Today I discovered that the attaching of image files on one of my sites had stopped working. Now, I know it was working a couple of weeks ago as a PHP upgrade had rendered it broken for a while and I’d fixed it and tested it thoroughly. All was working fine. Until today that was.

First stop therefore was the code I’d fixed a couple of weeks ago, all seemed OK there and after some investigation all seemed to be working fine. In fact, the images were being uploaded and added to the database as they should be, it seemed therefore as though the problem was further down the line when it came to displaying these images within a post.

I looked at some older posts and the images were being displayed as they should, the images for newer posts were being uploaded but were not being displayed… This puzzled me for a while as they use the same files and database, but then I noticed a problem with the database structure.

The post_id column in the image attachment table had been assigned a type ‘SMALLINT’. For those of you who don’t know, this means that the maximum value this column can have is 32767. The post_id column in the posts table was however correctly assigned as an INT, allowing it to contain much higher values

The site had recently exceeded 32,767 posts so when a new post was added with an image attached to it, the scripts were correctly trying to insert a post_id in the image attachment table with a value that exceeded 32767. The MySQL database didn’t like this and simply entered the maximum value it could which was 32767. This meant that the image was being added, but when someone viewed a post with an id of higher than 32767, and image associated with it had the wrong post_id so never got shown.

Simply changing the column type from SMALLINT to INT fixed the problem. Easy when you know how, but it had me puzzled for a little while.

It was satisfying to get to the bottom of it though, which means I can now have some lunch!

The first was just a little way south of Conwy called ‘This Daughter became a Conwy Valley Tour Guide‘. It was right beside a road so I managed to park pretty much on top of it and make a quick grab.

The next was just on the outskirts of Conwy in a little garden beside a stream. Unfortunately there were quite a few people about so I didn’t feel comfortable nosing around too much. I found the garden but not the cache itself. So, Gyffin Garden was a DNF for me.

I then spent a day do ‘naturalist’ type things and found a geocache called Watch the Birdie just outside the RSPB Conwy reserve. This one was an easy find and despite the fact that there was quite a few people around who had gathered to watch the starling roost I was able to sit down on top of the cache and retrieve it with raising any suspicions.

The Turbo Trainer sessions are going well. Last night I did a 3:2 minute interval session where I did 7 repetitions of 3 minutes @ 320 Watts and 2 minutes @ 120 Watts, the highest I’ve ever done that workout at and it was OK.

Heart Rate from 3:2 minute Interval Session

My maximum heart rate was only 150bpm so I obviously need to work a bit harder on these.

Today I did a 1:1 minute interval session, so after a warm up did 7 repetitions of 1 minute @ 400 Watts and 1 minute recovery @ 120 Watts. Again, 400 Watts is the most I’ve ever done this at and although it did get quite tough and my heart rate peaked at 166 bpm I did finish all 7 reps. The heart rate trace is pretty though!

Heart Rate Trace from 1 minute Interval Session

Time for some food now and plenty of water to get me ready for tonight’s activities.

For a start the shared dorms mean you just don’t know who you might be sharing with which is always a bit of a worry.

Will they snore?…. Yep!
Will they smell?… Yep!
Will they lie on their bed completely naked reading the newspaper? Yep!
Will they read 15th Century poetry out loud?… Yep!

Needless to say I didn’t really get much sleep, and what makes that even worse is that when I get up after being kept awake by them all night long, they don’t even stir despite the fact that I am now making a bit of noise. I know that I’m no good at sleeping, but how can people sleep through anything.

They aren’t that cheap either. They are of course cheaper than a B&B but at £25.90 with breakfast it isn’t that much of a bargain. It was better than sleeping in the car, as it meant I could have a shower, use the toilet and have breakfast in the morning, but I may have actually got more sleep in the car.

The catch comprised of:

• Shoulder Stripe x 16
• Dotted Border x 3
• Pale Brindled Beauty x 1*
• Mottled Grey x2
• Early Grey x1*
• Chestnut x1

It looks as though things are hotting up and I’m going to be busy identifying and counting moths throughout the summer.

* = New to our garden

I’ve just spent the weekend in Conwy. I decided to head up to North Wales as there was a North Wales Moth Recorders’ Meeting at the Pensychnant Conservation Centre. I travelled there on Saturday, stopping on the way to do a few geocaches and arrived in plenty of time for the meeting.

After a coffee and a chat with some fellow moth-recorders we had a presentation by Zoë Randle the Moth Recording Coordinator for the Moths Count Project. She talked us through the successes of the Moths Count Project and Butterfly Conservations efforts to put moths on the map.

Butterfly Conservation have had funding from a variety of sources, and lots from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Zoë told is how this money had been spent. Most of has been spent on the website and the publication of national moth distribution maps. I’ve yet to have a close look at these, but they look pretty impressive, especially as many of them can be zoomed in to resolutions of 100m so that you can see exactly where moths have been recorded. Hopefully some of my records will start showing up on these soon. These really are ‘putting moths on the map’.

Money has also been spent on publicity and organising events such as the Garden Moths Count and National moth night. This prompted some ‘discussion’ as one person there in particular thought hat this was a waste of money that could have been spent on computerising historical moth records so as to allow for a better understanding of trends in distribution over time. However, I think that publicity and events are actually a good use of the resources they have. I for one wouldn’t be recording moths if it weren’t for such events. I may only be one small person doing my little bit but I’ve been recording moths, have been partly responsible for setting up the Ceredigion Moth Group and collating records from Vice County 46 and have been spending some of my time on a voluntary basis computerising the historical records.

Just a small amount of money recruiting new recorders and volunteers such as myself can pay dividends in the long run, which has to be better than directly paying to have historical records computerised. Of course such events also fall within the ‘community’ remit of the funding requirements which is why they have featured heavily in the activities of Moths Count.

After the ‘moth meeting’ I headed off to RSPB Conwy where I had a walk around the nature reserve where I saw a little Egret, found a geocache on the banks of the estuary and then stood and watched millions of starlings come into roost.

Not a bad way to spend a day and I almost felt like a naturalist by the end of it!

Little Egret, Conwy

This has been made more frustrating by the fact that I have seen plenty of moths on the wing in front of my headlights whilst driving between Aberystwyth and Borth, or whilst up in the hills. Also whilst out mountain-biking at night in the hills and forests there have been plenty of moths attracted to our lights. Here at the coast though there is little protection and the moths have been scarce.

I was out mountain-biking last night and saw quite a few moths fluttering around so was pleasantly surprised when I got home and found 5 moths on the porch walls, attracted by the porch light. I quickly collected them and have this morning identified them.

• 3 x Shoulder Stripe (Anticlea badiata)*
• 3 x Dotted Border (Agriopis marginaria)*

I might put the trap out tonight to see what else we can get, but its good to get off the mark and have a few moths to record.

Unfortunately there was quite a mix up with marshalling and sign-posting so the overall results are a little odd and difficult to work out.

How did I do? Not too badly I don’t think. According to the results my overall position was 33rd and I was 13th in my category (Male 31-40). My finishing time was 3:37:46. Mind you, the winners came in at around 2hrs 17.

Many people hope that the increasing popularity of Apple’s mobile devices in the form of the iPhone, iPod Touch and the new iPad will pressure website and content providers to provide their content in a form that doesn’t require Flash. YouTube is already moving in this direction and is experimenting with HTML5 to deliver its videos and others will follow suit as more an more users demand it.

Adobe seem to be hitting back though in conjunction with HP and their up and coming tablet device – obviously inspired by the iPad! Let the tablet wars begin!