Laurence & I went to the housewarming at the Lumpery the other night. It was a carnival sideshow theme, but we ended up pretty much dressing girly. I think I might have been some sort of ringmaster gypsy psychic.

Laurence & I went to the housewarming at the Lumpery the other night. It was a carnival sideshow theme, but we ended up pretty much dressing girly. I think I might have been some sort of ringmaster gypsy psychic.

Oddly enough, my university degree and my university job both finished on the same day. I am very glad. Both were very good and edifying in so many ways. But also often pretty exhausting.

Rich people are obviously at a huge disadvantage because their lives are so pretty, that when they start acting ugly (which is kind of always for a lot of them) it's desperately ugly. Like tonight. I almost walked over to them to ask them to have some dignity.

There are AppleScript's to copy the "Artist" field to an empty "Album Artist" field namely Doug Adam's one, but that only works on Macs. I started writing myself a iTunes Windows scripting thing, but I'm too lazy to figure it out.

I found Mp3tag through Yahoo! Answers and it's very good.

To copy the field with Mp3tag:

1. Create an action group called "Album to Album Artist"
2. Add a new "Guess values" action to that and set the "Source format" value to %artist% and the "Guessing pattern" value to %band%
3. Run that action group for all your albums with an empty "Album Artist" field
4. You'll probably have to clear iTunes cache (use "Get Info" on all your tracks, don't change anything but press "OK")
5. You are done

I think this is the table in our backyard. And I think the dark splotch on the table is our peg bucket.

So I've gone back to the stable world of Apache, although not on the important server. In all the years I used Apache and mod_php it gave me no problems at all. A total rock. I was seduced by lighty's memory footprint, but I was a fool.

I'll move the other server over to Apache as well at some point, the one with Thoughtful Foods and KSAsub.. I thought rewriting all the configuration files was going to be a pain, but it was actually really quick. RewriteCondition with -f is bloody marvellous.

This photo makes me happy.

I found this...

9.Why isn't any renewable energy good? Why does it need to be new and accredited?

When someone buys GreenPower, they usually want to make a difference to their greenhouse emissions. If their purchase has no effect on the amount of renewable energy that goes into our electricity system, it has no effect on greenhouse emissions. Green Electricity Watch considers the non-accredited part does not increase the amount of renewable energy. Accredited GreenPower is certified to come from new renewable generators - additional since when the scheme started – and continuing sales increase the size of the market so more renewable energy generation is built.

...which strikes me as pretty dumb. They're suggesting that we should build new renewable energy plants instead of using existing renewable power plants. Not only are they suggesting that, but they're including it in their evaluation of green energy providers. I can understand wanting to encourage further investment in renewable energy, but it seems to be creating some perverse incentives to build new plants when there are perfectly good ones sitting there already.

So I think that instead of trying to change to Origin because it has a slightly higher rating, I'll just stick with Energy Australia....

Except I just rang Energy Australia and they only do fixed price deals. So we'll be paying $108 extra per quarter for only $49 worth of green energy. Stupid capitalism. I want my own farm with a wind generator on it.

def <=>(other)
  [self.dtstart, self.dtend] <=> [other.dtstart, other.dtend]
end

It was real good but. Good gore spatterings. Lots of gore spatterings. More than you could reasonably ask for in one film.

# Overrides the default Date::_parse() method for dates of format dd/mm/yyyy
# ParseDate does the typical American thing and assumes mm/dd/yyy and
# doesn't seem to be configurable

module Date::Format::EuropeanDates
  def self.included(base)
    base.class_eval do
      class << self
        alias_method :_parse_sla_us, :_parse_sla_eu
      end
    end
  end
end

Date.send(:include, Date::Format::EuropeanDates)

With thanks to Simon who showed me how to replace static methods. This is the kind of wacky stuff you could never do with PHP. Not that we should want to. It's kind of ridiculous.

This is the original code:

gen w01ceil = w11ceil + (1-mrw_alpha) * pr * (1-coerc_pi01) + (1-pr)*coerc_pi10

This is the correct code:

gen w01ceil = w11ceil + (1-coerc_alpha) * pr * (1-coerc_pi01) + (1-pr)*coerc_pi10

I'm sure I originally had it right and changed it at some later point for testing. I just didn't change it back. Luckily, although the correct¹ results are fairly different, they still support the point we're trying to make.

