The theme du jour is ‘Rounded Transparent.’ Quite nice, though I may find it hard to customise later. I figure I’ll stay with this for a while.
Archive for October, 2007
Rounded Transparent
Friday, October 19th, 2007Blue Earth
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007Forgive the hyperactive appearance. I’m giving a new appearance a try. This one is ‘Blue Earth,’ which is a mind-bender of a name given the theme’s appearance.
I’ll probably be switching again before long. Note how the calendar appearance is wonky and how there are those weird corner thingies at the bottom of posts. I love web editing, but I don’t feel like making a special effort for a blog. Hooray for canned aesthetics!
Yes, But Is It Arse?
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007The best thing about contemporary art is that it acts as a random noun generator. Perhaps you will recall Chris Ofili, creator of the Virgin Mary made of poo and pornography. Whatever an artist’s motives are, nothing else in the realm of reality would bring the nouns Virgin Mary, poo, and pornography together into the same sentence. (Well, not nothing, but do you really want to think about what might?)
Another artist you might want to consider when you need an example of a sentence that is syntactically correct but somehow doesn’t register in the brain is Paul McCarthy of Salt Lake City, Utah. His art is part performance, part…body fluid. One journal tries and fails to describe his actions in words:
In Class Fool, for example, McCarthy flung himself around a classroom at the University of California, San Diego. Slipping in ketchup, dazed and bleeding from falling and running into things, McCarthy vomited several times, after which he inserted a Barbie doll into his rectum. The performance ended when the audience, unable to stomach the performance any longer, left the room.
And We Lost Everything
Monday, October 15th, 2007A lesser-known name for the American Civil War is the War of Northern Aggression.
One friend commented that a great way to make people do a double-take is to use that term in conversation. It doesn’t matter that you’re not a Confederate sympathiser. The goal is the irony! Try making it a game: players earn points inversely proportional to their location’s geographic latitude. Brownsville, Texas = 0; Bangor, Maine = 99.
You just keep on trying until you run out of cake
Sunday, October 14th, 2007It will be at least a year and a half before I start playing Portal, but the concept already has me hooked. It’s inexplicable in 20 words or less, so I’ll point you to Wired, who is glad to clarify the iconoclastic storyline for you.
The music ain’t half bad, either. In fact, I find myself listening to the last song on the soundtrack, ‘Still Alive,’ on loop. The song is a lighthearted spin on the Half-Life universe (science kills people, then makes cool guns for killing more people, end of story) rendered by a heavily audio-filtered female singsong voice. It’s Valve’s best effort at music not meant as background texture. It also contains their best humour.
Listen and download the song here. (Warning: as the lyrics and YTMND image seem to suggest, there are numerous spoilers in the form of game in-jokes. I don’t feel spoiled yet, so I recommend indulging yourself.)
This was a triumph.
I’m making a note here: ‘HUGE SUCCESS.’
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.
‘Aperture Science: We do what we must because we can.’
For the good of all of us (except the ones who are dead).But there’s no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
And the science gets done
and you make a neat gun
for the people who are still alive.
I’m not even angry.
I’m being so sincere right now.
Even though you broke my heart and killed me
and tore me to pieces
and threw every piece into a fire.
As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you!
Now these points of data make a beautiful line.
And we’re out of beta; we’re releasing on time.
So I’m glad I got burned.
Think of all the things we learned
for the people who are still alive.
I’m making a note here: ‘HUGE SUCCESS.’
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.
‘Aperture Science: We do what we must because we can.’
For the good of all of us (except the ones who are dead).But there’s no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
And the science gets done
and you make a neat gun
for the people who are still alive.
I’m not even angry.
I’m being so sincere right now.
Even though you broke my heart and killed me
and tore me to pieces
and threw every piece into a fire.
As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you!
Now these points of data make a beautiful line.
And we’re out of beta; we’re releasing on time.
So I’m glad I got burned.
Think of all the things we learned
for the people who are still alive.
Go ahead and leave me.
I think I prefer to stay inside.
Maybe you’ll find someone else to help you.
Maybe Black Mesa?
That was a joke. Ha ha, fat chance.
Anyway, this cake is great. It’s so delicious and moist.
Look at me still talking when there’s science to do.
When I look out there, it makes me glad I’m not you.
