Each year the Royal Mile Whiskies Whisky Fringe showcases the wares of the whisky industry in the picturesque settings of Mansfield Traquair. For £20, you have four hours in which to wander round 30 or so stands sampling any of the ~250 whiskies and ~30 rums on offer.

Upon entry you get three things – a printed programme booklet, a biro and a tasting glass. I’ve tended in the past to try to take notes in the booklet, but it requires an unusual manoeuvre of trying to hold the tasting glass and booklet in one hand while scrawling (with less success the later in the day you are) with the other.

So on Thursday night I threw together a quick mobile-friendly website for myself and a few friends to use to track which whiskies we taste on the day and which we particularly like or dislike.

The interface is as simple as possible to allow one-handed operation on a phone – phone in one hand, sampling glass in the other. The list of whiskies is presented without much fanfare with a alphabetical jump-list at the top for navigation. Users can say that they either liked, disliked or simply tasted a given whisky which is recorded in a MySql database along with a timestamp such that we can piece together the events of the day after the fact.

It remains to be seen whether it’ll hold up for the day (having effectively had to teach myself PHP in the space of a night for this one, it’s probably not the most robust implementation I’ve ever been involved in)…

After the BBC announced that they were going to enter into a timeshare of sorts for the live TV rights to Formula 1 from 2012 onwards there’s been a fairly vocal crowd on Twitter, Facebook, the BBC message boards and petition sites making their views known. And those views are, understandably, almost universally negative. At time of writing, the ‘Keep F1 Coverage On The BBC For All Races From 2012‘ petition on PetitionBuzz has over 28,000 signatures and nearly 20,000 Facebook likes.

Since I’d intended this to be a technical blog, I figured that there wasn’t much better a way of starting off than hammering out some code over a single malt to track the progress of the petition as a chart:

A cron job running every 15 minutes first scrapes the petition site for the number of signatories, which is stored in a MySQL database against a timestamp. The above graph is then refreshed and saved to disk, such that it’s always in line with the latest data but not forever being generated on-the-fly. The graph is generated using the jpGraph library (the free version) with the actual incantations effectively copied-and-pasted from a sample on the website – I was going for quick and dirty with this one, and good Lord is it that.