Never been one to let the carrier drop

When I was about 12, one of the things I enjoyed doing was using Broderbund’s Print Shop along with my word processer to make signs, school reports that had headers and footers, greeting cards, and other assorted chunks-of-printwork. The software had all the limits one would expect of something running on a machine with 128k of RAM, connected to a 9-wire thermal printer, but for all of the suckiness, it did actually do some pretty cool things.

Fast forward to 2006. I’m browsing in Half Price Books, and I come upon, for $3, a copy of Print Shop V20.

Version twenty. Jeez, how many products make it to V20? Anyway, so, naturally I buy a copy, having just bought this super-snazzy printer, and bring it home, and guess what? It’s just as much fun as the original Print Shop. So you all will probably groan when I send you homemade cards and whatnot, but I’m having fun…

Also, for a day my web site had the source code for fetching entries out of LJ into mysql as the entry-of-the-day which is being fetched out of LJ. Somehow it struck me as wonderfully recursive.

I’m thinking of buying some more UPS capacity for my house – I have enough to run for about 20 minutes, but since most power failures last at least a hour, I’d like to get more. What I’m wondering is – and yes, I know that I could cut open the UPS and add the ability to add more batteries, but that it might fail spectacularly because the charger isn’t designed to charge said batteries for any length of time and the UPS doesn’t have enough cooling to run for two hours at full load – so what I came up with is to daisy chain UPSes – i.e. plug one UPS into another into another etc. Has anyone tried this and does it work as expected i.e. 3 UPSes gives you almost 3x the runtime of one UPS?

I’m also going to write a randomizer for my web site that shows a different photo every time, but has the ability to ‘weight’ the photos so that favorites happen more often. I’ve come up with a easy and fast if somewhat wasteful of disk space way to do it, and I wondered if anyone had any better suggestions.

What I came up with is to create a table which has one entry per photo, unless the photo has a weight greater than one in which case it has several – a bunch – of entries for that photo. Then call rand(0,$number_of_rows) on that table and there you are, a weighting system. I also want to use the same code to generate playlists for wshr to play when it is otherwise ‘idle’ i.e. no one is broadcasting on it, so it will always have a signal.

Hopefully I’m making all this portable enough that it will continue to run on the new computer, once known as Chloe but by request from Kayti now named Peterbuilt. [One of my other computers is the mac, because it’s the only macintosh I have worthy of being called a computer, and we just saw Cars a month ago, so naturally..

Okay, I know this is a much more mundane journal entry than a lot of my more esoteric ones, but nonetheless I’m happy with it. I can’t imagine that I’ll care about anything I just wrote ten years from now, but then, I’ve been suprised before.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 5th, 2006 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.