Chris Worfolk's Blog


Monaco GP

June 8th, 2012 | Distractions

This year has been the best year for Formula One I have ever seen. Right from the start it has been an amazing season and Monaco always promises to be an interesting race.

It was great, though it’s hard to say it was extra special given the standard of racing has just been so high this year. In the end, it was a fairly comfortable victory for Mark Webber, though the real victory was that we saw virtually no interruption to racing – the safety car was out briefly at the start (when it doesn’t really matter) and then remained in for the rest of the race.

The Leveson Enquiry

June 7th, 2012 | Religion & Politics

Printing money

Couldn’t find a suitable picture of the Royal Mint, so I had to make do.

ImageMagick, Apache and Debian

June 7th, 2012 | Life, Tech

Following on from my previous post about installing ImageMagick from source, to get it working with Apache you need to do the following. First, we need to install something from Pecl. So make sure you have the pecl command at hand – if not, install it.

apt-get install pear

Then run the following.

apt-get install php5-dev
pecl install imagick

Finally, add the extension to your php.ini.

extension=imagick.so

Ray Bradbury, 1920 – 2012

June 7th, 2012 | News

Ray Bradbury

Yesterday, it was announced that science fiction author Ray Bradbury, best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, had died. While it is far from a tragedy, at the respectable age of 91, he will be deeply missed.

If remembrance, here is Rachel Bloom singing about her love for Ray.

Magic Hour

June 6th, 2012 | Distractions

Magic Hour

Based on a true conversation.

Foursquare

June 5th, 2012 | Tech, Thoughts

Recently, I stopped using Foursquare.

I really like the concept. Making every day life a little more fun. It’s good because it encourages you to go out and do new things – if only to get the Foursquare points, and anything that encourages people to go out and explore the big wide world is a positive.

However, I found it was just taking over a little too much. The first thing I would do when arriving at somewhere new to check in, and it was just taking too much time to log onto my phone all the time and check in somewhere. So I decided to go cold turkey and remove it from my phone.

How do they keep getting away with it?

June 4th, 2012 | Humanism, Religion & Politics

The May meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire saw Mike Granville speak to us on the topic of “The Vatican: How Do They Keep Getting Away With It?”

It was a chilling reminder of the amount of outrageous things the Catholic church have done and gotten away with over the centuries, from the the Papal states, to the complicity in Hitler’s Nazi Germany and constantly covering up child abuse.

This also struck a chord with Alistair McBay’s recent article in NSS Newsline who commented that a certain “non-resident octogenarian” named Rupert Murdock was recently hauled up in front of a government committee to answer claims about his organisation covering up people’s phones being hacked and described as not being fit to lead such an organisation.

Yet, when another non-resident head of a multinational organisation arrives in the UK, someone we know covered up child abuse claims against priests and even resisted their removal from the priesthood, he is welcomed with open arms on what was described as a state visit.

Google wants your memory

June 3rd, 2012 | Tech

By this point, most developers have realised that Firefox is a cludgey pile of crap that eats up all your memory, and made the switch to Chrome, those developer tools long since surpassed Firebug.

Recently though, I’ve been running out or memory a lot and I don’t think it’s accurate to say Chrome isn’t to blame. As it runs everything in different processes, it’s easy to miss how much memory it is eating up, but I found it using 620MB of memory with just four tabs open.

Activity Monitor

Of course having Netbeans eating up so much clearly isn’t helping either, but IDEs are always a bag of crap (Eclipse is worse, I miss Notepad++).

Disabled parking

June 2nd, 2012 | Photos

You have to be a bit of a dick to park in a disabled bay when you’re not disabled. The same thing applies to parking over two parking spaces. But parking over two disabled spaces – that takes a special kind of asshole.

Parking

Compiling ImageMagick from source on Debian

June 1st, 2012 | Life, Tech

There is an RPM available for ImageMagick on Debian, but it isn’t the most update to date, so if you need all the new features, you’ll need to compile and install it from source. Luckily, it’s very easy to do.

wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar xvfz ImageMagick.tar.gz
cd 
./configure
make
make install
make check