Stereo, finally!

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Well I’ve finally got my MP3 head unit installed in my new (to me) car. As I write this I realize that I haven’t told my car story here, but in brief around the beginning of 2003 my mid-eighties Mercedes which served me wonderfully for about a year was replace by a ’98 Chevy Lumina, which is currently on the road to being cool. One of the biggest problems with the Lumina has been that the after-market head unit was hooked up badly and would reset everything every time the car was turned off. This had the unexpected side effect of helping me learn the beginnings of several CDs very well, but never making it to the end. One of the interesting results of this is I was able to time how long it took me to get places very well because the clock would start at 1:00 whenever I turned the car on.

Anyway this was a problem that should have been quickly resolved, since I have a nice Aiwa MP3 head unit from the Benz, but I never seemed to find a weekend when my Dad was home and we both had time during daylight hours to hook everything up. Well today was that day, and we (mostly him) got it hooked up beautifully. I seem to have lost most of my MP3 mix CDs though, so I might have to burn some new ones. I think I’m going to do an artist-based approach, so for example I can have one CD labeled “Brad Mehldau” that will have all of his CDs condensed into one. Fair use is a beautiful thing. Anyway this is the first step to really making this car “mine”. Actually the second, since while my Dad was working on the stereo I was using a razor to take off some stickers from the previous owner. So my car no longer indicates I’m an Aggie fan, say “Worldwide Panic,” “You’re a naughty girl go to my room,” “I don’t mind being stared at,” or “Texas Department of Safety.” What a combination! I left the Cat in the Hat sticker. I miss my old stickers though.

Redesign

Meta

Well all the cool kids are doing it ;). No actually, I’m starting to get back to the site in flux idea that I was attached to in the beginning. Before I had a home-brew theme system and I was committed to adding a new theme every month and making it the default for that month. As I added new features though it became cumbersome updating the different themes, and it was slowing me down when I was trying to add functionality. So I came to the decision that it was better to have one well-tweaked theme that worked perfectly with everything, rather than twenty themes that worked alright. I’m itching for a new design, plus I have some things to fix up around here, so it’s going to be a meta-day. Also to be honest I like having total control on how the site is displayed, which is why NS4 users see just text and other things, which is different then some sites that let you write your own CSS file even. There’s a lot to do, so I should probably make a list:

  • New design
    • Resizable fonts (no pixels for IE/Win)
    • External links differentiated
    • Something new with fancy cap stuff
  • RSS feedsDone
  • Finish archive system
  • Set up CVS (maybe gforge too?)
  • Install stereoI’m happy to say I think everyone in the neighborhood has heard it now
  • New intra-site link systyem
  • Improve error handling throughout
  • Install new RAID card and hard drives
  • Set up file-server
  • Try new battery in laptopThe new battery is nice, but the problem still appears to be the charging circuitry, just like I told them.

I think that’s enough for today.

Website Launch: Crystal Awards

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Finally! As of about five minutes ago the AMA Crystal Awards site is now live and open to the public. Check it out and let me know what you think. This is actually the second iteration of the design, the first was entirely done in CSS and the barest XHTML and it worked quite well cross-browser but it was decided that we needed more uniformity across the print and web pieces and so this is what I came up with.

If you’re interested in seeing more of Miss Richfield 1981, he has a very informative website where you can find out all about him. I’ve heard rumors that he might be flown down for this year’s awards as well. We’ll see . . .

Scum

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There has been a lot of talk about referrer spamming in blogspace, and while browsing a PHP network query tool I stumbled across this, which looks terrible. What’s even worse is there is some genuinely neat looks scripts on their site, some things that I’ve been meaning to write myself, and it looks like I’m going to have to because I couldn’t support any that sells a product like ReferBomb.

This script will get up to 1000 Google search results for the search term of your choice (we’ve provided a few suggested default search terms), then automatically fetch all of the resulting web pages. What does this do for you? Think “public web stats” or think “blogs who reciprocate referring links!”

Bizarre Content-Type Problems

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I’ve been having some really weird problems with my mime types lately, which has put a hamper on some of the RSS and standards compliance stuff I want to do here. Every document generated by PHP was being sent with a Content-Type: text/html; encoding: iso-8859-1; regardless of whatever was being specified with header in the code. I’m still not entirely clear on what fixed it, but I believe it had something to do with no default content type being specified in the php.ini file, but a default encoding specified. This confused things somewhere and it’s all resolved now. There is the default content type of text/html which works for 99% of stuff, and the overrides now work for the rest. Now I can rest easy.

H-Town Blogs New Site

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I’m happy to see we have a beautiful new site designed by the wonderful Christine with the header picture by Elaine. Elaine takes great photos and you should check out the ones on her site, also the last time I was at Kaveh Kanes they had a couple of hers on display.

I just had a kinda-cool idea for the site: what if the top image rotated with different pictures that the author felt characterized Houston. For a perfect example of what I mean see Typographica, which has different headers rotate that link to the font and the designer of the header image. It occurred to me when I was looking at the site and thinking “What a nice picture of downtown” and then I noticed the street and the lamps and I started thinking of where Elaine was when she took that picture. My mind wandered to the cool pictures Christine posted the other day and how it was a totally different view of downtown. My mind continued to wander (it does that a lot) to how when people think of Houston, they tend to think of either the Rodeo or the postcard view of downtown, when in fact there is so much more than that. Anyway, just an idea.

