It’s hard to believe that after two and a half years in BC that I’ve never made it over to Vancouver Island. But yesterday I met with a client in Port Alberni and took the opportunity to take in some of the great scenery on offer. I would have liked to visit Tofino, but that will have to wait for a future trip.
Cathedral Grove
MacMillan provincial parkstraddles the #4 near Cameron Lake on the way to Port Alberni. It’s a fantastic spot with some short trails that wind past towering Douglas fir and red cedars. I was practically alone for most of my stay, which is just the way I like it. (although a person or two would have been nice, if only as a reference for scale)
This is a really accessible park, perfect for bringing the whole family. The trails are short and smooth enough to accomodate a wheelchair. While my preference is for more rugged, isolated parks, I think we need more places like Cathedral Grove. People need some exposure to wild, natural places so that they have a greater appreciation of the natural beauty of this planet and the impact that our way of life has on it.
Qualicum Beach
At the eastern end of the #4 is the town of Qualicum Beach, with a view across the Straight of Georgia. The grey clouds that had dogged me since I broke out my camera in Port Alberni finally began to break up a bit. A scene this expansive is hard to capture, so you’ll have to imagine what it was really like.
Rathtrevor Beach
Another provincial park south of Parksville, Rathtrevor is your basic campground-on-a-waterfront. With the tide low, the exposed beach stretched far into the straight, and there was even more driftwood washed up here. Still in my steel-toed shoes, I chose to stay out of the sand and just enjoy the fading sunlight from further back up the shore.
I’ve been doing some Xdebug profiling on LightPress to ensure that speed is properly balanced with memory usage, thanks to some tips from Sencer. While I was at it, I thought it might be fun do a few profiles on my WordPress development site.
Xdebug offers numerous profiling modes, but the one I’ve used here is the “Total Execution Time” (4) profile which sums the excution time for each function call and lists functions in descending order. E.g. if the function apply_filters is called 10 times, the total will show the sum of the 10 separate calls (note that further calls made within a function count do count towards its total). This is a useful profile to determine which functions make up the bulk of WordPress processing time.
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After a complete rewrite, I’m pleased to announce the release of PreFormatted 2.0 beta. This is a plugin for WordPress 1.5 that reduces page rendering time by pre-formatting post content, excerpts and comments when they are saved to the database rather than formatting them every time a page is viewed. The original version of PreFormatted (primarily developed for the WPFF/LightPress project) suffered from a few design limitations but these have been eliminated in version 2.0.
The highlights:
- “Pre-formatted” data is now saved to the database separately from the original data.
- Generates pre-formatted data when unformatted content is viewed for the first time.
- Compatible with other formatting plugins such as Markdown and Textile.
- Extends LightPress formatting by allowing the above to be used. Note that a LightPress plugin (to be released soon) is required.
For more information please visit the PreFormatted plugin page.
Special thanks go out to Denis de Bernardy who provided numerous suggestions, testing and a patch or two. You can see PreFormatted 2.0 in action on both his site and mine.
When British Columbia’s Green Party revealed their campaign platform on April 13, I was disappointed to find their website in tatters, still covered in the cobwebs of the 2001 provincial election with the new platform nowhere in sight. But I’m happy to report that they have since given it a much-needed a facelift and the new website is a much more friendly place. And it even includes a news feed.
I’ve read through the 2005 Green Book to get a better understanding of the party’s platform, but the key points are well-summarized on their (new) site:
- Sustainability
- Social Justice
- Grass Roots Democracy
- Non-Violence
- Community Based Economy
- Gender Equality
- Diversity
- Decentralization
- Personal and Global Responsibility
- Ecological Wisdom
Sustainability is really the crux of the platform and what attracts me to this party. We really need to take a long-term view to ensure that quality of life is not only improved in the short term but also for generations to come.
The Green Party is worth checking out prior to casting your vote on May 17. They offer a refreshing alternative to the union-backed NDP and the pro-corporate Liberals (whose spending policies seem to make no sense whatsoever). Unfortunately the Greens’ poor communications have left them in the shadow of these two giants. The media hardly acknowledge their existence and fail to take them seriously when they do, despite winning a popular vote of 12% in 2001.
BC-STV, anyone? (explanation from CBC)
Hot on the heels of my transition from CDs to MP3s, we have finally invested in a digital camera. Strangely enough, we have spent the beginning of this millenium using a device known as an “SLR camera” which uses a curious material called “film”.
Now, our SLR camera is a very nice thing indeed and will continue to be put to good use when high-quality prints are required. But a digital camera gives us a smaller, more portable option that theoretically allows us to take as many shots as we’d like for free. Theoretically.
The camera in question is a Fujifilm E500: nothing fancy, just a compact 4.1 Mpixel unit that was very reasonably priced. What sold me was the “28-90mm” lens (in 35mm terms) and the ability to put the camera in full manual mode, both unusual at the E500’s price point. I could have gotten more zoom, but I find that wide-angle comes in handy more often — after all, you can only back up so much. This is by no means a fantastic digital camera — we hope to one day replace our current SLR body with a compatible digital one — but it’ll get the job done.
Thanks to the generosity of Will Luke, I now have an account at Flickr where I’ve posted some of my fledgling attempts at digital photography. I’ll spare you all the out-of-focus test shots of our cat, I promise.
