August 2008 Archives

Poor Sarah Palin.

John McCain chose her as his vice-presidential candidate, and now she's being attacked by just about everyone. Republicans don't like her, Democrats don't like her, the bloviators are digging up embarrassing pictures from her time in college.

I hadn't planned on voting for John McCain, so I don't really care who his vice president might be. But that doesn't mean I want to spend the next two months watching this woman dragged through the mud.

Please, can we have a campaign about issues, and ideas? Not about character assassination?

It works. Yay. This is what I did:

Downloaded MySQLdb from http://mysql-python.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge is really disorganized & clunky. Like most open-source projects, it's half-implemented and under-documented. The standard open-source response is: Feel free to jump in and help! Um. No, thanks. I have my own projects to work on, that are considerably more interesting to me.)

In _mysql.c, change

#ifndef uint
#define uint unsigned int
#endif

to

#if 0 && !defined(uint)
/* removed due to duplicate type error building on leopard */
#define uint unsigned int
#endif

The build & install as usual:

python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install

Other people have reported that they had to edit the MySQLdb site.cfg file before building, and create a symlink after installing -

sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/ /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql

- but I didn't do either of those, and it seems to work anyway.

My Python web project needs MySQLdb, so it can talk to the database. But it seems MySQLdb 1.2.2 has to be tweaked a bit to install on OS X 10.5.

The MacPorts setup on mork is full of duplicate libraries that can't be uninstalled. I'm inclined to wipe the whole MacPorts setup and start over.

But to do that, I need to back up & restore the subversion repository. Which means I need to find the subversion repository. I thought it was in /svn, but that directory doesn't exist. I can't figure out how to persuade the svn client to tell me where it is, either.

Feeling very stupid this morning, I am....

Update: My favorite unix command to the rescue:

find / -name 'svn' -print

...and the previously-hidden repository turns out to be in /Users/Shared/svn.

Update #2: I had forgotten that OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) includes Python 2.5.1 and subversion, which means that I probably don't need the MacPorts foolery any more. And that's a good thing.

I poked around a bit just now in the Culver's online menu, to find something to eat when the kids & I go there for lunch (which we'll be doing today). Clearly, healthy eating was not a concern when the Culver's people were designing their meals.

The numbers are mind-boggling. The four-piece chicken dinner has 2,185 calories and 3,806 mg of sodium: that's more calories, and almost twice as much sodium, as an average person should consume in an entire day.

There are a few things on the Culver's menu that aren't so bad: the Garden Fresco salad with raspberry vinaigrette dressing is only 280 calories and 520 mg of sodium.

I think I'll be having that today....

The big pile of Python code that I've been fooling with lately - the whole Model / View / Controller page-rendering business that may or may not ever see the light of day - actually works.

I updated the copy checked out in ~/Sites on the iMac, then (over on mindy) pointed Internet Explorer at it; and ran into a file-permissions problem: the web server isn't running as me, so it can't write to ~/Sites. Duh.

Ultimately, there will be web-server foolery so the script does run as me; in the meantime, that code is commented out.

I hit refresh in the web browser, and...kaBOOM: module 'os' is not defined. Oops, forgot an import statement. Easily fixed.

Refresh again, and...kaBOOM: global 'view' is not defined. Oops, should have been self.view. Also easily fixed.

Refresh again, and...it worked. I got back a page, albeit one with most of the callbacks unevaluated (since the view object doesn't know yet about page titles, subtitles, footers, that sort of thing.

But simply to return an XHTML document requires quite a bit of code to work properly. So I'm optimistic.

Will I ever use this code for anything? Possibly. If I ever finish it, I'll probably use it on the iMac, as a front end to my various databases. And maybe - just maybe - it'll end up running http://patrick-rice.net/. But that's far in the future. For now, it's just a fun brain-stretcher: an excuse to learn about the model / view / controller architecture.

A commit message I wrote this morning:

In theory, the basic flow of control is now complete:

page.cgi creates the request & response objects, which are the incoming page request & our response;

page.cgi creates the controller object, as directed by the request;

the controller creates the model and view objects;

the view object creates a template object;

the template object renders the response page, by making callbacks to the view object (which can then call the model and/or controller as necessary);

template.render() returns a (content-type, content) tuple to view.render(), which returns it to the controller's handleXXX() method, which assigns it to the response object's content property;

page.cgi then calls response.send() to send the response to the client.

The bits go round & round & come out here....

