randomwisdom.com

I was trying to figure out how to do a simple search and replace of entries in the database which holds all the text for my site. Since I've rearranged a lot of design components, I needed to change the old links to match the new style for the site.

So you'd think that a full-featured database program should have a query option to find and replace substrings within table entries. And it does, almost. If I want to replace a specific string with another specific string, I can do that. But if I want to replace something which has variable numbers (like the tags that drive the images on my site), wildcards (like % and _ for SQL) don't work AT ALL. So if I want to replace "yadda yadda width='???px' height='???px' " with " " I can't.

So the workaround, for now, is using an .htaccess file to dynamically redirect old links to their new locations. Because .htaccess supports replacing stuff with wildcards. And regular expressions. Because it doesn't suck.

So hopefully you can still access the large-sized photos by clicking on the thumbnails, just as before. If there's a problem, please let me know, because I'll need to fix that if it's still a problem.

I took the day off today to bicycle along Hirose River to Itsutsu-bashi (bridge) and one of my favorite shrines, on top of a hill.

Post box near Yodomi-bashi

Yodomi-bashi

Lunch break, riverside

More photos will appear tomorrow....

Just finished putting some finishing touches on the look of the page, and tweaked some of the comment settings as well. Hope you like the modified look of things.

As for me, I'm going to take a break from lab for awhile. Seeing as how it's going to be open house here Thursday and Friday, I certainly won't be able to get any work done on anything important. So, you may not see posts for the next few days. But I'll be spending that time taking some photos, so don't worry.

So here's a little bit about the trip to Aomori I took this weekend. Aomori is the northernmost prefecture on Honshu, the main island of Japan, and its name means "green forest" (or BLUE forest, if you're either a wacked-out crackhead or color blind). And there is a lot of forest.

Green forest

Aomori is also home to Japan's nuclear reprocessing facilities and hazardous waste facilities. And Japan certainly needs one, seeing as it gets more than half of its energy from nuclear power. You see, when you put fuel in a nuclear reactor, you get a lot of heat, some reacted material, and some unreacted material. So what they do is stick all this stuff in a big centrifuge, separating all the useful stuff from the Really Nasty Waste Products. Then they throw the useful stuff back in the "atomic furnace" (as a nuclear reactor is called here in Japan) and the process repeats itself. So what do you do with all that Really Nasty material? You melt it into glass, wrap it up really nice in layers of stuff, and bury it underneath the ground for a few hundred million years, hoping that nothing bad happens.

So I went there, but they seemed a bit nervous about cameras. Maybe they were worried about terrorists casing the joint? Bad PR from burying large yellow drums with a radioactive symbol on them? Or maybe our tour guide was just camera shy.

So after that we went to the hotel and had a big traditional feast in a traditional room, with fish and noodles and rice and mushrooms and some other stuff that I didn't really know what it was.

The feast

Oh, and of course, we toasted with beer. Some people said that they didn't want to toast with beer, to which the chaperoning professors looked at each other and said, "Well then, how about whiskey?"

I love this country.

Oh, and there was Karaoke too.

The puppet speaks English.

... before it decides to take a dump on you.

http://channels.lockergnome.com/news/archives/20040615_why_you_should_dump_internet_explorer.phtml

I'm migrating my site to another tool called "Wordpress", which will give me a lot more control over formatting, and probably make things faster to boot. The flip side is that there will probably be some hiccups as things get migrated over, and things may not look like they should. Ideally, you shouldn't see any differences within the pages, but we'll see how that goes....