2015 — 4 March: Wednesday
Given my choice of "falling asleep over" book last night1 one might conclude my current aim is to become a 'script kiddie'. One might not be too far wrong. How else to stand any chance of understanding some of Brian's more esoteric magic Python spells as I seek to adapt them for my own foul ends? Interestingly,2 at least we've concluded that full compliance with the wonderful world of i18n would be an unnecessary step too far for BlackBeast. Python is even more versatile (it turns out).
Meanwhile...
... if I'm also to stand any chance of using yesterday's SQLitebrowser to actually maintain the data entries in my spiffy new Books SQLite DB — rather than just peering at them "through a glass, clearly" (as it were) — it seems I now need to embark on my first foray into the mysteries of "making" a more up-to-date version than the one I installed from the package repository yesterday. (To avoid the tiny bugette that prevents such maintenance by the current version.) <Sigh>
The proof of...
... that particular "pudding" will be my success (or otherwise, of course) in adding yesterday's three acquisitions to the collection when using my revised (remade?) version of SQLitebrowser. This might seem a little onerous, but only for a moment. After all, consider my equivalent situation on Win8.1 Pro if ever faced with a proprietary product suffering from such an ailment. What chance would I have as a mere paying customer of getting the bugette attended to, possibly (in this case) even before my breakfast? Would the product development team be happy to ship me the code and let me tinker with it, or (in this case) merely even just try to re-assemble it in working order? I somehow doubt it!
Watch this data space!
Apparently (so says Mr MilliBean, leader of HMG's loyal opposition party) "Britain's economic recovery" — existence of which, as a poor pensioner, I beg leave to doubt — " since the 'financial crisis' has only benefitted the wealthy." Now there's a huge surprise. The BBC Radio 3 news just quoted him, but I can't find his name in the story currently on their web site.
I was unable...
... to finish the Austen parody I bought a while ago...
... that's mentioned in the TLS review here. (I enjoyed both the films, though, very much.) Paula Byrne (author of 2013's rather too detailed "The real Jane Austen") clearly had a different reaction:
This is why by far the most brilliant of the many modern adaptations of Austen is Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009): "As Mr Darcy walked off, Elizabeth felt her blood turn cold. She had never in her life been so insulted ... She meant to follow this proud Mr Darcy outside and open his throat". Austen would have loved the manner in which the decorum of the prose is maintained even as the action reverts to the zaniness of the juvenilia.
Courtesy of that 'financial crisis' I can no longer afford to buy Folio Society editions! :-(
See whether...
... you can deduce the award recipient before following the link at the end of this transcript:
This has continued into more contemporary times with wild and always inaccurate, not to mention disparaging to America, allegations about Abu Ghraib, the manipulation of intelligence before the Iraq War and now, importantly, about Iran, a country our honoree wrote at length, in The New
Yorker again... I thought they were famous for their editing... was not interested in nuclear weapons. This nonsense came out almost exactly the same time as the IAEA produced detailed evidence exactly to the contrary. Our man sluffed this off... let certain members of our audience be
warned... as the excessive influence of "Jewish money from New York." (I'm out of this — I'm from LA.)
So we can say our first Rather honoree is the poster child for a phenomenon endemic to our culture — slanted opinion writing masquerading as serious unbiased journalism (would that there were such a thing). But at least he's consistent. In the view of this man, everything about Western
Civilization is evil and/or corrupt, except, of course, when it pays his check.
Here's a fragment...
... of the first of my new, Python-generated, book lists made using Brian's latest code drop this morning, as run against my spiffy Books SQLite DB. It takes a shameful 0.572 seconds to open the DB data, read seven data fields for each book record, and write the 9,000 or so titles formatted in tidy SHTML for the web:
My current versions of all these (rather large) lists are on the internal variant of 'molehole' rather than cluttering up the Texan webserver. If and when I pretty these pages up sufficiently for external consumption that policy may change. It's a nice division of labour. I'm providing the SHTML and CSS-related bits, while Brian hones his skills on (in this latest case) "the pythonic way to toggle between two values (for 'class=odd' or not)" — thus efficiently outputting the data that uses my CSS to produce the alternating colours.
Compare and contrast my earlier, hand-cranked (some might even say "primitive" or "lazy") approach, which just dumped the raw ASCII books data inside a pair of <pre> and </pre> tags:
In my defence, the resulting web pages are considerably smaller files.
Nice!
In between more industrial sounds hereabouts I can hear, from time to time, one of the more reliable harbingers of Spring: the distant sounds of a woodpecker's head-banging. [Pause] Another reliable harbinger: IBM insider share transactions. Grrr.
I don't think I have...
... yet quite grasped all the finer details of character code pages. As I've said, I check in on Eric Raymond's Jargon File to see what my web browser makes of his useful 'test' page and its set of weird and wonderful characters. I lifted a small portion of it directly from his web page (by copying the source) and present it here:
| glyph | description |
| α | greek character alpha |
| Ï | greek character pi |
| £ | pound sterling |
It is unhappy at having been cruelly transplanted to its new home! [Pause] The blame for this, apparently lies (in part) on a line in one of my SSI files, dagnabbit:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"></meta>
Grrr. Again. Of course, if I simply change it to be 'utf-8' instead there's no telling what might go 'bang'! [Pause] Let's see, shall we? [Pause, to edit an SSI or two] Blimey, it worked! Of course, it means I now need to update the notes I jotted here on my SSIs. Just last month.
I found...
... both these pieces very entertaining. They each appealed, I suspect, to a different, not quite overlapping, subset of my prejudices. Link #1 on creative writing. Link #2 on Gary Groth. Your smileage will vary.
To my delight...
... downloading (from github), unpacking, compiling, and installing, a fully up-to-date version of the SQLitebrowser was a doddle, and I've already used it to add my three most recent acquisitions to my spiffy new Books SQLite DB. Which probably needs a better name than 'David'...
Very cool.
Just finished 'correcting' all four occurrences of "¬blog" (I hope) to "¬blog" hereabouts. View the source to spot the difference! I don't know whether to blame a Windows code page glitch, myself for having adhered too long to ISO-8859-1, myself for trusting each of my keyboard mappings to behave properly, or myself for not using the proper HTML symbol (¬) in the first place. One of the pieces of toxic fallout from globally changing over to UTF-8. Another was a batch of sexed quotation marks I'd somehow overlooked back in January.