This coming weekend we will probably take the M5 on a bit of a jaunt. I’m heading off to do the 3 peaks in a leisurely fashion with a few friends, and naturally it’s essential in my view to take the car with the most horsepower: mine. Facing around 1,200 miles it’s going to be important to have a fair old selection of music in the car, and I fear the six CD changer and in-dash cassette deck isn’t quite going to cut it. So despite the fact that the M5 will probably be put up for sale next month, I’ve decided to invest £93 in a Dice Silverline Duo BMW iPod integration kit.

Installation was surprisingly easy. I can barely remember the details of installing the Connects2 item in the back of the 330d in 2006, but I’m sure that was a good deal more involved, although I can’t think why. Anyway, I whipped out the CD changer, and used the loom adapter that came in the kit to make the Silverline connect to the CD changer’s old cabling.

I fed the cabling behind the boot trim and popped it through the seat back where it arrives behind the arm rest. I’ve mounted the Silverline there, and it has a lengthy cable that terminates with the traditional Apple connector. Here’s a picture showing it connected to my iPhone.

And with the leather backing replaced:

Connected to an iPhone 4, the system works well. The phone plays/pauses as the stereo mode it switched to and from the ‘CD’, volume of course works, and so does skip forward / back. It even attempts to show the track information on the display:

The obvious issue is that I don’t want to have my phone permanently back there. Fortunately we have a fair few compatible devices lying around:

So I thought it’d be nice to permanently mount one of the two old crusty iPods behind the arm rest. For trips such as this forthcoming weekend we can just extend the cable out to anyone’s phone – that’s quite a good solution, but in general I’ll want my phone with me in the front with a large music collection elsewhere.

Sadly, the big white brick doesn’t seem to receive charge from this integration kit (it does from the Connects2 in the 330d), so that’s no use. The silver unit does receive charge, and the audio output is sent to the car, but the start/stop and skip controls don’t work, and neither does the on-screen text. That’s no use either; again that device works perfectly with the Connects2 in the 330d. The 3GS is Diane’s, so I didn’t bother trying it, but the iPhone 4 works perfectly.

I guess if I was going to keep the car for any duration I’d test with a modern iPod and purchase one of those if it worked, but it’s more likely I’ll just stick the car up for sale and pop the CD changer back in so that everything’s nice and standard back there.

So overall I can’t really rate this kit. It’s okay. Sometimes even when connected to the iPhone 4 it doesn’t send any audio and has to be powered down and reconnected. There are plenty of similar complaints on the internet. Maybe more expensive kits are better; for the purpose of a tour of the UK though, this thing will do nicely!

Summary: MOT passed, refurbished alloys, some bodywork, pipe cleaning and painting, and ultimately, for sale.

The M5 passed its MOT last month, and at the time they advised that the brake and fuel lines under the car looked a bit corroded. It’s entirely common for these to gain a bit of surface rust, but of course the danger is that they get so bad they lose structural integrity. The M5 has therefore spent the last couple of weeks up in the air with belly panels off while I dropped down all fuel and brake lines for inspection.

As I expected, I was relieved to find that a general build up of grot and surface corrosion was the only issue. After few hours of scrubbing with emery paper followed by some painting, we’re now in a position where the underside of the car looks very healthy indeed.

Above, nice clean brake lines. Below, nice clean fuel lines (although, not yet fully clipped back into place).

However, that’s not all that’s happened by a long run! In my March update I noted that there was a spot of rust under the boot lid. Since the MOT the car has spent a week at a local body shop to not only have that seen to, but also a little rust along the bottom of the driver’s door, and most notably it’s had all 4 alloy wheels refurbished. The result is that the M5 has never looked so good during my ownership! I’ve also treated it to new wheel bolts and centre caps.