I've been fooling with this code for a good long while now. It's shaping up nicely. (Someday I might actually try to run it.)

I just finished reading a transcript of Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Denver. (Strange that Obama gave his speech at a stadium in Denver, rather than wherever the convention was held. [Where was the convention? Neither the newsdroids nor the Democrats seem willing to pin it down more precisely than "in Denver".]) Very inspiring.

I'm sure the professional bloviators will be outraged by just about everything Obama said, with the possible exception of -

Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America.

- but the bloviators have no credibility with me.

It's not surprising that someone like Rush Limbaugh can sit at a microphone for three hours a day and make millions, with nothing to give the nation but fear and anger. But I'm not buying what Limbaugh is selling.

I'd rather listen to someone who inspires, who challenges. Someone who is realistic about the nation's problems - the real problems, not the wedge issues dreamed up by professional campaign manipulators to distract voters - but who is optimistic that with a little work we can solve them.

As Obama said,

America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.

That's why I'll be voting for Obama, come November.

(I know, I know. Nobody cares what I think.)

Update: Jennifer tells me that the convention was held at the Pepsi Center, http://www.pepsicenter.com/. (Jennifer is usually better-informed than I am about things....)

Sam is trying very hard to change his schedule from a short afternoon nap and an early bedtime to a long nap and bedtime two hours later.

This is rather unfortunate, because he keeps poor Jacob awake. And Jake needs his sleep, because - unlike Sam - he has to get up early and go to school.

I think tomorrow young Mr. Sam's afternoon nap will be brief - if he gets one at all. I'd rather deal with a misbehaving little boy at 3:00pm than at 10:00pm.

Dear Cow-orkers:

Is it too much to ask that, before committing your code, you make sure it compiles?

Apparently so.

Now & then I visit the sites in my Secondary folder, just to refresh the login cookies and see whether anything's changed / broken. Today I visited the Live Mesh site.

Live Mesh is still very pretty. And I still can't think of any use for it.

The 'softies keep hammering the point that Live Mesh isn't just file synchronization! but - so far as I can tell - neither they nor anyone else has released any application or service for Live Mesh that isn't file synchronization.

I have no need to synchronize mere files across the five computers - three at work, two at home - that I use just about every day. I need to synchronize my bookmarks, address book, calendar and to-do list. I want the same information to show up on all five machines, regardless of the particular applications I'm using on each. I want to make changes on any of the five machines, and have my changes automatically propagate to the other four.

Can Live Mesh do that? Alas, it cannot.

CDW will sell me an 8GB thumb drive for only $42. That's 60% more storage than Live Mesh offers, and more portability. (Less collaboration, I suppose. But I need collaboration even less than I need file synchronization.) So what's the point of Live Mesh?

USGS reports a magnitude 6.1 earthquake, off the northern tip of Vancouver Island.

One hopes penmachine and piranha are all right....

I'm burning some vacation, today & tomorrow: stretching the Labor Day weekend out to five days, because three days just isn't enough.

Grandparents are coming over from Normal this afternoon.

The Plaxo calendar thingy tells me that I have a mere 8,012 days remaining until retirement.

That's assuming Congress doesn't raise the retirement age (again) to bail out Social Security.

1. Every now & then, the iMac loses its FireWire devices: the 250GB disk disappears from the Finder, and iTunes doesn't notice when I dock the iPod. I have to reboot to get them back.
2. Sometimes, when I sit down at the iMac, there's a message box waiting for me: Something bad happened with Time Machine. No, I won't tell you what it was. Er...Apple? That's pretty bad UI design. At the very least, give me an error code I can look up online.

My close, personal friend Gary H. at Pair says:

As requested, you have been upgraded to MT Pro 4.21. You will be prompted to complete the upgrade process the next time you log into the MT Dashboard.

Also, it is strongly encouraged by Six Apart to disable the WidgetManager plugin once logged in, since this plugin is now integrated into Movable Type.

Let us know if you need any further assistance.

The upgrade went off without a hitch. The WidgetManager thingy was automatically disabled by the upgrade, so I don't know why Gary wanted me to manually disable it.

Supposedly, MT 4.21 is oodles faster at things like publishing. Time to find out....

Jacob seems to have caught a cold somewhere. All day he was sniffling & blowing his nose.

It seems like there's more crud in the air lately, so it might be just allergies. At bedtime we dosed him with some benadryl, just in case.

Poor little guy.

