Current position in Ireland (blue dot) As I finished writing my blog post last night I was absolutely exhausted. I retired to my tent, there was an ambient sound of children playing and they occasional tschhhh! of a drinks can being opened, but I was soon asleep. I awoke however at around 2am feeling quite unwell, I had a headache and felt a little nauseous. I think it was probably a combination of dehydration and something I ate. Read more...

Inaccurate Map It seems inevitable that I cannot hold on to nice things. I got a great wicking hoody for this trip, it was warm and everytime I put it on I thought “this is a good item of clothing”. It’s gone. In contrast, I have several pieces of clothing that I’d like to lose but which stubbornly remain with me for decades. I really have no idea what happened to it, I would have had it on this morning, maybe I left it on the back of the bike, perhaps it fell off a cliff. Read more...

Inaccurate Map It turns out the moody weed smoking youth I shared my bunk with was not unsociable at all, but rather anxious and potentially stoned. When I returned in the evening after dinner he told me “I had pizza before going to the concert, normally I drink too much, but this time I ate too much and left early”. He had come down from Donegal for the concert. Read more...

Rough Route For breakfast there were flapjacks, toast and coffee. All complementary at the Ben Lettery Hostel. I was joined for breakfast by the Munich girl, she was going to stay another night and climb the mountain, presumably the Benlettery mountain which the hostel is named after, after that she would be doing my last ride in reverse and staying at the Valley House on Achill island (although driving). Read more...

Rough Route I’m now sitting in the lounge of the Ben Lettery Hostel. This is a big hostel, there are groups and individuals, French, Spanish, German. Mostly French. There are lots of French about in general. For dinner I cooked baked-beans-on toast à la cacouette (baked beans on toast with peanut butter). Peanut butter has previously been trialled in other expeditions and was found to be highly suitable to put into anything. Read more...

TL;DR Nothing happened today. In a dormitory everybody has a common purpose, to sleep. Sleeping in groups can actually be soothing. I’ve slept in dormitories hundreds of times and with few exceptions have slept very well. Last night was one of the exceptions. We had just turned off the lights and a few of us were in bed and “can somebody let me in” was heard. I roused myself slightly, happy to open the door if somebody forgot the code, but there were no more importations, no tapping at the door. Read more...

Rough Route I’m now sitting in a pub with a Guinness, the pub is part of a larger facility that also has a hostel and I’ve booked in for 2 nights. I’m waiting for a pizza which I may have ordered a prematurely as I’m not feeling particularly hungry right now, but it can’t do any harm. Today was a good day, it was cloudy. There is a group of young Irish adults imitating wolf cries on the next table. Read more...

Current position (the blue dot) Even though the bed was exceedingly comfortable and clean, and there was no sound at all, I didn’t sleep great last night. I could hear the blood rushing in my left ear and my body was restless from the exercise. Before I went to bed I got a message from Sharron saying that breakfast would be in the kitchen I should help myself when I got up. Read more...

Map “Hi, it’s Dan, I booked the single bed room, I think I’m outside but I’m not sure because there is no internet, I can see a greenhouse” “Hi Dan, yes that’s us. I left the door open, your room is at the end of the corridor”. It’s quite strange to walk into somebody elses house and have a shower without having met the person whose house it is. Today was the first time I tried Air B&B. Read more...

Highly accurate map The man wheeled up to me on a bicycle “the accomodation is round the back, follow me”. We went round “the back” and there were 3 people, 2 swiss people smoking and a local you wouldn’t want to get in a fight with. “Your room is here, but I haven’t got a key, because I’ve given the keys to the others - but it’s OK, you can just put your hand through the window” and he looked at me and the swiss people as if it was self evident and normal. Read more...

Map I’m currently sitting in the corner of a shelter on what is probably one of the best campsites I’ve stayed on. There is a fire burning and josticks are burning, everybody is very sociable and it feels more like a good hostel than a campsite. It has a filter of over 18s only, so no kids running about. Although there are a bunch of school kids doing their Duke of Edinburugh but they are very civilised. Read more...

