2016 — 4 January: Monday
Quite what's so appealing about "Akhnaten, Hymn to the Sun" will remain unexplored until sunrise breaks through the (Philip) Glass.
I have to wonder...
... if Mark Zuckerberg simply couldn't find time to watch — and thus take heed of the implicit perils strongly conveyed by — the messages of "Transcendence" and "Ex_Machina"1 in between reading his two books a month in the last year or more. "Simple AI as a fun intellectual challenge..." for him to code for himself? Yeah, right. The world clearly needs an AI constructed with any of Facebook's extremely creepy DNA. I'd rather take my chance against the Cylons2.
You know when...
... a transient focused enthusiasm is getting out of hand? It's when all but one of yesterday's phone calls were about Kodi... and the one that wasn't was about bereavement! (That last is not an enthusiasm, but a simple fact of non-AI non-life.)
Very interesting...
... but stupid (if you recall Rowan and Martin's "Laugh-in"). My online bank has just paid some annual interest into a new savings account that was already "maxed out". When I last unwittingly broke their limit they bounced my attempted transfer back into my current account and then complained in writing. If they complain this time I shall be mildly annoyed. Meanwhile, it's only two days until the next dollop of IBM pension. And we are now approaching my traditional season for an infusion of tech toys to keep endorphin levels up.
Should I celebrate...
... what would have been dear Mama's 99th birthday this week? As Big Bro wrote in a "Round Robin":
Betty departed after several years in a rest home... A small estate was shared with David, and both brothers 'invested' in new cars and other unplanned spending effort...
It would have been a "large estate" without the "rest home".3 But he's right. My rather muddy little Mazda is already near the 1,500 mile mark and is genuinely delightful. Particularly the non-Zuckerbergian AI in it that goes "beep" as I career madly backwards towards unnoticed obstacles.
Breakfast beckons. My household AI says it's time for my first supplies run of the new year, too. "Set machine to beep, Mr Sulu, and take us out."
Mid-afternoon...
... sees the first walk of the new year pencilled in for tomorrow (which looks drier, currently) and the completion of a spot of useful documentation for Brian to assist him in future Python-mediated generation of "molehole-compliant" web pages. I think it's time for my next cuppa.
Fed up of waiting...
... for my 'usual' email Ansible to arrive, I simply browsed for it on this fancy new Web thingy. This is fairly priceless:
For the record
"Last week's column mistakenly misidentified a source. The European Commission president is Romano Prodi, not Buffy the Vampire Slayer." — The Prague Post.
I have a three-pipe problem!
I can see two tricky solutions, and one obvious one. The obvious solution means pop-up windows, which I hate, and which aren't necessarily universally available. Tricky solution #1 means adding a bit of JavaScript. Tricky solution #2 means adding a bit of CSS. I suspect that may be my preference, on aesthetic grounds. But all this goes against the grain of my philosophy for 'molehole' pages, which has until now been to keep them simple. Just like the webmaster, in fact.
"I need a vacation!"
90 minutes later...
... as I was serving up and enjoying my evening meal4 I saw solution #4. But first, what's the problem? Quite trivial, really. Generating a list of the films I have on my DVDs and Blu-rays is simple. But doing the same for all the TV shows, and/or all the episodes within a given TV series, is fraught. I "want" to list each TV title once. But I also "want" to keep on hand the location, cost, and date of purchase, of each TV series without swamping my simple list of video material.
Consider that much-loved comedic gem "Northern Exposure". One simple title, but 110 episodes (plus a bunch of cast interviews and deleted scenes) spread across six seasons. All I need to know is where each season "lives" in the CaseLogic folders that hold all the films and all the TV stuff in one glorious muddle mixture.
Solution #4 involves no nasty JavaScript. Nor any clever CSS, aesthetic or otherwise. But it does mean extra work for Python to generate two web pages, in parallel, while traversing the data tucked away in Kodi's SQLite DB in one processing pass. Page #1 will list, by title, each TV show, and also make each TV show a link to a target in page #2 showing as much, or as little, extra data about that show as I define. Boring? Yes, certainly. But simple. I like simple.