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Monday, October 8th, 2007
Is a head I like to be in. For like a week now I've been thinking non-stop about the design of the site, how I can put features in and have the code look elegant and run quickly, what features belong in a coherent model. It gives me a real feeling of focus, like I have when I'm reading a book that I'm really absorbed in. It can be annoying not to be able to focus on other stuff, but oh well, it's pretty much worth it.
posted evening of October 8th, 2007: Respond
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When I was new to programming, in 1994 or '5 -- when OLE was a pretty freshly minted technology -- one of the projects I was working on was a way to abstract the functionality of some of my company's libraries into a common interface so that a program could load any of the libraries dynamically at runtime, based on a string key. I came up with the stunning realization that the interface could be expressed as a pure virtual C++ base class. All the libraries had to do was to export a function called "Create_x" which would instantiate an object whose class inherited interface x. This seemed to me like an awesome bit of innovation. By funny coincidence, another project I was working on around the same time was converting some of the company's VBX controls to OCX. (I don't think the term "ActiveX" had even been coined yet, but regardless we were not using it.) I wasn't reading the documentation of OLE very closely, relying on Microsoft's compiler to do most of the work for me; so it wasn't until a month or so later that I realized I had just reinvented a subset of OLE, and that I could have used OLE's framework to give my design a little more robustness. But whatever, the feeling that I was doing something new and inventive was payoff enough. So why this now? Well, I've been doing some pretty intensive design work in coming up with the database that supports this blog ("READIN 2.0", I am calling it in my head), and I have come up with a pretty cool idea. It seems innovative to me because it is something I've never heard of anyone doing; but I am not at all schooled in database design. I will write it up later on or tomorrow, and hopefully somebody will write back to me and let me know who invented it and where I can find out more.
posted evening of October 8th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, October 6th, 2007
OK so it's a little corny... I spent last night and some of this morning writing code to administer and display at random different images and quotes at the top of the blog. This is fun, but I think I am doing it mainly for the sake of getting better at writing SQL queries and PHP scripts. The administrative pages are set up pretty nice and clean, I think.
...And guess what I have now!!! -- The ability to delete posts, something I have never been able to do before; and an automated backup script for the whole site, databases and scripts and all. Currently all my data zips up to ¾M.
Ok, so instead of putting up new posts every time I add a feature, I am just going to update this post for a while. (Hopefully I will get out of programmer head sometime and be able to think about anything besides updating the site...*) Just now I wrote a really cool addition to the database which handles categorization of posts with SQL joins instead of dumb text searching. This will eventually, I am thinking, allow me to include lots of interesting (?) information in the sidebar about what category of post is being displayed, which will involve some pretty sophisticated programming.
*This morning I was trying to read Other Colors and I couldn't stop thinking about database tables! How annoying.
posted afternoon of October 6th, 2007: Respond
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Bill just told me about the Grey Lodge Occult Review which looks like a fun site. The first thing I noticed is, their current issue has a downloadable edition of Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus. Cool!
 Update: You can also read the book at scribd.
posted morning of October 6th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, October 5th, 2007
So here's what I did, see: There are thousands of links all over the internets pointing to my blog, with the address http://www.readin.com/blog/blog.asp. Well I wanted to write the site in PHP; but what to do about all those old links? As it turns out I just kept the same url and told my http server to send .asp files to php: AddHandler php5-script asp I'm pretty sure the new script is able to handle all the parameters the old script was, and to give back quite similar results for nearly any set of parameters. So hopefully all those old links are going to continue to work.
posted evening of October 5th, 2007: Respond
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Tonight I was watching A Streetcar Named Desire and thinking about All About My Mother -- as I noted before I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the source material and then watch Almodóvar's take on it again. Really nice viewing experience -- I was able to start imagining that Brando and Malden and Leigh and Hunter were members of the same circle as Almodóvar's characters. Note: Brando seems too young for his character at points. Leigh does too, especially early in the film.
posted evening of October 5th, 2007: Respond
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Hi everybody, this is my new blog. I realize it looks largely the same as my old blog, if not indistinguishable. But it's quite different under the interface, and I have got lotsa plans for ways to enhance it and improve your user experience. (Hopefully they will come to fruition sooner than the plans expressed in the last paragraph here.)
posted evening of October 5th, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, October 4th, 2007
PHP is the coolest. Update: But its lack of required declaration of variables is, well, kind of a pain.
posted evening of October 4th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, October first, 2007
Well now I've got Apache 2 and PHP 5 installed on the new server, and working nicely together. Tonight or tomorrow should see MySql working, and then I'll be ready to write a test version of this blog. Also: I built my own vim, because the one that came in the distribution did not have a lot of features I use like syntax highlighting and mouse support. Update: ...And, MySql is working! A bit of a hassle while I recompiled the latest version of php with MySql support, broke it, and eventually fixed it. (Still not quite sure what was broken or how I fixed it; but am finding the FAQ's at php.net pretty useful.) Update: Here is an update done with the new system.
posted evening of October first, 2007: Respond
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One thing the sheet music for Farewell to Peter does not include, is the fiddly bits that you hear when you listen to Natalie MacMaster playing it -- grace notes, trills, etc.. I've been trying to get some of these going on, and having a little success with it; but more success when I am not looking at the sheet music.
posted morning of October first, 2007: Respond
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