Category: Uncategorized

howto: replacing a substring in a column value with a MySQL query

MySQL Reference Manual :: 13.2.10 UPDATE Syntax: “You sometimes run into the problem that you want to replace a substring occuring in a column with a different string, without touching the rest of the string. The solution is surprisingly simple, thanks to MySQL:

UPDATE xoops_bb_posts_text
SET post_text=(
REPLACE (post_text,
‘morphix.sourceforge.net’,
‘www.morphix.org’));

using the string function REPLACE, all items in the post_text column with ‘morphix.sourceforge.net’ get this substring replaced by ‘www.morphix.org’. Ideal when writing a script is just too much effort.”

This will be useful for changing a bunch of text on the various wiki pages for pixfestdoc.terrorware.com. I had a bunch of links that read ‘View/Upload Photos’ and I want to change them to ‘View/Upload Photos and Video’. This would have sucked to do through a web interface, but messing with the database should make it quick. I ran into a little problem with the Mediawiki handles caching so the changes didn’t show up right away, but I waited overnight and it worked out.

UPDATE: This the query that I used to add additional text to all the show pages:

update pixfestmw_cur set cur_text=(concat(‘== Photos/Video ==\n\n’, concat(cur_text, ‘\n\n== Audio ==\n\n== Stories ==\n\nTo read stories from this show, please click on the \’discussion\’ tab at the top of this page.\n\n== External Links ==’))) where cur_title like ‘%June_%’;

Sharing a file system among Linux, Mac OS, and Windows – The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog – microsoft.weblogsinc.com _

Sharing a file system among Linux, Mac OS, and Windows – The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog – microsoft.weblogsinc.com _: “When you’re dual-booting (or triple-booting, or …), or when you’re sharing a portable USB2/Firewire hard drive among different boxes, all of a sudden, file systems become important. NTFS isn’t supported by Mac OS, to my knowledge, and while you can read it under Linux, writing is still iffy. Fat32 is supported by everyone, but that’s kind of a sucky filesystem. So what can you use?

Ext2 isn’t a bad choice, since it’s supported under Mac OS X, Linux (duh), and even Windows, to some degree.”

short north business association

short north business association: “When individuals give spare change to people on the street, they may not know whether the money is buying a sandwich or feeding an addiction. The spare change may actually worsen the condition of the panhandlers by enabling them to delay seeking help. Give money where it can be used effectively – to those organizations that provide the means to help these individuals move off the street.”

I was in Columbus for 24 hours recently, and I realized that the thing that sucks about Columbus is that there never was any real arts or culture going on and the city jumped straight to the gentrified, yuppified version. While watching a movie, I saw an advertisement for some upscale, fake-ass loft apartments and realized that, besides the BLD, I had never really heard of people actually living in warehouse spaces. While I lived there I always fealt asked whether the cheesy galleries or coffee shops or Asian restaurants were a blight or at least better than the college-oriented bar and grilles that were the other development going on throughout the city. If you check out the website for the Short North Arts District, you’ll find mention of real-estate underneath the arts listings, and you’ll find the above page on panhandling. Sadly, though the photo of a fake panhandler with a cardboard sign says “Give me spare change and I may never get off these streets. Give to organizations that could really help me and you could save my life. It’s up to you.” only one such organization , the Faith Mission, is listed. This article, from last year, seems to indicate that existing services are severely lacking. I don’t know if the Short North Business Association contributes to organizations that are trying to address homelessness in Columbus, but it is frustrating to see campaigns like this ad that are clearly trying to remove homeless from areas of key development like the Short North. I can’t help but cynically think the priority is to get the homeless out of sight and out of mind rather than bolster agencies serving the homeless in Columbus.

Army.com – Military Recruitment In High Schools Raises Questions

Army.com – Military Recruitment In High Schools Raises Questions: “At the heart of this matter is Rochelle’s own admission of “overlooking or concealing problems and police records that might make a recruit ineligible.” Most notably is the case of a 17-year-old high school student in suburban Denver, David McSwane, who posed as a drug user and dropout for an article for his school’s newspaper. Recruiters assisted McSwane with passing a drug test, manufacturing a fake diploma and getting around physical fitness requirements. In Houston, TX a local television news station, KHOU, broke the story of a recruiter who threatened to arrest a young high school student if he failed to show up at the recruitment station. And in Ohio a mentally ill student was signed for military service despite prohibition of such enlistments. His medical records were available but were never requested by the military according to his parents.”

I found this article, surprisingly critical in tone given that it was on the Army’s website, when I was searching around to find out if a high school diploma was required to enlist. I thought about this because when I was traveling in Philadelphia in June, I saw an ad on the subway for the Army sponsored Operation Graduation. I’ll have to dig through my journal to find the exact text of the ad, but it featured an image of a man in a 1970s looking suite saying something like “Of course I hire high-school dropouts – who else will work for that cheap?” The point of the advertisement was to tell kids that dropping out of high school will put them at the mercy of exploitative employers. I thought it was ironic that the Army sponsored such an ad since, as this article indicates, Army recruiters are more than willing to try to enlist those with limited education or play on economic concerns. When Defiance, Ohio played in the military town of Goldsboro, NC, I met a boy who was so sweet and quiet that I couldn’t imagine him having to go overseas and do battle with anybody, and he told me that he hated the army but joined because he had to help his mom out.

