A Centre or a Center?

Posted on March 22, 2006 by Arthur

The big discussion around town is the feasibility of having a new Civic Centre (TD News): apparently the aim is to build a centre so Central Nova can host the 2011 Canada Winter Games.

This is big news, naturally and in the discussion that goes with it you’re either for or against it: people who are for organizing this event say that it’s good for the local economy, while people against it loudly wonder who’s actually going to pay for it. With our warmest Winter behind us (and no snow), one can only hope that if the Games come to town, it better be snowing a lot again in 2011.

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ETA: ‘permanent ceasefire’

Posted on March 22, 2006 by Arthur

Good news coming from Europe: The ETA (The Basque separatist group) announced a ‘permanent ceasefire’ today. In the early 80s the group was frequently in the news and apparently in one year it claimed over 100 deaths.

It’s not known why the group has so suddenly announced a ceasefire: I read that most people assume that the March 2004 bombing (which were initially blamed on the ETA) played an important part.

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The return of the Excel experts

Posted on March 21, 2006 by Arthur

Via David, this graph that appears to blech illustrate that Saddam killed a lot more people during his regime than the current Iraqi dead count! Spot the errors!

Hints: 1. The red graph is a daily average of people killed during Saddam’s regime, which spanned a period of over 20 years.
2. Once again, the red graph shows a repetitive pattern, which tells that somebody is trying to tell us that January is Less Deaths Month! Hurray!
3. Where is the ‘Max. Death toll’ line?
Related: How Michael Jackson Influenced The Oil Price.

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Huh !!!

Posted on March 21, 2006 by Arthur

Yesterday’s logs revealed that the amount of MBs transferred topped the 160 MBs. That’s only for one day. Generally, this domain only pulls a boring 20 MB a day on average.

Either someone was downloading images from my wife’s pages or the links came from a popular graphics site.

Posted in Hyperlinks | 2 Comments

A Scribe

Posted on March 19, 2006 by Arthur

I noticed that Everything2 has updated the level advancements, which means that after 5 years of not actively contributing, I became a level 4 user.

When I logged into my account for the first time since, uh, 5 years, I was allowed to give away the traditional ‘Cool!’-s. And oh, I had to clean out my messages inbox too1. Still, after so many years, I have no idea what the point of Everything2 is, particularly since the popularity of Wikipedia. Mind you, Everything2’s approach is more playful, since it allows members to progress in an a sort of Role Playing Game-like way. But I wouldn’t be surprised if many E2 users have moved on to Wikipedia.

It didn’t surprise me to find out that Everything2 is still slow as a hog. It was also this slow when I connected to it on dial-up.

1. After so many years of not logging into Everything2, I was suprised that I was able to reproduce my E2 password. Only 4 tries. This is bad.

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Tabs vs. Spaces

Posted on March 19, 2006 by Arthur

There’s an interesting collection of links in this Metafilter thread ‘Spaces vs. Tabs’. I, naturally, use spaces when indenting code. Two of them, actually, so, I’m with JWZ: Tabs don’t belong in plain ASCII files.

But skimming the replies in that particular thread, this particular comment stood out:

“Tabs. When it absolutely, positively has to line-up.”

That gives a whole new meaning to WYSIWYG programmer.

Slightly related comments

Posted in Hyperlinks | 4 Comments

I just ate your culture

Posted on March 18, 2006 by Arthur

For some Swimmers do the dancekind of reason, I find this image of New Zeelanders celebrating the win of Moss Burmeister (news),while performing a Maori dance, highly comical. Maybe it illustrates that our great western ‘civilized’ culture is just a mash-up of cultures that were conquered the last couple of centuries. Or more specific, the question is, particularly when seeing the New Zeeland rugby teams perform the Maori Haka (Google video), which culture conquered which one?

