Went to Kew Gardens (The Royal Gardens) yesterday. It was very big and open, you can walk everywhere – no keep off the grass signs. My favorite was the Water Lily house. It’s basically a greenhouse with a huge pond in the middle, filled with (you guessed it,) water lilies.
There was also a tree top walkway. I was excited to go see it, thought it would be like canopy tours in a rainforest. Not quite, it was a walkway among some seriously tall trees, but no ziplines or monkeys or colorful birds. Too bad there’s no monkeys or exotic birds in England. That would have been cool. They did have peacocks though.
After I went to a nearby bookstore and bought two books for the flight home. I stayed up Tuesday night til 2:30,
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Hey, hope you are having a good week. I’m back Thursday night.
Saturday After I arrived at my hostel and checked in, I took a bus out to go dancing at “Salsacrity”. I only showed up about an hour and a half before it was over. Good dancers, live band, it was fun.
I asked the organizer how to get a cab home. She was super friendly and got a band member (Toby) to take me home. She also introduced me to the owner of the website where I found them (LondonSalsa.co.uk) so I talked to him and his girlfriend/wife for a bit. They were so pleased someone from Chicago used the site. After the dancing was over, i helped clean up a bit then went up to the Kizbomba room. Asked what kind of music they were playing. “Kizbomba.”
Oh.
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Friday I arrived at Harm and Jovanka’s place 3 minutes before Jovanka pulled up. We had frites (“French fries”) for dinner and some assorted other fried foods (they were using a deep fryer). I suggested making crab rangoon, Beth and I made it a few times and it was great. Just the frying without a fryer was a bit too messy.
So I looked up a recipe and we discussed the translations. We decided to have it for lunch on Saturday.
We watched “Holland’s Got Talent.” and it was pretty good. They had breakdancers, a juggler/drummer guy, an absolute weirdo, and two violinist “cats” with an attitude.
Saturday Harm went to the market early, and got all the right stuff for crab rangoon. We then went to the Huizen Festival (they live in Huizen, a former fishing village).
Highlights:
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I found something about a Magiq Spiegeltent that has Salsa on Thursday night near Antwerp. A Spiegeltent is a mirrored tent – I looked it up, it’s a Belgian thing. How could I pass up an opportunity to go dancing in a Spiegeltent, let alone a magical one?
Maybe they’ll have ponies. Funhouse mirrors. Sparkly stuff. And fairies! And a little circus or two!
Their website is in Flash, which won’t run on my iPhone or the hostel computer. So I asked Harm if he could take a look at it for me. He sent me a translation that basically said it was on for thursday night.
Yes! Magical Spiegeltent, here I come!
Walked over to the Diamond Museum. They had little handheld gadgets where you type in numbers from next to the displays, and it tells you what you are looking at. They printed out the English version for me.
The story of diamonds is pretty interesting.
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So I got to Antwerp yesterday around 5. I didn’t have good directions for Brussels so I found a train station and took the train in. Problem solved. My ticket was 6 euros, the ticket for my bike was 1.90 euros. I was a little self conscious trekking my bike through the station, until I saw a guy RIDING through the station.
The hostel was nearby and single rooms were cheap so I got one. Laid out ALL my stuff to dry since I was rained on for over 4 hours. There wasn’t much ventilation though. Stuffy. (They moved me to the best room in the place this morning.). I passed out for 3 hours then went walking in the rain.
Went out walking looking for FOOD – didn’t stop to eat all day because of the rain. Bought a “big frites” (fries) with curry sauce. It should be called “Feed a family of four” fries, and hungry as I was, could barely finish half of it.
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Yesterday was rough. I was biking into strong winds much of the time. I was heading mostly south and west, and the wind was from the southwest.
It poured through much of the morning, I just stayed in the water park. Most pools/parks in the US seem to close if there’s rain, but this was just a rainstorm, not a thunderstorm. I finally ran out in the rain and moved my bike to a covered “porch”. Ate breakfast, packed, put on my rain suit then left. If course it never rained the rest of the day.
I tried to take two ferries – after biking into the wind so much I was looking forward to a break. The ferries weren’t running. 
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This is long…
Am at Port Zelande, a small island in the southwest of Holland. Yesterday I got pretty far and could have made it all the way here. But I wanted to make the most of this campground so I stopped early yesterday. It has a water park that’s mostly indoors. Was supposed to have hot tubs, and I’ve got saddle soreness so I was looking forward to that. The hot tubs are really just warm tubs though.
