Yay, the basketball hoops are back at Jack Goodlad Community Park on Kennedy. I’m not given to shooting hoops, but to see everyone playing and socialising there is a good use of public space.
Blog
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mcca rocked the sanctuary
Mayor McCA is back in town, and he totally rocked the Music Gallery. Can’t wait for his new CD in September.
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the commitments
When I was testing BlackBerry typed-alike words (dactonyms?) I found that sqlite was averaging about 1 insert per second. This is by no means good.
It turns out that, under Perl, sqlite auto-commits after every write. This slows things down terribly. Here’s how to fix this:
When opening the database handle, turn AutoCommit off:
my $dbh =
DBI->connect( “dbi:SQLite:bberry2.sqlite”, “”, “”, { AutoCommit => 0 } )
or die “$!”;Then, only commit occasionally — say every thousand writes:
while ( … ) {
…$id++;
$dbh->commit unless ( $id % 1000 );
…}
$dbh->commit;It works out about 1000 times quicker this way.
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best beat neat nest
Beware, nerdiness follows: I generally like my BlackBerry 7130e, but its multiple letters per key can sometimes give the wrong result. Using word frequency lists from the British National Corpus, sqlite, and way too much programming time, I determined that the key sequence with the most possible word results (81?2) produces best, beat, neat or nest. The device itself suggests also brat and bray, so I should try a longer word list — in my copious free time, of course.
The longest (common words in the corpus) that have the same key sequence are employers and employees, which might briefly cause hilarity in an HR or legal context. -
Energy Saving Tips for Canadians, #1: a name thing
Canadians are remarkably profligate in their energy use, and I think I know why. It’s not to do with the oft-cited scale of the country, the size of our houses, our cold winters or our hot summers, it’s something simpler than that; it’s what we call our electricity.
Power here is generally known as hydro, and with it comes images of tree-lined rivers with bears happily fishing for salmon. Local electricity companies tend to have that watery thing in their name: Toronto Hydro, Hamilton Hydro, London Hydro (Crieff Hydro is something quite different, though). Some happy green images, eh?
I propose that we stop using the term hydro, and replace it with the snappier smog belching, nuke leaking, only fractionally hydro. It’d certainly make yer average Kathy or Doug drop their double-double (or donut, or dumaurier) when they got their smog belching, nuke leaking, only fractionally hydro bill in. Energy use would plummet, and at no cost to anyone!
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… with raspberry vinaigrette!
Paul and I often talked of doing this, but I see someone’s done it for real: they hacked the GO Train scrolly LED signs to read Stephen Harper Eats Babies.
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blackberry lost and found
GPS is good. I was walking this huge field, and somewhere in the middle dropped my BlackBerry. I can’t follow tracks for toffee, but with the GPS track map set to high resolution, I found it.
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writey
my review of the Noris Ergosoft at Pencil Revolution.
(I just got a lot nerdier than you thought possible, didn’t I?)
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i see…
Blue skies, crops growing, grasshoppers hopping, wind turbines turbing, blue-winged swallows over my head.
In short, it’s a beautiful day in Kingsbridge.
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Happy Nuke Day!
Yup, Chernobyl was 20 years ago. Let’s just have a wee pause for a technology that’s still messing us up, yet we’re told it’s the green technology of the future. Yeah, and I bet it’ll be too cheap to meter, too.
There are still farms in Scotland affected by the fallout from Chernobyl. Though, what with all the nuke plants in Scotland, it could be any one of them that’s the real culprit.Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a wind farm to survey …
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Sarah’s Solar Art
Sarah Hall works with glass and light, and her most recent commission for Regent College in BC combines solar photovoltaics and an LED light show into the installation. It’s a beautiful design, and I’d like to thank Sarah for inviting me to the official unveiling yesterday.
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Tax Time
Phew – that’s the 2005 income taxes filed for Catherine and me, and also my GST return in. I don’t grudge paying taxes (no civilization without taxation, after all), but I hate filling out the returns. I’m also too cheap to get someone to do it for me. Sucks to be me, eh?