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While I was away

Posted on March 17, 2006 by Arthur

While I was away (as in doing other more important stuff), the following stories caught my attention, the very first moment I decided to log-in to this site:

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Canadian tire

Posted on March 11, 2006 by Arthur

Earlier I discovered that the Canadian Tire family (Via Alan), Ted and Gloria Simonett no longer star in the new Canadian Tire commercials. There’s (most likely) going to be a short discussion over at Metafilter.

Not that I really care: I just wanted to mention that the first time I saw a Canadian Tire commercial, I thought Canadian Tire was a charity. When I found out that it wasn’t I (wrongly) assumed it was probably a company that sold tires. Which isn’t completely true either, after I figured out that the couple above really were trying to sell people Mastercraft wares instead of tires (‘Only at Canadian Tire!’). Imagine my surprise when I heard about Canadian Tire money.

Surreal, I’ll tell you.

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And uh.. once again

Posted on March 11, 2006 by Arthur

Once again, I decided to do a WordPress update. This time I was actually prepared and created a simple shell script that should get me going next time. No mention what was actually updated, exept for some information at the WordPress Milestone 2.0.2 trac page.

This is also where I noticed bug 2434, ‘Linked Image + Apostrophe In Post = Database Error’, which is the one I mentioned here before. I could have entered the WordPress Hackers Hall of Fame. I smell irony there.

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Opera

Posted on March 9, 2006 by Arthur

Earlier Brecht and Weillwe finished watching the opera ‘The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny’ on DVD. The performance (Salzburger Festival of 1998) on this DVD was recorded for a TV production and was originally distributed by ORF. The DVD (courtesy of Alfons, our thanks) is long but worth the watching, particularly if you’re familiar with the works of Weill and Brecht. It’s definitely not for the romantically inclined, so to say: this 1930 opera was meant to shock its audience: the opera’s jazz and blues influences, the social critiques and the political satire painted such a haunting picture of modern society, that it was soon banned by the Nazis.

I’ve Denn wenn manseen this performance before: if I’m not wrong it was broadcast on national television during (or around) the Weill centenary (2000). My favourite part is between the second and third chapter, when a hurricane threatens the very existence of the city and in all the despair, Mahony (the protagonist) ridicules the citizens of Mahagonny. It’s here where the opera’s leitmotiv is introduced (the “As you make your bed” song), it’s here where classical music suddenly transposes into a bitter-sweet blues-like song. I find it weird to find out that in our modern age those kind of musical changes don’t surprise anymore. In the early 30s, it surely rattled the Nazis in the audience.

1. Related: Brecht’s ‘Epic Theater’
2. 40 second sample of leitmotiv (700KB) (sample removed).

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Strictly rhetorical

Posted on March 8, 2006 by Arthur

A rhetorical question, more or less closer to a joke than to a question: If you were hired by Yahoo!, Google or MSN, would a free e-mail address (Yahoo/GMail/Hotmail) be part of the company’s benefits? Would you be demanding this?

If Canada wins from the US in a baseball game, does that mean all hope is lost for the US sports?

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Varchars kill the integers

Posted on March 7, 2006 by Arthur

Iknow several professional applications that use varchar fields to store typically invoice and order numbers, just because it makes it easier to fill this field with non-numerical characters (for example when issuing credit notes and that).

This is pretty irritating on the part of indexing and sorting results: after all, which comes first when using alphanumerical sorting: ‘10001’ or ‘200-1’? Most likely, you’ll lose a lot of speed too: sorting (and comparing) integers goes a lot faster than comparing sets of characters.

Instead of declaring these types of fields varchars, consider making them integer fields: after all, adding dashes (and other non-numerical characters) can be easily made part of a formatting mask in the UI of the application: heck, most graphical UI have masked edit field controls (Win 32/.Net/KDE/Gnome).

Additionally, on typical transactional databases like Postgres and Oracle, (integer) sequences are created atomically [transaction independent], which can save you a lot more headaches than trying to generate a unique combination of characters in a multi-user environment.

Posted in SQL | 2 Comments