wiredfool

Ben, being a toddler, mispronounces quite a few words. I’ve always been partial to inkuu (thank-you) and apaco (helicopter). Kwiwi. Sock, with an f leads to laughs. Embarrassed laughs. Appa Dooce. Dooce should come out with a line of baby juice products, just so that toddlers can ask for it by name.

But now I’m the e-Daddy, and this is my pluter.

So, if you’re writing an e-commerce application and you need to include 3000 words of terms and conditions, it’s really not that friendly to put it in a textarea that’s 4 lines by 10 characters. To read it, you really need to copy and paste it into another application.

Sprint, this means you.

But hey, it’s a textarea in a form. It’s editable. Rule #2, If you’ve got editable terms and conditions, check to see that what’s in there is what you expect to see.

So Sprint. If service doesn’t work here, you’ve just agreed to pay me $1000 and send me a pony. I agreed to it, and you accepted the agreement.

One of the things that most interests me about the Mac/Intel switch, apart from the promise of new shiny toys, is that I may finally tame some of the mass of cables and cpus in my office and consolidate the quantity of machines I’m running. Currently, I’m running windows for some client development, linux for server development, and the mac for my normal day to day desktop. Right now, due to historical and other details, that manifests itself in a loud, seldom used windows box, a rather quiet headless linux box, and a nearly silent mac mini with a nice display. Oddly enough, the only one that’s truly indespensible is probably the windows box.

Until last week, there was one piece of the puzzle missing, and that was the ability to actually run the other operating systems on Intel macs. Apple released Boot Camp, a way to dual boot their systems, and Parallels released a (beta) of their virtualization software using OSX as the host operating system. There are rumors of VMWare entering the fray as well, and I see no reason why they wouldn’t be able to do it as well.

Boot Camp is important, since it’s Apple’s affirmation that they’re serious avout having Windows run on their systems. Parallels’ system is at the very least a Holy Grail Shaped Beacon, since it enables simultaneous usage of linux, osx and windows on one cpu, without such 20th century drawbacks as rebooting. While it’s nice that Windows can run on bare metal macs, I just don’t see myself rebooting for it.

Personally, I’d expect to remove 2 mini towers at about 200 watts each, one CRT monitor, and a keyboard and mouse from my desk, not to mention the cables.

There are only a few technical questions left for my usage, what’s the performance like under load, what do I need for memory in the host system, and how do usb and serial connections appear to the hosted virtual machines. That woudl then leave thae all important funding question, but I’m hoping that I can swing that. But I’m guessing that I’d want to take two, a mini and a laptop, so that one could go on the road with me.

If we had a garden that was missing due to browsing, as opposed having a garden missing for other reasons, I think that this might be one of the culprits.

There are also bunnies, but I haven’t gotten a picture of them yet. And goats, but they’re generally on a leash.

You may have noticed the lack of pictures lately — between not taking many and not having my home network in one location anymore it’s not as easy to upload. Those two are related, tangentially anyway.

The last two weeks have been filled with moving to Whidbey Island and getting the house in Ballard ready to sell. One weekend of painting, without the rest of the family, One weekend of packing and moving, then one more weekend of painting, cleaning, and moving. This is the first day in two weeks that one of us hasn’t crossed the ferry.

Then in a sign that something is right in our timing, the tulips in the front garden came out in the couple of days before we listed the house, and the dogwood blossoms (seen in the header banner here) aren’t far behind. It’s on the market now, and people seem interested in it.

I’ve known about some work coordinating Postgresql and XML for years, looking at that post and it’s predecessor, it’s been in the works for at least 3 or 4 years. While I wasn’t watching, it made it into the Postgres standard distribution in the contrib section.

The general idea is that you can store an xml blob in the database, and then use it as semi-structured information for queries and the like. It’s not relational, normalized, nor is it a replacement for actually putting things into rows and columns like a database should be, but I actually have a use for it. (It can also be used to do XSLT transforms for output, but that’s not my problem now).

For a while, I’ve been caching complete results in an xml format in my database after parsing out the bits that I need — stuff that I’m not immediately interested in that might have fields added to it as time goes on, but that’s really not worth pulling out into it’s own relational model right now. Occasionally, it’s nice to be able to do some ad hoc mining of those blobs to see how well things have been performing, and that’s where some XML parsing in the database really beats eyeball or regex parsing.

So now that I’ve just been saving these chunks, I can issue a query like:

select id, amount, score 
   from xpath_table('id', 'xml_string', 'results', 
      'amount/value|amount/score', '1=1')
   as results (id int, amount text, score text)

and see two fields from deep into the xml pulled out for me to filter and join against.

This is one of those cases where there is an impedance mismatch between relatively dynamic data and static sql modeling — similar to the impedance mismatches that make object relational mapping so much fun. This sort of thing has been described in terms of type safety and compile time type checking. Often times you just need a way to defer parsing or understanding chunks of data until later. That article mentions blobs of XML in interfaces, this one is in data storage.

Imagemagick is really wonderful, except when it’s not.

~$ convert -density 200x200 -units PixelsPerInch test.png test.tif
~$ convert -units PixelsPerInch -density 200x200 test.png test.tif

These two commands do different things, the first gives 200 pixels per centimeter, the second gives 200 pixels per inch. (This with 6.1.7, I’ve seen a bug report for 6.2.x as well.)

• The microwave really kills the wifi performance of the mp3 player. Constant skipping, for 4 minutes at least.
• Painting bathrooms is a pain. Prep is half the battle, the other half is cutting in all the random corners, edges, and behind the toilet. It’s about 1 hour of hand painting to 10 minutes of rolling.
• Purdy roller covers work better than the cheap ones from Home Depot.
• Low/No VOC paint is worth every penny. I like Safecoat from the Environmental Home Center
• I have honey cream highlights in my hair now. From painting myself in a closet.
• Orange peel texture hides so many surface imperfections it’s not even funny. Now I know why it’s used in inexpensive new construction.
• It’s unbelievable how much I can get done when there’s not a toddler in the house.