“No”

From the classsified ad section “miscellaneous” of the Bayerischen Taferl, one of the local weekly ad newspapers, not the first time source for odd things:

Meditation im Advent ein Thema für Dich? Tel. ...
Translation: Meditation in advent time a topic for you? Phone…

I considered calling for fun, saying “No” and hang up immediately – then I saw this one, too, in the same block of about 40 ads:

Familienaufstellung etwas anders! tel. ...
Familiy Constellations with a difference!

To this, my reply would be “No thanks, don’t want your nonsense“.

There were even more such ads scattered around this block with the same phone number (didn’t find a web site for these offers, by the way):

Engel - ein Thema für Dich? Tel. ...
Angels – a topic for you?

So we’re back at the simple “no”. At least when considering how this question is meant, since it actually is a topic since I’m writing about it here.

I almost missed this one (actually the second of these), showing the lady’s versatility:

Weihnachtsgeschenke selbstgemacht, z.B. Bären u. Engel stricken. Tel. ...
Self-made christmas presents, e.g. knitting bears and angels

These come in handy – in German, that is, ’cause there’s the proverb of “tying a bear onto someone” = to hoax someone, which she’s probably gonna do for the other things she’s offering…

Music Quiz 38

Welcome to the latest music quiz, again with picture riddles depicting band and/or song titles…

1.) Which song title (from whom) is this?

Musik-Quiz 38.1

Gelöst von David: “All Right Now” von Free (Video)


2.) Welcher Albumtitel ist dies?

Musik-Quiz 38.2

Gelöst von David: “Death Magnetic” von Metallica (Video von “The Day That Never Comes”)


3.) Welcher Liedtitel wird hier zusammen mit dem Bandnamen dargestellt?

Musik-Quiz 38.3

Gelöst von Julia: “Hammerhead” von The Offspring (Video)


4.) Welcher Liedtitel ist das?

Musik-Quiz 38.4

Gelöst von Julia: “Bad To The Bone” von George Thorogood & The Destroyers (Video)


Das war’s für diese Woche, bis nächsten Dienstag!

High database load from Ajax Edit Comments…

… and a preliminary solution:

The WordPress plugin “Ajax Edit Comments” from The Reader Appreciation Project1 allows the commenter to edit his comment for a certain time – useful especially for typos and minor corrections. (Admins can do more.) Visitors utilize it here for about every 10th comment, by the way.

Now Pierre notified me yesterday about the high number of database queries (and that the response time could be better, too) – higher than what I always saw when logged in. (See the blue footer line.) Doing a little research, I found that it’s the aforementioned Ajax Edit Comments that uses 4 additional database queries for each comment in order to check if the visitor is allowed to edit it (unles (s)he’s logged in as admin who is always allowed to edit). That can sum up to quite a lot if there are many comments on a single post.

I quickly added a little modification to the plugin2 which check the comment age in advance without database access – in my quick tests, these modifications appear to work fine. If you too don’t see any problems – feel free to test it here or maybe later for the music quiz on 16:00 – I will, of course, send the changes to the plugin’s author, hoping they will be included in future versions. :)

  1. for WordPress 2.5 and higher – old version for 2.1–2.3.x here []
  2. in both the old version I’m still using here and the new in my test environment where I’m preparing the WordPress 2.7 update []