I have accounts on blippr, brightkite and NoiseRiver. I won't be using them much any more.

blippr is a micro-review site: express an opinion on books, movies, music, etc., in 140 characters or less. Curiously, there's no way to post a micro-review of blippr itself.

brightkite is a location-tracking site: tell it where you are (i.e., street address, or latitude / longitude), and it will point out nearby friends and/or interesting things to do. Generally speaking, I'm either at work, at home, or in transit between the two. And I'm not about to post my home address to brightkite. So the whole thing's rather pointless.

NoiseRiver is...sort of like FriendFeed, only different. How? If I knew that, I might keep using NoiseRiver. (I'm amused that NoiseRiver keeps telling me my own posts aren't very interesting.)

So all three have moved to the Secondary section of my bookmarks: where I keep bookmarks I don't intend to use very often (if at all) but haven't yet decided to delete. Also in the Secondary section: 23, identi.ca, kwippy, last.fm, lifetick, Live Mesh, mixin, Plaxo, Pownce, Social Oyster, socialmedian, swurl, tumblr and zigtag.

Um. Do you think maybe I got a little carried away?

Sam is up early from his nap, and - judging by the sounds I'm hearing on the monitor - is not very happy about it.

Poor little guy.

Update: Poor Mr. Sam, woke up with a bad case of the screaming crazies. Fortunately, Jake & I found something to soothe him:

Handy thing, YouTube....

Jennifer's off at a sewing day. Sam's taking a nap (maybe). Jake & I played numerous games of Age of Empires, now he's watching television and I'm messing about on Jennifer's computer.

Sputnik reports 84°, which doesn't sound very uncomfortable but nevertheless is keeping me indoors today.

Poked at some old Python code earlier today; might poke at it some more now.

Finished - last night, somewhat later than was perhaps wise - reading The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume 5: The Eye of the Sibyl by Philip K. Dick.

The stores in this series are arranged in chronological order by date of composition (as opposed to date of first publication), so volume five contains the last stories Dick wrote. The usual themes are still present - reality vs. delusion, that sort of thing - but they're considerably darker & more disturbing than his earlier stories.

I still have a few unread Dick novels in my library, and I've seen a few more in bookstores that I haven't bought yet, so I'm not quite finished with the collected works of Philip K. Dick. But I imagine one of these days I will be.

The 33rd Annual Urbana Sweet Corn Festival is this weekend: 5:00pm - 11:00pm tonight, 11:00am - 11:00pm Saturday.

Closing the festival, with a two-hour set on the main stage starting at 9:00pm Saturday, is...Foghat.

I've asked Pair to upgrade the daybook from MT 4.1 to the recently-released 4.21.

Supposedly the new version is oodles faster than its predecessor. If true, that will be a most welcome improvement: MT on Pair's machines is painfully slow.

Usually Pair is quite prompt in responding to support requests. (I hope they wait until I've saved this post....)

Mindy had a bit of hardware trouble today: apparently Jennifer & Sam were enjoying a spirited game of basketball when Jennifer's water glass was dumped onto the keyboard.

A watery keyboard displays amusingly poltergeist-ish behavior: as if tiny homunculi were jumping up & down on the keys. And since mindy's keyboard is full of special-purpose keys - media player controls, sleep / shutdown / etc. - the homunculi could cause even more mischief than usual.

So mindy is making do with mork's old USB keyboard while hers dries out. (At least it was just water. If it had been something sugary or syrupy - juice, soda, that sort of thing - we'd have real problems.)

My supply of predisone is dwindling rapidly: I have only three or four days left on the prescription I received the week before last.

I rather enjoyed my first week of triple-dose prednisone: no aching body parts, lots of energy, and an excess of personality that Jennifer found amusing.

Alas, all good things must end. Today my left knee is back to its usual creaky, protesting self; and my demeanor has returned to its usual dour, mildly-grumpy state.

At least my neck feels a little better.

Since I first set up the iMac, two and a half years ago, it's accumulated various peripherals: a UPS, two disks, a USB hub, an iPod dock, etc., etc. I was rather careless about hooking up all these new toys, plugging them in wherever happened to be convenient at the time.

The result of my indiscipline: a prodigious rat's-nest of cables & power cords, buried under a two-year-thick layer of dust. And half of it wasn't even plugged into the UPS.

Today I said to myself, Something must be done.