I’ve experiments to run; there is research to be done
on the people who are still alive.
And believe me, I am still alive.
I’m doing science and I’m still alive.
I feel fantastic and I’m still alive.
While you’re dying I’ll be still alive.
And when you’re dead I will be still alive.
STILL ALIVE
spamguy, The Non-Profit Organisation
Saturday, October 13th, 2007Getting settled into visiting http://filer.case.edu/wro1/blog every day? Great, because it’s time to pack up and move.
If you’re reading this, you’ve likely been bounced from the original site to here. Blog-wise, there should be no difference in experience, other than the utterly badass URL: http://www.spamguy.org/blog. (http://blog.spamguy.org will also work, eventually.) That’s right, I’m apparently a non-profit organisation. With that in mind, you still have a little over two months to mail me your cheques and count them as tax write-offs.
Other features of spamguy.org will be deployed as they are finished. In the meantime, continue to stick around here for important commentary about amusing song lyrics and Library of Congress filing system arcade games.
END;
Thursday, October 11th, 2007I have particular trouble getting SQL triggers and procedures to work. They’re just syntactically grumpy. Tonight, for example, I spent an hour, perhaps two, debugging a syntax error in a four-line trigger. Given the examples supplied in the above links, how can I go wrong?
[code lang="SQL"]CREATE TRIGGER myTrigger AFTER INSERT ON table1
FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
INSERT INTO table2
(
foreignid,
timestamp,
zerogoeshere
)
VALUES
(
NEW.id,
NOW(),
0
);
END;[/code]
Only after brute experimentation did I discover the problem. If your trigger has only one statement (e.g., INCLUDE), not only are BEGIN-END; superfluous, they won’t work. Keep the statement by itself:
[code lang="sql"]CREATE TRIGGER myTrigger AFTER INSERT ON table1
FOR EACH ROW
INSERT INTO table2
(
foreignid,
timestamp,
zerogoeshere
)
VALUES
(
NEW.id,
NOW(),
0
);[/code]
That’s utterly ridiculous. What if C++ returned a syntax error for typing
[code lang="cpp"]if (lameBoolFlag)
{
cout >> "Your flag is true, shit-for-brains!" >> endl;
}[/code]
I hope this will help someone, somewhere. Lord knows Google searches save my ass every day whilst coding.
Neetshee
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007I’m willing to forgive some people’s confusion between you’re and your…even though it makes you look like a 2nd grade C-student.
But I’ll nail your ears to the floor if I hear you pronounce Friedrich Nietzsche ‘Free-drich Neet-shee.’ It’s ‘Free-drich Neet-sha.’ Do you really think a German (a German advocating the vision of the superman, no less) would have had a dorky, non-Teutonic name like Neetshee?
I could almost see Neetshee being the name of a Chinese dude in the 12th of 11 overly racist and censored Merrie Melodies cartoons made prior to 1945.
Blind date()
Sunday, October 7th, 2007Applaud the buddy-buddy relationship of PHP and MySQL all you want. One thing about SQL has always bothered me: dates. You can add them to your database however you want, but it will always be spit out ‘YYYY-MM-DD.’ With dashes, leading zeros, and year in front. Only three tribes of sub-Saharan Africa write dates that way.
Wouldn’t it be great if PHP could pick up the slack with a do-all function? If they can include functions like jdtojewish() ((Hint: Much of PHP was developed in Israel.)) , there should be something like
[code lang="php"] $crappySQLdate = $row['crap_date']; $awesomeDate = convert_date($crappySQLdate, 'm/d/Y');[/code]
Tough. In this cold, mean world, you have to break the date into month, day, and year variables, pop each into a function to generate the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, then convert it to a date format of your choosing:
[code lang="php"]
$crappySQLdate = $row['crap_date'];
$day = date_parse($crappySQLdate);
$awesomeDate = date('m/d/Y', mktime(0, 0, 0, $day['month'],
$day['day'], $day['year']));[/code]
Next up, printing text one character at a time using nested ‘for’ loops.
Proof of Purchase
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007Proof of Purchase is a rather clever blog authored by an Oklahoman about my age. Er, actually, most of the work is done for him by lonely cashiers at $6.50 an hour. The few words he does add are pregnant with loneliness, yet optimism. It’s a blog where even brooding thoughts must stop to eat.