Heather and I were awoken in the early hours of the morning last night by a violent shaking of the house and a loud rumbling sound. It would appear that we, like many others in the region and in fact across the country, were witnesses to the strongest earthquake the UK has had since the quake felt in North Wales back in 1984.

Measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale the quake caused minor damage to a few buildings and caused objects to rattle across surfaces and furniture to move around on the floor. Considering how infrequently we have eatrhquakes here it was quite a bizare experience, and many of the reports in the news speak of surprise and concern.

A fair few articles are now present on the BBC website detailing the event.

On Tuesday morning I awoke early in the morning to find the ground, trees and cars ouside totally covered with rime. Given that this is not a common weather phenomenon and created a beautiful spectacle I decided to take some pictures. Some of them came out quite nicely. I carried my camera with me to campus later in the day and took a few more pictures.

If you are wondering what “Rime” is then I found a Wikipedia page offering a good explanation with some pictures bearing a resemblance to my own!

Over the weekend I stayed with Heather and her family at their house in Middlesbrough. It was a special occasion for two reasons. Mainly because Heather’s sister Claire is soon to travel to Australia for the year and so was having a farewell party, but an added bonus of the weekend was that I got to meet the rest of Heather’s family who I had not yet had the fortune to meet.

All in all it was a very enjoyable weekend and while I now have a huge quantity of work to catch up on I had a great time and look forward to staying with Heather’s family again soon (hopefully during the Easter vacation).

This weekend has meant that I’ve now met all of Heather’s immediate family and she has met all of mine. Considering we’ve been going out for well over a year now, its taken quite a while!

I had a quick hack around today with Calendar for WordPress and I have fixed some of the long standing bugs that while weren’t serious, were causing some people issues. I’ve also tightened up some of areas I considered sightly weaker than they should be on the security front and also introduced a few new features.

One of the most notable changes is in the way the links work on the new version. Personally I much prefer the clean URL structure that currently ships with Calendar, however this requires a modification to the .htaccess file which many users were having issues with. This was due to the vastly differing ways in which people had chosen to setup their blogs and permalink structures already chosen.

The new version will provide standard arguments-in-a-url style operation and nothing else. It will install and work on any blog configuration out of the box (even MU as I’ve had requests for it to work on that too) and without edits to the .htaccess file. Clean URLs however will only be possible with a code edit to the plugin file and the addition of lines in the .htaccess file. Because of the support time that .htaccess issues have consumed in the past, users making such changes on their own will have to choose to do so unsupported.

Below I have listed all the modifications made so far, but this is not an exhaustive list of everything that will make it into the next release.

• Security audit resulting in increased code injection protection of argument strings
• Removed the need to edit the .htaccess file
• Removed clean URLs by default as these were causing issues for novices
• Placed the whole plugin into one file; install is now just a case of dropping this file into your plugins directory and activating it
• Enabled compatibility with WordPress MU
• Fixed the bug in the admin screen that would cause IE users to not see the dates, times etc. in add/edit event the form.
• Allowed the week to start on a Sunday. Users who have their WordPress options set to Sunday as the starting day of the week will see the calendar obeying the setting.

A release will be made in the next few days both here and on the WordPress plugins repository. If anyone has anything in particular they would like to see in the next version then shout in comments.

I got my semester 1 exam results today and I was pleased with the outcome. I continue to do well in Leeds School of Computing and obtained a 1st average in the latest round of exams. Its suddenly become very plain to me how close I am to graduation and how very close I am to obtaining a first overall. It motivates me very much to think that I could be standing in the degree ceremony at the end of the year with a first grade piece of paper with my name on it.

While this is a great result, it was slightly tinged by a particularly poor grade in one of my modules. While this didn’t affect the average too much it did leave me the closest to the 1st grade boundary I have ever been and it woke me up to the idea that one single bad module grade in the next round of exams could tip the balance. While I don’t feel I could have done any better in the module it makes me more resolved than ever to work extra hard so I don’t risk letting slip what is nearly in my grasp.