READIN

Monday, October 15th, 2007

🦋 Venus in Exile

Beginning on page 207, Wendy Steiner's Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art features some discussion of the philosophy of being in The Blue Flower.

posted afternoon of October 15th, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, October 14th, 2007

🦋 Rockabilly

Bob and I went over to Menzel Violins in Livingston today and listened to Eugene Chrysler's band. Great stuff -- Skip, playing the pedal steel, was just phenomenal, and the other musicians were excellent too. Unfortunately no fiddler was with them.

posted evening of October 14th, 2007: Respond
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🦋 There is no such concept as a thing in itself!

We can sing beneath his window, "We know what is wrong with your system....There is no place in it, no place for love."

I seem to have a poor memory for schools of thought. Like right now I am reading The Blue Flower, about the life of German Romantic poet Novalis; and I find that I can summon up only a very hazy memory of the history of German Romanticism, which I know I studied in two classes in college; and furthermore that I don't even really know what kind of thinking "Romanticism" is. (I think it must be similar to "Idealism" which I have a little bit of a handle on, but I'm not sure how they differ.*) I remember when I was 18, that my sort-of-mentor Jim Higgs told me I was a romantic thinker, and that I read some Romantics to try and grasp what he was telling me about myself. But if I ever was successful in that it has escaped me in the meantime.

So probably I should school myself a bit in the meanings of terms, as I approach this book. The book seems like a lot of fun. I am liking the descriptions of Friedrich's family and school life, and nodding and smiling with recognition at certain passages -- notably the youthful Fritz's insistence that "the body is not flesh, but the same stuff as the soul," and later his statement to Schlegel that "the golden age would return, and that there was nothing evil in the world."

*Interestingly Novalis is the top hit that comes back from a Wiki search for "Romantic idealism"...

posted evening of October 14th, 2007: 3 responses
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Saturday, October 13th, 2007

🦋 Our first gig

Janis and Bob and I have been jamming together for about 4 years now; today we are playing our first actual gig! At the Meeker St. block party, starting in about an hour. Exciting, we have a set list and everything!

posted morning of October 13th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, October 12th, 2007

🦋 Passed the first test

So in my log I see a bunch of requests today for

GET blog/?k=<keyword> \'\'
and(char(94)+user+char(94))>0 and 
\'\'\'\'=\'\'

where <keyword> is one of the keywords that links exist to on the site; and also I see that my script translated those requests to

<keyword> \\\'\\\' 
and(char(94)+user+char(94))>0 and 
\\\'\\\'\\\'\\\'=\\\'\\\'

(Note: but while editing this post I realized there is a different kind of escaping that you have to do when you are writing to forms -- the < and > signs were translating to markup in my inputs. Funny I never ran into that problem on the old site, you wouldn't think it would be a PHP-vs.-ASP distinction.)

Update: So what do I have to do to ban these guys from my site? I tried putting the following in my httpd.conf:

<Directory (path to root of my site)>
    order allow,deny
    deny from (IP)
    deny from (IP)
    allow from all
</Directory>

Another Update: I think I got it: the Directory directive in apache2/sites-available/default is overriding the directive in httpd.conf because httpd.conf is included first. I think I just need to take the default directive out.

posted evening of October 12th, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, October 11th, 2007

🦋 Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. I've only read her The Golden Notebook (if memory serves), though I have some of her other books on my shelf. Christine recommends me to read the Children of Violence series.

posted afternoon of October 11th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

🦋 Transposition

Sylvia is really interested in transposing music. Today we were working on Andantino, she was playing it in in G, D, and A, moving back and forth -- we were only doing the first half of the song, which is all on two strings, so she was able to do this without moving out of first position. It's pretty neat to watch, like she just discovered you could do that -- I think influenced by watching me play violin tunes on the viola -- anyway it seems like it will be a really good way of building her musical ear.

posted evening of October 10th, 2007: Respond
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Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

OMG! Comet in Moominland is being produced in NYC! And Ellen is trying to get us tickets! Got my fingers crossed, that would be too much fun.

...And rats, it is sold out. Oh well, some other time I guess. (Kind of a nuisance for the Times to review the play at the end of its run rather than near the beginning...)

posted morning of October 9th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, October 8th, 2007

So as I go through my site testing various filters and archive pages, I am reading a fair amount of what I've written over the last four years. And -- im ganzen und großen -- I'm pretty happy with it.

posted evening of October 8th, 2007: Respond
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🦋 Categories

Like I said below, I don't have much experience with database design. I don't really have any clue how to write a design document. But I want to describe the design I've come up with and see if I can make it sound as good as it appears to me to be.

The thinking behind this is as follows: I have a lot of text records ("posts") which I want to classify by subject. I've done this, just like every other blog around, by using keywords -- if I tag a post with "food" say, or "singing", then it will show up when somebody looks at the site filtering for that subject. This is implemented with a simple search through the list of keywords on each post; not particularly fast but that's not a major problem in the context of my low-traffic site.

But when I was putting the new software together, I had the idea that it would be great if, when somebody looked at the blog filtering for "food", they would see a little sidebar explaining what I write about when I write about food, and maybe some links to food sites I like etc. And more to the point, when somebody filters for "book:namered" (which is how I've been tagging my reading posts, "book:" and then a short identifier for the title), they would see up top that the posts were about My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, links to some outside reviews, links to Amazon and Abebooks, maybe a list of other of Pamuk's books that I have written about. So that is the problem I am trying to solve; and I think my solution is a pretty good one.

First, simple keywords, like "food" and "singing". This is pretty easy; I have a table keyword with columns tag and description -- the description is what will be displayed in the sidebar when somebody filters by the tag. And I have a table (which I decided to name categories, for reasons that will soon become apparent) with two columns, postid and keyword -- I can join this table with posts when I want to do a filtering operation.

Now what about the complex keywords like "book:namered", which include a class and an instance? Well check it out: every time I add a keyword which has a new class, I can just add a column to the categories table with the class name as the column name. And add a table with that name, which looks the same as the keyword table. And think of simple keywords as a special case of complex keywords, as if they had "keyword:" in front of them. So if somebody requests a filter for "book:namered", I can query from "posts JOIN categories ON posts.id = categories.postid JOIN book ON categories.book = book.tag" where book.tag = "namered". This will work for movies, projects, whatever. But the really cool thing is, I can add whatever columns I want to the book table and write a custom script to display the data associated with the tag "namered" in my sidebar.

Consider these three requests:

• SELECT posts.* FROM posts JOIN categories ON posts.id = categories.postid WHERE categories.book = 'namered';
  (This query would be represented by the keyword "book:namered".)
• SELECT DISTINCT posts.* FROM posts JOIN categories ON posts.id = categories.postid JOIN book ON categories.book = book.tag;
  (This query would be represented by the keyword "book:".)
• SELECT posts.* FROM posts JOIN categories ON posts.id = categories.postid JOIN book ON categories.book = book.tag WHERE book.author = 'pamuk';
  (This query would be represented by the keyword "book:author:pamuk".)

The first query will bring back all posts about My Name is Red. The second query will bring back all posts about reading any book. The third query will bring back all posts about reading any book by Orhan Pamuk. And all this is pretty easy to automate! It's all nearly in place!

The next step, which will be a bit of effort to keep it elegant but totally within reach, is to create an administrative page for writing scripts to render an informative sidebar based on the column data contained in, say, the "namered" record in books.

posted evening of October 8th, 2007: Respond
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