All this leaves me in a strange position where I’m entirely satisfied with the car’s condition, and that leaves me in a bit of a quandary. I’ve done under 10,000 miles in nearly 3 years of ownership. Snoop’s arrival vastly reduced the scope for M5 usage, and now we’re expecting a baby in October, I really can’t see the super saloon getting much use at all. Now is the sensible time to move this car on – I’ve never been more confident in its condition, or in the fact that I’m really unlikely to require its services that often. Enquiries are of course welcome via this site; it’ll go on the usual sites at the end of the month.

When replacing the M5′s front brakes it took me a little longer than I might have hoped to locate the brake fluid reservoir, so this is a quick blog post to address that in the hope that someone else finds it helpful. As you stare at the engine under the bonnet, it’s under the driver’s side pollen filter, as indicated by the arrow below:

To gain access, undo the plastic clips just to the right of that arrow to free it from the ducting. Also unclip the housing lid – there’s a metal bar running along the front that holds the lid in place. A certain amount of wrestling should reveal the reservoir:

I’m currently lucky enough to have an extra 330d sport touring on the driveway, as it’s half way home to its new owner. It’s a year younger than mine, which means it’s the 204hp 2,993cc unit with a 6 speed gearbox; mine’s a 184hp 2,926cc 5 speed effort. It’s finished in Imola red, which was my first choice colour (I settled for black). This article was originally intended to represent my thoughts based on these comparisons, but as I was photographing it quickly became clear that it would also cover a list of my customisations, as the red car is absolutely in stock condition, while the black car has now been in my possession for over 5 years. I’ll cover the cosmetics first, and come around to the driving experience at the end.

It turns out that my tractor was very much between the two E46 revisions, in that it had the facelift body but not the newer wheels, engine and gearbox. The wheels were rectified a while ago, but of course the other elements remain. The point is though, that colour aside these two cars look the same.

So, red. It’s not a colour I’d usually choose, but BMW’s Imola red with black trim just works for me. My last 4 BMWs have been black (or near enough; the M5 is a very, very dark blue), and that’s been far more about the car’s other attributes than a concious colour based decision. Oh, please ignore the tragic plate – the new owner will be removing that promptly, at which point it’ll revert to its 53 plate.

Anyway – the first customisation is most apparent there: the black kidney grilles. Given that both these cars have the black shadow gloss option, which basically means that the chrome trim around the windows is replaced with a black gloss effect trim, in my view the chrome kidneys look a little out of place, especially on a black car.

Under the bonnet there’s a slight difference in the engine covering but in this case the real difference is how filthy my engine bay is.

The wheels, as mentioned, are the same, but of course the black car is sporting those floating and drilled brakes.

Moving to the boot, the most obvious difference is the significant amount of dog hair and general filth I carry around with me everywhere I go! More seriously though, the red car lacks navigation. This is the only thing that it lacks that my car doesn’t also lack – sunroofs and heated seats would be nice too. Ian (the red car’s new owner) seems quite keen to retrofit heated seats to his, so perhaps that’s something I’ll get involved with too.

So yes, rather hairy. The sat-nav computer is the factory difference, but there’s also the DVD movie player and an inverter present in that cubby hole in the black car. This photo also neatly highlights the 6×9 speakers I fitted in the rear. Cars with the Harmon Kardon audio upgrade pack (neither of these cars has that) have a larger basket in the rear to accomodate 6×9 speakers, and before the days of this blog I got hold of some of these baskets and upgraded the rear speakers. The result isn’t much to write home about, but these photos make it really obvious.

Under the boot floor I was again reminded of how a standard car should look. I’ve dug out an older pre-dog photo of my car for this comparison.

Bling bling mo-fo! There’s no detachable tow-bar on the red car, but the black car has the tow-bar stowed under the circular cover in the lower boot floor. Remaining in the boot area I’m reminded of another customisation – the metal dog guard. I’m so used to this I had to pull the luggage net up in the red car to make myself feel more at home!

