A Geek Goes Flying

For the first time in my life, I have a dog that’s AKC. Time to start competing. (I have my reasons.) He’s still so much a puppy, but growing so quickly! I'm just going to throw this out there: The dog the AKC used for their website is basically my Labrador. White, with darker ears: I have no idea where to start. Talked to opposing counsel on one of our cases who was requesting a trial continuance because her Border Collie keeps winning. She pointed me towards the “Jack Bradshaw” website, mentioned “conformation classes,” and described a new AKC 4-6 month puppy “competition” that doesn’t count but gets dogs and handlers familiar with what to expect. Okay, now I’m on a mission... I don’t think my boy is registered with AKC yet, so that’s step 1: https://www.akc.org/register/ I’m so glad I scan everything. I needed his AKC number to register, and found it at the very top of the registration form his breeder gave me: But at least finding the paperwork was as simple

I’ve been using SSH to remotely access UNIX (Linux, Mac OS X / macOS, etc) computers for more than 20 years (switching over when the perils of plaintext telnet were made very clear to me during HIP ’97 ). Not sure how I never knew to setup an .ssh/config file before! Super convenient. Had to figure it out to get BBEdit talking to a remote web server (BBEdit only groks FTP/SFTP), and I’ve configured the web server to only accept key pair authenticated logins. Good tutorial: https://linuxize.com/post/using-the-ssh-config-file/ Also, this is in the manual, but it still took me a second to find it ... FTP/SFTP bookmarks are configured under the BBEdit menu → Setup... option. (There’s no way to bookmark an open connection, or to configure one from File → Open from FTP/SFTP Server..., which is a little surprising / obscure, for a Mac-native application with such a long history.) Mac-Pro:~  wingedgeek $ cat .ssh/config  Host  webserver.mydomain.com IdentityFile ~/.ssh/ webserv

So I built a database of documents. As of this writing it contains 18,693 HTML documents, which  combined contain 1,453,866 paragraphs. Once the most common words have been excluded ( ' the ', ' of ', ' to ', ' and ', ' a ', ' that ', ' in ', ' is ', ' for ', ' or ', ' on ' ), there are 272,708 distinct words. So far so good. The issue I’m slamming up against now, though, is the  word-level inverted index  ( wordIndex ) I built so I could do phrase searching, find WordA within 5 words of WordB, find documents with WordC, WordD, and WordE all appearing in the same paragraph, etc. Kind of a poor man’s LexisNexis . I rolled my own for the mental exercise ‡ , but now I’m wondering if there’s a better way. Profiling the PHP code that builds the index, the single most expensive call is writing to that  wordIndex  table. It takes an average of about 10 minutes to index each document; here’s a representat

This shouldn’t be that hard, but, it’s Microsoft, so ... I built a little tool that automatically calculates litigation deadlines based on a set of rules I coded based on the California Code of Civil procedure. In Firefox and Safari and probably others (but not Edge or MSIE, sigh), it also, in JavaScript, builds on the fly .ics files for easy importation into your calendar app of choice. When that file gets opened on the Mac (using Calendar.app), quite sensibly the user is prompted as to which calendar the event should be added to: But ... Not on Outlook. In both the Outlook 2010 and 2016 desktop applications, the iCalendar file gets automatically opened by Outlook: Outlook populates a window with the event information, but does not provide any option to specify which calendar the event should be added to: When the event gets saved, it’s created on the user’s personal calendar, and has to be manually dragged and dropped onto the shared ca