2015 — 5 March: Thursday
Being a trusting soul,1 I'm going to assume that this slightly obfuscated data from the one AJAX line that was all there was for me to scrape off Uncle ERNIE's prizewinners web page...
{"You've won \u00a325 in March 2015's draw"}
... is his avuncular way of telling me he's wafting the lightest of his prizes in my direction later this month. And that character code '00a3' may even turn out to be UTF-8 "speak" for a £ symbol on deeper reflection. Though, if so, my current Firefox settings are still slightly askew. And my NoScript setting is clearly too defensive.
Meanwhile...
... it's time I sat down and documented (though not here!) the various steps so far entailed in migrating from my simple flat-file lump2 of hand-maintained 'structured' ASCII data, via some crafty Python, into a proper (grown up) SQLite database. If I don't do that soon, what chance will I have of dealing similarly with my various flat-file lumps of non-Books data? That's right: none whatsoever. <Sigh>
I have another...
... dental date later this morning. So, as an afternoon treat after that, Len has promised to pop over to oversee my conversion of BlackBeast's data-filled SSDs from their current NTFS format over to their new ext4 format — preferably without spilling a drop of data — and possibly their assembly into one logical volume. A bigger, seamless, data space for me and my bits to play in. I no longer have to think in Windows terms of drive letters (just as well, given my tendency to forget which bits live on which drives). I do have an excellent memory; but it's fair to say it does what it wants rather than what I want. Rather odd, if you think about it — so I tend not to. That way lies madness. Besides, it's always been like that.
At least, for as long as I can remember :-)
Interesting slant
Rather than a rant. Source and snippet:
With our software, an idiot could be head of risk at a global investment bank. Nobody bought it, banks continued to measure risks the hard way and the world economy collapsed. Sometimes I think if we'd found a way to make it harder to use, our software might have saved us all from a decade of poverty.
Reasons to be cheerful...
... include, but are by no means limited to:
- the pink blossom I spotted slathered lavishly all over a tree on the way to the dentist...
- the news that Python 3 has totally revamped (and thereby improved?) its Unicode support and character string handling (a factoid deduced from an article in a Linux magazine I was browsing in Asda)...
- and the four little treats I somehow managed to ease off that fine establishment's discount DVD shelves on my circuitous return from said dentist.
Chaps need little post-dental rewards in their Life, don't you agree? And I found a nice little blue flower growing under the plastic bag some kind soul had flung into my front "garden", doubtless to frost-proof it. Bonus!
The afternoon...
... whizzed by with Len first helping me swap my three 'data' SSDs3 over from NTFS to ext4 — a minor-league juggling exercise where each disk in turn was emptied of its current NTFS data, re-partitioned, re-formatted, and re-filled (more or less4) — and then — much more usefully for my long-term chances of staying organised — helping demonstrate the power and utility of Linux symbolic links.
For example, unknown to the lighttpd webserver that runs an experimental version of 'molehole' deep inside BlackBeast, its data is now coming from one of the 480GB SSDs rather than the device I still persist in thinking of as the 'system' disk. All without changing so much as one binary digit of the configuration file that lighttppd uses to find its way around (as it were). It's just that the spot that "X" marks on the treasure map is now actually on a different Treasure Island on another SATA port. In fact, the entire web site data was moved while the server was up and running and it never skipped a beat. Try doing that on Windows!
Meanwhile, in a galaxy...
... across the village, Brian was busy reworking what I now belatedly realise he regarded all along as merely a "Proof of Concept". He's turned it into a more general-purpose and easily modified / expanded Python / SQL system of well-nigh Industrial Strength. So now, of course, he wants me to take it out for a test spin round my Data Park.
So I shall be re-generating a subtly-different SQL DB from a subtly-different master data file and then running a subtly-different Python SQL query against the DB to spit out what should (with luck) be a completely identical piece of SHTML code for my Books web lists. Point being, I will in future be able to load further sets of data (for music and videos) defined by different schemas into the same SQL DB and run the same sort of generic Python queries to generate similar web pages for those items. The devil, of course, being in the details.
So, although it's true to say I no longer know quite where anything is on my Linux PC any more, I don't actually need to. I just need to know that it's all available from my "Home" space, one or two mouse clicks away. And losing my Windows 8.1 system looks very much like a blessing in disguise. I haven't been this pleased with PCs since my first encounter with the Acorn RISC OS system 25 years ago.
And it's seven years to the day since the Blue Screen of Death that, in retrospect, marked the end of my trusting relationship with Windows XP... and soon thereafter to the start of a fraught one with Windows Vista.