Category: development

If I were rich, I’d get one of these for the office, one of these for upstairs to go along with my work provided Powerbook and abandon the PC World forever.

While I’m dreaming, I’d have 1.5mb/sec DSL, a wireless network and everything would have Airport cards so there aren’t wires strung all over the place. And because it’s OS X, everything would just work. I wouldn’t have to worry about Microsoft anymore, or the weirdness that is Windows XP. I might miss my games, but I have a PS2 now, and I don’t play games on my PC much anymore anyway.

It’s a nice dream, isn’t it? It’s a $6600 dream, but still nice (I actually thought it would be a lot more than that)

I love that I’m ahead of the curve on something. I used to use definition lists because they were easy to style (back in the wild days before CSS was widely supported). Now, unordered and ordered lists are easy to style. My favorite is to use margin-left:-15px to keep those bullets lined up with that that horrendous whitespace to the left of list items.

Yeah, I’m the ListGeek, bow before my orderly data!

This will interest no one but me, but I don’t care. I’ve found something completely annoying about AOLserver and I need to share. Let’s say you download these bigass (the technical term would be “friggin’ huge”) files every day and have to parse them out and dump them into a database so you can do a bunch of conversions on them and generate spiffy reports. Let’s just say this is a new system that worked fine in testing with small files, but now, it will only parse a small portion of each file before deciding to give up. Let’s then say that the reason it does this, and then doesn’t report any kind of error is a helpful feature in the server that closes active (and very busy) db handles after they’ve been open for a certain amount of time. Does it check to see if they’re doing something? Nope. It just closes it. Thankfully, there’s an obscure configuration setting (MaxOpen in the pool/POOLNAME section) where you can set that timeout to some insane number (did you know that 1,000,000,000 seconds is approximately 192 days?). This will run tonight… I hope it gets all twenty-four hours instead of just ten or eleven. The only good thing is that it made me go in and fix up a bunch of things it was doing that weren’t quite as efficient as they could have been, which got us from 9am to 1pm, but still, sheesh.

I love AOLserver. I use it for things it wasn’t intended for, like turning it into a cron job handler, and reporting system. I guess that’s why I run into this stuff. I can live with that. But I’m still gonna whine about it when I run into stupid stuff like this.

The other thing is that Postgres doesn’t handle databases with more than 200k records in them very well without creating a LOT of indexes (like on every column of every table). Before I deleted the records older than two weeks, it took five minutes just to get a count. If I were a real DBA, I’d go find out why. But, I’m not. I use it because it’s easy to install and configure for use with AOLserver. It also supports all the SQL features I’m used to with Sybase. It’s also reasonably fast for normal use.

If I didn’t have this headache, you all would never have known all this stuff. Thanks, Dr. Nik! (yes, my dentist’s name is Dr. Nik)

Not everything needs borders and a background color.

There have been a lot of great shots at the Mirror Project, but this is by far my favorite.

Oh yes, and they’re lovely. I remember visiting this site many moons ago, and harvesting loads of fonts. Since then, they’ve expanded: Free dincFONTS. Some beautiful typefaces for your designery.

Ok, my favorite new feature in OS 10.2 has go to be iChat. They’ve outdone the AIM client in almost every way. It’s gorgeous in that iTunes kinda way, and the Rendezvous thing looks like it will be a lot of fun. The only problem is the fact that I think I’m the only person on my floor using it, and well, that means my Rendezvous window is empty. The thought baloons are cute, and I think might start to annoy me eventually. For now, they’re a nice departure from the same old thing. Thankfully, you can shut them off and go back to formatting them as regular old IM’s.

Amazon.com is great. It allows people who’ve used a product to rate and review it so I can make a more informed decision. This system is especially useful when buying video games (yes, I broke down yesterday and bought a PS2). But, I’ve noticed an annoying trend. Games that no one outside of the company creating the game and a small number of beta testers haven’t played yet have ratings. Adventurous psychic souls have rated games that aren’t coming out for sometimes months in advance. For example, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter sounds like a great game. You can’t rate the concept of a game before playing a game. If you look a the concept for one of the most popular video games of all time: a yellow circle eats small dots, gets chased by ghosts, and for short periods of time gets to chase those ghosts after eating a slightly larger dot. There, that sounds pretty crappy, doesn’t it? The same with classics like Super Mario Brothers, etc. People, people, people, you’re screwing up a great system. Amazon, please don’t allow people to rate items before they come out, or at least wipe the slate clean once the item is released. It artificially skews the rating for premonitions to count the same as real-world experience.

Ok, I’m done… and by the way, Jak and Daxter is amazing. The world is huge, and loads of fun to explore.