I unplugged all the power cords, disconnected all the USB & FireWire cables, gave everything a thorough dusting - there were dust bunnies on the desk, behind the computer (euww....) - then reassembled it all, more carefully than the first time.

The DSL modem, the AirPort and the AirPort disk are plugged into one power strip; the iMac & its disks are plugged into a second power strip; and it's all plugged into the UPS.

The UPS isn't very burly to begin with, and running all these gizmos means the battery won't last more than a few minutes if/when there's a power failure; but the purpose of the UPS is just to smooth over the occasional brief power drop, and/or gracefully shut down the iMac should the lights stay out too long. It's good enough for that.

My desk is neat and tidy once more. And everything still works, too!

(At some point, Jennifer's computer will get a UPS. But I seem to have spent all my spare cash this month on the sidekick and some new clothes, so the UPS project is on hold for a while.)

I've had my new phone - I think I'm supposed to refer to it as a 'device', but have some weird mental block about using that term - for about two weeks now. Some further thoughts:

The camera is excellent. It's easy to take a picture & shoot it up to Flickr, so I've been doing that quite a bit.

Email works pretty well, but there are problems. The Sidekick doesn't seem to respect (or modify) the server-side message status (i.e., read / unread), so every time it polls the server it downloads all the messages again. And under certain as yet poorly-understood circumstances, it will download a new copy of each message every time. I checked my inbox the other day, and found two dozen copies of every message.

The web browser works well. The sites I've visited are quite readable, even on the (relatively small) screen. But the only way to get bookmarks into the browser is by entering them on the phone - there's no web-browser section in the desktop interface. I've been too lazy to do the necessary data entry, so my on-the-bus browsing is limited to MSNBC and the Onion.

I've been running into quite a few broken links on the My T-Mobile page. (I should make a list of these, then find out where to report them.)

Sometimes the download catalog works, sometimes it doesn't. I try to look at an application, and get an endless 'downloading information...' (or whatever) dialog. I did manage to buy the terminal client, which has proved quite useful.

I haven't tried the media player yet, mainly because I have nothing on the phone to play. (Getting iTunes to play nicely with the phone seems like it would be more trouble than it's worth.) Maybe there's a way to have podcasts downloaded automatically, so I can listen to them while walking, or on the bus. Must RTFM a little on this one.

It takes two or three days for the battery meter to drop low enough that I get nervous about losing power & plug it in for a recharge. I need to let it run all the way down, once or twice, just to see how long the battery really lasts.

I'm always worrying about scratching the screen. I need to find some kind of screen protector / sleeve / case. T-Mobile sells cases, but they're too big and bulky. I don't want a huge leather phone purse, I want something minimal that still protects the screen.

I haven't figured out yet how to synchronize the sidekick's address book / calendar / etc. with the ones I already have (on the iMac, or online). I want all of this information available on the phone (so it's available even when I can't get a network connection), but I don't want to maintain two separate databases.

To summarize: I like it. I'm glad I bought it.

There are rumors that Microsoft bought Danger so it could combine the Sidekick with the Zune and produce an iPhone killer. I hope not. Microsoft+Danger makes me think of the jokes people used to tell about Taligent:

Q. What do you get when you cross Apple with IBM?
A. IBM!

I like my sidekick, but I worry that by the time my contract is up - in the Clarkeian year of 2010 - the latest models will have been thoroughly ruined by the 'softies.

Jennifer reports that around noon today, Sam announced, "I'm hungry." He ate a good lunch, and a good dinner.

He's been feisty, but also tired.

We're quietly hopeful that our second encounter with this brief - but messy - illness is nearing its end. (The big question now: Who's next? Jennifer? Me?)

I've been walking a bit, these last few months: fresh air, exercise, lots cheaper than feeding Mr. Explorer.

(This morning I walked five miles. Why? Because I can.)

My pedestrianism has a curious effect on motorists: they assume that everybody drives a car, that I'm walking only because something bad has happened to my car, and that I'll welcome a free ride in their car.

Seeing me trudging down the sidewalk challenges their world-view, or something. For their own peace of mind, they're compelled to get me back inside a car, where I belong. (I suppose God made feet so we wouldn't have work the brake & accelerator with our hands.)

I have a hard time persuading these well-meaning (but confused) individuals that I'd rather walk. Sometimes I have to say No, thanks, I'm fine three or four times before they give up. This is particularly awkward when it happens in the middle of a busy intersection, with traffic piling up in all directions.

I feel ungrateful for wishing they'd all just let me walk.

