last week

Property (and stats)

A great (well, I think so) read from the ONS in their latest house prices index. There are some big regional differences in the changes they report but it seems a drop in transactions is pretty consistent across the county. That said the historic numbers do suggest a spike in transaction numbers in April 2017.

Technology

I discovered an issue I was having with email sending from PHP (running in apache), which was only visible via the slightly cryptic exim log message:

unable to set gid=3000 or uid=0 (euid=0): forcing real = effective

Was actually down to my use of mpm-itk without also setting the LimitUIDRange configuration value. Although I can't see it specified on the mpm-itk site, the LimitUIDRange setting must be global (eg in an /etc/apache2/conf-available/itk.conf file - make sure you a2enconf it too) rather than in a vhost section (like most other mpm-itk settings). An important hint to this was found here although they talk about the LimitGIDRange setting, which I found didn't solve my issue and I haven't needed to set at all.

Writing

Handy little tool for find repeats in writing. While I'm talking about writing tools, there's also this one to help with keeping what you write readable. (No I haven't run this journal through either - I'm waiting for their Vim plugins!)

Time away

I had a few days away this week - not exactly a holiday but certainly a change of scene. The primary purpose of the trip was for Liz to attend a family history conference (apparently it was excellent); so as a non-attendee my intention was to work. As it turned out I ended up taking a very relaxed approach to that work! It was a kind of holiday after all.

I did manage to catch up on some very overdue server changes that my web and domain hosting company needed though - having work time at a weekend meant the small interruptions were more acceptable.