Almost a month ago now, I moved flats. I’m now living with a friend, Des, rather than on my own. I’m adapting well to this change of living arrangements, though initially it was strange sharing a flat with someone again!

The new flat is around five minutes walk from my old flat, so no major movements.

The building is a nice big old Victorian building. It lives up to its name of “Mansions” much more so than a house I lived in a few years ago. If you follow the link to flickr, I’ve added a note for the window belonging to our flat.

I was reminded today how powerful and world-changing the internet is. I was able to do something that wouldn’t have been possible until very recently: I’ve just found, listened to and watched a singer I’d never heard of an hour ago. This is, when you stop to think about it, simply amazing.

I found out about the group The Gadsdans a few months ago when I heard a song of theirs on 6music Introducing. I went back to their myspace page today to have a listen. Having some time on my hands, I decided to listen to some of the Gadsden’s Friends. The first link I clicked was She Makes War (Hey, I’m a sucker for girls who make music). What a wonderful piece of serendipity this was.

I have decided to move the dx13.co.uk domain to point to my Ruby on Rails version, though it is still very much a work in progress. Both the backend and the design are subject to major change. The reason to put the current iteration live is simply a desire to post. If I post on the old plain-ruby version of the site it is a chore to bring any posts I make into the Rails site.

This is the first post from the rough and ready Ruby on Rails powered backend of dx13. If all goes well this will appear on the front page and then migrate to the archives as soon as I work out something more interesting to write about!

Already the backend is almost as good as on the old, ASP-powered version of dx13, though it’s still not very pretty and is very unpolished. It would be great to have a nice backend to post from, to encourage me to write things through the sheer joy of being able to use it. Whether my skills are up to that, I don’t know.

In Rails 2.0, ActiveRecord changed the default for per-request SQL query-caching to on. The cache caches the results of each SQL query made during the processing of a single request to the application; the cache is flushed after the request is completed.

Caching can obviously save trips to the database if queries are repeated multiple times in a request, so it makes sense to have it on by default. I ran into a problem which was traced to this caching behaviour the other day, so, as information on query caching seems to be spread across several blog posts, I thought I’d draw together the bits I found.