Here’s what’s currently growing on our allotment:

1. Slug-eaten swedes
2. Swiss rainbow chard
3. Late and not too optimistic marrows
4. The summer’s lettuces run to seed
5. Really tall swiss chard
6. Cabbages, albeit caterpillar eaten
7. Brussel sprouts
8. Worryingly autumnal looking privet
9. Wild brambles at the end of the garden

Stuff we have had but maybe didn’t mention:

1. New potatoes
2. Broad beans
3. Peas
4. Radishes
5. Lots of lettuce and rocket
6. Biiig marrow
7. A solitary head of broccoli

So whilst some things are a bit ‘odd’ (e.g. the tall cabbages or the too-late marrows) I would say it has been a good year.

I’ve been a bit child-like with some of it - e.g. the caterpillars eating all my cabbages fascinated rather than appalled me. Once the novelty wears off I will no doubt be less tolerant.

Outdoor space is also definitely good for the mind. I find myself going out there to do a two minute job and then getting completely side tracked with nothing in particular just because it’s nice to be wandering around outside. There aren’t many times that I feel as though I have time to savour things but out there I do.

We got our shed delivered by the nice people at Swann Timber, St Georges Road - Hull.

It is 10′ by 6′, made from hard wood with bolt fixings for a little extra.

It feels like quite a landmark - and looking at these photographs almost exactly 12 months after we moved in I think that we should be quite pleased with how far we have come.

I was speaking to the guy from Swann Timber about sheds and he said that prices haven’t gone up in about 15 years - sounds like a good time to buy a shed me thinks. He wasn’t too surprised or concerned that searching for them the Internet yields no results - they advertise in the Hull Colour Pages but unlike yell.com it looks like they don’t understand how search engines work - look how many results for ’swann’ there are on their site in Google.

Anyway, they don’t care as most of their trade is by word of mouth. If you want their number it is: 01482 229992.

When I grow up I want to be a cat, or at least a cat as comfy as this one.

I was speaking to good friend the other day and he was surprised to learn that I use Linux instead of Microsoft Windows. Given that he is doing some IT training at the moment it is a bit of a shame as he didn’t appear to regard Linux as viable alternative.

I have been using various flavours (distributions/distros) of Linux since about 2003. These have included Novell’s Suse and the Redhat sponsored Fedora.

If you are new to Linux you could think of the flavours of Linux as different versions of the Microsoft operating system - e.g. 98, ME, 2000, XP but that isn’t correct because each of those is an upgrade to the previous. It is better to think of a Linux distribution as an operating system in its own right, and it could replace whatever version of windows you currently have installed.

Anyway, enough of that - the point of this entry was to tell about a recent upgrade which I did.

For the last 6 months I have been using Ubuntu version 7.04 which was codenamed Feisty Fawn. It was the most user friendly o/s I had ever used. Well last night I fired up Ubuntu’s version of Windows Update and it told me that version 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon was available. Upgrading your entire o/s is generally risky, however I decided to give it a go and I’m glad I did - it went perfectly.

The files which needed to upgrade were downloaded in about an hour (1.6GB) and the upgrade itself took a further hour. But it just worked, I am quite amazed. Can you imagine upgrading XP to vista over the Internet and it not costing you a penny? No… neither can I!

So, thanks to the efforts of volunteers across the globe I have a totally free operating system that has all the shiny aspects of Vista installed over and evening without having to lose any my files. Great!

I have been using Xdebug for a while now during development of my PHP projects.

The feature that I have found most useful is its ability to create cachegrind files which can then be interpreted by tools such as KCacheGrind.

Cachegrind files contain all the function calls made in you PHP application - this can contain invaluable information which can help you streamline parts of your code which are unnecessarily wasteful. As an object-oriented programmer you sometimes get your head up in the clouds and need a bump down to earth as to how your code is going to perform in real life, kcachegrind helped me to identify some hard to find bottlenecks in my code.

Oh, and did I mention that it automatically dumps pretty stack traces?