The red car still has the standard droopy exhausts:

These cars have a leather tag connected to the boot floor that ends in a plastic clip – handly for lifting up the boot floor and hooking it in place if you need to get under it. I’m especially good at leaving this dangling out over the boot lip, and then slamming the boot lid shut on it shattering the plastic hook. The average life expectancy of one of these in my car is about a month. However yesterday I learnt that they can be neatly stowed in a way so as to protect the plastic clip under the boot floor, while still exposing the leather hoop to permit the boot floor to be easily lifted, look!

Moving on to the interiors, we once again return to the question of colours and taste. You see, while the outside of my car is a nice safe black, the inside really isn’t. It’s yellow. A fairly bright yellow at that. I’m not going to lie, I really wasn’t sure about it at first. It’s certainly a bit refreshing.

Ultimately I warmed to it, as an all black interior can look rather drab. Or, as is the case within the red car, rather smart:

So, are you ready for the comparison? Brace yourself…

I actually quite like it now, especially the way the black is used for contrast in places such as the door arm rest and handle. Of course, it’s a similar story in the front of the cars:

I would say that the E46 interior is exceptionally hard wearing. The red car has done 113,000 miles, the black car 130,000 miles, yet neither looks like it has suffered anything like that kind of use. Moving to the dashboard, we start to see the first signs that all is not the same under the bonnet.

Note that the black car, with nav and the older engine, red lines at 4,500rpm, where the newer car red lines at 5,000. I’m sure that’s a rather basic view and that more specific details may show less of a difference, but it is an indication that translates to the driving experience. The newer engine seems to drive slightly more like a petrol – the power stays accessible for a little longer before melting away. The older engine by comparison is marginally weaker up the top, but my fettled version at least provides a touch more grunt down at the bottom end.

The newer car comes with a six speed box, something I’m especially familiar with from various M cars and this is the single feature that has generated the most tractor envy! The whole package adds up to suggest to me that the newer car is worth quite a premium over the old.

I had the pleasure of piloting the new car from just north of Oxford back to Woking. There was a healthy section of bendy A roads, most of which was taken at a brisk pace, followed by the M40 tackled at typical motorway speeds. My 330d would have managed all this at around 40mpg while showing a clean pair of heels to most other vehicles on the road. This 330d reported 51.4 MPG. Simply amazing given the performance.

If I could blend Ian’s car with my modifications and nav, and add a sunroof and heated seats, we’d have quite a machine. Of course I can’t do this, but I can hand the car over to Ian later today, and I’m sure it won’t be long before the car is a magnificent example. Overall this car has certainly reinforced my position as a massive E46 330d sport touring fanboy.

So today I settled down to replace the M5′s front brakes. When I got the car, some two and a half years ago now, I noted that the front discs were quite crusty and lipped, so now seemed like a sensible time to do something about them.

Generally speaking, the brakes and wheels are just some of the parts of the car that prevent it from looking really smart. I therefore decided to not only replace the brakes, but also give the calipers and carriers a decent clean and a paint, and I’ve also booked the car in to have its wheels refurbished next month.

So straight to the usual routine – car up, wheels off…

Despite the discs being rather corroded, I was pleased to note how well maintained the various bolts were – they were all a pleasure to operate, and showed no sign of the car being 10 years old.

I had a little bit of a mission finding the brake fluid reservoir – turns out it’s under the driver’s side microfilter. I’ll probably make a dedicated post on this matter in due course to make this information easier to find for others, but for now, here’s this photograph:

Having marvelled at how well maintained the driver’s side brake assembly was, I was of course massively stitched up by the other side. The M5 has not one but two retaining bolts to hold the disc to the hub, and unfortunately one of those heads had been previously thoroughly rounded. There was just no way I could get a tool of any sort to bite in there – I even tried hammering in a star key. So I took to drilling it out.

Several hours later I was clearly getting there but was running out of daylight and warmth. This was extremely disappointing, so I did what I always do at such a stage, and I gave up and called Alex. Regular readers might remember that Alex saved my arse when I couldn’t replace the 330d’s propshaft donut. This time we discussed the issue, and I explained that I was patiently drilling the bolt out. Alex told me to man up and use an angle grinder, and 5 minutes later I was done. Good advice!

