Over the weekend, I was helping Norman Junior III with a C programming exercise (a wordsearch puzzle). I had rather hoped purchasing him the original and definitive text ‘Kernighan and Ritchie (Second Edition)’ would enable him to become a C wizard without any further intervention from me but no. In a flash of inspiration, I had introduced some symbolic constants for each of the eight possible directions. When I asked him - ‘Can you remember how to specify a constant in C ?’, he replied ‘Oh yeah - I know, I remember. Hashtag define’. ...

I am currently hosting this site on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). For the first 12 months I am eligible for the Free Usage Tier pricing. The Free Tier isn’t completely free but includes ‘5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests’. Initially, I had to test, review and deploy the entire site a few times before I got things right and Google’s crawler was busy re-indexing the site so I wasn’t wholly surprised when September’s bill was a measly 15 cents. ...

One of the main advantages of a statically generated blog (like Octopress) over a blogging platform that uses a database (WordPress, Drupal) is performance. My humble blog doesn’t get enough traffic for performance to be a consideration and I thought I wouldn’t be able to discern any improvement. This graph is from Google Webmaster Tools. Can you guess when the blog migration from Drupal to Octopress was done ? Yes - that’s right - the middle of September (17th to be precise). ...

Diamond Geezer recently posted his annual analysis of how many blogrolls he appears in. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the number is steadily declining and he finds it harder to find new blogs to add to his list. I thought it might be interesting to look at the blogging platforms used by the 98 blogs listed. Here are the results: Blogger 60 WordPress.com 11 WordPress.org 11 Typepad 4 MovableType 3 Livejournal 2 Canalblog 1 Drupal 1 ExpressionEngine 1 Nucleus CMS 1 Serendipity 1 Guardian (journo) 1 Custom 1 The dominance of Blogger/Blogspot didn’t surprise me that much. I have noticed before that it’s very popular amongst UK bloggers; particularly veteran bloggers who maybe had less choice available that the plethora of options available today. ...

Frustrated at the inability of Google to provide a simple sync process that works for disparate versions of Chrome and Chromium browsers, I decided to adopt a pragmatic approach, return to Victorian values and go back to using a Web based bookmarks service. Way back, in 2005, I evaluated three different bookmarking services and dismissed Delicious, mainly on the grounds of the user interface design of the home page which, according to me, ’looks like an undergraduate knocked it up during a lunch hour’. This was a little rich from someone with no design experience whatsoever but still. ...