Map hostels and campsites (route in purple) I’ve got a small tent. A small and expensive tent. I used to have a lovely 2 man Colemans tent. It had a porch big enough that I could stack all my baggage up in it and the entire side of the tent would open up, it would fit comfortably on my rear rack. I got the small expensive tent because weight. It was only after buying this tent that I don’t care about weight, I care about space. Read more...

I got out of bed this morning at 8am and quietly climbed down from my bunk and gathered my bags. I was sharing a room with the Australian cyclist and a man from Southport. The Australian was already up and reading and I nodded goodbye to him as I left the room. I put my stuff in the baggage room and announced to the Canadian at reception that I would be back in two hours. Read more...

Map with “Liquor store” locations Currently sitting in a hostel in dinning room in Bushmills eating chips-cheese-and-beans[1]. I just had a conversation with an Australian who is riding around the coast on a Brompton bike. I’m drinking a ginger beer and it’s been an interesting 24 hours. Last night the campsite was very noisy, there were 6 year old kids running about everywhere and a group of 14 year olds having a small party in the next field (not part of the campsite) blaring house music through a portable speaker. Read more...

I am now sitting in a ferry teriminal in Craegvany waiting for the Stena Lines ferry to Belfast. Unusually I was instructed to wait inside the terminal until somebody will show me to the ferry rather than waiting with the cars outside. From Belfast I’ve decided to head north and follow the northern coast in order to join the EV 1 (Euro Velo 1). I had intended to follow the EV1 inland from Belfast, but I couldn’t see any reasonable accomodation en-route. Read more...

It’s been 2 years since I blogged about about a cycle tour, but only one year since my tour: I cycled with a good friend from Paris to Ouistream, taking in the Normandy coast. It was a a slower paced and more relaxing tour, which ended with me sailing to the UK. This year I will be going on another solo tour. The original plan was to visit all of the Inviqa offices in the UK. Read more...

I just installed Lineage OS on a new phone Breaking the Pixel 4a ¶ I was out running a few weeks back, with my phone in my hand, listening to music, when I tripped over a paving stone and fell flat on my face. The phone landed squarely on it’s front and with the amount of force that I knew instantly that it was done for. Lying on my back I turned upwards and shouted theatrically in pain, then just to be sure, I picked up my phone to check, and of course it was done for: Read more...

Skin O' My Teeth I guess this one is for last month and it’s another cover. I’ve been listening to alot of Megadeth recently, and got a tablature book: Countdown To Extinction Tab Book Drums ¶ In previous songs probably the thing that took the longest was programming the drums. In this cover I saved time by finding a MIDI file (warning contians ads). I imported the MIDI file, muted the other instruments and the drums mapped almost perfectly to DrumGizmo. Read more...

This song is a cover of “Holy Diver” by Dio: ⚠ WARNING: My singing on this song may cause irreversible nerve damage. Holy Diver Holy diver You’ve been down too long in the midnight sea Oh what’s becoming of me This is this months effort at recording a song. I tried to record a song about the Agile Manifesto on Saturday, but it didn’t succeed, so I decided to record a cover of a song I’ve been listening to on repeat for the past 3 weeks. Read more...

Phpactor (it’s a Language Server) has a new type system, the most interesting features of which might be: First Class Types Generics Type Combination Type Literals In the examples below the function wrAssertType is used. This is an assertion used in Phpactor’s tests. History ¶ When I started Phpactor 7 years ago I had absolutely no clue about type systems (that’s only slightly less true today). As a consequence types were represented as a single class: Read more...

This is a song about phpactor: Phpactor Theme Song Phpactor - It’s a Language Server Don’t use it on a project that it is to big It will crash I have spent the majority of my spare (project) time this month working on Phpactor, this weekend was my last opportunity to record a song, and I had not written any lyrics, so on Sunday I decided to just record some music and I had the Phpactor documentation page open in my browser. Read more...

