Spending sprees, CGI scripts, vi, and other fun things

Submitted: Sunday, March 21, 1999 11:39

The trick is to keep breathing. That's the title of the song I'm hearing right now. What does that have to do with anything? Well, very little really. Except that it's a song on the new cd I bought yesterday.

I went on a big spending spree. Took an impromptu journey to Cherry Creek with Bouncing and my mom. By the end of the afternoon, I had obtained two new cds, a couple of those cool O'Reilly pocket reference books, and even managed to pick up a free O'Reilly Open Source shirt from a Tattered Cover promotion. Pretty cool. It's more money I've spent in a while, being a poor college these days, so that was fun.

I'm liking this Garbage cd very much. The title, "Version 2.0" is an obvious reference to the software world, as well as an indication that this is their second album. I'm not sure whether to take it as a sarcastic jab or a compliment to the computer industry. Given the power and energy of the music, I think I'll interpret it as a compliment. Or maybe just good old fashion marketing. Oh well. I feel like I got my money's worth. Record companies, if you're reading this, take note (like anyone outside a few people I know read this anyway, but I gotta say it): I first downloaded and listened to several illegal Garbage mp3s before buying the cd. Had it not been for that, I probably never would have gotten interested enough in this music to buy it. See? Mp3s are your friends.

Haven't even opened the other cd yet, but I know I'm gonna enjoy it. Hole. Celebrity Skin. Tower Records had it at one of their many listening stations. (That store rocks!) Every review I've read said it was awesome, so I picked a few tracks at random in the store and listened to about the first 60 seconds of each. Totally powerful melodic rock sound. Well, my Garbage cd just finished the last track, so it's time to open and experience this latest production from Courtney and Company. [Bitscape takes the shrinkwrap off the cd case, removes the disc, places it in the player, and is quickly engulfed in power chords, percussion, and the stylish vocal emanations of Courtney Love.]

Now, getting down to business. That little movielog mishap revealed several weaknesses of using a CGI-based data entry system. For one thing, there was no way I could easily save my work incrementally without submitting it. It's not like you can just go :w from a cgi form. When I'm making big entries as was the case Friday night / Saturday morning, this becomes a significant problem.

Another problem: My editing session revealed some blatent bugs in Netscape's CGI form handling. Besides the obvious memory leak, it was other erratic things earlier during my editing session. Example: Hitting the up arrow at the top of an editing window would sometimes send it all the way back to the top of my text instead of scrolling one line up. Very annoying.

I still haven't decided how to handle this. One way might be to create a text file syntax which could be easily parsed with a perl script and sent into the database. This would let me use reliable old vi to create entries. I dunno. We'll see.

Speaking of vi and perl, I got a little tiny book for each yesterday. They cover all the commonly used syntax, functions, commands, etc. Very brief, to the point, consice. "Just what every geek needs." That according to the clerk in Tattered Cover who checked out the books and gave my a free shirt, compliments of O'Reilly. I must agree.

I've been totally isolated from the net for over three days now. Since Bouncing switched the house network over to 10BaseT in my absence, and there's no CAT 5 cable routed to my room, I'm out of the loop. Hopefully, that'll be corrected before the end of the day today. We're gonna be drilling some holes in the walls, like we should have the first time, instead of doing that ridiculous outdoor routing.

The funny thing is, even though I have been cut off from the net all this time, I don't miss it as much as one might expect. For all I know, Microsoft could have released the Windows source code, Linus could have resigned from developing the kernel, and RMS and ESR could have shot each other in a dispute over software licensing, and I'd know nothing about any of it. Perhaps the thrill of being home is good enough to offset net withdrawl symptoms. That and the fact that I've kept myself pretty busy the last couple days watching movies, writing movielog entries, going on shopping sprees, and ingesting excessive amounts of caffeine. Gotta love it.