Category: Revelation

Maddy

Maddy has a blog. Since she’s a good friend and a damn good writer and she just found she’s got cancer, I’d recommend reading it. She’s continually apologizing to me about how self centered it is, but if you can’t be self centered on your own blog, I don’t know where you can.

Today’s Revelation

Ok, I’ve been thinking blogs are a pain in the ass because you have to keep checking everybody’s blogs to see if they updated it recently. And then today I discovered RSS feeds. Actually, I’d heard a little about them in the past but never paid any attention to them. I kept wondering what this “Syndicate this site (XML)” link was on my own blog. And I wondered about Simon’s BBC News app and how it worked.

It suddenly all came together, and I discovered that there are RSS readers that you can use to subscribe to a number of blogs and news sites, and it will tell you when they’re updated. Sweeeet.

I googled for an application. NetNewsWireLite is the first one I found that was free for OS X. It seems ok, although I’d like the option to poll the sites more frequently than once every 30 minutes.

I’ll have to find one for Linux as well, so I don’t have to spend all day at work hitting refresh on Slashdot, Linux Today and The Register.

Well, that felt good

At work, we had an operation that was taking too damn long. Looked at the code, looked at the query it was generating, and it was pretty horrible, but I don’t see any way to avoid doing it. Then used the SQL “explain” on the query. Hmmm, it’s doing a sequential scan on two different tables. Hmm… Put an index on one column on one of the tables. Suddenly it’s only doing a lookup on one table. Ran downstairs to the big 30-plex test machine. Did the test once. Took 1:31. Added the index. Ran the test again. Took 0:08.

I’m a fucking genius.

Opus

We went to see “Secondhand Lions” at the theatre this weekend. The movie starts in a cartoonist’s studio, and the first thing that lept out at me was that the Berk Breathed drew the cartoons. It was so incredibly obvious that we had to go home and check IMDB to make sure. (No, that doesn’t make sense to me, either, except that it’s nice to be right once in a while.)

A few days ago, I’d read this story (and others of course) about how Berkeley Breathed is bringing back Opus.

I have to wonder if he didn’t enjoy making those cartoons for the movie that he decided he missed it enough to want to get back into the business. If so, it’s another thing to love about this movie. And there was a lot to love about it, no matter how annoying you find Haley Joel Osment. A lot of people hated the ending, but I didn’t. Maybe I’m a sucker for closure, but I liked having that extra proof.