Utoxin's Random Insanity

I know I haven’t posted much about programming recently, and I’ll try to correct that soon. I have some interesting new Cake Components to show off. But I felt that today I needed to talk about my weight loss. As many of you are aware, I’ve been working on losing weight this year. When I started, I wasn’t sure how it would go, since I’ve tried before and never done terribly well. This time is different. » Read more…

First things first. As of 11:45 PM last night, my latest project launched. Go take a look at TweeterDiet.com Go ahead. I’ll still be here when you get back.

Yes, I know it’s very minimal right now. I’ll be remedying that over the next week or so, by adding in some sample screen-shots and more features. But for now, it at least functions, and I’ve been using it personally for the last couple weeks. Here’s a basic rundown of the idea for the site. As you may know, if you read my blog regularly, or happened to glance over to the right sidebar, I’m trying to lose a lot of weight. To help me out, I’m going to the gym, but most importantly, I’m tracking my weight. I’m using a method borrowed from The Hacker’s Diet, which is quite simple: Weigh yourself once a day, and calculate a trended weight from that. The trended weight smooths out the daily fluctuations, and gives you a much better picture of what’s actually happening with your body. From that trend, you can calculate your daily calorie deficit, and know if you need to change things to lose weight faster or slower.

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Well, it’s happened yet again. Ubisoft came up with a grand new copy protection scheme that was going to stop pirates in their tracks. It would be the holy grail that would make it so only paying customers could use the game. If they had an internet connection. Every time they wanted to play the game. Huh. That sounds… annoying. But if it works, maybe it’ll help. Right? » Read more…

CakePHP is great, but the default installation has a performance issue that is very easy to resolve, and should be fixed in any production installation of a CakePHP application. The solution is very simple.

In the default install, there is a file in the webroot called .htaccess. It contains mod_rewrite rules, and you have to set you vhost up to allow overrides. This introduces a significant overhead to each request, as apache has to search for applicable htaccess files and merge their settings into the core apache config every request. On a production application this can become significant, especially if you get a significant amount of traffic.

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I’ve tried the Hacker’s Diet once before in the past, and did fairly well, but eventually lost motivation and just stopped. But this year, my employer has offered us what amounts to a free gym membership, and I took the extra step of paying for a trainer. So I’m taking the opportunity to start the Hacker’s Diet back up, and to get deadly serious about getting in better health.

I’m going to the gym 3 times a week, for at least 30 minutes each time. I’m also participating in a bowling league weekly (more exercise than you might think… it makes me break a sweat in a hurry), and once the weather improves, I’ll be golfing at least 9 holes a week (walking and carrying clubs). That plus the great weight tracking provided by the Hacker’s Diet tools has already started to make a big difference in my health. I’m feeling more energetic, and I’ve lost several pounds in the last month.

I’ve added a little weight tracking badge to the sidebar here, and I’ll be posting update regularly to my twitter feed. I want all my friends to hold me accountable on this. Ask me how I’m doing. Chew me out if I start to slip and climb back up in weight. My eventual goal is ~210 pounds, which will take a little more than a year to achieve at 1.5 pounds per week, so by the end of this year, I should be around 225 or so. Which would be amazing. I haven’t weighed 225 since around the time I got married, over 10 years ago.