Erdos Had The Number First

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.

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.

While it may be important to understand that  the wicked may use the ethics and morals of the just against them, one must be vigilant and not treat the wicked in kind.  Otherwise, the just would be devoured.  The Righteous cannot remain so by acting as the wicked do.  Nor can just ends be pursued by wicked means.

So Dell just hired the fourth horseman (OK, he’s not that bad, but its not a good sign) X-Motoroller Ron Garriques
. Here’s the deal, Moto is dead. They got lucky with the Razr but they are getting their lunch eaten by the Koreans.

And this guy is one of those people who thinks that if they just make their products pretty everything will be fine. Well, here’s the problem:  When you comodify yourself, you can’t differentiate.  Dell makes a commodity product, they are the GM of the computer world. Which is the source of their problems, the Chinese can out-dell Dell.  And so, now they are thrashing around, looking for Silver Bullets and they’ve pounced on this guy. I’d bet they’re seeing Apple be so successful and think “hey man, if our boxes looked good we’d be able raise prices!”. The problem is that people already understand Dell to be a company that produces comodity boxes.  They’re not going to see a nice looking Dell and convert any more than a Porche driver buys a Chrysler because she found one that looks nice.

The other problem is that Cell phones are not computers.  People can afford to make fashionable phone choices because they’re cheap.  Edgy computers are not cheap, and a cheap edgy computer won’t sell. Dell already proved that with Alienware (which had a really nice placement last week in USA Networks’ Psyche).   They’ve hired the wrong guy on many fronts.
Dell?  Sell!

I know, I already sound like a breathless fanboi. But trust me, this is not just a johny-come-lately to the XML camp expressing praise. What I really love about XML isn’t really XML itself but the applications that can be written with it. Like the XMLResume library.

If you have ever written a resume, you should go now (don’t even both reading the rest of this posting until you See The Glory) to XMLResume on Source forge and check it out.

The biggest thing that has me right now so, so happy is the ability to filter elements of your resume. I’m in the camp that you should always target your resume to each employer. This is because it is up to YOU the job seeker to present yourself as attractive to the potential employer. You should never rely upon the innate brilliance of whoever is reading your resume to translate it for you.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: Way back during the Great Bubble I had an interview. I was then working for a very large Options clearing firm, and we were processing a little more than half of all of the options trades done in the world. I figured that the people who were interviewing me would understand these things. The interview started out with one guy saying “You’re coming from a pretty small environment, what makes you think you can cut it here?” They did, indeed have a largeish environment. I was stunned. In my head I thought “Huh? you don’t get it: my CEO’s bonus last year was more than the gross sales of all the companies you’ve ever worked for combined! What makes me think I can cut it? Are you nuts?” and on and on and on. The problem during this interview wasn’t this guy. He was, after all, interpreting what he read on my resume according to his own experience and world-view. The number of server and admins was not very large comparatively. If I had been coming from a warehouse operation or some other data-center he would have been quite correct. I didn’t offer him the information in a way that he could have understood.  Now I can, and XML made that possible.

What a wonderful world.

The funny thing about TiVo hiring is that they have the ability to put want ads on their own TiVo boxen. That, honestly, is pretty cool. My wife does usability work (and of course, Tivo is hiring Usability People), and even she was impressed.

The only problem is that it seems like they are casting a pretty wide net. I know, as a hiring manager in the past, when you put up a job posting you get deluged with resumes. Even if the job isn’t a cool job, and TiVo is pretty cool place to work (I suspect, you could at least get good discounts on the boxes).