Today started early, and with a bang: Sam woke up at 5:00am, throwing up.

Semi-digested peaches all over himself, all over the bed. Euww....

Poor little guy.

Foggy this morning, visibility a quarter-mile or so. Walking around in it, you can feel the mist against your skin. Temperature a bit on the cool side, but not intolerably so.

(I must remember to buy myself a new jacket for autumn. Last year's model surely fits no longer.)

Jake's back in school today. Let us hope he stays there.

Poor Mr. Jake, he's picked up some germs.

Shortly after midnight last night, he woke up Jennifer - he never wakes me up any more; I wonder why - to announce that he was going to throw up. Which he did.

Jennifer got him cleaned up and tucked him back into bed, this time with a bucket (an old coffee can), in case he needed to throw up again.

Which he did, three or four times more over the rest of the night. (He was very neat & tidy about it: no new bedclothes were requred.)

This morning, Jennifer took Jake to Convenient Care, while Sam & I stayed home. (One of us wrote some Python, the other one watched Cars. See if you can guess who did what.)

The diagnosis: the five-minute strep test came back negative, and he had no fever. So no amoxicillin this time. We're to keep him on a bland diet for the rest of today; if he keeps everything down, then tomorrow he'll be back in school.

(By a curious coincidence, yesterday at school Jake's teacher presented a lesson on bucket fillers. Jake surely was a bucket filler last night....)

Meeting the other grandparents - plus a to-be-determined selection of aunts,uncles and/or cousins - in Monticello today, for a visit to the Monticello Railway Museum.

There will be pictures, I'm sure.

Sam likes to wear Mama & Papa's shoes. Just now, he came clumping up to me with Jennifer's sandals on his feet.

"Sneakers!" Sam said.

"Are you wearing shoes?" I said.

"Is not shoes, is sneakers!"

This year's birthday present: a Sidekick 2008, from T-Mobile.

First impressions: smaller than the previous models (which all seemed a bit large), solid construction (I'm not worried about breaking it). The screen is big & bright, with very good color. The keyboard is surprisingly usable, despite its tiny size.

The Sidekick does email, which is very cool. In theory, I can hook it up to Pair's IMAP server, and check my mail from anywhere, but I haven't tried this yet.

It also has a pretty decent web browser, so I've been loading it up with bookmarks for the mobile versions of my most-visited sites: Google Calendar, Twitter, etc.

And it takes pretty good pictures. They're not as good as a regular camera, and perhaps they're not as good as the ones taken by über-expensive phones like the Blackberry Curve; but compared to my old phone they're a huge improvement.

(It records video, sort of: 176×144, very blocky & overcompressed. Usable in a pinch, I suppose.)

The Sidekick is a fairly complex device. But the user interface is well-designed, and very well organized. The menus are very clear, and there are hints everywhere for keyboard shortcuts and miscellaneous help. Somebody put some serious thought into the questions users might have at any point in the system, and made sure the answers were right there.

The Sidekick is complex, but discoverable. It rewards exploration. All in all, it's a great phone.

Two glitches so far:

• I can't send SMS messages to the local bus-tracker: I get Access Denied, every time. (But there's a web equivalent that works even better, so I don't really care.)
• I managed to scrozzle the address book last night: so far as I could tell, the data was still there, but it wouldn't display correctly. Fortunately, a soft reset (just press @-1-0 on the keyboard) cleared that right up.

I'm not sure it's possible to operate the Sidekick one-handed. Certainly I haven't figured out how.

I've been reading reviews of the Sidekick on various web sites: all negative, most rather harsh & mean-spirited. Typical reviewer complaints:

• It has too many buttons. (I like the buttons. They're a bit overwhelming at first, but ultimately quite useful.)
• The camera is no good. (It's not a Nikon D80. You won't be making poster-sized prints of Sidekick pictures. But for uploading to Flickr, Sidekick photos are great.)
• It's a toy for teenagers & twentysomethings, not a serious telephone for serious grownups. (That's a criticism of T-Mobile's marketing, not of the Sidekick.)
• It's not an iPhone. (True enough. But neither is it a hovercraft.)

I like my Sidekick. Great features, great price.

The other day, I was in the kitchen. Sam was in the bedroom, watching television. Suddenly, from the bedroom came a loud T H U M P. It was louder than the usual dropped-something thump, louder even than the fell-out-of-bed thump from Sam's early days in his big-boy bed. Convinced that Sam had managed to pull down the television on himself, I rushed in to investigate.