Phpactor is a monolith with some exceptions. Over 20 packages have been imported into the main repo and their github repositories abandoned. This should make development far easier going forward. Background ¶ You may have heard me tell this story before. Hopefully this will be the last time I tell it. When I started Phpactor in 2015 I had just read “principles of package design”, and wanting to be a good developer, I decided to architect Phpactor as a set of decoupled packages, in general there would be four classes of package: Read more...

February song, it’s called “Ballad of Senior Dev” Ballad of Senior Dev It’s about being a good senior developer. This was recorded over the past couple of days during the criminal invasion of Ukraine. Today I attended a anti-war demonstration in Berlin where 100,000 people gathered in support of Ukraine. The Russian Embassy Russia invaded Ukraine two days later I invested a short amount of time over two evenings writing the lyrics, the following weekend I then recorded an initial version of the song (version 1), a very poor Nick-Cave style ballad, it was out of time and not very great. Read more...

This song is a cover of “Fansong” by Dethklok: Fansong You people out there give us something more than just record sales You give us something to hate And we hate you, you brainless mutants I recorded it between 14:00 and midnight on Saturday, the idea was to try and learn stuff. As such it may not actually count towards my 2022 goal of recording a song every month (ideally on the topic of software engineering). Read more...

15 years ago I was having a conversation with a friend: “I don’t know what to write songs about” “Write about something you know” “I only know computer programming” “Then write songs about that” So that’s what I’m doing this year. This is a song about software testing: The Testing Song What people said about it: “I had no idea what’s going on, it’s shit” - My brother “Nine Inch Nails meets Layla” - Jason “I thought it captured the emotional trajectory of the development cycle beautifully” - Quentin Resolutions ¶ This year I made some new years resolutions, one of which was to record a song once a month. Read more...

TL;DR;: Check the 0.18.0 release notes Phpactor 17 was released 11 months ago. After some busy months working on Phpactor I switched focus to phpbench for better or for worse and because of that there has been very little development on Phpactor for the past 6 months. During which time PHP 8.1 has been released. Phpactor 18 does not support PHP 8.1 features (e.g. Enum) currently, but thanks to tolerant-php-parser it supports the syntax and won’t crash if you use a readonly modifier. Read more...

PHPBench currently samples the time taken (in microseconds) to run code around a loop. This post aims to provide some insight into: If there is a benefit to using a loop (@Revs) when taking a time sample. The value of using hrtime instead of microtime. Background ¶ PHPBench samples the time taken for your code to run. The default executor does this by iterating over your code a number of times (@Revs) and dividing the total time in microseconds (i. Read more...

Today my new laptop arrived. My previous X1 Carbon lasted for around 4 years - I say lasted: it still works, but the keyboard was completely destroyed: It could have been repaired. I feel guilty. On the plus side this laptop actually has a UK layout keyboard (for the past 4 years I got very good at typing without looking at my keys due to the German layout). This is probably my 10th Thinkpad Laptop. Read more...

PHPBench 1.2.0 has been released, the highlights are: In reports you can now dynamically create and group columns in tables Memory can be displayed in binary memory units Support for filtering by variant name Support for filtering reports Report Improvements ¶ PHPBench 1.1.0 improved report generation, allowing you to use components such as tables and bar charts. This release improves table generation, adding support for grouping and expanding columns dynamically: Read more...

PHPBench 1.1.0 as been tagged! PHPBench 1.0 removed many features, most were deemed useless, the HTML report was an exception and it has been re-introduced in 1.1 along with other improvements, some of the more notable ones being: “Safe” parameters: You can now use any serializable class as a parameter. This change included some internal refactorings and I have, to the best of my knowledge, preserved the B/C promise. $include and $include-glob configuration directives to include other configuratoin files. Read more...

The templates we use in our favourite MVC frameworks are awful. You pass an unstructured bunch of data to a template which hopes the you passed everything it needed. They do not define what their inputs are, they are not type safe. For some years I’ve been using a different way of rendering views - it started when I was trying to create a new CMS framework, but since then it has come in useful time and time again. Read more...

