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Today’s project…

…is to figure out how a join such as -

JOIN `build_status` ON `build_status`.`id` =
    (
    SELECT `id` FROM `build_status`
    WHERE `build_id` = `build`.`id` 
    ORDER BY `id` DESC LIMIT 1
    )

- can be expressed in SQL Alchemy.

Posted in Web/Tech.


Guttr

I’ve had some kind of web presence since 1996. (That doesn’t make me one of the old-timers; I came late to the party, compared to some.) I’ve been posting pictures online for most of that time.

Over the years, I’ve tried various approaches to online photo albums:

  • Hand-coded HTML. This proved remarkably tedious.
  • Gallery 2, which was too big & slow for the Pair servers. The memory-hog killer kept knifing it.
  • Gallery 1.5, which worked, but was ugly. (Maybe the blame for that lies with me, not with Gallery.)
  • Flickr, which is adequate. (I’m still using it, but mostly from lack of a suitable alternative.)
  • SmugMug, which I didn’t like (and about which the loyal readership complained vehemently).

For now, the photostream – 1,718 photos, 13 videos – resides on Flickr.

But the statistics I get from Flickr – view counts, referrers, etc. – make me wonder whether my Flickr account is worth the effort & expense of keeping it. As near as I can tell, the visitors to my Flickr photostream are all coming from: 1) various image-search sites (Google, Yahoo); and 2) Facebook, whenever Jennifer posts a link to one of my pictures. (Now that the AirPort disk-sharing problem has been fixed, and Jennifer has access to all [recent] pictures, I imagine links from Facebook will be less frequent.)

Sometime when I wasn’t paying attention, the role of ‘poster of family photos’ shifted from me to Jennifer. That’s ok – she’s far more social than I am – but it leaves my Flickr account with no obvious reason for existing.

Posted in General.


Memo to self

Some things I’ve learned recently, that are worth writing down somewhere so I don’t forget them:

  1. The AirPort Extreme’s USB port isn’t quite right: it’s underpowered, or something. (The explanation I’ve heard is that it was designed for printers; disks were an afterthought.) Some USB disks will work with it, others won’t. The 1TB something-or-other (LaCie?) plugged into my AirPort is – alas – in the latter category. The fix: plug a powered USB hub into the AirPort, then plug the disk into that. It’s a regrettable proliferation of wires, but it works.
  2. Synchronizing the iPhone with the MacBook is no longer such a good idea. For one thing, it causes iPhoto to download a second set of pictures (the first set being the photostream thingy that showed up with iOS 5 / iCloud / etc.). I need to save the cable for recharging, and synchronize the iPhone & MacBook with iCloud, not with each other. (Funny thing about iCloud – it’s useful. One could argue that Microsoft had the same idea, years earlier – but all the ‘softies managed to produce was the clunky, bizarre & generally useless Windows Live Mesh.)
  3. Buying the iPod Classic last August was a mistake. The ability to carry my entire music library around with me doesn’t matter as much as it used to – with iTunes in the Cloud (or whatever they call it) and a wifi-enabled device (iPhone, iPad, etc.), I can download & play the tracks I want, whenever I want to hear them. Music used to be CDs; it was hard to carry around very many of them at one time. Then, music was bits on a disk; and the problem was finding a disk big enough to carry all the bits. Now, music is the right to play bits that live off on the internet somewhere; which solves the storage problem very neatly. (There’s a risk to it – by storing your music on somebody else’s servers, under somebody else’s control, it’s that much less your music. Instead of something you own, it’s a service you’re paying for, that could – in theory – be withdrawn at any time.)

Posted in General.


Stagnation

I have various ways to post my ‘content’ (as the marketroids would say):

I have quite a bit of content spread over these four sites – except for Facebook, which I use mostly to read things posted by other people. I seldom if ever post there.

They’re old & familiar companions, and I’m getting a trifle bored with them all. I need to find replacements.

Posted in General.


Defeated by technology

Sam wants to play Locomotion, a railroad-building game. We had it on the old computer, but that one went away last month. (It’s out in the garage, waiting to be recycled.) I thought I might install it on Sam’s new computer (formerly known as Papa’s netbook); alas, there were problems.

We bought Locomotion from Atari, in February of 2008. Atari doesn’t sell it any more; their web site denies all knowledge of Locomotion. So buying a new copy (as I recall, it cost $10) isn’t an option.

Plan B: find the copy we downloaded four years ago, and install that. Before shutting down the old computer, I copied all the important files to a disk attached to the AirPort; the game is in there, somewhere. (There are occasional benefits to being a packrat.) Alas, a recent AirPort firmware update has rendered it incapable of serving files from an attached usb disk. (I gather this was not what Apple intended. Perhaps a future update will fix the problem.)

