Wired: Full of Lies / MoveOn.localhost.localdomain

This article in Wired, "Saving the World Without Hippies" apparently postulates a possible universe where Jer isn't a hippy.

Although pho was a delight as ever, I was sad to learn that he'd soon be leaving for greener pastures. It seems that we're again at one of those large-scale transition points, where everyone i know picks up and moves around.

As for myself, I will be in Austin, the Bay, Tahoe, The City, and the Carolinas in the next couple of months, so if you're going to be doing social stuff in one of those places, you may as well let me know. In particular, I will be in the bay area around Xmas, in case anyone has entertainment or housing suggestions. (I will be in Seattle for NYE and thereabouts.)

quote of the week

Amy is my hero.

i feel like the benefit i bring every editing gig is that i'm flighty and have a short attention span and i'm preoccupied with fashion and novelty. it's good for the readership.
--matilda

Hero.

answers to people who asked me anything...

What's the dumbest thing you've seen tongodeon do?
I've never known him to do anything stupid, I have seen him really fail to get things. The prelude to "I am a big shame balloon" comes to mind, although that was topped off by the local schizophrenic.

What's your favorite foreign candy?
I'm not a big fan of candy, but my friend E- had some great chocolate from Belgium with him at one point that I tried.

I need to convert a small bibliographic database that was originally built with DBase in the '80s, and that runs in the command line, into something usable with a web interface. I do have access to the source files, and the original creator. How would you begin, and can I hire a student programmer to do it?

Response questions: Do you mean the source of the program or the source of the data?
I would start by dumping that to a CSV format and then importing it into a new database based on SQL.

If you're feeling shirty, you may wish to use Microsoft's ODBC drivers for dBase to access the original data and then send it into your new, improved datastore (say mysql), some handy C++ code can be found here: http://www.codeproject.com/database/cpodbcdbase1.asp
There are probably VB and .NET equivalents around for this, I'm too lazy to look up all that newfangled shiat, ask a liberrian.

RubyOnRails would probably be a good choice for a front end after you're done, in terms of campus popularity, but it would be possible to do other things as well. There are a variety of ways to put XBase derivatives directly on the net -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBase contains useful information, but in my experience, I've found web things based on xbase to be spite-added shiat.

In general, I'm a big fan of the dump and suck approach, as long as you don't have any data integrity issues introduced that way. One thing I find handy is to make sure that your primary keys and interrelationships don't get screwed up when you re-add the data. The two ways to do this are to make all new IDs when you add the data to the new base, which is problematic and fraught with error, or setting up keys and indexes after you're done, which one should consult the db documentation about.

What sort of religious/philosophical creature are you?
In general, I was raised Episcopalian and have a lot of stored tropes from there. Philosophically, I have absorbed a lot from Quakerism and various early Christian and Buddhist writers without adhering strictly much to any. Ethically, all the reading I did at UChicago on ethics in early modern east asia and the classical world had a huge affect on my thought, not always linearly.

Why is it dangerous to go alone, and what good is that kitten going to do to defray teh dangers?
otherwise you might miss sarcasm.

Who was that you were sitting with at Online Coffee?
Unknown, since you weren't more precise, but probably my friends Amy, Rowan, or Steve. Amy and I are usually chatting without laptops when we're sitting together. With the other two, we're usually working at the same table with laptops, and they're easily distinguishable.