Well, as I mentioned in an earlier post, we got the news that the large Norway maple in the backyard had to go.
On Monday, it went…
Left to right, the pictures show the following:
• The problem. A rotted-out trunk.
• Before (in the spring, right before leaves appeared)
• After. Wow. Naked backyard.
Oh well, will have a lot more sun now.
There’s an interesting article in CIO Today titled The SCO Boomerang and the Strength of Linux.
It’s written by Pamela Jones (PJ), of Groklaw fame, who is well suited to write an article detailing some of the results of SCO’s litigation against, well, the world. In this case, PJ outlines how she believes Linux is getting strong in spite of SCO’s litigation; in her opinion, SCO’s lititgation and general bad behavior has helped Linux and the GPL.
Sorry Darl. I think she’s right.
Well, the mourning period for Pope John Paul II ended today, and on Monday the process of picking the next Roman Catholic leader begins.
The (weak) picture here is from the public audience with the Pope I attended back in July 1979. No private audience – I don’t have that kind of pull – but I was seated a couple of rows ahead of Merv Griffin, so I had some inside connections.
This was less than a year after his election to the papacy (October 1978), and before the 1981 assassination attempt that seems to have begun the decline of his health.
I’m a fallen-away Catholic – and I was at the time, as well – but it was still a great experience. The helicopter comes in, the pope-mobile rolls in, and then there is an address the Pope gave in several languages. To a packed house in the middle of the colonnade in St. Peter’s Square.
Dave Winer – love him or hate him, he does have a lot to say about this subject – wrote a short essay the other day about Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and RSS.
Basically, he says Yahoo and MS grok it, whereas Google seems to have its head up its ass in this regard.
I agree. Google (and Sun) have wasted too much time on Atom – RSS has reached the tipping point, and – whether or not it’s the best system – it is the syndication system. The old Betamax vs. VHS arguement. Get over it.
At the same time – as I’ve said repeatedly this year – I expect big things from Google this year. I’m hoping some sort of RSS concession will be part of this. Why not?
Update: 4/19/2005 Another story on same subject – be sure to read the comments.
OK, today is tax day (submitted your return yet? No? Hurry!).
Seems like a good time to revisit something I mentioned in my post of over a year ago re: the so-called Death Tax.
I guess it’s getting close to passage, as this Business Week article notes.
My position on this has not changed. As one who will probably never have to worry about this (the current Death Tax affects only 2% of estates; I don’t think I’ll die in that rarefied air…), I’m probably a good spokesperson.
Why?
Because elimination/reduction/tightening of this law will affect me adversely: Since the dead billionaires are taxed more lightly, I (and the other 98%) will have to either suffer loss of government services or personally have to pony up more tax dollars to keep the status quo.
I still think the Death Tax sucks. You’re being punished for dying. And for having been successful while alive.
Wow. Double whammy. Actually a triple whammy – whatever you leave, you’ve been taxed on before. (Income, property and so on.)
Some liberal types think scaling back the Death Tax sucks, but I don’t, and I’m more liberal than the average bear.
Did the rich bastards get the dough illegally? Prosecute the mofos while they’re alive; don’t tax the dude in the coffin.
Is this rich bastard issue really an issue? We’re talking 2% of the population (currently; the new laws would trim that percentage). Doesn’t seem to be an issue beyond money management.
When Congress fixes all (OK, some) of the asinine loophole and other cost-ineffective measures it has in place (sometimes for all the best reasons; usually to get re-elected), then we can talk about things.
Happy Tax Day – just remember, your tax dollars are partially going to something you absolutely disagree with – abortion clinics & abstinence requirements; tobacco farmer subsidies & litigation against tobacco companies; calls for smaller federal government intervention & intervention in politically photogenic issues such as steroids in baseball or Terri Schiavo – that’s what the framers meant:
– Voltaire (who helped Ben Franklin during the 1770s)
It’s an interesting country, this USA…and so relatively young…
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve upgraded to mySQL 4.1.11 from 3.23.58.
Great.
However, there were a couple of surprises I’ve run across in the testing of that change that – to me – shouldn’t have been a surprise: It should have been very clearly stated up front in the changeover docs from mySQL.
The mySQL documentation says the following about subqueries (i.e. subselects):
A subquery is a SELECT statement inside another statement.
Starting with MySQL 4.1, all subquery forms and operations that the SQL standard requires are supported, as well as a few features that are MySQL-specific.
— mySQL documentation; subqueries page
Sounds great, doesn’t it? ALL subquery form and operations that the SQL standard requires are supported….
But you scroll to the bottom of the same page (before the user comments), and you see this limitation: “One restriction is that currently you cannot modify a table and select from the same table in a subquery. This applies to statements such as DELETE, INSERT, REPLACE, and UPDATE.”
In other words, for same table subqueries, all you can do is SELECT. I.e. one of five possible statements, or only 20%. What a letdown. This limits the functionality of the subquery tremendously.
If they had said this up front, it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. Underpromise, overdeliver.
Oh well. Still better than was preceded it…
Upgraded my mySQL server from 3.23.58 to 4.1.11 – all in one fell swoop.
Except for a white space I inserted in a config file that I should not have, an unbelievably simple and not complicated upgrade. Swap out the engine, change some config files…don’t touch the data files (MYD,MYI,frm) – yep, kept ISAM tables.
And it worked. Huh! I like that…
And now I get sub-selects! *Shrug* Again, this is why people flame mySQL – this should have been in there l.o.n.g ago.
To me.
But now I’m a happy pseudo-DBA.
On the downside, we found out last week that one of the two huge trees in our backyard – the Norway maple – was going to have to go.
We knew this was coming – we’ve had the tree service out three years in a row to make sure it was stable for another year – but still, it’s sad. It’s a great tree. And the picture to the the right is the only one I can currently find of the tree. I’m sure I have one somewhere else, but I usually take closeups, not step back and view the whole tree.
On the upside, this will give us more sun in the backyard, so we can plant more of the sun-loving plants that we like.
On the downside – beyond the mere loss of a great tree – is that this tree was near the house and arched over the sunroom – so we’re going to lose that insulating effect in the summer. (In the winter, leaves dropped and whatever sun exisited came through. Perfect!).
The other tree – a freakin’ huge silver maple is in great shape, accoring to the arborist. This tree is about 60-80 feet tall, with a base diameter of about 3.5 feet. It’s a beaut.
Well, spring has (finally) sprung in the Chicago area, and I spent a good part of today out the yard doing clean-up: Specifically, the bushes along the back fence.
This area has been pretty much ignored by me since moving in (will be six years this October, methinks), and – from the looks of things – pretty much ingored for over a decade. Bleh.
Basically, I was trying to trim and thin the row of deciduous shurbs along the fence (I don’t even know what kind of shrubs they are). My tools? Pruners, an electric bush trimmer and (drumroll, please)…a genuine Milwaukee Saws-All.
Yep. More power pruning.
I took out as much as was left – all either dead, dying or not a bush (emerging trees). One such tree I took out has, with a quick count, 13 years of rings. A fruit tree (crabapple – Malus something or other). Yep, it’s been growing there for over a dozen years.
Hopefully I won’t let it get that bad again anytime soon…
I’ve bitched about the lack of features on Blogger – vs, for example MT – and I’ve also said that I expected big things from Google this year.
OK.
One of my gripes has been the lack of permalink support in Blogger.
Today, I discovered that it exists.
When did this happen? Are the blackouts coming back again? (Probably)
So I re-coded some templates, fixed some RSS generate/parse scripts and we are fucking almost happy now.
Not bad for late Friday night coding.