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The weather was pretty lousy on Sunday so I had to cancel plans to hike some of the trails in Brown County. Rapidly running out of reading material for this trip and anticipating some long flights later this week, I instead spent the afternoon browsing the local Barnes & Noble. Buying books south of the border is a great deal with the current exchange on the Canadian dollar. The price printed on the jacket is usually close to 50% higher on the Canadian dollar, which is nowhere close to the current rate. So I decided to stock up!

Joel recently linked to his Programmer’s Bookshelf and I noted a few books in there worth picking up (that I didn’t have already). By way of coincidence, the bookstore had a “Computer Classics” display showcasing a number of books from his list. So I snagged a few (20% off!) and now have enough to last me for the trip home.

I was especially excited to find Robin Williams‘ “The Non-Designer’s Design Book”. Anyone reading this site will immediately note my poor design talent and total lack of colour sense. I’ve already finished this book and it has really helped me identify why I prefer certain designs over others. I also understand why I prefer to format reports a certain way (I make a mean report, if I may say so myself) and my newfound knowledge can only help to improve on that.

So if you’re clueless about design like me and need a few pointers on the basics and a good treatment of fonts, I highly recommend this one. Maybe I’ll write up a review of the others once I finish them. That is, if I can find room in my bag to bring them all home!

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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“A branch is like a puppy.”
- Eric Sink on source control branching

Eric Sink has just posted the latest chapter of his informative Source Control HOWTO series.

The explanation? “Don’t create a branch unless you are willing to take care of it.”