So then I was finally able to crack on again. I wired brushed and solvent prepared the calipers and carriers. Previously:

Then, painted:

A reminder of what the brakes looked like this morning:

Crusty! This evening:

That’s as far as I’ve got – bad light stopped play. Tomorrow morning I’m off in the tractor to BMW to collect new retaining bolts, and I’ve also elected to replace all the wheel bolts – once the alloys are refurbished this should really make the car look much smarter.

I had previously mentioned that I was hoping to fit drilled discs to the M5, but unfortunately C3BMW have stopped stocking those as they say they received too many complaints about them warping. The only other options were > £2,000 for full on multi-pot caliper conversions. Since I don’t actually track the car, and I haven’t got those sort of funds available(!), I’ve therefore fitted BMW parts.

It’s a bit of a shame really, as when viewed in perspective with the rest of the car, these brakes don’t really look up to much:

Could be bigger, or drilled or generally a bit more bling, no? 400 horse power after all sir. Oh well, at least it’s all clean and tidy now. I hope to be back on the road by lunchtime tomorrow!

Last month I popped the tractor into a local independent garage to have a small PAS leak sorted. While it was there, I had a similar age 318i touring, and ignoring the obvious it made for a very interesting comparison. I’ll compare them in terms of looks, performance, ride, economy and interior, and finally discuss the main point: overall value. So the 318i; here it is next to the M5 on the driveway.

Looks

To the untrained eye (for instance, my father’s) it’s the same car. I appreciate the high gloss shadow line and the white indicators – with chrome around the windows and orange corners it’d look really basic. That said, those 16″ wheels are tiny (the tractor wears 18s – even its winter wheels are 17s – those 16s wouldn’t even fit over my front brakes!) and the SE bumpers look far more placid. The chrome kidney grilles complete the “wouldn’t say boo to a goose” image. For comparison:

Beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder, but I felt the 330d won this round.

Performance

This comparison isn’t supposed to be a one way street, but I must get the numbers out of the way. Compared with my dyno figures the 318i has 70% of the power and just 48% of the torque. On the road that difference is painfully obvious under all circumstances, so again, the 330d wins this round hands down.

Initially I tried to motivate the 318i into proving that it was in any way an Ultimate Driving Machine, but I soon realised it was best to waft. This worked well: the 318i is extremely smooth and makes a delicious noise. Especially in warmer weather with the windows down I find myself operating the 330d’s accelerator fairly digitally; the rush of the torque wave and the sound of the wastegate releasing are extremely addictive, so it was good to be more mature with the controls and thus travel with a little more comfort.

Ride

On the subject of comfort, having ridiculed those teeny wheels I soon noticed the transformation in ride quality. It’s fair to say that while a lower ride height on stiffer springs and ultra-low profile tyres makes for some eye-popping cornering, it also makes for a spine shattering ride over bumps and pot holes. On comfort suspension and big floppy tyres the 318i was a real pleasure over Woking’s battered roads. The compromise of course arrived with each corner, but the whole package makes sense: without performance and supportive seats there’s no point trying to corner fast, so I didn’t. Even so, without question the 318i wins a round here.

Economy

I’ll lay down the facts here, and we’ll come to the topic of overall value soon enough. When I was really, really kind to the 318i, I got 30mpg. If I tried in vain to extract some performance, that figure tumbled. The 330d either does 40mpg on a sensible run, or 35mpg if you drive it like an animal. Yes, diesels are renowned for economy, but smaller petrol engines shouldn’t be this bad. I guess here the sheer weight of the car meant that the engine was always strained. In any case, a definite win for the 330d.

Interior

Compared with a late E46 M3 the 330d certainly lacks some switchgear on the panel in front of the gearstick. However, inside the 318i was a bit of a barren wasteland.