PHPBench 1.0.0 as been tagged! I started this project in 2015, I’d like to say I’ve been working on it for six years, but really I worked hard on it for about 6 months to a year and then largely ignored it when I started another project phpactor - which began with me wondering how easy it would be to add PHP auto completion in VIM and ended up with me writing a language server and “maintaining” over 50 packages. Read more...

PHPBench Alpha 5 as been tagged. I tagged PHPBench Alpha 1 in about 5 months ago since that time numerous improvements and features have been introduced, I will talk about three of them. Local Executor ¶ One problem I had when developing benchmarks is that it’s difficult to debug when the benchmark launches in a separate process, for this reason there is now the local executor: $ phpbench run --executor=local Will run the benchmark in the same process as PHPBench, allowing you to do whatever you need to do (var_dump($foo);die()) to debug your benchmark. Read more...

In September 2020 I was on holiday and I made a decided effort to start working on PHPBench again, and I wrote a blog post about it. Iterations 1 and 2 (September 2020) ¶ One of the main features was a new assertion engine - and I wrote a simple parser. The first implementation used Parsica. It looked something like: /** * @Assert("variant.mode < baseline.mode +/- 5%") */ public function benchFoobar(): void { // . Read more...

TL;DR;: Check the 0.17.0 release notes It’s been over 6 months since the release of Phpactor 16. Time really files! I planned to release Phpactor 17 last August - but, well. It didn’t happen and in the meantime there has been a huge amount of activity in develop. PHP 8 Support and Github Actions ¶ Phpactor can now be installed with the PHP 8 runtime, some necessary fixes were made to support new PHP 8 syntax and some new features: Read more...

TL;DR; Maestro is a package maintenance automator which is in development. It’s Christmas and Phpactor needs to be upgraded to PHP 8.0, but Phpactor has many packages: $ composer show | grep phpactor | wc -l 42 Most of these packages were created almost 4 years ago, and have been updated little by little as necessary. Even editing the composer.json file to allow PHP 8 for each repository is a big task - not to mention needing to migrate from Travis to Github Actions (as Travis has become unusable in the past months with build times sometimes taking an hour) - and that’s before I can even start manually editing all the test suites to be compatible with PHPUnit 9. Read more...

PHPBench is over 5 years old. I started working on it because I wanted to write a new implementation of the PHPCR spec, and I wanted to ensure that it was faster than the existing Jackalope implementation, I needed a framework to write a large number of performance tests. The existing Athletic framework didn’t quite meet my needs so I decided to write my own. I didn’t write the next PHPCR implementation (luckily, it would have been terrible) but I did spend the next several months working on PHPBench, a large part of it was written while I was cycling from Vorarlberg (Austria) to Ankara going back through Greece and up to Slovenia. Read more...

I said goodbye to my friend and his fiance, and proceed down the “moor road”. Eaglesham (pronounced Eagles-ham) is on the very outskirts of Glasgow and I rode through the moor into the country. Windmills on the Moor It was a relief to leave the city traffic and be on a road where most of the oncoming traffic was in the way of cyclists and after an initial climb to around 300m I enjoyed a beautiful downward sloping 10 miles of moorland. Read more...

This morning I didn’t rush to leave the campsite, but sat and made two pots of coffee while sitting and reading Moby Dick, leaving after 9:30. This a bit late, as I knew that the next ferry would leave at 10:00, leaving me little time to make it to the ferry port. As I was cycling I calculated that I would miss the ferry, but then finally rolled into Talbert at 9:55 and realised it wasn’t too late, so I cycled as fast as possible, until I saw the ferry - which was just unloading cars, I arrived with a few minutes to spare. Read more...

The campsite provided a good nights sleep, and it wasn’t cold in the morning. I left at around 9am - I had thought that if I picked up my route that the next shop would be in 10 miles, but the campsite manager looked puzzled by this “why don’t you go to Oban, it’s only 10 minutes down the road” “No, I’m not going that way” I said. I was very confused the evening previously. Read more...

