One year ago today: September 19, 2015, on 7-segment LEDs.
Five years ago today: September 19, 2011, the Musuo, from Tibet.
Nine years ago today: September 19, 2007, old hotels, old computers.
Random years ago today: September 19, 2012, WIP
MORNING
Trivia. Canaries can never be tamed. If they come near you at all, it is because they want the food. When they get it, they will avoid and ignore you, preferring the company of their own kind. You know, when you stop to think about it . . . .
I further read a number of Arduino “library” sites. Libraries are nothing more than good old subroutines of commonly used code snippets. Most programmers, or as the C+ subset of near-programmers like to call themselves, “coders”, usually develop a collection of these and copy as needed. I use them mainly in spreadsheets to avoid things like #VALUE errors when a calculation is blank. And have I found a doozie trying to parse the blog URLs.
It was with smug satisfaction I noticed most library protocol sites are no longer accepting code from idiots, and in fact have published a set of guidelines spelling out what they won’t tolerate. It reads like this blog thirty years ago. Seriously, thirty years, my friend. That’s when C+ came along and bastardized the industry. For example, these “new” guidelines say variables must be named something logical. And no underscores, duh. And commands must be named for what they do, not whatever flies through the coder’s ears and misses his brain.
These new guidelines impart what is called “structure” and it will be hell on the crowd who thinks scatterbrained distraction was the New Age of programming.
Bread and gravy. I got up last night at 3:30AM for bread and gravy. I’ve snacked early a lot, but to have the surplus bread and gravy is symbolic—I usually don’t cook in batches large enough to have surplus items like gravy. If I do, it gets frozen or something. So the symbolism is that I’m finally making full recipes again, which are rarely cooking for one. Hence, I have enough remaining to have some real leftovers right in the fridge. Funny how I notice such things mostly because they were absent for so long. How are you this morning?
Dang, I’ve got all the knicks and scrapes of a construction worker again. Including the stubbed toe and slightly sprained ankle from that hole in the back yard. I won’t be able to go contracting any time soon, but the level of exercise would make my cardiologist proud of me. He keeps insisting I “go aerobic”, that I’m good to go on that. But I prefer to slowly work up to it at a slow and constant pace. Burn the same total calories without burning yourself out.
It won’t be long before I have the back room in operation and we’ll have some new adventures for you. Am I driving you bonkers with constant photos of that uneven floor? Yeah, well what about me? I was supposed to be getting some help on that one. This blog reports the biggest events of the day, what can I do if that involves a lot of plywood?
White Sands, England.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
NOON
Music. It’s been ten days and I’m still getting the flakehead guitarists answering my ad. The problem is, these flakeheads last only to the part where it dawns on them they will be playing rhythm. There are none of their galactic lead breaks simply because none of that music is on the list. You get the occasional Johnny Cash intro, and that’s it. None of them have been asked to audition yet. (But you watch, sooner or later I bump into all musicians and they will ask to be reconsidered. No.)
What is the most common failing? The inability to learn new music coupled with a continual refusal to play music they do not personally like. Instant reject—but only when it is continual, Glen. The world already knows that all music you do not like sucks. Now explain why there is so much of it. Ah, thought so. You really think you are that good. But my point here is what is the second most common failing? Whoever talks about that?
It is guitarists who are self-indoctrinated that they are leaders. I’ve never met a guitarist who was a natural leader, though I’m sure they exist. My applicalants arrive well over 30 years old and have never survived in a band for any length of time. There’s a reason most bands are impressionable teenagers. Anyway, they see my ad for a duo and scheme if they can only get a bass player to toe the line, that’s their stepping stone to adding a drummer and then they’ll show the world a real power trio with themselves as top bill.
What, the bassist wants them to actually play rhythm? What kind of nonsense is that?
I put in six hours on the room, enough to get all the small things done. Have you heard the latest establishment attack on Trump? America is “too good” for him, they say. We don’t need somebody like him as a president. They go further to say that nothing is wrong with America, everything is just hunky-dory. Vote for anybody else and let things slide. Forget about the 50 million unemployed and the 20 trillion in debt.