The lack of sat-nav was the most obvious visual difference, but the flat seats and narrow steering wheel certainly left the 318i feeling substantially less focussed. Here’s a comparison with the 330d taken when I fitted the new E46 M3 steering wheel (but before the black leather illuminated gear shifter).

So while there was nothing wrong with the 318i’s interior, getting back into the 330d felt a lot more right. 330d win, again.

Overall value

Now we come to the point. Given that the 330d gives better performance, is a more pleasant place to be and costs less to fuel, what are the benefits of the 318i? The smaller petrol engine still has two clear advantages: it’s cheaper to purchase, and it’s cheaper to maintain. Brakes cost less, services are cheaper, tyres I imagine are a fraction of the price. Yet the 330d no doubt holds its value better.

Clearly I’d rather have the 330d – that’s why I’ve got one. But if pushed for funds would I rather have a 318i touring than a similarly priced Vectra estate? Yes – it’s properly built and the correct wheels are driven. It’s a good car, but the 330d is simply excellent.

Update 26th April 2011 – 21:00 GMT

Sony have released more details on their blog – personal data has indeed been compromised. The important bit:

Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state/province, zip or postal code), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity passwords and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence that credit card data was taken at this time, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, to be on the safe side we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may also have been obtained.

So, if your PSN password is associated with your PSN email address anywhere else, time to change all other instances.

What is unavailable?

At the time of writing Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) has been unavailable for over 5 days. As an avid user of online gaming (mainly the Call of Duty series and Gran Turismo), this has now certainly reached the point where I’m getting a bit grumpy about it. Had we not had such good weather over the weekend, I’d probably be fuming! It’s still possible to play single player games and watch movies etc, but online gaming as well as internet based services such as LoveFilm aren’t available. The incredibly poor photo on the right shows what happens when I try to log in: “PlayStation®Network is currently undergoing maintenance”.

Why is it unavailable?

PSN is down because it was hacked last week. Well, Qriocity (pronounced ‘curiosity’) was hacked, that’s PSN’s media streaming service. Sony appears to have taken the view that it is best to take the entire service offline while they sure up their security.

Has any information been leaked?

This is a very interesting question, and one to which we haven’t yet got any answers. [See above update; we have now!] In order to sign in to PSN you need a valid email address. There are about 70 million registered accounts, so that’s quite a haul of valid email addresses. If those have got out, expect some spam (links to malware sites enticing you with Adobe products appear to be most in fashion at the moment). However, the real haul would be the credit card details many users have on file to permit them to easily make purchases from the PlayStation Store. Sony offer all sorts of media from game extensions to the latest films for hire, so I’ll bet a good chunk of those 70 million users have credit card numbers stored along with their addresses on the PSN. If those have got out, it’ll get rather more interesting for everyone.

Why was PSN hacked?

As yet there’s no official answer. It could be simply an attempt to harvest the email addresses and credit card numbers mentioned above. I think there’s a good chance this event can be traced right back to the launch of the PlayStation 3 Slim in September 2009. Prior to that point Sony had an extremely geeky USP in that the original PS3s offered OtherOS – or the ability to install any operating system (normally Linux) on the unit to sit alongside Sony’s. Just before the slim was launched Sony enforced a software update that removed this functionality – probably due to game piracy concerns.

To cut a long story short this suddenly made it a challenge among the hacker community to find ways around Sony’s attempted block. Then followed the usual ping-pong match of loopholes being found and patches being released, but the sparks soon turned to flame when Sony filed a lawsuit against renowned hacker George Hotz (Geohot) who had published his PS3 jailbreak technique on his website. Many argue that Sony deserved this for removing one of the console’s key features – essentially they have mis-sold the product. Sony I would imagine see this as an unfortunate side effect of protecting the reproduction rights of game creators. While Sony and Hotz have reached an out of court settlement, speculation is rife that Hotz’s supporters have led this breach on Sony’s network.

When will PSN service be resumed?

