Atkins Diet: again.

I'm back on the Atkins diet: this is Day 2. I'd tried it a couple of times before and managed to keep it going for 6-8 weeks each time. It really worked, I lost 4 kilos a month. The only reason I stopped each time was because something changed. The first time, I went on holiday and just started pigging out on holiday food, so that was the end of that. The second time, I think I just went into a mega-depression and it all generally went off the rails.
So this is Day 2 and I feel bloody hungry. The self-restraint is tiring me out and I've noticed that I've been feeling a lot colder than I normally would. I'm not getting stoked up with carbs, that's why.
I know I've got to get thru this bit though, in order to get my eating back in some sort of equilibrium, over the last week I have been scoffing chocolate bars and I don't know what like there's no tomorrow. And Helen's home-made bread is really very good...

Yasser Arafat

Today Yasser Arafat is being buried in Ramallah, and with him, we hope, the past. The Israelis point out that he was linked with terrorism in the 70s, he arranged hijackings and bombings. On the other hand, he was expressing the anger of a people robbed of their homeland. No one should sanction vengeful violence, but in some cases you can understand it. In public, the Israelis always refused to deal with Arafat. Behind the scenes though, the Oslo negotiations took place and the brave initiatives of doomed Rabin could have borne fruit, were it not for interference by the west and by radical Islam.
There is now an opportunity to start again, to make a lasting peace. The whole world will be involved, like it or not. This will affect the course of world history for generations to come. These conflicts don't have to be perpetuated.
Israelis, Palestinians, Americans, Arabs: please don't screw it up.

MySQL: Lest I Forget...

Appropriate sentiment for Armistice Day.
If you want to select a whole row where just one column is distinct, you can't do it with the DISTINCT keyword. This will then apply to all the columns specified on the SELECT, which may not be what you want.
If you want a whole row, but where just one column is affected by the "distinct" criterion, you have to use "GROUP BY".
e.g.

SELECT * FROM atable GROUP BY acolumn

will return whole rows, but where acolumn is distinct.
This page helped.

Bitchin' in the Kitchen...

Got an invite from Jezz to join his food blog, so thought I'd better give him a link back. What can I write about food? What do I know? Whilst Jezz waxes eloquent about obscure ingredients, I will be limited to discussing moderately-priced brands of fishfinger... Well this feed is now syndicated on my site.

Finally...

The Jeannot site is now pretty much fully configured using the Mambo CMS. My weblog Atom feed is being translated to RSS via FeedBurner (as Mambo can't handle an Atom feed yet), and is being served up on the homepage. My collection of links has also been migrated from the old site, by just importing the MySQL table it was stored in into the Mambo weblinks database table (some data transformation was required...).
Despite some confusing moments, the configuration of Mambo has proved really easy and I haven't found any bugs. So now I've just got to actually do something with the site. I plan to put some more interesting feeds on the homepage, but don't know which ones yet.
The other thing to mention is that the default cache time appears to be 900 seconds, so changes to weblogs etc. won't be reflected until after 15 minutes have elapsed.
I also have to make sure I've got all this stuff (content, source and database) backed up!