicycle rides. Hovis also kindly offered free sandwiches at the festival, so at least we didn't have to pay outrageous prices for food like you usually have to do in Central London!

We took a few photo of the event, but it was generally harder to take photos of the actual route as we were riding along with the crowd and never really felt like stopping to take pictures. However, we did manage to take some at the beginning and at the half way point. I've uploaded all of the photos that were taken and you can see them on my Zooomr page.

12/09/2007 - Wednesday

I know that I'm not a great fan of the English football team (I generally cheer for the opposing team when they're playing) but I'll have to admit that they're playing pretty well at the moment. The team currently playing (Robinson, Richards, Ferdinand, Terry, A Cole, Wright-Philips, Barry, Gerrard, J Cole, Heskey and Owen), which I think is the same team that played Israel on Saturday, have bonded quite well and worked together. There have been times when they've looked pretty sloppy and let chances get through, failed to take advantage of their own chances, and missed plenty of shots on goal, but they've managed to score 3 goals in each game to win 3-0. This should really be the team that continues to play together, rather than bumping them off to bring on the rubbish "big name" players. I say it like that because when those players are on (ie. Beckham and Rooney) England lose. England don't need them and do far better WITHOUT them playing. Get rid of those two rubbish players and England will likely continue to play well and win more games.

09/09/2007 - Sunday

TV

Not Going Out and After You've Gone were excellent. I'm glad that they returned. Casualty has also returned for a new series after only being away for a few weeks. It's now on for another (roughly) 48 weeks and they're introducing some new characters as well as getting rid of some.

Healtheriser

I'm still working on the measurements tests although I think I'm nearly done with them. I need to clean up some other code as well as write a few more tests for something else (which isn't fully tested properly).

I also managed to fix a problem which had been plaguing me for a little while now. When I ran my tests using my standard way (autotest) they all completed perfectly fine, but when I ran them the standard Rails way (rake test) the integration tests would complain about accessing the fixtures data and the functional tests (controllers) gave a failure of "SQLite3::SQLException: SQL logic error or missing database".

I tried searching for anything that would help but I couldn't find anything that made the slighest difference. The changes that were suggested seemed like they weren't even taking effect. I even tried creating a new website project and adding a blank controller and test and noticed that the failure occured even then.

This had me stumped for a while until I stumbled across the cause. In tracking down why the fixtures were still being instantiated I realised that I had installed a plugin called PreloadFixtures which preloaded all of the fixture files before the tests are run in an effort to speed up the tests (they're preloaded and kept for each of the tests instead of each test loading and then destroying them). This was causing all of the fixtures to be instantiated, which is one of the problems that I was seeing. I moved the PreloadFixtures directory out of the plugins directory and ran the tests again to see if it helped in any way, and I was shocked to find that ALL of the tests now ran perfectly fine and completed!

So if anyone else has a problem with your functional tests throwing an error of "SQLite3::SQLException: SQL logic error or missing database" and you can't find any other way to fix it, please take a look in your plugins directory and see if you have the PreloadFixtures plugin and consider disabling it to see if it helps.

02/09/2007 - Sunday

Wakoopa

It has been 14 hours since I did the weekly restart and the highest process id is now 3404 and has been that all day. Before the Wakoopa update it would have been around 60,000 by now (the 30k number before was because I did the update a while after restarting). I'm happy that I managed to find what was causing the high numbers!

TV

Not Going Out returns for a second series this Friday. Kate is no longer in the show, but has been replaced with Tim's sister. Hopefully it'll be just as funny as the first series, if not more funnier! After You've Gone also returns for a second series this friday (it's on before Not Going Out). I haven't read much about the new series, so I don't know if anyone new features. I used to turn my TV off pretty early on Friday evenings but not any longer!

Exercise

At Christmas I was bought an exercise set which contained a step machine. This was fine for eight months (with around one month of nearly every day use) until it decided to break. The plastic wheel that holds the cable in place and allows the step arms to move had bent which also caused a metal bracket to twist:



I emailed the customer support people and they sent out replacement parts for me to install. I was expecting to just get a new bracket and wheel, but they also sent a new cable and the main bracket that holds the wheel (the thicker one that the wheel is inside). I was expecting to receive them on Monday (it was sent Thursday evening) but they arrived on Saturday (hence why I know what they sent). I installed them (after finding another spanner to turn both nuts) and gave it a little try to see how it felt and it seemed fine. I haven't given it a proper try yet as I do different exercise on the weekends, so the first try will be tomorrow morning. Hopefully it'll all be fine and nothing else will go wrong with it!