They are shooting themselves in the foot.
NIGHT
I’ve decided to read a lengthy work on the history of the American Left, and how that created the Libtards who have done far more harm than good. I’m all for Constitutional freedoms, but not at the expense of personal freedoms. Every Liberal Judge who goes soft on crime makes each of us less free to walk alone at night. It’s these Jimmy Carter style appointments that made much of the mess of today.
And I blame the Libtards for the excess of record-keeping. You see, records have been a blight on mankind since biblical times. Not records of criminals and such, but the immense amount of records kept on private, law-abiding citizens. Once the government takes over and institutionalizes recordkeeping (think DMV, birth certificates, credit reports here), it does away with the need for most Constitutional annoyances.
To keep it interesting, I’m also reading “The Lock Artist”, not a book for everybody. It is about a kid who can’t talk, but he can open any safe. I enjoy it the more because of my background in locksmithing. The author really knows his stuff. I can only pick simple locks, but the principle is the same. As the book says, no two wheels are ever “exactly, exactly” the same diameter and any safe can be cracked.
I’ve never opened a safe, but I know that when I try to find the first “notch” on combination locks, it is incredibly easy to feel when you know what you’re looking for. I’m hoping the book has a few surprises. The kid hides out in a Chinese restaurant and gets contacted by pagers. This was in the early 90s.
ADDENDUM
Above I mentioned parsing the blog URLs. Now pay attention,coders, you are about to learn something. Here is a typical URL from 2011:
The string is common up to the 45th character, then at least in the early days before Google, the original creators were wise enough to make the date field 9 characters long, inserting leading zeros is needed. That’s the substring that reads /2011/08/. We are now at character 54. Then we encounter a problem. They left out the day field.
It would be really dumb to create a list of all these URLs, over 4,000 for this blog alone, unless you structure them into a database. The database required unique keys, and the logical key is the year-month-date. The largest subgroup toward the smallest is always the best option. Alas, the remainder of the URL varies in length depending on whether it is May or September. It is part of the address, so you cannot leave it out.
Rather than key enter every date, the commonsensical thing to do is to extract the date. In this example, you would “midstring” the fields “august”, “20”, and “2011”. The problem is, the commands to do this have to account for the different lengths of the month and day fields which are dependent on other variable field lengths. I will describe my approach.
√ Go to the 54th character and search for the first instance of the hyphen, “-“.
√ From that character position, (character 60 in this example), subtract 54.
√ This gives you the length of the month name (6 characters for “august”).
√ Add that length to the search criteria and seek the second hyphen.
√ This gives you the length of the day, either 1 or 2 characters.
√ Add that length to the criteria, the remaining 4 characters is your year.
This now gives you three fields you can use as a key. That’s “august”, “20”, and “2011” in the case given. You can now PROPER the month and concatenate the fields into a readable string: August 20, 2011. Should be easy as cake, a piece of pie.
Wrong. At the character position of the first hyphen, the spreadsheet formula refuses to cooperate. It will go to the hyphen, then miscount the characters to the second hyphen, regularly coming up one character too short or too many. I’ll get it, but it has wasted a lot of my time already. My formulas are correct and work 80% of the time, so there is some brand of syntax error I’ve never seen before. I’ll keep you posted.
A treat. Below is a sample of the database structure, with extra control fields. Most are self-explanatory, 9 is the number of characters in “september”. As seen here, the date extracts correctly for single digit dates, but miscounts for double digits, causing the year to appear as 015. (oh-one-five and the html delimiter period). These fields are cut and pasted from the actual blog, so the sharp-eyed reader may notice that the final instance of “september” is spelled wrong.
Why not just correct it? Because, it is the URL. You can’t just change it. It isn’t a word, it is a formula. The entire blog for that day has to be reposted with the correction. But now we’re getting into the simple shit that Patsie could have told you.
Last Laugh
