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!
Gallery: 1-28-2003
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Final On Words
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
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
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.
Out Damned Spot
There seems to be some sort of Microsoft SQL worm is making things darn slow or outright inaccessible. Of course the patch for this vulnerability was released months ago. This is really cramping my style though; I’m trying to do some web development work, but I guess I’ll have to wait it out.
Gallery: 1-25-2003
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First Letters
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.
Winamp
Speaking of things that haven’t been updated in a while, what ever happened to Winamp?
The Blogging Software Dilemma
This site is beginning to grow and grow, and forward compatibility has lately been in my mind more. Several days ago this site passed twenty thousand unique visitors, and more than seventy thousand hits, since late August. I recently converted everything (except the photolog) to XHTML 1.1, which was nice, but it’s not the markup I’m worried about. My logging software hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, and I can only hope that he’s okay.
What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?
Update, 2003-12-26: This became WordPress.
PHP Blogtimes for b2
I’m so happy that I found a version of Blogtimes written in PHP and designed for b2. This comes courtesy of Sanjay’s Coding Tips, a very interesting site that I’m going to keep visiting. For those of you wondering what this is, it is a post of what time of the day I blog using data from the last thirty days. As you can see I’m not a morning person.
Nuns vs. Fans
There were these three guys at a football game and it just so happened that they were sitting behind three nuns. They couldn’t see really well over their habits, so one of the guys says, “Man, I wish I lived in Ohio, there are only 25 Catholics there.” One of the other guys says, “Well, I wish I lived in Idaho because there are only 20 Catholics there.” Then the last guy says, “Well, I wish I lived in Oregon there are only 15 Catholics there.” Then one of the nuns turns around and says, “Why don’t you go to hell — there are no Catholics there!”
If you’re offended get over it ;). It’s “Funny Friday” on PhotoMatt, so stay tuned. Hat tip: Mom.
Sad News: Dough Boy
Please join us in remembering a great icon of the entertainment community. The Pillsbury Doughboy died yesterday of a yeast infection and complications from repeated pokes in the belly. He was 71. Doughboy was buried in a lightly greased coffin. Dozens of celebrities turned out to pay their respects, including Mrs. Butterworth, Hungry Jack, the California Raisins, Betty Crocker, the Hostess Twinkies, and Cap’n Crunch. The gravesite was piled high with flours. Aunt Jemima delivered the eulogy and lovingly described Doughboy as a man who never knew how much he was kneaded. Doughboy rose quickly in show business, but his later life was filled with turnovers. He was not considered a very ‘smart’ cookie, wasting much of his dough on half-baked schemes. Despite being a little flaky in his youth and a crusty old man, he was considered a roll model for millions. Doughboy is survived by his wife, Play Dough; two children, John Dough and Jane Dough; plus the bun they had in the oven. He is also survived by his elderly father, Pop Tart. The funeral was held at 3:50 for about 20 minutes.
That is the funniest thing I have read in my life. Hat tip: Mike.
More On Caps
Fancy Caps Thingy
I’m not sure how else to describe it, but if you’re browsing this with a modern browser you should be seeing the first letter of the paragraph of a post in a large serif behind the text. This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while, but never got around to it. CSS is a beautiful thing. It can think of a few tweaks for it, but basically the hard part is over. I’m still debating over what font to use behind the text, but I have all of the letter images (which are PNG by the way) generated through a neat PHP script so changing the font or color is a trivial issue.
Let me know what you think! Font suggestions? Too dark? Too big? Oh, and thanks to Rebecca for helping me out with the initial letters. She’s a life-saver.
Interesting
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to fit facts.
— Sherlock Holmes
Nas / Mickey Mouse
I was listening to Nas’ new album the other day and this stood out:
Pre-trial hearin is over, it’s real for the soldier
Walks in the courtroom, the look in his eyes is wild
Triple-homicide, I sit in the back aisle
I wanna crack a smile when I see him
Throw up a fist for black power, cause all we want is his freedom
He grabbed a court officer’s gun and started squeezin
Then he grabbed the judge, screams out — nobody leavin everybody get down!
For some reason it really reminded my of Eldred vs. Ashcroft and the whole Free the Mouse campaign. That is all.
GeoURL
If you haven’t checked it out, there’s a new (to me) service called GeoURL which allows you to put GPS coordinate meta-tags on your webpage and it will tell you who your website neighbors are. I’ve had it on my sidebar for a little while though, but I’m never sure if anyone looks at that.
A neat trick for finding out your latitude and longitude if you don’t have a GPS is to map your address on Yahoo Maps and zoom in all the way. Then in the address bar you should see your exact coordinates, or at least as close as the mapping system has you. There, now you have no excuse not to go add yourself.
All Work and No Play
Currently putting the final touches on two new websites, which I hope to link to here soon. One is for a single musician, the other is for a awards ceremony for a large organization, and I find the dichotomy enjoyable. For some reason when I work on projects in twos it keeps me balanced, from the manner in which the client is dealt with to the artistic freedom each project allows. One is usually a little on either side, and in the middle is me. I seem to do this with a lot of things in life.
The next two projects are lined up already, one for another musician, this time a lovely vocalist, and the other is going to be a national resource for Catholic educators teaching about the Holocaust. Links to come when they’re ready.
Gallery: 1-19-2003
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