Another story published!
My short story, "The Angel of Hunger," has just been
Fourteen Hills 19.2
The story is in Issue 19.2, which you can buy at that link.
New Fiction Published: Missed Approach
The lovely folks at Spartan have seen fit to publish a piece of flash fiction I wrote, Missed Approach. Go read it!
Make it easy to identify e-mail requiring responses when sending
I send a lot of e-mail where I expect an answer back. But tracking who I'm expecting to hear back from, and about what, is a manual process.
Why doesn't e-mail have a "send and flag for follow-up" button?
New Publication, online at matchbook
A very, very short story of mine, The Affair, was published today on matchbook.
I hope to have one or two more publications to announce by or around the end of the month. Keep your fingers crossed!
Random Technical Links
Friday was a good day for getting help from Google.
I broke the SASAG Web site. The main site worked, but I had a 500 error on the admin interface, with the HTTP error logs reporting Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_home_path() in wordpress/wp-admin/includes/misc.php on line 128.
I found other reports of the problem, which turns out to have been because I had upgraded WordPress before upgrading the backupwordpress plugin to 2.1.1.
In order to fix the problem, I needed to connect to the Web server with SSH. But I needed to use the Socks5 proxy we use at work to access the outside world. I'd never run SSH via a SOCKS5 proxy before, but it turns out to be very easy: I just added -o 'ProxyCommand /usr/bin/nc -x localhost:1080 %h %p' to use the proxy forward I had running on port 1080.
Once connected via SSH, I solved the problem by moving the old plugin version out of the way and installing the new version. (This did preserve my settings, fortunately.)
Later, at home, I wanted Microsoft Word for Mac 2011 to report its word count rounded to the nearest 100 words. A little bit of searching revealed a helpful answer for that too.
I need nicknames for my Amazon payment methods
Why do I need to know the last four digits of each of my cards in order to know if it's my personal or the joint checking account, if it's my personal AmEx or the corporate AmEx? Just a nickname per card would be terribly useful to me.
Early Thanksgiving
I'm thankful to live in a country where, when my 11 month old son is vomiting, I can walk to the drugstore and buy water with electrolytes and sugar tailored for his condition. (And I'm thankful to be able to afford it.)
I'm thankful to live in a time when, when my 11 month old son has a 104 degree fever, I can give him acetaminophen and his fever will decline. (And I'm thankful to be able to afford it.)
I'm thankful to be able to call a nurse after hours, and get guidelines on what changes in my son's condition indicate that we should seek immediate medical attention. (And I'm thankful that, had we needed to go, we have health care coverage.)
Yup, I'm a lucky guy. And my son's a lucky guy, even if he isn't feeling so great right now.
Protect the Giant Pacific Octopus
Courtesty Michael Bentley
Recently, several scuba divers did the unthinkable: captured and ultimately killed a Giant Pacific Octopus that was living at Cove 2, one of Seattle's most popular dive sites.
I'm not opposed to hunting, including spearfishing. But taking creatures at popular dive sites impoverishes everyone who dives in these places.
While these divers acted antisocially, their behavior was apparently legal. There's now a petition to protect the Giant Pacific Octopus at Cove 2, as well as evaluate broader restrictions on harvesting the GPO.
Seeing a Giant Pacific Octopus is one of my favorite things to do on a dive. They are beautiful, majestic, intelligent, and utterly alien. The only underwater sight in my experience that compares was a manta ray night dive in Hawaii.
I’ve moved
From my friend Rob's server, where this blog has been hosted for more than seven years, to a new home on Amazon EC2. I think everything is under control, but please let me know if you see something odd.
Kindle Screensaver Gripe
I've had a Kindle Touch for nearly a year now, and I love it. I'm doing my best to avoid upgrading to the Kindle Paperwhite (at least until I see one in person!), but I have one silly gripe: I want the screen saver for my Kindle (what appears when the device is 'locked') to be the cover of the book I'm reading.
The random images are nice, and could still be used if the Kindle locks while on its home page. But showing the book cover would be a lot more "booky" and might provide opportunities for casual conversation that the random images lack.
Today’s Python funny: C style increment operator fails silently
Where I work, much of our product is coded in Python, which despite much griping I think is a great language.
We've had a bug where an operation count was always reported as zero, even though the operation seemed to alter the filesystem. We've sort of shrugged, as it's an internal tool and it was doing what was required.
Today, a co-worker of mine found the bug: a piece of code was using a C-style increment operator.
Had the increment operator in question been variable++, this would have produced an error: Python doesn't support any increment operator; you write variable = variable + 1. This error would have prevented the program from running at all, and the bug would have been obvious.
Instead, the increment operator was a prefix rather than a suffix: ++variable.
In Python, a prepended plus is just a unary plus operator. It does, basically nothing. (Yes, that's not technically true, but it's effectively true in most cases.)
But, oddly, you can have two unary plus operators, which does double nothing! And runs without an error message! And, as a bonus, it looks to a C programmer as though it would increment a number.
Which would result in an operation count always equal to zero, no matter how many items you count.