...more recent posts
Note to the e-commerce department: How about I just give you my credit card number every time I want to purchase something? You know, like in the real world? Like we always do it? My credit card number is already my unique identifier. Why do I need a seperate unique identifier at every site?
This would have the following benefits:
1) I wouldn't have to fight your bizarre web site to set up a user account.
2) I wouldn't have to repeat step 1 every time I go to purchase something because I can't remember the password from the previous account set up ordeal.
3) I'll feel more secure, because my credit card number is not stored in your computers. (Really, thanks for the offer for help, but I don't have much trouble carrying my card around in my pocket.)
4) You'll escape giving the impression that you're just making me go through this whole user account process because you think I'm dumb enough to purchase something from you in the future just because I already have an account set up.
Thanks for listening. I'll expect these changes in place by later this afternoon.
I've been thrown out of my routine, and now I can't get any traction. A bunch of stuff is about to happen. The restaurant is opening. The basement office is finally done and ready for occupation. The new software is basically done and ready to be deployed. But there is still work to be done, loose ends to be joined. For me it's always this last bit that proves to be the most difficult. At first it's all possibility. It's all about what we want to make happen. But at this point, so late in the game, these projects are pretty much in charge of us! Demanding that we finish up this piece or that. Too late to make any real changes that aren't already figured in the present shape of the project itself. I grow bored at this point.
I'm really impressed by MB and J's ability to stay focused. Right through to the end. Meanwhile I'm quite scattered, and not really much help (if I ever was.) Still, I have been secretly laying plans for what might come next, although it's too soon for any details. Plus, part of the trick is making it seem like someone else's idea.
I'm up to 478 songs on the massive restaurant mix. That's 34 hours, 24 minutes and 25 seconds of music taking up 2.31 GB of space. That makes the iPod about half full. This project is taking more time than I thought. Haven't really been able to get anything else done. And I probably have a few more days to go.
I'm going to try to take a few pictures today. The restaurant is really coming together. Now if Con Ed would just be a little more helpful we could launch this thing.
Not sure what this will do to my web project. Hopefully I'll be able to jump right back in and not have to spend too much time coming back up to speed. We'll see. These are the dangers of being involved in many different pursuits.
Setting up a friends iMac today. Straight to OS X which I think will be good for a beginner. But what do you say to someone who really doesn't know anything about computers? I mean really nothing. How much do you explain? This is a hard question I've been thinking about for a few weeks now. I can't come to any obvious answers so I'm just going to wing it. But I'd like to have something more systematic to go by. Perhaps this will be the start of me developing such a rap.
Mozilla 0.9.8 is out.
I know my part. Don't expect any big surprises. With that said, I'll continue:
The iPod rocks. (Dude.) If one of your goals is to pick up weird geeky guys in public places then you definitely have to get one of these things. Girls, unfortunately, seem a little less enamored. Still, if you can get them to spin the silky smooth navigation wheel there is an occasionaly small rise in pulse.
So far I have 217 songs (that's 15 hours 8 minutes 5 seconds of music taking up 1.02 GB of disk space) loaded into iTunes. That's the program on my Mac that holds all my MP3s. I just put an audio CD into my computer and iTunes opens up automatically showing me all the tracks. One click and iTunes goes to the internet and fetches all the CD and track information (or I could type it in manually.) One more click and iTunes converts the whole thing into the much smaller MP3 format and adds it to my growing library.
I can search through the library in a bewildering variety of ways. And I can create "play lists" which are the digital equivalent of mixed tapes. I just make a new list (like making a folder) and drag whatever tracks I want out of the library and into the new play list.
So far this is all in my computer. Now when I plug in the iPod it also opens up iTunes and automatically syncs, adding any songs from iTunes that weren't already on the iPod and deleteing any that have disapperaed from the mothership. Play lists are treated similarly. Of course there are manual controls to override this behavior, but so far the fully autopilot mode seems to work just fine. Seperate volume adjustments (crucial for making mixes) as well as track length editing (cut out that talking at the beginning of the track, or trim the 45 seconds of applause at the end) are all preserved between iTunes and iPod. (Equalizer settings are lost, but to me that is much less important that track length and volume.)
The firewire connection transfers all the songs quite fast. And it charges the iPod which, by the way, came fully charged right out of the box. I walked around with it all last night and it didn't go below half on the power meter.
I'm ripping Love - Forever Changes in the background right now. Up to 221 songs. But I need your help. If you had to make the music for a restaurant what would your top album be? Top five? And don't say Getz and Gilberto because as great as that album is, we hear it everywhere. Ditto for Buena Vista Social Club. But that maybe gives you an idea where I'm at. So, like those (or not,) but songs people aren't already sick of. I know this crowd has some ideas. Come on, give it up. Free meals for a lifetime* to anyone who contributes. Thanks.