Sam was standing in front of the television, holding Jennifer's handweights. "I'm very strong!" he announced, then dropped them.

T H U M P.

Silly boy.

Also on my list of Things in Need of Fixing: my neck. It's been bothering me for a week or two, the same symptoms as last year.

So I called Mr. Doctor - I think he was Doctor #2 in last year's numbering scheme, but I'm too lazy to go look it up - and snagged an 8:30am appointment. (Just barely possible, given Jake's school schedule and my own carlessness. I took the bus, and arrived just in time.)

The doctor did a brief exam, then offered me a choice: more injections, or some pills. Hm... Injections: unpleasant, expensive. Pills: cheap, but perhaps less effective. What to do, what to do....

I went for the pills.

In theory, fifteen days from now - when I run out of pills - my neck will be much improved. If not, there's always the injections.

I dropped the Explorer off at Norris Tire & Auto yesterday morning, so they could investigate the disturbing clunky / rattly noise that the front end has been making for the last few weeks.

But Wednesday was a busy day at Norris, so Mr. Explorer had a sleepover. (I don't need a car nearly as much now as I used to.) This morning, they called with the diagnosis:

1. The exhaust heat shield - apparently intended to prevent brush fires when driving off-road, and not involved in atmospheric re-entry following Sunday drives to low Earth orbit - had worked loose. There's no point in having one of these if - like me - your driving is confined to paved roads, so the Norris people removed them.
2. And - surprise! - the Ford of Champaign mechanics were right: the transmission pan gasket really was leaking. So the Norris people replaced it.

Total repair bill: $135. (About half what Ford of Champaign would have charged just to replace the pan gasket.)

I used the T-Mobile feedback form to grumble about the 'overnight shipping' that takes two days to arrive; and got a reply:

I have issued a credit for the shipping charges. You should see the credit back in 7-10 business days.

Well, that was nice of them. (Now if only the UPS truck would find its way to Stately Rice Manor & deliver my new phone.)

Happiness is when the UPS package tracker says:

URBANA, IL, US 08/06/2008 7:28 A.M. OUT FOR DELIVERY

Today we packed away the crib, for the last time. Jake slept in it, Sam slept in it - it was a good crib, and it served us well. But there won't be any more babies in the house until the grandchildren (which - one hopes! - won't be arriving any time soon), and so it goes.

After an entire day of stonewalling, around 5:00pm the T-Mobile order-status page finally coughed up a UPS tracking number for the phone I ordered yesterday.

Then it was UPS' turn to stonewall. No such package, said the UPS shipment tracking page.

After two hours of that, finally UPS acknowledged the existence of my package - and revealed that my phone, which I ordered yesterday before the 6:00pm overnight-delivery cutoff and for which I paid extra to get overnight delivery - is still in Dallas.

Thanks bunches, T-Mobile & UPS.

I made Jennifer laugh today, by saying, "I'm forty-five now, so I'm ready for my mid-life crisis. All I need is a convertible and a toupee; I've already got the trophy wife."

NOAA reports that as of 4:00pm, the temperature in Champaign was 89°, and the dewpoint was 79°.

Usually a dewpoint that high means some heavy weather is on the way, but the current radar is quite empty of excitement.

On this date in 1963, in an Army hospital in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, I was born.

A somewhat klunky & tedious calculation in Mathematica -

In[1]:= b = AbsoluteTime[DateList["4 august 1963"]]
Out[1]= 2006640000
In[2]:= n = AbsoluteTime[DateList[]]
Out[2]= 3.4268239815312500*10^9
In[3]:= (n - b) / (60 * 60 * 24)
Out[3]= 16437.314601056134

- tells me that I am 16,437 days old. (Surely there's a days-between-dates function in Mathematica. And surely it is described in the documentation. But I couldn't find it.)

Birthday presents include: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.; a selection of tasty coffee (decaf!); and a big pile of cash that I imagine I'll be spending soon.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

(I've been doing fairly well in recent years, keeping up with Mr. Dozois' annual collections. This is largely through the efforts of Jennifer, Jake & Sam, who find them an irresistible choice for Father's Day or my birthday.)

There are two kinds of children's toys:

1. The kind with a thousand pieces: Legos, Lincoln Logs, that sort of thing. Kids play with these by dumping them on the floor, then kicking them under the furniture.
2. The battery-powered kind, with motion sensors that trigger ten or fifteen minutes of ear-splitting racket whenever they're touched. Kids play with these by nudging them just enough to trigger the ear-splitting racket, then leaving the room.

