Aquarionics

Selfaware

Aquarion is a coder/designer/writer living somewhere in England ( Cambridge Reading Letchworth, currently. This changes on a yearly basis). He is in his early twenties (Twenty two three, in fact) and an Aquarius.

His birthday has been on the 26^th January every year so far.

He works as a PHP/SQL developer for BrowserAngel, is attached to the wonderful lonecat, and has an affinity for the colour blue. He is most famous for writing the ESF spec, being in “Why Don’t You…?” on BBC TV, or writing strange articles for the newsgroup Alt.Fan.Pratchett. In his spare time he writes things to put things into databases and take them out again.

Hardware

Aquarionics is mostly written and designed on Maelstrom, an Athlon 2000XP box which duel boots Win2k with Gentoo linux runs Windows XP. It’s tested on, and connected though, reef, a Celeron 333 atoll, another Athlon running Debian Linux and being a news server, web server, db server, mail server and workhorse.

The site is hosted on Sneaky, which sits running Gentoo Linux and is hosted by pol.

Software

Aquarionics is powered by Epistula, Aquarion’s weblog and site management system built upon PHP, MySQL, and Coffee. It does everything except make the tea, and will one day rule the world.

The rest of Aquarion’s life is powered mostly by Nomical, a Personal Organisation Thingy. Since it will currently accept people into it, but not display them or do anything else at all, Aquarion is permenantly disorganised. Aquarion’s life is now run by a Moleskine diary, on the basis that Nomical clearly wasn’t working

When the amount of deletions and additions on this page reaches critical mass, he’ll probably rewrite it again +get someone else to rewrite it again+

Data is fun.

One of the nicest things you can do to a programmer like me is give him (or her) a pile of data in a nice format that is easily extractable, and tell him (or her) to go have fun.

Last night, after a couple of weeks of looking at it, pol installed mod_log_sql which is an Apache module that makes all access logs become a mysql database, so a list of referers becomes simply “select count(referer) as referals, referer from table group by referer order by referals desc”. Hit counters become easy, life becomes good, and I get to do all the automatic “This is popular, if you like $foo, go see $bar” stuff without parseing text files! Woot, and indeed, yay.