Slept well in the hostel and left to find breakfast - hoping to find a café with outdoor seating, unsuccefull I picked up another unsatisying breakfast from a bakery - an egg mayonaise sandwich, danish pastry and a coffee (all too small to fill me up). One of the reasons I didn’t go further yesterday was because the next part of the cycle network required me to take a ferry. Although it would have been possible to take the main road, it was very busy and I wanted to stick to the bike route, but getting the ferry at that time in the evening didn’t appeal to me. Read more...

Today was another spectacular day of cycling featuring some of the best scenery of the trip so far, and I wasn’t expecting it. In the morning I woke and checked my watch. The bunk bed was equipped with a shelf offering USB ports and a power outlet. I had plugged in my phone and battery directly above my head, and when I went to check my phone it slipped and hit me sharply on the head which is when I decided to get out of bed. Read more...

This morning I had no particular motivation to move from the bed. The thought of cycling another 150km didn’t appeal to me. So I decided to try and stay another night at the hostel. As I got out of bed I couldn’t help but notice what looked like a scab on my foot. I scraped it and it moved. It was a tick with it’s head stuck and glued under my skin. Read more...

I fell asleep last night staring out of my open tent flap at the stars, or the aeroplanes, or whatever that bright light was which was drifting across the sky. It was cold in the morning, and I didn’t prepare myself well enough. Far colder than it was at night. So I didn’t sleep in - the cold compelled me to get out of bed and make coffee. Surveying the scene, the river had what looked like steam rising from it, there was dew on the long grass surrounding the tent and my breath was visible. Read more...

The only other guy in the room (I guess the dorms are not at full capacity due to Covid) decided to come in at midnight and start watching a TV program on his phone with the loudspeaker. Forcing me to get out of bed and ask him to stop it (because he was so engrossed that he couldn’t hear me ask from my bed). The hostel provided “take away” breakfast but let me sit down in the bar and also lent me a UK power adapter so that I could use my laptop and upload yesterdays blog post. Read more...

Today was a very long day. It was a beautiful day. It was an exhausting day. I slept well in my tent last night for the time in years due to the new mattress, the night before I sat in the tent reading or otherwise staring blankly into the trees above the stream that I was camping next to sipping whiskey. In the morning I left, heading towards my provisional destination of the day before - Eyemouth. Read more...

I wasted the night watching a film (“Get Out”) and an episode and a half of “The Thick of It” in my cabin. I was woken at 8am by an announcement on the in-cabin PA system - we would be arriving at at 10am ship-time and breakfast would be served blah blah. I didn’t know exactly what “ship time” was but assumed it would be the same time zone as Holland - which meant I had two hours. Read more...

Slept well in the hostel but was awake at 7am, and out of bed at eight. I went downstairs to get a coffee. The reception was open but the host was busy making bread and wouldn’t serve coffee until 8:30. I sat down and started programming with bleary eyes. Finally I ordered some scrambled egg which came with the warm freshly made bread. Today I wanted to sort out my sleeping problem - I noticed a large camping shop when I came in to the town yesterday evening, so I checked out of the hostel and left my stuff “under the stairs” and left at 9:30 to find some camping gear. Read more...

I am now sitting outside at a pizza restuarnt in Haarlem, about 10km west of Amsterdam, and about 10km from the ferry port. I slept again badly last night, I thought I chose a quiet spot in the spacious but busy campsite (tents only). It was full people having a mostly quiet time, some spots were equipped with wood burners and it was as peaceful as it could be given maybe 100 people in a field. Read more...

I woke up at 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I lay the wondering why I had woken up - my air mattress was partially deflated and my legs were cold. Neither problem seemed critical enough to interrupt my sleep. I think the cold, as mild as it was, confused my brain and prevented it from sleeping. I was sleeping naked which probably didn’t help either, so I put some shorts and my fleece on and managed to get some sleep. Read more...