Hover mouse over article to stop it moving to the next article. Click the tabs to manually advance articles. Click the article to jump to blogs of that category.
Arse Face
So, Zaphod has turned into an escape artist and now darts past me into the garage when I go in there. I'll figure out a two door system like I've done with the front door and the cage around that, but it doesn't really hurt for them to go in there as there's nothing much for them to get into trouble with. Right, so I got my new bike and went out on it and realized it needed some adjustments, so I came back and decided to work on it in the garage. I figured I'd let the cats come in and look round while I was in there. Zaphod lept in, whereas Trillion was a little more cautious, but she did come in eventually. It was actually quite cute. If I called Zaphod, he'd come running over and start rubbing round my legs. Kind of an I'm here, don't worry type thing.
And then I fell over. Hearing the noise, Zaphod came trotting over and decided to rub round my head. Very cute to start with, but he pushed right against my head and, as he came past, he wiped his arse across my face. It's quite disconcerting to have a cat reverse up and push its bumhole against your nose.
I don't have a video of that, but I did pop a camera in the garage the following day in case something similar happens. What you see here is my obedience training proving that it works really well and then me trying to rationalize with a cat (or two cats in the end). Sorry about the fact that you see my arse. Maybe if you push your face to the screen at the right time you'll get a similar effect as to what I got.
Just FYI - that's not the new bike, that's the old bike. The new one is hidden behind it.
Say what you will about those videos ...
... and now you can! Comments have been added to the videos - yay!
Now with added emoji đź¤
If you've read the website blog on smack talk you will know that I've just “enabled” emoji's on the website. Stupidly, I thought this would be an easy task as I figured it's just a matter of getting the database (MariaDB) to accept the code for each emoji. It kind of is that simple, but a cascading sequence of events happened that dramatically increased the amount of work needed to get there. I've already done a blog title “I knew an old woman that swallowed a fly” otherwise I'd have used that here.
OK, so what you need to do is have the database and each table allow unicode which I'm 100% sure I'd already done. It's quite possible that I did, but emoji's have become a thing since then and they require a specific unicode. In this case UTF8MB4. Not a big deal, just write a SQL script to change the database encoding then iterate through all the tables changing them.
It failed on about the third or fourth table. I've significantly cut down the number of tables post the LEMP conversion, but there are still 51 left. The reason it failed is that the primary key was too big. Apparently the max size of the key is 767 which is 768 bytes. This is not something Neville told me #blameneville. Obviously converting from the latin character set to UTF-8 means that each letter takes up more storage space. I'm guessing 4x the amount given utf8mb4 is a 4 byte UTF-8 encoding. I have some tables that have a 255 character varchar field as the key - apparently this is a bad thing to do anyway as it creates a huge index which I totally get, but didn't .... #blameneville. These 255 character fields are too big to be keys with the new encoding.
Right, so I could have cut the corner here and just converted tables that were going to store emojis rather than all the tables. But if a job's worth doing ... you really should get someone else to do it for you. Next step then, figure out which tables had inappropriate keys. Some of them were pretty easy - I could just assign an auto number as they key and move on. Unfortunately the biggest issue was the email field that I used as a key for the folks that are registered and to link to the race game and playlists (the latter now hidden, but still exists as I moved RagBox to personal use only).
Sidetrack for a minute. I made the email field 255 characters long because an email can be that long. Actually, I think it can be longer. Can you imagine though if your email address was 255 characters long and having to type it in every time you wanted to register or logon with something.
Let's get back on track - data conversion. The fix is to assign each person a unique ID, then to add that field to each of the tables that was linked via the email address. Iterate through the table and populate that new field with the ID associated with each email. Then make that field required and part of the key (as it would have other bits that make up the key such as the competition number). Then delete the email field as it's no longer needed in the referencing tables.
The structure's now in place and we can accept emojis. Only we can't because every page that puts data into the tables is trying to put an email address in an email field that no longer exists and is not populating a required ID field. This is for things like registering with the race game, changing registration, making selections, editing selections, becoming a member, changing your membership, password resets blah, blah, blah. It's more than you think.
Right, so just change those pages and we're up and running. Err, no. The whole logon process that I created recently uses email addresses as the ID and I changed it to the new ID (which has logged everybody out). This bit is actually quite funny. I knew I'd be logged out, but when I tried to log back in, I was locked out because it couldn't validate me for some of the back end stuff that I need to do to run the scripts to make the changes. So I had to un-code the logon, to push the changes, to then re-enable the logon so I could log back in.
We're done now though and the changes are in. I đź’— data conversion. There's something about just figuring out data structures and what needs to be done that I find really calming. I think it's the sense of putting order to something. Parts of the back end are still broken. I need to fix some stuff with the music, but it shouldn't be too difficult. I just need to finish the mobile friendly responsive pages for the front end first. The joy of hobbies.
Cheap Flights
A great video.
Apple nailed it
I've noticed that my iPad has started to predict what app I want to open. It comes up with a message that based on my location in my house, the app I normally open first is YouTube. Which clearly appears when I'm taking a shit. It does seem that Apple have spent millions trying to figure out when I take a dump. I also like the fact that there's all this talk about China watching everything we do through the technology we use. I think the head of MI6 made a comment recently on the topic that gadgets were being used to monitor everything. It's the use of the generic term “China” given that there's 1.3 billion Chinese. I kind of now have this mental image of 1.3 billion people crowding round a big computer screen thinking “ he's going for a shit again”. If they keep inventing stuff, it won't be long before they can smell it through their technology too.
Blog Topics
The blogs have been grouped with some kind of logic. The recent blogs show the last ten posts for each topic. The history of all the blogs
can be found in the archives.
Stuff blogs are articles or comments about things I've come across that I found of
interest and decided to share. Mostly, this is where I get to point out silly things that I've heard. I guess you would class these as
general interest.
Website blogs are little snippets of information about
something that has been developed or is in the process of being developed for this website.
Build Your Own Blog (BYOB) is the pièce de résistance of the
EastBayRag blogs. Being even more sad than people give me credit for, I've documented how this website is created
and how some of the components work. To be honest, more so that I don't forget and have somewhere to come back and
refer to, but if you're thinking of doing something similar this may be of interest to you.
Open Forum is an open place for anyone to post an ariticle. Ever wanted the ability
to create your own article without having to create multiple entries. Well, now you have that ability and there's even
the option to add a picture to your article if you want to spruce it up. Note, however, these open forums are
open so anyone can submit an article. Hopefully this will work and it won't get abused, but we will wait and see.
(We are tracking access by IP, so we can find you!!!)
Archives
The archives provide a full listing of all the blogs for each of the categories above stuff,
website, BYOB and open.
Additionally, there are two other topic areas that are no longer being added to.
OBlogs are the ramblings of a mate of mine back in the UK. Originally this was setup mostly
to see if I could build a system that someone else could post on. Mr O posted many articles before realizing that the “Book of Faces” was a much
better avenue to write to multiple people instead of shouting in the wind here to, well, nobody.
Road Trip America is the story of the sights and sounds from a road trip
across the United States that four of us took in 2009. Two of these people being Mr O of the OBlogs and myself.