Welcome
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Oh Snap, The Timelords Are Back.
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In a Land of Plenty
Very, very good full-length history documentary about New Zealand's economic and political reform through the late '80s and early '90s. Highly recommended:
It's weird for me watching this, as I grew up watching the evening news and seeing these faces, these things happening. But, of course, when I saw them then they were the strange adults talking about serious things on the telly. So a detailed look at broader themes of what was going on is fascinating for me.
Also, Phil Goff had some sweet glasses in the early '90s.
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Where I can be found more often than here
I know I don't update very often these days. I'm going to try to work on that. In case I improve, here's where else I can be found on the web. I update these places more often:
- My Google Reader shared items. This is a tumblesque channel of things I come across in my reading.
- My Twitter profile. The usual inanities.
- My github profile is perhaps interesting. If you're into that sort of thing. Programming, that is.
I do have a tumblelog but I'm just using it for stuff about a project I have going. It's not very interesting yet, as progress is slow.
My web content activities have become spread out over more services and systems. They're more specialized, more proprietary services. I tweet short stuff, blog long stuff, share web stuff with Reader and social stuff with Facebook. Last.fm for music. Except for the music I listen to on Youtube, along with videos, that get shared to my Facebook stream. Flickr for photos, and they end up on my Google Profile. Oh, but put them on Facebook too, for the friends and family to see them.
The privacy implications? Yeah, it's a little scary how much of me is out there. But I'm more worried about the fragmentation! I feel diluted and spread all over the place.
I may go back to simpler internet habits: hermitize my profiles and wring out a plain old HTML essay or two. That would be satisfying.
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Joel Hodgson, Ladies and Gentlemen
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Clever
I got a 2degrees SIM card from their free offering on the web.
They just sent me an email, subject: "did someone steal your mail?". They've figured that I received the SIM. But they also know that I haven't made a call with it yet. (I've checked it works with my Android phone, passed it on to someone else.) So, in the email they have me on about it, encouraging me to make my first call.
That's great marketing.
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Pedal Board
This thing's finally off the ground, making progress, and making noise. Thanks to Dom for helping me procure the transformer which gives me eight filtered 9V DC supplies (plenty of room for expansion) and one 9V AC for the delay pedal; yes, the enclosure is a screwed-down takeaways container with soldering-iron holes in it. It can be seen that neatness isn't my priority; I ain't even gonna show you the insides of any of the boxes. The chassis is what's left of an old piano I've been salvaging for various furniture pieces about the house.
The signal chain right now is: gat, home-made fuzz/distortion, dunlop crybaby for bass, moog LPF with expression pedal to frequency, ZVEX ringtone, home-made fuzz, home-made buzzbox/weird tremolo-ringmod into buzzbox, line6 delay modeler.
The old piano pedal acts as a no-intermediary expression pedal for the delay pedal: when the pedal touches the nail it shorts a resistor across the expression pedal jack and switches between two delay settings. I want to do something similar with the other piano pedal to get another foot-control for the LPF, but that'll probably have to be latching. Next pedal is a multi-octave thing little more ambitious than what I've built there.
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Windows 7 and TrustedInstaller
So this probably isn't the best idea to override the system setting (it probably has a use right?), however i dont like notepad and i like something better like notepad2. So here is how you override the annoying as hell TrustedInstaller permissions that stop you from doing fun things to windows core files:
- Open a command prompt with admin privilage
- Take ownership of notepad.exe: takeown /F c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe
- Change the security settings so you have full access to notepad.exe: cacls c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe /G <username>:F
Things to note:
- If you get a virus, its now quite easy for it to over write notepad.exe to a virus (but i'm guessing it could use the above process anyway)
- As per usual, backup the original, just incase the proverbial hits the fan
Thank is all.
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Using Long Varchar Columns with Doctrine
MySQL has supported large varchar columns since 5.0.3, about four years ago (previously, you could only have varchar columns of up to 255 characters in length). So, for quite a while now, you've been able to use them with lengths up to 65,536 characters - depending on a few variables like your maximum row length and character set.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case if you're using Doctrine. By default, if you use a string column with a length larger that 255 characters, Doctrine will silently use a text column, not a varchar. That has a bunch of follow-on effects, that you might not notice at first. For example, MySQL will only use the first 1024 characters of your column for sorting. I could see this leading to some pretty hard to find bugs.
Investigating where the 255 character limit comes from, it does seem to be a property of the Doctrine Connection. That's good: it's the right place for the restriction to be recorded. But, even though
Doctrine_ConnectionextendsDoctrine_Configurable, thevarchar_max_lengthproperty of the connection doesn't seem to be configurable. In any way. At all.Let me make it clear. They could have implemented
varchar_max_lengthas an attribute, or as a parameter, in which caseDoctrine_Configurablewould have let you change its value. But they didn't. Or they could have implemented it as an option, in which caseDoctrine_Connectionwould have let you change its value. But they didn't. They implemented it as a property, which you can't change without subclassing the connection object. Yuck.OK, I thought. Not too bad. I'll just subclass the connection and use that. Oh, wait. All the connection drivers are hard coded in
Doctrine_Manager:$drivers = array('mysql' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Mysql', 'sqlite' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Sqlite', 'pgsql' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Pgsql', 'oci' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Oracle', 'oci8' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Oracle', 'oracle' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Oracle', 'mssql' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Mssql', 'dblib' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Mssql', 'odbc' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Mssql', 'firebird' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Firebird', 'informix' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Informix', 'mock' => 'Doctrine_Connection_Mock'); if ( ! isset($drivers[$driverName])) { throw new Doctrine_Manager_Exception('Unknown driver ' . $driverName); }WTF? Who thought that was a great idea?