The most interesting part is their lazy river. It is kinda like a lazy river / waterfalls / waterslide combination and the water is really warm. Brady would love it here. They also have an outdoor rock climbing structure and a ramp for launching bikes into the water (flips) and buggies powered by sails or kites. Not enough wind or I’d go try the buggies.
Yesterday I reached the coast and started heading south. There was a ferry near a town called Rozenburg. There was a huge crowd waiting,
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(This is something I sent to my friends and family while on vacation)
I’m on my second day of my bike trip. I’m just north of Rotterdam at a town called Delft, staying at a camping (campground) that is so nice it is sometimes used for weddings. The showers / washrooms are as clean as any hotel I’ve ever stayed at. I really lucked out, I hadn’t planned where to stay, I only started looking when the sun got low. They had a nice garden party here tonight.
My rear end is sore from 7 hour days of riding. Tomorrow I’m going to a camping that has a sauna, jacuzzi and steam room to work the kinks out. Crazy that A campground would have that but I’m not complaining.
Holland is truly gorgeous. The Dutch people I talk to are amused when I explain that in the US when we make a movie, there’s someone called a location scout that has to go around to find a pretty location for shooting. In Holland, they could play darts with a map to find good locations for shooting a movie.
Geez as I was typing this the owner cane out and put a candle jar by me. Then she asked me if I wanted something to drink. Brought me a glass of red wine and wouldn’t take my money.
I love this country.
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Don’t get me wrong. I love CodeIgniter – the documentation and community are great. The libraries are excellent. I’m outsourcing development of a couple private projects, and I couldn’t trust anyone to code properly without the CodeIgniter framework/paradigm.
CodeIgniter recently dropped support for PHP4. So we can expect quite a few improvements, but CodeIgniter will always be very limited.
The reason is that the whole framework is organized around the concept of a Singleton – $this.
Singletons have a very few uses, but otherwise are very, very, very bad. Codeigniter is an example of this.
The reason is, Singletons assumes that you’re only ever going to need one – and when they’re wrong, it makes things very hard to expand. CodeIgniter assumes you’re only going to need one controller. And they’re wrong, of course. Because of Singletons, Codeigniter can’t have a decent HMVC (hierarchical model-view-controller) implementation.
There are a couple libraries that claim to offer multiple controllers – Wick and Modular Extensions. But BOTH break when you try to use any libraries that use PHP5 autoloading of models. Ion_Auth dies if loaded in HMVC. DataMapper DMZ dies if loaded in HMVC.
Posting on the CodeIgniter forums about wanting to load a controller within a view will get a visit from the MVC police. “I don’t understand why you would want to…” is the most common response.
They’re idiots.
Look at any decent application or website of even moderate complexity, and you’ll see why multiple controllers are needed.
- Facebook has ads and widgets all over the page. Some are loaded via ajax too.
- Xero has a great interface, but I pity the fool that wants to put all that in one controller.
- Piwik is a great analytics application that allows multiple dashboards, and you can rearrange the way they show.
Kohana was based on the CodeIgniter concept, but is based on the factory method, not singletons. So apparently it can handle HMVC easily. The two things that stop me from using it:
- Smaller user community (which means fewer people to outsource to)
- Lack of documentation.
- Lack of concern for backwards compatibility.
HMVC is the only real drawback in CodeIgniter as compared to Kohana. Sure, the Kohana code is based PHP5 OO features while CodeIgniter is primarly PHP4 OO based. But you can still get things done – except for HMVC.
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Piwik is a great analytics program that competes with Google Analytics. It’s got great statistics and graphs and is being actively developed. There are hooks for plugins, and an API for getting output statistics.
However, it doesn’t have a working <noscript></noscript> for when javascript is disabled. This PHP script creates it. Merely put it in your piwik directory and include it. Then run piwik_tag(‘Your page title’); or if you have more than one website, piwik_tag(‘Your page title’,2); where 2 is your website’s ID in piwik.
Ideally this would be integrated right into piwik, but the problem is getting the proper page title programmatically. This is key to tracking, and is done automatically by javascript. I suppose someone could code output buffering and grab the page title that way, but there’s a performance penalty.
Grab the piwik_tag code here.
Note that you can simplify the code to just use a tracking image. This will avoid javascript altogether. However, this means losing piwik’s ability to:
- Track downloads
- Track outgoing links
- Track time on page
- (and probably a few other nifty statistics)
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