It was a bad day. A lot of bad stuff happened. And I'd love to forget it all. But I don't. Not ever. Because this is what I do. Every time, every day, every second, this: On five, we're bringing down the government.
Saturday, November 29
Turkeys
Quote One:
Philip Taubman, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, said that "in this day and age, there should have been a way to take more reporters. People are perfectly capable of maintaining a confidence for security reasons. It's a bad precedent." Once White House officials "decided to do a stealth trip, they bought into a whole series of things that are questionable."
Quote Two:
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, criticized the White House correspondents who made the trip without spilling the secret. "That's just not kosher," he said. "Reporters are in the business of telling the truth. They can't decide it's okay to lie sometimes because it serves a larger truth or good cause."
Quote Three, in a pointed response to One and Two:
But Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online, called the trip "a political masterstroke," saying: "This wasn't lying about an 18-minute gap on a tape or lying under oath. If they had announced the trip and there were attacks and people had died, everyone would be screaming bloody murder about how Bush put people in harm's way. I'm sure the press corps has their dresses over their head about it, but I sincerely doubt anyone in the real America will have any concern about it whatsoever."
(From the
Washington Post)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:42 AM
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1
I'm sure the press corps has their dresses over their head about it
NOT a pretty picture...
Posted by: triticale at Saturday, November 29 2003 12:26 PM (o+iAl)
2
The rest of that sentence should read "just before being kicked over the precipice, wailing like sissies the entire way down, ending only with a wholly satisfying 'plop'".
Posted by: Ted at Saturday, November 29 2003 01:58 PM (Qj620)
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Tuesday, November 18
Minus Threeth Normal Form
A list. In a string. In a field. In a table. In a relational database. With seventy-four million records.
A line-feed delimited list. Containing entries that are themselves lists. With data-dependent delimiters. Wonderful delimiters, like " --> ", for example. It's as if Codd had never lived.
You're not supposed to have to write parsers to pull data out of a database. That's the whole [bad word] point of [bad word] databases.
Mind you, the people responsible have been sacked. That's why I get to work on it.
Well, at least it's not nibble-aligned.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:25 AM
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1
:D At work, I'm trying to help some people translate our database to their Oracle-based system. What I work with - Model 204 - has no defined record structure within a file, which gives perfect flexibility. So if we need a field to occur zero times, once, twice, or hundreds of times in one record, it just does. I keep waiting for heads to explode ala Scanners as they try to wrap their minds around that concept.
Posted by: Ted at Tuesday, November 18 2003 11:05 AM (Qj620)
2
I have one word for you, "Perl".
Nothing beats it for parsing arbitrary text into records.
Posted by: Rossz at Wednesday, November 19 2003 02:55 AM (43SjN)
3
Perl. Fleagh. Gak. Blort. Plurf.
I don't like Perl.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 19 2003 09:06 AM (jtW2s)
4
Anyway, the problem is not parsing the data, the problem is discovering all the differnt (undocumented!) formats that the data is stored in so that it can be parsed in the first place.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 19 2003 09:07 AM (jtW2s)
5
Lets see. I did a data-logger in 6502 assembly language. Absolute assembler. Counting jumps, in hex, on my fingers (more like split octal, I suppose). I did a little hack in Turbo Basic to add carriage returns to text files so I could read downloaded pr0n from the bbs.
I've done data entry into a few inventory packages, one criminally wrong for the application (written for widgets; used for metal bar sold by the foot and the pound).
I know better than to create a mess like that. I'd even admit I didn't have the needed skills, and lose face and employment, before I'd create a mess like that.
Posted by: triticale at Thursday, November 20 2003 02:58 AM (qS4j9)
6
That's a good point. It's the people who don't realise they lack the needed skills that are the real danger.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 20 2003 12:11 PM (jtW2s)
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Wednesday, November 12
Good News, Poo News
Good news: I've finished recovering my files, all 380,000 of them. I'm just triple-checking before I reformat the drive and copy everything back.
Poo news: My ADSL is still down. Telstra* now say that it may be fixed by mid-day today.
* Spit.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:27 PM
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Meh
Telstra "fixed" their DSL network at 10:30 this morning and closed the fault. Then reopened it when a reported 15%* of users turned out to be still having problems. This was fixed at 1:30 this afternoon... That is, "fixed" as in "not fixed". Currently there are "some services" still having problems and there is no ETA on fixing those.
As someone once said:
Telstra must die. Die, die, die, die.
So if you don't hear from me for a while, it's because I'm "off line". I wonder what that will be like...
* 15%: A Telstra term used in reporting faults, meaning "Some customers are still able to use the services we are overcharging them for."
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:28 AM
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Tuesday, November 11
The Curse of the Pixies
I was typing up a fascinating new post and my X session crashed. Ploink. All gone.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:44 PM
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While I commiserate with your loss, I do have to admit that I'm somewhat gleeful to learn it's not only us Windows users that suffers such fates at the hands of the pixies.
Posted by: Glenn McGaha Miller at Wednesday, November 12 2003 10:30 AM (a/AG8)
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Saturday, November 08
Bleah
Well, at least this one was brand new and didn't have any files on it when it died.
Also, it's under warranty.
Still: Bleah.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:54 PM
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1
I think I'm going to have to start sending you condolence cards if you loose one more hard drive or whatever geekly thing it was....
Posted by: Susie at Sunday, November 09 2003 01:07 AM (0+cMc)
2
it's beginning to sound like some ancient curse :)
Posted by: Ted at Sunday, November 09 2003 01:37 AM (2sKfR)
3
Man, you're quite the hard drive destruction bunny, aren't you.
Posted by: Matt Navarre at Sunday, November 09 2003 01:43 AM (n/wkr)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 09 2003 02:45 AM (jtW2s)
5
You had it easy. I lost everything on my server's two hard drives (one was brand new) when the power supply blew. I just set up the new server and I'm in the process of adding content. I plan on getting an external USB 2.0 DVD burner for backups. I decided on an external model so I can move it from system to system as needed. Can anyone recommend a decent model? I'll be using it with both Linux and Windoze.
BTW, don't ever trust a Seagate Traven tape drive. They are "write-only".
Posted by: Rossz at Sunday, November 09 2003 02:31 PM (43SjN)
6
My mom, at times when things went consistently tits-up, would say that I wasn't holding my tongue right.
I don't know how helpful this might be.
Posted by: LeeAnn at Sunday, November 09 2003 04:31 PM (HxCeX)
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