RSS feedWhen upgrading my site recently, I noticed that I no longer linked to the companies where I work, a fairly stupid oversight considering that I own them, and it is probably in my best interest to publicise them.
So on the side bar you’ll now see Aggmedia. We specialise in microcontent, software architecture/development and audio/video production. Underneath that, you’ll find Ludic Creative, providing improv tools and storytelling for business.
I’ve always hated SQL. From the day I installed one of the first IBM VM/SP versions on our 4361 mainframe back in the early 1980s, until today, with still no end in sight. It ran like a dog back then, which is geek speak for s l o w l y, and still has a whole swag of issues to deal with which ignorant sysadmins and amateur database architects still get wrong.
So the other day I converted this blog from using super fast Perl DBI hash ties, in which I’ve simulated a relational database, to good ol’ SQL, MySQL in particular. The choice was not mine, but the complexity of some code I was working on, which needed a bit more order than ordinal arrays of pseudo database columns.
Anyway, so I converted the code over, and it runs like, you guessed it, a dog. It was initially taking 30 seconds to load the main page, and then the following day that stretched out to about 5 minutes. Once a dog, always a dog.
My hosting provider then found a server problem, which they haven’t fully fixed or conveyed to me yet, but the site is running a little faster now, which saves a bit of backout work. Suffice to say, it may not be MySQL, but I like to tar everything with the same brush, so MySQL it is.
SQL, the COBOL of databases.
From Wikipedia:
Preening is the art of cleaning, grooming, and maintaining parts of the body.
Among animals, birds must preen each of their feathers once a day to remove parasites, keep them in good aerodynamic condition, and oil them.
I bumped into Marco the other day. She was sleeping at the time. I’ve renamed her Sally.
SMS changes the way we deal with the world. Especially when its antisocial and slow to encode nature is contradictingly combined with a supposed ever increasing world need for speed and immediacy of communications.
Ironically, it was the U.S. (and the incompatability of their telco networks) which caused most resistance to the pandemic rise of SMS worldwide, only giving in after the rest of the world had well and truly solidified the permanent place for SMS in modern communications. In fact it was the initial failure of SMS in the U.S. which caused many of their reality TV shows (such as Big Brother and Survivor) to be voted by the progam participants, instead of like the rest of the world which tends to use members of the public via the SMS cash cow.
Not bad for a protocol which simply uses the unused space in mobile (cell) phone tower control channel packets. At 10c per SMS, and no additional outlay, SMS is the telco world’s gravy train.
Now if we could only type on a 9 digit keypad as fast as we can make a voice call. What’s wrong with this picture?
The menu background for a DVD production I was working on the other day.
One of my favourite albums of all time, well probably at least in the top 5, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation has been added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress (scroll to the bottom). To quote the Sonic Youth site:
Sonic Youth’s 1988 album Daydream Nation has been added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. Daydream Nation now joins Emile Berliner’s ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ and ‘I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man’ by Muddy Waters (among other recordings) in the collection mandated by Congress ‘to maintain and preserve sound recordings and collections of sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.’
While it was ground breaking at the time, and was a significant landmark in the journey to 1991, the year that punk broke, who would have thought it back in 1988? And there was much rejoicing.
The splash screen for a DVD production I was working on the other day.