Category: Legacy

Posted on by lhl

I had started writing a custom MT plugin, but it turns out that Brad’s MT-SQL plug-in will let me do just about everything that I need (the latest version of MT-SQL [v1.6] isn’t linked, but can be gotten by changing the d/l link appropriately or grabbing it from Brad’s CVS tree – necessary if you want to use the MTSQLBlog tag).

Now, the first, simple thing I was trying to do was to write a last-updated blog-roll. I’m sure it’s been done before, I just couldn’t find code. I did learn a couple things. Doing something like:

SELECT DISTINCT entry_blog_id blog_id from mt_entry WHERE entry_status=2 ORDER BY entry_modified_on DESC

won’t work because DISTINCT functions like a GROUP BY and doesn’t let you order on another field. OK, so do a subquery like:

SELECT DISTINCT entry_blog_id blog_id FROM mt_entry WHERE entry_status=2 AND blog_id IN (SELECT FROM entry_blog_id FROM mt_entry ORDER BY entry_modified_on DESC)

that’d work fine, except that only MySQL 4.1 (alpha code) has subquery support (*sigh*). The final code that does it is using a MAX and GROUP BY and then ordering by that:

SELECT DISTINCT entry_blog_id blog_id, max(entry_modified_on) AS d FROM mt_entry WHERE entry_status=2 GROUP BY blog_id ORDER BY d DESC

Now, I’ll probably do a plugin wrapper for the multi-blog aggregation I want to do, since the SQL code will be quite messy otherwise.

(yeah, you’d think with all this MT programming I’ve been doing I’d switch my blog off vim, and onto, well, any blogging tool, really. At this point however, I think it’s pride/stubborness more than anything else.)

Posted on by lhl

Browser stats for USC.edu from finals week last December:

Web browser                 Page views      %
Internet Explorer/6.           4832922    72.70%
Internet Explorer/5.           1130105    17.00%
Gecko                           242722     3.65%
Netscape Navigator/4.           174118     2.62%
Safari                          155681     2.34%
Netscape Navigator/3.            58450     0.88%
Internet Explorer/4.             27761     0.42%
Netscape Navigator/2.            25670     0.39%
OS                          Page views      %
Windows XP                   3,240,173    49.69%
Windows 2000                 1,360,074    20.86%
Windows 98                     853,311    13.09%
Mac                            470,978     7.22%
Windows ME                     343,354     5.27%
Windows NT                      165055     2.53%
Windows 95                      53,439     0.82%
Linux                           25,844     0.40%
Sun                              8,904     0.14%

Gecko-based browsers finally beating out NS4, although it’s still hanging in there with an inordinately large percentage. (combination of user labs, ancient machines, and software.usc.edu)

Posted on by lhl
  • EACCUESheets – 4 types of EAC CUE sheets
  • GapSettings – tutorial to use EAC to extract and burn exact CD copies

    • The proper way to do things? Looks like exporting a non-compliant CUE list, FLACing from EAC, and then batch LAME-encoding on the server end (the hardest thing is doing the metadata transferring). Hmm, can EAC just output a batch-file output?

Posted on by lhl
  • No end in sight to dollar’s descent – of course you won’t see these kind of headlines in CNN/Money, back to Wal-Mart citizens, nothing to see here
  • Rubin Gets Shrill = latest Krugman Op-ed

    In a paper presented over the weekend at the meeting of the American Economic Association, Mr. Rubin and his co-authors Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution and Allan Sinai of Decision Economics argue along lines that will be familiar to regular readers of this column…

    “Substantial ongoing deficits,” they warn, “may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy. . . . The potential costs and fallout from such fiscal and financial disarray provide perhaps the strongest motivation for avoiding substantial, ongoing budget deficits.” In other words, do cry for us, Argentina: we may be heading down the same road.

  • My So-Called Blog – Emily Nussbaum writes a long feature on teenagers and online journalling

    J.’s sense of private and public was filled with these kinds of contradictions: he wanted his posts to be read, and feared that people would read them, and hoped that people would read them, and didn’t care if people read them. He wanted to be included while priding himself on his outsider status. And while he sometimes wrote messages that were explicitly public — announcing a band practice, for instance — he also had his own stringent notions of etiquette. His crush had an online journal, but J. had never read it; that would be too intrusive, he explained.

  • Two Against One – high-school bi-sexual love triangle ends in a murder. TV movie material for sure
  • RipDigital – will rip your CD’s for ~$1/CD. OK if you don’t have any neighborhood kids you can pay to rip your music I suppose.
Posted on by lhl

Weekend project: figure out the best way to rip/encode the rest of my CD collection. At this point, I’m thinking that instead of using MAREO w/ EAC (encoding on my WinXP Athlon XP 1800) I should take advantage of my mostly idle (current uptime load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00)Xeon 2.4GHz processor and try to find a good way to encode w/ that. I’ll be doing FLAC, hopefully with a way of retaining in/out points, and then a compact lossy format for the iPod and streaming.