Right now the best sources of information would be the PlayStation blog, or their twitter account @PlayStationEU. There’s also this entertaining site.

You should have bought an XBox!

I know some of you just can’t wait to cram the comments box with this sentiment, so I thought I’d save you the energy.

Today Alex and I popped along to Castle Combe circuit to spectate at their Spring Performance Car Action Day, the highlight of which was to be two drifting sessions. I’ll start right now by saying that I wasn’t disappointed in any way – today was nothing short of awesome! There were a huge variety of cars present, and a full gallery of photos is available here. Also, for those with a shorter attention span, here’s a video clip to help convey the general atmosphere of action!

So, down to the usual blogging business. After an early start I found myself parked next to Alex’s van trackside at 9:30.

We spent the morning watching those brave enough to take to the track on get to grips with our little corner.

Of course plenty of people were doing very well, some were a bit slow, and some were a bit bland. But then the mistakes started to happen, and we were happy!

Just before the first drift session was a about to begin, I found myself exceptionally entertained by this gentleman doing apt justice to his Vauxhall Omega – it’s hard to get more sideways than this!

Here’s the above hero at work:

Soon the first drift session was underway:

It wasn’t long before we saw the first wheel loss of the day…

Here’s the video clip that leads to the above!

And some classic E30 action:

We then went for a wander along the pits where we saw lots of wonderful cars (and some, er, dubious ones…). Let’s start with this – if you know me, you’ll know how excited I was…

The afternoon sessions saw two more cars lose wheels (that we saw on our corner – who knows how many wheels were lost in total today!), and another epic drift session that went a bit like this:

I’ll spare a special note for this E39 M5 – it had lovely multi-pot AP brakes and the tyres looked well used, but I couldn’t help thinking that the poor chap looked a bit slow. It really made me want to take to the track to fly the M5 flag, but I didn’t because I know what I’m like and I had no spare wheels and tyres to get home on. As this conversation was taking place, said M5 came past us and simply popped a wheel off for me to inspect – almost as though it was offering to help!

Really, a BMW dropping a wheel off on the circuit? Outrageous! He clearly should have been going faster – those nuts rely on a good dose of V8 to self-tighten, don’t you know.

Here are a few more of my favourite photos, starting with a Ford Capri:

This Lancia Delta Integrale was showing a level of decay typical for its age:

This reminded me a bit of Smith’s Chavbo:

And this definitely reminded me of our old 106 Rallye.

Carry on racing – there’s nothing to see here…

POWER, POWER, POWER…

What a glorious day to chuck a wheel…

Always good to see the show cars in top notch condition – in particular I liked the rear wheel arch.

Raah!

Best place for a Corsa, really.

The king of the forests needed a bit more grunt on hot sticky tarmac.

What a scene!

Anyway – there are loads more photos on the gallery page, and of course there are more videos on my Youtube channel. I’ll conclude by saying that it really was an excellent day, and by thanking Paul Stewart for letting me know about it. If you’re one of my friends who so often thinks “damn, I wish I’d gone along” then why don’t you actually do that next time?

Yesterday I took (and passed) the Zend  PHP 5.3 Certified Engineer exam – more information here from Zend and on Wikipedia. Having worked with PHP for about 11 years I had first imagined that this qualification wouldn’t be particularly stressful – that didn’t transpire to be the case! It turned out that I covered about 60% of the syllabus in my regular work patterns, but even then I relied on the PHP manual a lot more than I had realised.

The last (credible) exam I took was probably at university, and upon reflection I got myself considerably more wound up about the ZCE than anything in higher or further education. The last time I got this stressed about an examination was my driving test. The two events were similar in that I considered myself more than competent in the appropriate field, yet the exam stood between my assertion and independent confirmation.

