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Domino Theory

Water bill is huge.

Toilet’s running, jiggle the handle.

Not quite. Sewer dude says there’s a constant flow.

Food color in the tank, wait a few seconds, shows up in the bowl. No problem, replace the stopper.

Turn off the valve. Oops, water still flows … valve shot, must replace. Shut off water main. Here it is, embedded in a root ball near the sidewalk. Main won’t budge. Get more leverage, no joy.

Call EBMUD to have main valve replaced. Not an emergency, wait for Monday.

Nothing is simple.

Music: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Falling From Above
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Trenchless

Had a sewer dude out with his ‘scope Friday. Watched on the monitor as he pushed a camera through our pipes, like a public colonoscopy. Tree roots woven evenly through 1942 clay, from one end to the other. “It’s a miracle this system hasn’t totally collapsed,” dude said.

Decided to get ahead of the game. With trenchless line replacement, they don’t dig your yard. Instead they attach a conical steel anvil to the end of a length of HDPE (not PVC) pipe — HDPE is more flexible, can bend without deforming in a 4′ radius. Draw a cable through the old line. Attach one end to the anvil, the other to a honkin’ winch on a big old truck. And start pulling. The anvil breaks the old pipe into tiny pieces in the soil where it lies, leaving the HDPE in its place. Cut, attach the ends to existing system, split.

The weird thing about sewer work is that you spend all this money and have nothing tangible to show for it. The toilet flushes just like it did before. Can’t see nothin’ different. Amy said that when our friends come over we can invite them to go hog-wild.

Music: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Sun Green
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High ASCII Madness

FileMaker is more than happy to set users up with “value lists,” which coyly store multiple values in a field — a concept that’s pretty much anathema to “real” databases. Values in the list are separated by a weird ascii character. To forge a bridge b/w MySQL and FileMaker, wrote a routine to grab each element in a form array and insert this weird character between each. If all elements were named perfectly, FM would show the proper boxes checked upon data import. In a prior incarnation of this system, data was output from MySQL to a web page, then imported into FM. But now that this weird ascii character is present, we were getting inconsistent results. After much sleuthing, turned out that some browsers (Make 7 Up Yours, IE/Mac) were conveniently discarding the special character, so nothing matched on import. Rewrote the app to write the export to a text file on the server, the offer the file for download, taking browser discrepancies out of the mix.

Music: Black Cat Orchestra :: Sanfonando
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Happy Billionth, Unix Time

A couple of days ago the Unix clock — which measures time in elapsed seconds since the epoch (January 1, 1970) — ticked its billionth tick. Planes did not fall out of the sky. What did happen is that computers “paused for a second, then changed to 1 billion and 1 seconds.”

I confess that I used to store “real” date/timestamps in my databases. Discovering the total liberation afforded by reinterpreted Unix timestamps opened several of my projects up like happy oysters.

To celebrate, I bought a Bingo Wacky Wobbler tonight. Bingo, my favorite Banana Split, who was probably conceived right around the time a bunch of bearded Unix weenies were conceiving second zero of Unix time.

You might want to celebrate by defraggling your motherdisc.

Music: Orchestre Murphy :: Day Dream of a Marriage Guidance Counsellor
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How Much Is $87 Billion?

Regarding Bush’s request (or was it a demand?) for an obscenely thick wad to fund ongoing occupation, TrueMajority asks:

How much is $87 billion? For that amount of money, America could:

Solve the school budget crisis in every one of our communities,
OR
Provide health insurance for every uninsured American child for 15 years,
OR
Provide food for all 6 million of the children who die from hunger around the world for 7 years.

A day of protest is being planned for October 25 in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles and places in between.

Update: costofwar.com provides a visceral, real-time tabulation of what this involvement is costing us.

Music: Huun-Huur-Tu :: Chiraa-Khoor (“The Yellow Trotter”)
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Gotterdammerung

Laying down newspaper to varnish some trim yesterday, found half an article on the recent Sex Pistols’ reunion.

“… the night never pretended to be anything more than a greatest-hits cavalcade.”

Ack, where’s the other half? SFGate to the rescue.

The real Sex Pistols met their Goetterdaemmerung with open arms on a spit- soaked Winterland stage in 1978. The embalmed facsimile that played San Francisco on Wednesday as part of its second blighted reunion tour (the first was in 1996) barely qualified as an homage.

Sounds painful. Almost glad I missed it. “”Ever get the feeling you’ve just been cheated?”

Music: The Carter Family :: No More The Moon Shines On Lorena
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Be Settles Suit with Microsoft

Raise your hand if you sold all your BEOS stock when things became hopeless. If you kept it until March 15, 2002, you may be paddling a new canoe this Fall. Microsoft just agreed to pay Be $23,250,000 and “admit no wrongdoing” to put the lingering lawsuit to bed forever. The spoils go to those who held Be stock after March 15.

In case you missed all the fun, this is the sort of wrongdoing to which Microsoft is not admitting, but for the sin of which it has ultimately agreed to pay.

Former Be exec Frank Boosman has more.

Music: David Gray :: Silver Lining
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Under the Radar

MacObserver studied McAfee and Virex virus data, and found that “out of about 71,000 viruses, only 579 were for Macs, all but 26 of those were MS Word & Excel macro viruses, and none affected OS X.” Is this phenomenon strictly related to the size of the installed base, or inherent to security infrastructure on either platform? Jason Deraleau at O’Reilly says Size Doesn’t Matter.

I’m not sure the question is easily answerable, but in the end, Mac users fly under the radar. Though we do still have to deal with inboxes flooded by sobig and friends.

Music: Modest Mouse :: Life Like Weeds
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Up the River

Jon Carroll writes for The Chron about blogs coming out of Iraq — not American journalists blogging from abroad (though some of those are quite excellent, but Iraqis telling the story from their perspective.

One of the cited blogs quotes an Iraqi construction engineer, whose very experienced construction firm estimated the cost to repair a bombed-out bridge at around $300,000. Allowing for overruns and excess, just to be really really safe, quadruple that to $1.2 million. Then the American bid on the same job comes in: A cool $50 million.

Iraqis need the work, need the cash circulation. But Iraqi firms aren’t allowed to bid on jobs to repair their own country. Only American firms — Halliburton and Bechtel, right? — can do that. And they get to write a blank check. With your money.

Foul beyond description.

Music: Super Chikan :: El Camino