War

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In his address to Congress in 1951, Douglas MacArthur said: “I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.” I’d recommend everyone read the entire thing. Hat tip: Mom.

Updated autop

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Most of the scripts I offer on this site are things I’ve written myself, for myself. As part of this living site they are constantly updated and tweaked, yet sometimes I don’t update the scripts section with what’s running live here, usually because I tell myself that the code is so ugly that no one would ever want to use it. Well . . . it works. I’ve decided to put the updated autop code up for all to use. Impetus for the change came almost two months ago from Phil Ringnalda, though my implementation is pretty different from the one he suggested in his post.

Basically what the update does is make the paragraph code ‘smarter’ to deal with lines that end with block-level tags, therefore not creating extra spaces and invalidating your HTML. Try it out! I’ve left the simpler version there for people (like me in some applications) that don’t need the extra code at all.

Just Wait For The XP Version

Humor

Bill Gates is hanging out with the chairman of General Motors:

“If automotive technology had kept pace with computer technology over the past few decades,” boasts Gates, “you would now be driving a V-32 instead of a V-8, and it would have a top speed of 10,000 miles per hour. Or, you could have an economy car that weighs 30 pounds and gets a thousand miles to a gallon of gas. In either case, the sticker price of a new car would be less than $50.”

“Sure,” says the GM chairman. “But would you really want to drive a car that crashes four times a day?”

Books?!

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This is crazy: I swear just minutes ago I had my books, my three Ethics books and Arabian Nights for Human Situation. Yet when I just opened my backpack they aren’t there, even while my laptop, palm, camera, and various other electronics are. I may have left the Ethics books in my car, but I had Arabian Nights for class this morning, and I haven’t been that many places since then.

Consortium Magazine

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If you see an art magazine called “Consortium” pick up a copy because I wrote a short review for this first issue. I haven’t seen it yet myself, but the launch party is tonight so hopefully I’ll get a good look at it then. I’m very excited!

Final On Words

Meta

Final answer: most common starting words are “I”, “Well”, “The”, “It”, “This”, “There”, “Okay”, and “Just”. Most common first letters were I, T, W, A, O, S, M, and then J and H tied. I feel like I’m in a episode of Sesame Street. I’ve decided to add all this neatness to the Zeitgeist so you can check out the full list, updated live with the latest content, there.

More On First Letters

Meta

Well I ran some regexes through all the posts in database hoping to clean them up a bit, and got rid of all the instances where I was starting with an unnecesary paragraph tag, now that it’s all taken care of automatically. I also took out some things so my RSS feed should be cleaner now, or at least if I ever offer the old stuff up for syndication. I think I’ve reached the limit of what I can do with pure SQL, so I think I’m going to patch something together in PHP one of these nights. I basically just need to do the same thing except maybe strip_tags first. Then I can modify that to find if there’s any pattern to the words I start out with. How exciting!!! Hold on to your seats:

+--------+-------+
| letter | count |
+--------+-------+
| I | 116 |
| < | 65 |
| T | 49 |
| W | 42 |
| A | 17 |
| O | 14 |
| S | 13 |
| J | 10 |
| Y | 9 |
| M | 9 |
| H | 9 |
| F | 7 |
| D | 6 |
| C | 4 |
| G | 4 |
| E | 4 |
| L | 4 |
| B | 3 |
| P | 3 |
| N | 3 |
| V | 2 |
| . | 1 |
| U | 1 |
| " | 1 |
| 9 | 1 |
+--------+-------+
25 rows in set (0.00 sec)

(Of course I don’t really think that’s exciting.)

Sometimes

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Sometimes when reading what should be a very dry article you see an unintentional typo or some similar snafu that makes you spurt Dr. Pepper. Sometimes I wish my keyboard had the equivalent of a sneeze guard. From Tuning MySQL Server 4.0 Query Cache:

You may increase or degrease query_cache_size to find the value, which provides best performance for you.

So am I going to need one of these if I want my database to be tweaked to perfection? All joking aside, the query cache in the 4.0x series is, for practical web applications, one of the best improvements thus far. Though it annoyed me back in the 4.02 days when they changed the syntax for the configuration options. Why? No good reason. They’re on 4.09 now and things couldn’t be smoother though. I know of several major sites that run MySQL 4 as their main backend.

First Letters

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I’ve been noticing now with the fancy caps watermark that most of my posts begin with the letter I, and so I wondered how many of my posts were like this, so I put together a little query like so:

mysql> SELECT DISTINCT LEFT(post_content, 1) AS letter, COUNT(*) as count FROM b2posts GROUP BY letter ORDER BY count DESC;
+--------+-------+
| letter | count |
+--------+-------+
| < | 373 |
| I | 10 |
| T | 2 |
| A | 2 |
| W | 2 |
| C | 1 |
| S | 1 |
| M | 1 |
| O | 1 |
| Y | 1 |
+--------+-------+
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)

What does this tell me? Pretty much nothing except that before I came up with the autop function I started each post with a tag instead of text. Maybe it’s time to go back and clean up some old content.