26% Rotten and Counting
EZ-E: Please handicap odds that this piece of work will be an Oscar candidate this year.
Message to Darren Aronofsky: Lay low this year!
EZ-E: Please handicap odds that this piece of work will be an Oscar candidate this year.
Message to Darren Aronofsky: Lay low this year!
For those readers who have not heard of my travails with strep throat, I got strep throat early last week. I knocked it down with some antibiotics, finished my pill bottle, and the infection came right back yesterday.
My diagnosis this time included the word “acute,” and what “acute” means is that you get a shot in addition to the prescription medications. It also tends to freak your wife out a bit.
This leads to what I learned: there is no such thing as a “shot in your right hip.” Your hip is a bone. But more importantly, your hip is a euphemism.
Also: at a Mexican restaurant, you can pretty much take the “hot plate” warning with a grain of salt. However, the “this may burn a little,” especially considering the locale as discussed above, is to be taken quite seriously. Depending on my posture, I’m still taking it a bit seriously.
The other thing I’ve learned is that 600mg ibuprofen is the trick for me. This would be three standard Advil caplets.
The evil machinations of SAP are becoming familiar to me.
I think I finally get what “metadata” is within a database. I think they are equivalent to the MS Access concept of “Relationships” … if I’m getting the concept right. These define many-to-one, one-to-one, and one-to-many correspondences between different tables of data.
I also now understand the whole star schema thing, and it is brilliance. I think it is often the intuitive default, but forcing it is probably a great idea.
A few years ago I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a progressive arm to bluegrass music, but I really like Nickel Creek. Soothing and challenging at the same time, somewhat akin to a dark coffee.
Perhaps all this medicine is making me loopy.
All I know is that I am quite productive today, despite some interruptions and distractions.
So, I just found out that ever since OU did a major migration to exchange mail, I have not been downloading mail through my OU Mail account via my home server. This is hilarious because I have not received a single message in that account since then that was worth anything.
Of course, one might wonder why I still have that account, but OU is a generous ex-overlord.
What I’m not looking forward to is the massive influx of worthless, months-old refuse flooding my inbox when I “fix” this “problem.”
I wonder what OU’s legacy server is thinking, as it has received POP3 requests for new mail every five minutes since they took down the server. Hopefully there was nothing listening on that IP. It seems like it’s all dead.
My content management system work has been … considerable … in the past few days.
You can take a look at the login window and the main editor screen. Although the editor has some “simulation” (i.e., cardboard cut-out un-functionality) still active, most of what is visible on the screen is working off of real data.
This program does not use a database, instead opting for an extremely complex version of something like the file-based back-end on Cluster 2.0. Much more complex, though.
The basic model is this:
You have a user. The user has a login, a real name, and an e-mail address. The user also belongs to one-and-only-one group.
This group has permissions associated with it: the ability to modify {all, a selection of} files, and yes/no permissions to:
Note the correspondence to the tabs on the top of the screenshot. Now, you have the concept of a “page,” which, not much of a stretch, is a page of content on the site. Whenever a user without the “revision control” permission but with the “modify this page” permission actually modifies the file, the system saves a backup of the previous page’s content before saving over with new data.
An administrator with the “revision control” permission can then view past changes and/or roll back the file to a previous state. If an administrator modifies a file, it is the administrator’s option as to whether or not a revision document is saved. This helps cut down on full file backups when commas are added, etc.
Anyway, that is about the entire system, and the only reason it takes so much time is spending all the extra thought power on usability, stability, and fault-tolerance. When you design a system that essentially opens a technical field up to less-technical users, you pretty much have to think like a toy company, because the small parts can certainly be a choking hazard.
Cutest icon in SAP: Definitely has to go to the top hat “Document Header” button.
Every now and then, I want to tell people “FTE” stands for “For The Employment,” in the spirit of “For The Win,” et al.
It’s actually Full-Time Equivalent in the dusty, moldy world of budgeting.
I’m not one of the anointed few who have gotten to see what “Gmail 2.0” (unofficial name, apparently) looks like in person. I only log in to Gmail when I’m afraid there’s a server outage at home, or when I get one of those “check your e-mail and click the activation link” sign up things, and I’m not ready to wait the average 2.5 minutes of latency I incur by only syncing my mailbox with Gmail every 5 minutes.
With Gmail now supporting IMAP, I would have even less reason to use the “traditional” web Gmail. What’s still incrementally cooler about hosting IMAP from home is that I have an automatic backup copy of any incoming Gmail message stored on Google’s servers, in addition to the local mailbox copy and any backups I create within my home network.
As a web services provider like Google, perhaps the best argument for adopting IMAP support is that virtually nobody knows what it is, or why it’s better than POP3, let alone it’s improvement over a “rich” web client experience.
Heck, at this point you could possibly configure a webmail system hosted on a local computer to facilitate a connection directly to a Gmail account. So, basically you could have a skinnable Gmail.
This article features a link, which features a song, which features whatever the corporate equivalent is to my alma mater. It also features some classic Greenpeace “Roads are bad! Yeah!” stuff which was of course basically ignorable.
My read on the rest of the article was that they didn’t care what Exxon did; if it doesn’t actually hurt the company they weren’t doing any favors.
But I didn’t read it that well, so maybe they were thinking a bit deeper than that.
The main thing is that the song is hilarious, although I’m not going to say that it is something that is circulated around here. As far as I hear, it was made for a specific conference or meeting or something, and it has found it’s way abroad, for better or worse (probably mostly worse).