I booked the exam 3 weeks in advance (as soon as we got back from Thailand) and spent the first two weeks gently revising. Then I sourced my first mock test, and the horrific reality of the situation became clear: not only did I need to learn a lot more about the aspects of PHP that I used every day, but I also had a whole load of new topics to cover. The less technically interested can leave now with the following summary: I revised like my life depended on it for a week, and yesterday was I victorious which was a massive relief. Those who want to know more about the PHP 5.3 Zend Certified Engineer exam, read on…

Note that when I took the exam I signed a disclaimer promising not to reveal any of the questions, so please don’t ask me for them. I can best sum up my horror with the following mock question I dug up from the internet, which asked what the result of this code would be:

echo strlen(sha1(’0′, true));

Now I’ve since asked a couple of people much cleverer than me about this, and I was pleased to note that neither of them knew what the second parameter to sha1() was (even though it’s the same as the second parameter to md5(), ha!). Still, unlike me, they both guessed that it meant it’d yield the raw binary output, and as such proved they’re naturally in a position closer to passing than I was a week ago. There were more though, like what does the second parameter of count() do, and what does this output:

echo “hello123″ . 34 + 4 , 123 . 11;

Then there’s the next issue: this was a PHP 5.3 test. I started working with PHP 3, and today work with the current enterprise release on CentOS which is 5.1.6. I chose to do the 5.3 exam partially because it was the only one available, but I was also convinced of its merit because RHEL 6 has just been released with PHP 5.3(.2), so this qualification should stand up for a few years yet. The issue of course is that being a creature of habit I hadn’t used all of PHP5′s functionality, and I hadn’t even been exposed to the 5.3 software at work.

Fortunately my home server now runs Fedora 14 and so had PHP 5.3.6 which was excellent for a revision platform. Still we’ve got some (IMO very good) custom frameworks at work, which meant I hadn’t had direct exposure to PHP’s PDO, mysqli, SimpleXMLElement, DomDocument and streams functionality. I managed to hoover all this up in a week, and in doing so implemented some nifty custom scripts including a revised RSS reader to HTML module to provide work blog content on various web pages.

There were some moments during the test when I doubted its quality; for instance I needed to recall in free-form the allow_url_fopen ini variable, but at the time couldn’t remember if it was in fact called allow_url_open. In the real world under such circumstances I’d just open the /etc/php.ini file and search for allow_url_ – this would hardly cost me any time – yet the exam would only reward me for the exact answer.

Ultimately passing the test and obtaining Zend Certified Engineer status has been extremely satisfying. While I don’t think it’s a perfect measure – the very fact that I can pass (and there’s no higher merit pass) means that those who clearly know more than me can’t achieve further recognition – it does set a useful standard. In my role as an employer I would certainly take any prospective PHP engineers with ZCE status seriously.

During the various cold snaps of the past two winters the M5 has refused to start due to a completely flat battery. I don’t blame it for this: it often goes for 2 to 3 weeks without being used, and the battery is dated 2004. When I bought the 330d’s drilled discs from BMW I noticed that they were offering 30% off all batteries in February. So right at the end of the month, I took the plunge and gave them £130 for an enormous 28kg 110Ah monster.

New one on the left, oldie on the right. Same part number after 7 years – quite unusual in my experience! Due to the lack of a spare tyre, the battery fits quite neatly under the centre of the boot floor, and it takes just 3 13mm nuts to hold it in.

On other matters, I’ve found a disappointing spot of rust on the back of the car. I’m sure that wasn’t there just a few weeks ago! The paint hasn’t yielded yet (despite looking like it has in the picture below). There’s another spot elsewhere so I’ll give the car a once over and consult a body shop later in the year.

I did give the car a rather satisfying clean though, removing lots of grime from the rubber seals around the windows and within the boot lid space.

As a final thought, we’ve got a silly situation now where the 330d’s brakes look more bling than the M5′s. Given that the M5′s discs are rather worn, and I’m toying with the idea of making the M5 tackle some circuits later this year, I’ve found some tasty items on C3BMW. Discs, pads and sensor have come to £475 – I shall report back in due course!