The Twilight Report

belmont.wdlabs.com is occupied territory

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:55:00 GMT

Jay, who is the only contact I have at the new grander IdeaBank sends me an e-mail this morning:

If I insert a new row into the quote table is there anything I have to 
do to make it work in queries??

INSERT INTO quote VALUES (
'Kazoo',
'kazoo:dino:barney:slate:wilma:fred:betty',
(SELECT MAX(id)+1 FROM quote),
'kazoo dino barney slate',
'kazoo
dino
barney
slate
wilma
fred
betty' );


We ran this, and when we do a search (from the web site) on kazoo or 
slate it isn't found.

To which I responded with... well actually I didn’t respond, and in case anyone else is wondering: no I won’t do your homework for you either. This guy is getting paid to do this, but if I saw this on a newsgroup I would strongly suspect the guy was trying to get someone to do his homework for him. That is how good his SQL is.

Also, maybe you shouldn’t be tinkering with a production server that you know nothing about? Definitely feeling the Schadenfreude when I connected to the website and the dynamic content was broken due to a server configuration error. But then, that is what you get when you buy custom software and hire some hack with no experience in the languages it was written in to run it instead of the original author who knows it better than anyone.

If it were Chuck still in charge, I would probably give Jay some pointers (I actually know why it isn’t working from the snippet he provided), but I have no loyalty to (or compensation from) this company, and definitely not to Jay.

nullray.wdlabs.com

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:37:00 GMT

I told Chuck that I was moving a couple of months ago. We agreed that nothing had to change, that I could do my job running the server as easily from down under as anywhere. I was nervous that he'd freak that I was leaving, but when he didn't it was one less thing that I had to worry about in the move. Then New Year's day I get this phone call from him and an e-mail telling me, more than asking, that the server billing needs to be transferred him, and that I need to show Jay how to do the few several tasks which are required to be done manually. Apparently he sent me a snail mail asking about it just before I went to Salt Lake for Christmas, but I never got it. I felt blindsided by this whole thing.

Anyway, I suppose I should have expected it. When I originally started the account with RackSpace (who have been wonderful, btw-), Chuck would insist that he get the bill and I'd say, "but that is not what we agreed to." Then a couple of weeks later he'd be back at it. It died down for a while. It hadn't come up for years.

So I've decided to get my own server. Everyone with belmont accounts (there are like four of you out there) will get an account on the new machine instead: nullray. The downside is that I have to configure the system to support all of the services that belmont currently takes care of. The upside to this thing is that the new machine will be much faster (2.4GHz), have more memory (1GB), larger hard drives (2x160GB) and newer operating system (Fedora 4).

For those of you with email or shell accounts I will let you know more when there is more to know. I expect the transition to be largely transparent, but you will at least have to remember to ssh nullray instead of ssh belmont during the switchover.

I Cannot Be Hurt by Anything this Wicked World Has Done

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 13:13:00 GMT

What was 2004? It was a year of stolen and disputed elections in Georgia and the Ukraine, the rise and fall of Howard Dean and John Kerry, the first private space flight and the end of the "X-Prize," disaster in Darfur, prisoner abuse in Iraq, expansion of the European Union, the death of Ronald Regan and a month of flags at half mast, the return of Greek Olympics and a very smug presidential victory. In less political but tragic terms, the worst natural disaster in my memory has occurred in Asia as Tsunami death tolls top 135,000 according to CNN.com.

For me, the year started out as a bleak one in the coldest New York winter I have ever experienced. My mother came to visit me for her birthday. We stayed in Manhattan and it was bitterly cold.

Lowel and Johanna

I took a lighting class at Dutchess which was a blast. Some of my friends from Black and White II were taking the class and I met some other cool people. It was so much fun working with those people, including the teacher, Lowel Handler.

(Read more...)

In Short, 2004 was A Great Year and I have high hopes that 2005 will be even better.

Sale

Mon, 27 Dec 2004 19:26:00 GMT

I was being somewhat disparaging about IdeaBank in a recent entry. We added a new feature where in passers-by can sign up for a paid account right off the home page. I never expected it to generate too many new subscribers. I believe most users will go through the old existing process: ask for a free trial first and then, if we are lucky sign up for a paid account. However, today was historic apparently; I got this edited message from Chuck:

From: Charles Francis
To: Graham ...
Subject: FLAST NEWS

Dear One and All:

We have just received our first subscriber who subscribed on line. He is ***** *** ****** from Kuwait. He used his Visa credit card for a Plan 1. I must say that, so far at least, everything worked perfectly. It was almost all automatic except for my insertion of the Due Date. Thanks to everybody for helping put this new feature in play. Regards.

Chuck Francis [ emphasis mine ]

Let's hope there will be more of those :)

3, 2, 1...

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 17:59:00 GMT

Three

My lunch is culturally schizophrenic today. I ordered the Goulash Soup and the Texas Beef Brisket.

Two

Some of you already know that I run a web site for a retired marketing guy (henceforth "Chuck"). This is on the side, my day job is still working at The Company. The web site is www.idea-bank.com. Originally I did everything involved with the web site, except for write the actual content, of course. Some time back Chuck wanted to revamp the look of the site, and I recommend that he get someone else do the HTML. So now someone else is responsible for the HTML and I do the back end database and administrative tools.

This actually seemed like a pretty good idea at the time, because my philosophy toward HTML is somewhat old fashion. I don't believe in spinning or flaming logos, and I don't think every web page needs a fancy JavaScript driven GUI. I actually think those things tend to distract from the content, which is (contrary to popular opinion) why you actually go to a web site.

Chuck wants to improve the web site with some new features. As it turns out the back end (my part) is actually flexible enough that the changes required are minimal. A few weeks ago I asked our HTML guy to make some really minor changes, amounting to copying some files to a different location. I could actually do this myself... it is my server... but I want to stay out of the HTML code, and besides it would be rude. He still hasn't made these changes. I guess this is the downside to this arrangement.

Since the server is mine, I like to keep everything neat and tidy, and this guy is a Windows user, so he does little things to annoy me like using the short .htm extension instead of .html. We aren't running any sorry ass sixteen bit operating systems here; filename extensions do not have to be three characters, damn it!

One

Think I finally got Parallel Abstraction working. I'm stress testing it with test cases right now. This is big. This is proof that the Universe does not hate me.