Erdos Had The Number First

Carol and I are presenting at PodCamp 3Pittsburg. We’re presenting on Usability and Utility, which is a topic near and dear to both of us. This is our first joint presentation, too, which should be interesting.

A Simple Assignment

Slow cookers speed things up
front lawns required time, labor, and money
They were meant to be remote and awe
inspiring; he went for huge lunch at his parents.
that first terrible moment,
his blood froze: racism is worst than you think.
The bourgeoisification of man.
His uglification and diminishment:
not a completely fair summation of his sojourn there.

“You know”, his mother said, ” I have trouble understanding art.”
Her approach always from the Financial, the Economic —
consequence of early training.
irrelevant confession and self-incrimination.

I’ve been staying at the Coxhead House in San Mateo for the last couple of days. I’ve got to say that it’s one of the nicer B&B’s I’ve been in (not that I’ve been in a lot, but it’s still pretty nice). The food is great and the innkeepers are very nice.

It’s right down the street from our offices here, too, so that makes it even nicer. All in All, I recommend it.

Ok, I searched and searched and searched for this. Found a lot of stuff about Windows but NOTHING about how to automate ODBC DSN creation on a Mac. On Tiger, this is very, very easy.

Basically, you have to add the appropriate config lines to the file found in /Library/ODBC/odbc.ini

For example, let’s say you have a sqlite database that you want to connect to. You have installed the Actual Technology ODBC drivers but you want to deploy this application to a bunch of machines. You don’t have apple remote desktop, and you just want to run a script to get the job done.

The file is a standard ini file. You have to modify one category and add one in order to install the DSN. You must add the name of the new category (which is also the name of the DSN) to the ODBC Data Sources section. In this example, you would add a line like this:

newtest = Actual Open Source Databases

Now, you add a new section to the ini file that looks something like this

[newtest]
Driver = /Library/ODBC/Actual Open Source Databases.bundle/Contents/MacOS/atopnsrc.so
Type = SQLite
DBQ = /Users/jsmith/Documents/sqlite/test.db

Now, if you fire up the ODBC administrator, you will see your new DSN. Now for the Great Part: If you add this stuff to the /Library/ODBC/odbc.ini you create a system DSN. If, however, you add it to the odbc.ini found in ~/Library/ODBC (your home directory) you create a USER dsn.

Pretty cool, huh?

I just had a very strange situation. I’ve got this Tiger CD here that came with my Macbook Pro. But it seems to be corrupt somehow, because I coudln’t install a bunch of softare off of it. when I used my older Tiger CD’s it worked like a charm. But I got stuck down a rabbit hole for a while: where the crap is all the MacOS package manager documentation?

Nowhere, it seems.

I don’t like that at all.

So, It’s T-1 Days until NaNoWriMo and my starting on the “The Things I might Have Said” my newest and bestest novel.

At least I have a title. I think that’s more writing than I got done last year for NanoWriMo.

Against my better judgement (perhaps), I rather like Mike Huckabee. The problem I have the Gov. H is that he is _really_ socially conservative and supports a set of views that I find, well, problematic (to be diplomatic).

However, he shares my views on many economic and foreign policy initiatives. Especially given the current (and prone to adventure-ism) Dude we have now.

The biggest thing I like is that he seems like a straight shooter. Like someone that I can deal with. Unlike the aforementioned Dude, he will not attempt to cloak his opinions in order to get elected. He doesn’t seem like the kind of man who would claim to be a uniter, not a divider. He is not a crypto-facist. What a pleasant change.

Wrote while listening to: Saint Joe On The School Bus from the album “Marcy Playground” by Marcy Playground

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Kurt Vonnegut is Dead. I was first introduced to his work when I read “Cat’s Cradle” in high school. I read a bunch of his stuff, and found him to be an insightful author and commentator.

I also found him to be an inspiration to my own writing. He said once that

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Now there is a man I can admire. I’ll leave you just with this:

I read you died last night
and sighed
and laughed and though well
at least I'd read you
your books
and heard you talk and
had nodded in such agreement
with your speeches and your prose
and laughed in astonishment
at your insight and so it goes
but now I sigh
again
this time in sadness
because I did not get to
do any of those things with you
so now I'll play one of Prokofiev's ballets
and dream
of the Indianapolis of your youth
it is the least I can do.