* offer dependent on validation from someone actually in charge
By default, perhaps, but I am in charge of the music system for the new restaurant. Of course I bought an iPod. It just came in the mail (I ordered it Friday with 2 day shipping - pretty good.) So far it's as slick as I expected. Apple is so good at this.
So now I get a week or so with it to make a lot of playlists. And then it will live at the restaurant. If this works J. said she'll buy them for all the places. Still, I'm trying to convince her to just get iMacs so that we can put all the numbers on the web and she can work from anywhere. But this is a good first step. And if we do end up following my ultimate plan then maybe the iPod will fall back into my hands.
I'll report more this week as I play with it.
I think I remember something like this happening before. I'm within striking distance of being preliminarily finished with my project. And now I've had another realization about how to greatly simplify the underpinnings. Why didn't I think of this three weeks ago? Probably because I didn't understand the problem well enough at that point. I needed to work with it in order to get to this point where I can see clearly. But now what am I supposed to do? I thought I was almost done.
In some ways this is probably a trap. Sure I can keep writing it over and over again and probably always make some improvements. But the idea is to finish. And something that works right now might well be better than something that will work better when (if) it's done. Still, this was an important insight. I'm genuinely confused.
Last night I was lying in bed thinking about this and I decided I'd dedicate today, one day, to laying the foundation for the new idea. I'll keep all the old work intact, and I won't do anything to prevent myself from just switching back to where I am right now with the present code. But I'll give the new idea one day and see how far I can get. Might be just a wasted day, but it's a Sunday so that seems alright.
Not like I'm going to watch the Super Bowl or anything.
I remember the last time I made a large change to the system. About a year ago. The worst part was translating all the old posts into the new database. This time, thankfully, it's not seeming so bad. Maybe I didn't make as many changes.
Well, truthfully, I don't have the comments importing yet, so there may still be problems. But I just wrote something to grab all the posts on my page from the remote server ("oak") and put them into the new database here on my desk ("tulip".) I takes about a minute over this 56k dialup to suck it all down. Not bad.
I'm probably not as close to being done as it seems from the news that I'm already importing the old database. This is just for some testing so I can make sure I'm not missing any obvious problems just because I don't have many posts in the system.
The biggest finding so far, which is obvious but still worth noting, is that everything works really fast when it's all on the same machine. Wow. What a pleasure to not have to wait even one second for anything to happen. This makes the on line experience feel rather lacking in zip. I wonder how much of a difference a dedicated server will make?
Did some good work yesterday, and over the weekend, after last Friday's failing. Seems I need some down time after every few productive days. It feels like I'm not doing anything, but maybe that's not actually the case. It's interesting the way the mind works on problems.
It used to be that I slept very deeply straight through the night. Every time. Now that hardly ever happens. Lately my pattern has been (as best I can make out) to sleep for a few hours. Then I wake up after a first round of dreams. Lay in bed for a while unable to get back to sleep. After about 30 seconds my mind starts working on code again. I can't help it so I just let it go. Eventually I fall back asleep, and then after another dreaming episode I wake up again and start back in on the code. I think I had about four cycles last night. This is pushing back my wakeup time a bit in the morning. But on the other hand, I'm actually working during the night.
Yesterday evening I was sitting at the bar at aKa having a glass of wine, waiting for MB, and writing notes to myself about things still needing to be done in the new system. And then it hit me. Not only could I move comment page directory entries out of the main directory table, but I could just get rid of them all together. Without losing any functionality! It's easy to make huge breakthroughs when your original idea was so far off. Here are some numbers concerning this site which might illustrate why I'm so excited about this:
There are 4,379 entries in the directory table. These entries correspond to the 4,379 pages on this site.
But under my new system I'll only need 231 entries to categorize the same information (most of those 4,379 pages are threaded comment pages which, it turns out, don't really need to be in the directory.)
The subscription table is even worse. With one entry for every users subscription to every page we presently have 144,507 entries in the table (33 users X 4,379 pages.)
In the redesigned system this number would be 7,623. I will have to add one column to the table to make this happen, but still it's a major savings.
These are some startling results. We'll see if I can make it work. If so, then my fears about hitting the ceiling for how large this system could scale have been pushed back quite a bit. I'm going to try to get it minimally working today.
H. ordered one of the brand new (well, O.K., "speed bumped") dual 1Ghz G4 Powermacs today. 5 days ship time. I'm very curious how 10.1 feels on that compared to a 500mhz G3. Little faster I'd guess.