It’s a beautiful day outside (although quite windy) and I will turn 30 in approximately 90 minutes.

And then all hell will break loose.

Possibly.

Not.

:|

… the magical, floating, multi-color space-orb just disappeared and I was able to go on with my so-called life.

Anyways, I was working on ZagrebDox for the whole month of February and it kind of took all of my time and energy, but ended up being a really nice project because I’ve, once again, learned a lot of new things about WordPress.

I’ve also learned a few new things about MySQL and how to crash your hosting provider’s shared server.

What happened:

• the site has over 300 pages (each with at least 3 attachments)  and I’ve used a permalink structure which started with %category% – this combination produced waaay too many rewrite rules
• there was a 20MB database size limit
• for some reason, the wp_options->rewrite_rules field got duplicated ~10 times, and the database had grown to 50MB in no time
• combine that with the 20MB limit and what you get is a bunch of neverending transactions
• s0 the server went kabang! and the site was promptly moved to another one

To solve the problem, I’ve changed the permalink structure to begin with %year%, disabled creation of rewrite rules for attachments (thanks to Johan Eenfeldt – his code has made my number of queries per page drop from ~3900 to ~90), set the number of post revisions to 2, and then repaired and optimized the database which now stands happily still at 5.7MB.

I don’t know how rewrite_rules field got duplicated, I haven’t used any plugins that would mess with it, so I’m still in the dark about that. What I do know is: you can’t host over 700 sites on one single server and expect everything to go smoothly until the end of days. Not to mention that the only available transport protocol is fsockopen which made the admin area a bit slow until I’ve blocked all the others…

There’s been some other stuff I’ve worked on, but I’ll put that in another post.

It’s lunch time. And I miss Ma.gnolia…

One more year and I’ll have my diploma. I’ll be free to do whatever I want with it, even burn it if I feel like it. Not that I plan to do that. Although, I have considered the option.
Unfortunately, that would just piss some people off — my parents, for example. But the thing is – I don’t really need a diploma. I have knowledge. And I got that knowledge by reading, working, messing around with computers, with software, by learning from other people on and off the net — by doing stuff in real-world situations. And it seems like I need a diploma from some third-grade "school" to prove it. I don’t. I don’t plan to work for anyone but myself. But… You never know what kind of shitty old chocolate you may find in that box, so you better be carrying guns. Or a diploma. Get it if you can. Knowledge is power, especially if it’s certified. Nerd power.

A comforting thought: life sucks even if you’re a billionaire.

Mr. Nenad "16×16" Jalsovec ".org" of Counterclockwise fame is one of the few sad, little people who have applied for some public ass-kicking in the beginning of 2008. And paid a small entrance fee for it. I’m, of course, talking about the IGF – Independent Gaming Festival, and this very paragraph’s first sentence is what people refer to as sarcasm. It’s that kind of a day today, so please bear with me.
While Nenad is crunching the numbers code, I’m learning how to fart working on the sound effects and music, but it’s all still very messy at the moment. The game is addictively playable and very kick-assy old-school in a way and it’s gonna be universally awesome. This is, of course, a hyperbolic statement – but truthful, nevertheless. You’ll get a chance to play it yourself in a couple weeks, anyway.

No new music from me. I’ve had no inspiration lately. I hope this year will go by and be forgotten as fast as the new "Bionic woman" will should be.

Love, peace, beer, no kids.

I’ve got a 2 month old kitten with me. I named him Dexter. Quite appropriately, I must say, as it’s a flesh-eating killer cat. I’ve got worse scars on me than Amy Winehouse had after she got in a fight with her own husband last month (or maybe it was back in September?). But I like him. I freaking love this allovermycables-peeing little piece of fur. But I’m sadly aware of the fact that I’ll have to find him a new home soon. I’m one of those ever-worrying freak-people. Unfortunately. Fingers crossed for a great new home for little Dexter? Yes, please :)

Also: I’ve played Half-life 2 Episode 2 and I liked it a lot. I’m going to play Portal over the weekend, it looks promising. I still have Minerva to finish (very cool).

Have a great weekend, y’all.