Jake & Sam have quite a few of each....

Dear Senior Developer:

Parameter validation is good.

Parameter validation works.

Consider using it sometime.

Thank you.

Grandparents coming over from Normal today, to visit the grandchildren.

I've been seeing a bit of chatter recently about http://www.socialoyster.com/, so I thought I'd take a look.

SocialOyster is a lifestreaming service. That's the new buzzword for sites that aggregate all your other online accounts - Flickr, Twitter, etc. - into a single comprehensive view. FriendFeed does lifestreaming. So does Swurl. I'm sure there are others.

Alas, SocialOyster doesn't work very well.

I created an account - they're free - and tried to add my Flickr account to my 'oysterline'. (Why the emphasis on shellfish?) It found somebody else's Flickr account, and added that. And there seems to be no way to modify or remove entries from one's oysterline, so I'm stuck looking at PhatZephyrRide's pictures until the SocialOyster developers - should we call them CodeOysters? - get around to implementing that (rather obvious & important) feature.

(The whole idea of the oysterline seems a bit off. It groups the various items into columns, one column per site: this column for Flickr, this column for Twitter, etc. The whole idea of a stream is to present everything, in chronological order.)

I don't suppose I'll be using SocialOyster much. Maybe I should just delete my account now, and get it over with.

Installed some software on Jennifer's computer:

From Microsoft Update: Microsoft's new Desktop Search thingy. It might prove useful.

From Apple: a new version of iTunes. Includes support for expensive consumer-electronics devices that we don't own. (Which suggests this update wasn't as necessary as Apple said it was.)

From Evernote: the Windows desktop client. Synchronizes with my online Evernote account, which has exactly four notes in it (one of which is the welcome-to-Evernote note that comes free with each new account).

There's been much chatter online about the coolness & usefulness of Evernote, but I'm still trying to find a use for it. I take notes, all the time; but somehow taking them online is just alien to me.

Some people say that if two full moons fall in the same month, the second one is called a blue moon. (This isn't quite correct, by the way.)

But what about new moons? Google Calendar tells me that this month will have two new moons: today (with a bonus solar eclipse), and on the 30th. Is there a special name for the second new moon in a month?

The nice folks over at Lifehacker posted an article, "Forget the iPhone - The iPod Touch is Good Enough", which offered up two useful things I didn't know were possible to do via SMS: create events on Google Calendar and create tasks on Remember the Milk.

I created a Google Calendar event easily enough, but I can't manage to create tasks on Remember the Milk. It's a bit kludgy, in that you have to send a Twitter direct message to Remember the Milk's Twitter account, instead of directly to Remember the Milk, so I'm not surprised that it isn't working.

I don't know how to fix it, though. Either my messages aren't getting through to Twitter (which has happened before), or Remember the Milk isn't receiving them, or I haven't authorized my phone with RTM. Or something. The complete lack of feedback makes diagnosis difficult: I compose my message, I hit Send, and...nothing. No confirmation, no error message.

Argh.

A while ago - two years ago - I experimented with cooking oatmeal overnight in the crockpot: start it before bedtime, wake up to zero-effort oaty goodness for breakfast.

Alas, there were problems.

I had the notion to try again this week. It's important to eat a healthy, filling breakfast every morning, but equally important not to spend very much time on preparing one.

I found quite a few discussions online of overnight oatmeal; all could be summarized as follows:

Tastes great!
It burns. Every time.
If you burn it, you're an idiot. And your crockpot is too big.
My crockpot is just fine, and I'm not an idiot!
Then why do you keep burning your oatmeal? Idiot.
etc.
etc.
etc.

The general consensus was to leave out the dried fruit and half&half, use a lot more water than the recipe calls for, and reduce the cooking time. So I tried that.

And it worked. Yay.

Eight hours of cooking time is still a bit long, though: I get a layer of overcooked, not-quite-burned (but still inedible) oatmeal sludge caked to the bottom of the crockpot. Perhaps I should get a timer - like the one we use for the Christmas tree - to turn on the crockpot around 1:00am or 2:00am.

(Oatmeal with fruit - blueberries, raspberries, etc. - stirred in is very tasty. And pretty darn healthy, too.)

Every few years, the external surface of Wolfram Research World HQ needs extensive repairs.