1. "Correct" as of 22nd May 2008.

The first trade was between AGL and Westpac for 1 unit of carbon (which is 10,000 tonnes). Australia emits 603 million tonnes a year according to SMH, so those traders were really just doing it for the fun of it. I interested in working out how much more my life would cost if my carbon was offset, or if I chose to buy some share of a fixed amount that we decided was OK for the plant. AGL reckons the price could rise to $50/tonne by 2020, which is a much more interesting number to me. The price will rise because it will get harder and harder to reduce emissions as we take advantage of the cheap technologies and have to start using more expensive ones.

Last year I took two short flights and two long flights. AGL reckons that emitted 4.5 tonnes of carbon, but GreenFleet reckons that total impact on the atmosphere is more like emitting 12 tonnes. Those flights cost about $1200. If I added the cost of buying the rights to emit the carbon I produce it would cost $50 * 12 tonnes = $600. Which is a fair whack. So I'm inclined to conclude that I should probably stop flying. Or perhaps only fly for funerals of nuclear family members perhaps. I think I should commit to offsetting my flight emissions if I do decide to fly.

I'm also happy I ride a bike.

And green power is the bomb. It is so easy and so cheap, and you can reduce your emissions by a heap. If we didn't have green power, the Enmore house's carbon emissions from energy would have walloped my flight emissions. So everyone should get green power.

I did the AGL carbon calculator based on my emissions last year. The road trip would add a lot to that this year. Driving the diesel 4WD around Australia created almost 5 tonnes of carbon.

But flying is the real problem. I should stop.

# Overrides the default AR date casting for dates of format dd/mm/yyyy
module ActiveRecord
  module ConnectionAdapters #:nodoc:
    class Column
      def self.fallback_string_to_date(string)
        string.gsub!(/([0-9]{2})\/([0-9]{2})\/([0-9]{4})/, '\3-\2-\1') # Convert to unambiguous date
        new_date *ParseDate.parsedate(string)[0..2]
      end
    end
  end
end

Rails ActiveRecord (or ParseDate at least) assumes that date strings with forward slashes are always in the form mm/dd/yyyy. That's all very well for silly countries like America, but not for a lot of the rest of the world.

This is my fairly shite attempt to transparently solve this problem. If you put this code in lib/autocast_date.rb for instance you can go require 'autocast_date' at the top of any model that needs it.

This will obviously break support for American style dates.

require 'human_attributes'

class Puppy < ActiveRecord::Base
  humanize_attributes :breakfast => "Puppy's preferred breakfast"
  validates_presence_of :breakfast
end

It doesn't do anything very spectacular, but it took me a long time to work out.

# lib/human_attributes.rb

module ActiveRecord
  class Base
    # Humanize attributes
    def self.human_attribute_name(attr)
      @humanized_attributes ||= {}
      @humanized_attributes[attr.to_sym] || attr.humanize
    end

    def self.humanize_attributes(*args)
      @humanized_attributes = *args
    end
  end
end

ActiveRecord::Base#humanattributename is deprecated and will be replaced by proper string inflection. For those with fancy, modern humanizing Inflectors you might have to change it to something like this.

def self.humanize_attributes(*args)
  humanized_attributes = *args
  Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
    humanized_attributes.each do |attr, label|
      inflect.human attr.to_s, label
    end
  end
end

Although I couldn't get that to work, probably because my Rails isn't new enough.

This house was very big. Perhaps not oversized compared to the average house, but most definitely oversized compared to the average house you see scooting along at 100km/h on the back of a truck.

This is the final route the intrepid road trippers ultimately tripped. It was a mighty fine adventure.

It was 7,371km according to Google but the trip meter reckons we drove about 9,700km (including the optional detour to Uluru).

I am pretty tired. I rode 37km. I suppose it isn't so far, but you have to remember that I'm kind of a pansy.

I think maybe I'll try do that more deliberately. I'm looking for some signal to people that the change isn't begrudged. You could just smile at someone and say "You're welcome". But as I come from an economic tradition I have a bias towards signals that are costly to fake. This signal certainly isn't in the costliness order of Les Miserables, but I suppose that's where the thought comes from.