Author: Paul Tomblin

I suppose it was too much to hope for.

The other day they “upgraded” our Lotus Notes to a “6.0 style”. Evidently I had been using a “4.x style” without upgrading it. Ok the new view looks more modern, but it’s slow. Even by Bloated Stoats standards it’s slow. About the only thing I like about it is that when you delete something, it actually goes away off the list instead of still being there but with an “X” beside it until you hit F9. The user interface still sucks like a really sucky thing.

One of the things I really hate about Lotus Notes is that it doesn’t just encourage “TOFU” (Top post Over, Full text Under), it makes it hard to NOT do it that way. I noticed an option on the “reply” button that says “Reply with Internet-Style History”. Dare I hope? Would this be a way to do trimmed quoted text with the reply text interspersed? Breathless with anticipation, I clicked it. And disappointedly, I exhaled. I ended up with the cursor at the top, followed by the reply to the reply to the reply, then the reply to the reply, then the reply, then the original text. And it was quoted with a single line of “>” quote marks, not multiple quote marks for the multiply replied to text.

Oh well. I still continue to expect miracles, I guess.

You know what sucks?

– Dental surgery sucks. I got a temporary crown this morning. Between the numb mouth, the screeching of the drill and the feel of things being ground away inside you, or the two people with their hands in your mouth, one of whom is constantly telling you to open wider as your fight with all your mental might to not bite them and tell them to get the hell away from your mouth, there isn’t much to like. It’s four hours now, and I’m getting the feeling back in my mouth, but this temporary crown feels like a foriegn object in my mouth. At least it’s not cutting into my tongue the way the fragments of tooth were doing all weekend, but I probably bit my tongue a few times while it was numb.

– Canadian voters suck. It’s almost as if they’re afraid of insulting politicians they used to like, so they keep voting for the PM who gets more and more unpopular, but wait for him to retire and then vote his replacement out of office out of anger at the one who just retired. They did it to Trudeau/Turner, Mulrooney/Campbell, and now it looks like they’re going to vent their anger at Chretien’s arrogance and corruption on Paul Martin, who seemed like a pretty decent PM for a change. I’m just hoping and praying that Harper doesn’t get a majority, because he would be a giant step backwards for social liberalism in Canada. Plus, Canada is the only member of the G7 with a balanced budget, so why vote in a guy whose going to fuck with that to give giant tax breaks to the rich?

Nice flight

It was a surprisingly nice day. Actually, I hadn’t noticed it was going to be a nice day until I was reading Information Echo, where he was opining how he was going to miss the flying day due to family commitments. I quickly hit F12 to bring up the Dashboard, where the Aviation Weather widget showed me that the only clouds forecast were high cirrus. Ok, not exactly sunny, but extremely good VFR throughout the region.
Continue reading “Nice flight”

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck

I applied for long term disability insurance. Not because I anticipate problems, but because I don’t want Vicki and I to end up broke and homeless if I can’t work.

After review of your application, we regret to inform you that we are unable to issue a policy to you because of your longstanding history of multiple joint problems.

Because if there is one thing that would prevent me from typing all day, it’s chronic knee pain.

Today’s interesting discovery

I’ve just discovered  lighttpd, a small memory footprint web server that supports all the stuff I currently use on my Linode – it’s got server side includes, fast cgi, simple virtual hosting, and mod_rewrite type redirection.  And Ruby on Rails supports it.  Ruby on Rails also supports SQLite, a small memory footprint SQL RDBMS.

Considering the small memory on my linode, I’m thinking that a transition from Apache and MySQL to lighttpd and SQLite might be just the ticket to improve the performance.  Which will be important if I start playing around with Ruby on Rails, because these “do everything including the kitchen sink” things tend to be memory and CPU hogs.

Now I’m trying to figure out how to test a transition.  I could install both of them on my home server and run it on another port.  I could install both of them on my linode and run it on another port.  Both of those options have the problem that it’s not a 100% accurate test, because I’d have to change the code to support a different port, and then change it back if/when I make it the true thing.  Another possibility is to buy another Linode for a few months and try it out there.