Plan C: unplug the disk from the AirPort, plug it into the netbook. Alas, the disk is in some OS X format unknown to Windows XP. It saw the disk, but refused to believe it had any files on it. (Disk Manager helpfully asked, “Delete this partition?” No, thank you.)

Plan D: unplug the disk from the netbook, plug it into the MacBook. That worked, though it took longer than I expected to copy the (500MB+) installer image. Next problem: get the file over to the netbook. After considering various geeky alternatives (AirDrop [OS X only], scp [no server on the netbook, server on the MacBook not configured], etc.) I grabbed a spare 2GB thumb drive & used that.

So – finally – I had the installer on the netbook. It ran well enough, no obvious problems, until…the activation screen. It seems the Atari activation servers still remember that we activated Locomotion on the old computer, way back when, and they won’t activate it a second time. Thank you so much, Atari and/or Digital River.

 

Posted in Genealogy.


Tableau

Yesterday morning, riding the 7E bus through a part of town to which police are occasionally summoned to investigate shots fired, I saw:

A school bus, lights on & engine running, parked in a driveway;

The screen door of the adjacent house, held open by a stern-faced, large-bellied, inexplicably shirtless middle-aged man;

Standing motionless on the front porch, a small child, wearing a dark blue hooded winter coat, staring up at the man.

The bus moved on, and the tableau receded.

Posted in General.


Postal

Sam’s Cub Scout pack visited the Neil St. Post Office this morning; I decided to tag along.

(Jake would have preferred to stay home & play Half-Life 2. He’s pretty much old enough to be home alone – for a little while – but apparently the quiet & empty house creeps him out. So if the rest of us are going somewhere, Jake comes along.)

Watching a half-dozen first-graders following the tour guide was rather entertaining: pack is certainly an apt description. They were very attentive and well-behaved, marching along in what was supposed to be – and occasionally was – a line. I think we all learned a little about how the Post Office works.

Behind the counter is a single large room (there are a few offices along the north wall). It’s full of route stations, each comprised of three shelves of cubbyholes. The mail – what couldn’t be sorted by machine – is manually distributed into the cubbyholes.

I should have taken pictures. Oops.

I was expecting more automation, rather than a bunch of people pushing baskets around & manually sorting mail. I assume all the machinery is at the Mattis Ave. Post Office, which is much larger and newer.

Either way, there’s something very last-century about trucking pieces of paper across the country. I’m surprised that so many people are still doing it.

Posted in General.


Missing

WordPress tells me I haven’t posted anything here since the 15th. The last time I neglected the daybook for so long, I ‘d been hospitalized.

Nothing like that is going on this time. (Thanks for asking!) Mostly, it’s just laziness.

That, and a tendency to post my blather elsewhere. These days, I have quite a few elsewheres to receive my blather: some public, some not.

Posted in General.


Fun with technology

Jake was in the other room, watching YouTube videos on the iMac. I was sitting at the kitchen table, pecking away at the Macbook. I was thinking of the OS X text-to-speech system – i.e., trying to remember whether it really has one – when I stumbled across the following:

NAME
       say - Convert text to audible speech

DESCRIPTION
       This tool uses the Speech Synthesis manager to convert input
       text to audible speech and either play it through the sound
       output device chosen in System Preferences or save it to an
       AIFF file.

And I wondered what would happen if I logged in to Jake’s computer (via ssh) and entered a few commands:

say Hello, Jake.
say This is your computer talking.

The results were…amusing.

Posted in Jacob William.


Music

I noticed a while ago that the iTunes store claimed to have four albums purchased (by me) but not yet downloaded; this puzzled me a bit, because iTunes also told me all four albums were in my music library, with nonzero play counts.

Maybe they’re upgrades, I thought. Amazon has done that, once or twice: spontaneously offered to download to my Kindle an updated copy of some book I’d bought months previous. I thought about downloading them, but dithered. I hadn’t noticed anything wrong with the current files; why ask for trouble by updating?

(Unnecessary ‘upgrades’ cause endless problems on Windows. I’ve learned to be a little cautious.)

This evening, I decided to download the new files. The results were…disappointing. The ‘new’ files were all 128kbps & DRM’d. The old files are 256kbps, no DRM. At least iTunes kept both, so I can delete the one & do my best to forget they ever existed.

(I suspect this is some kind of licensing squabble between Apple and the record labels: I bought the tracks during the brief-but-happy time when they were available in iTunes+ format – 256kbps, no DRM – then Apple was forced to revert them to their pre-iTunes+ state. Silly record labels, screwing your customers is not a sustainable business model….)

Posted in General.