This page on the army.com website offers some ambiguous information about whether a high school education is required to join the army. It first lists “a high school diploma or equivalent (such as a GED)” as a basic qualification for enlistment but then goes on to say “You are not required to have a High School Diploma.” (The “not” is actually in bold on the website.)

Houses

The above photo of me was taken on the day that I moved into the Sweet Little Dude House (before it even had that name) 2 years ago.

This past weekend, I moved out of our house, the Sweet Little Dude house in the near west side of Bloomington. It was the place where I lived in Bloomington when I “lived” in Bloomington. I guess I still live in Bloomington, though even for two years it’s been a struggle to figure out exactly where I fit in. Matt, David, Ryan, Theo, Sparky, Greg, Mike, Joe, and Mykel all lived here and countless others spent a night on the couch or the floor or the treehouse. As much of an impact as visitors can have on a house, I will always love seeing old friends and the excitement of sharing a morning on the front steps with a stranger who just rolled off your couch. I once had the grand plan of interviewing everyone who slept on the couch at our house, but could never get the recording equipment to work right and I eventually lost interest. There would have been some good stories though, of great journeys, new loves, broken relationships, punk rock tours, new towns, and all the other changes and adventures in life that bring you to someone’s couch. The Legion of Doom in Columbus had a history tacked to the wall in the living room, and I’d like this to be like that – a comprehensive account of our time together as a house – but I guess I wasn’t even in town for a lot of it, and as this summer has left me saturated with experience, I doubt my ability to recount history anyway.

I’m always nostalgic about houses, and my memory tends to make the times seem better than they were, perhaps. I have a tatoo, on my left ankle, a stick-and-poke that some of us gave ourselves in one of the last evenings of the Sweet Life house in Columbus. I once teased a former housemate about her lack of tattoo and she replied, essentially, “Why would I want one of those? That house wasn’t so great.” The same could be said about the SLD, I guess, because there were house meetings that went on forever, and unfinished projects, fallings out with landlords, days when housemates would pass each other without a word, broken pipes, and astronomical gas bills.

Ultimately, I don’t think that the time I spent in that house was so amazing or so terrible. What gives it the emotional weight is that it can be so formal. You move your things in and, two years later, you move them out in the same silver station wagon that belongs to your parents. Despite this formality, your life experience measured by the dates on a lease, the end of this episode hasn’t yet given me a way of defining these past two years of my life. I moved to Bloomington from Columbus because I fealt done with one part of my life and somewhat certain about where the next part would begin. The fact that I’m still in Bloomington, but with only a P.O. Box to tie me here illustrates a new lack of certainty that has been swirling around these last two years. I like it here though. A few nights ago, we ate food for Kevey’s birthday. Libby and Tristan made salsa, Steven grilled tofu dogs and kebobs and afterwards some of us went to play four square. And I just had this feeling of “oh yeah, these are the things you do in Bloomington.” If I were to try to articulate these things – sharing food with friends, playing games in a parking lot, riding bikes around town and crossing paths with friends as a reason to live somewhere, I would find the words increasingly hollow, but that night, after months of itinerancy, living them felt great.

I wrote in an e-mail today to a friend that moving out of a house can feel like ending a romantic relationship, which I now think is hyperbole because I don’t know if I’ve ever intentionally avoided someone the way I’ve avoided riding past the old house these last few days. Still, whether its the akwardness I feel riding past the house and seeing strangers move their things in, or, more gently, my altered cartography of this town, they still say the same thing – things are changing.

—

Its a hard question, what to do with your things when you move out and it sucks, with all the shit we talk about wasteful consumerism to see the mountains of stuff that a punk house can throw into a dumpster. I like to believe in the Internet and I found that Amazon was an easy way to sell shit and Freecycle was an easy way to give it away. I didn’t manage to make it to the “Really Free Market” that was part of the Crimethinc. convergence in Bton, but I admire Freecycle projects because they encourage the idea of freely sharing things amongst a wide variety of people – from suburbanites to grandmas, and I feel like things like the free market might have been off the radar for them.

Gizmodo Japan: CraftRobo Pro and Other japan Stories : Gizmodo

Saw this on boing.boing. I always thought that black and white photocopied flyers would be cooler if they could be cut to a shape, but I never did it because it would have taken so long. This “printer” would make that simple. I wonder what the life span is on the blades.

Gizmodo Japan: CraftRobo Pro and Other japan Stories : Gizmodo

The craftrobo pro is a new inkjet printer sporting a built in cutting head which can spit out pre-cut patterns that fold into 3d objects. The craftrobo site features a library of downloadable patterns with novelties like robots, and dinosaurs, but the real fun begins in the box & bags section, where kids can download and print out their very own candy-colored “suspicious container” for anonymous deposit at their local train station. yay! –JM

howto: Pepsi Can Stove and Windscreen

stove: http://www.pcthiker.com/pages/gear/pepsistove.shtml
windscreen: http://www.backpacking.net/makegear/sgt-windscreen/
stove stand: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/photonstove/stove/HighPerfAlcoholStove.html