The Dragon Reborn

Book Love Affair blog discussion for this book and the Tor reread outline by Leigh Butler.

I love the feeling of being absorbed in a richly imagined alternative world, as I used to enjoy in Everquest, and I experience some of that in these books. They're very long, with enough juiciness and intrigue to stay inviting, although they have their frustrations for this reader.

It has become more clear to me how women dominate in the Wheel of Time world. The breaking of the world legend turns female power (saidar) into the authority, and women dominate or are equals in most of the societies, as compared to our world. To the extent that it's not mere "political correctness" I find that angle interesting and compelling.  Compare Jordan's WoT world to the Tolkien world of The Lord of the Rings: female characters there have a distinctly minor importance, Galadriel excepted. Is there a well-conceived theme of feminine and masculine principles organizing the thread of the Wheel of Time story and the trajectories of character actions? Mmmm... sort of,  but not really. I'll see how it unfolds.

The Great Hunt

Reactions to The Great Hunt
I found this book more absorbing than The Eye of the World; I finished reading it around Feb. 15 and had to force myself not to start The Dragon Reborn until March. Picked up Bernard Cornwell's The Winter King in the meantime, but more about that in another post (TK).

Leigh Butler's smartly written synopses at Tor are very handy references and refreshers.

I think these books need to be understood as "Lord of the Rings fan fiction". I read that quote somewhere. Wheel of Time could never have been written without LoTR. These books have similar strengths and weaknesses of LoTR: shallow characters, black-and-white vision of good/evil, a chaste and non-gritty way of describing and experiencing, richly envisioned landscape, culture, and long journeys, epic "save the world" plot, and of course the usual cast of warriors, magicians, orcs, elves and other such myth-like beings. For those of us who were entranced by LoTR, the WoT promises a much longer immersion in a magical world where one's actions have epic meaning and value.

Starting The Great Hunt

Reactions so far to The Great Hunt:

I'm enjoying Rand's resistance to his calling. Almost every genuine spiritual calling is met by horror and resistance. Oh, you need examples to prove the point? Moses, St. Augustine, Jesus (if you like Kazantsakis' deeply-felt interpretation) ... um, I'll think of some more. A "spiritual transformation" is a destruction of the ego. It's a "lose yourself to find yourself" thing. It's the meaning of death. Yeah, I don't think most of us are ready to die, we're way too full of self-love.

No, I think Siddhartha is a different story, Buddhism isn't about "spiritual calling", a Buddhist should laugh or snort about "spirituality", they wouldn't have patience with it. Most of what goes by the name of "spirituality" these days is new-age wishful thinking, quest for warm-fuzzies, yearning to feel connected or important.

I do like the Aes Sedai envisioned as spiritual practitioners.

The Eye of the World

OK, signed up for the Wheel of Time big read-in on Book Love Affair blog.

Just happenstance that I started reading WoT. I really liked George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire (so far) and wanted to indulge my LoTR-inclination, did some research, and picked up The Eye of the World.

What I enjoyed in this book:

• Large, detailed world with (typical fantasy-lit) medieval-style political/economic/technology/cultural setting
• Plot-driven, suspenseful writing
• Sense of an epic, unfolding narrative
• evocative villages/towns/cities, buildings, clothing, and landscape descriptions
• Likable characters
• Tolkienesque equivalents are enjoyable homage: Aragorn/Strider, hobbits, wizards, Sauron.

What I didn't enjoy in this book:

• simplistic, unexplained good vs. evil scenario
• uncomplicated (dare I say shallow, one-dimensional) characters
• some continuity/context errors

Count number of files of certain size


find ./ -size 0k | grep "sess_" -c

This finds the files and directories matching a path and matching a size.
Can use -size +[number]k (above a certain size) or -size -[number]k (below a certain size), or a size match.
Then it pipes that to a grep for the word "sess_" and returns a count.
Helps us count the enormous number of blank sessions that our app is generating on OSX.

Selecting non-distinct rows in MySQL

Got this here.

SELECT *, COUNT(*) AS count FROM tablename GROUP BY fieldname HAVING count > 1


To count the number of session files in a directory

count number of session files in a directory:

ls -l | grep "sess_" -c


PHPMyAdmin: Setting up the MAMP environment

Continuing notes to self. Followed the PHPMyAdmin macports installation instructions here.

I couldn't get logged in to PHPMyAdmin. When I tried to log in I got the message "#2002 - The server is not responding (or the local MySQL server's socket is not correctly configured)"

I googled the error and found this helpful thread in the MySQL forums. Amusingly, I found that I had previously had the same problem and thanked the poster almost exactly a year ago for the solution. Memory is short and technology is a long bizarre road.

yes- this works for me. You just have to go into the config.inc.php file and change:
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'localhost';

to this

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = '127.0.0.1';

Configuring my new MacBook Pro for development

I'm setting up my new —well, used, thanks JB!— MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard for development. I'm using MacPorts for simplicity, but of course, one always runs into something that baffles and confounds.

For future reference and benefit as I struggle through this:

Setting up the MAMP environment for Apache

1. Don't forget to install XCode before installing MacPorts.
2. This MacPorts guide is a good starting point.
3. My first struggle was to get the right Apache launching, NOT the built-in Mac version.
4. Make sure that the "web sharing" is off in System Preferences. This should be done before installing the apache2 macport.
5. To check if you're running the right httpd (Apache daemon process) in terminal:
   

   ps -ax | grep httpd

   you want to see /opt/local/apache2/bin/httpd
   
   you don't want to see /private/etc/apache2
6. To get apachectl commands working in terminal, I couldn't get the alias working, I had to add the path to .profile like this:
   export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/opt/local/apache2/bin:$PATH
   That includes the paths that MacPorts wrote.
7. To see if you're going to execute the right apachectl, use this command in terminal:
   

   which apachectl

   and you'll see which one is first in line to execute. Very handy little command.
8. I couldn't get my virtual hosts working until I edited /private/etc/hosts to assign them to 127.0.0.1 as described here. It wasn't enough to configure vhosts or my username.conf file and include it in httpd.conf.

Temporarily locking submit button

Suggested by this example.
I need a temporarily locking submit button because if there's a validation error on the page, the user needs to resubmit. But I need to stop the clickers (slow response sometimes on this server) and give them some feedback.

$(document).ready(function() {
   $(':submit').click(function() {
        $original = $(this).val();
        $(this).val('Saving, please wait...')
        .attr("disabled","disabled")
        .fadeIn('slow')
        .animate({opacity: 0.4}, 4000)
        .fadeIn('slow', function() {
             $(this).val($original).removeAttr("disabled")
             .animate({opacity: 1}, 2000)  
        }); 
   }); 
});

My only problem is that it conflicts with the jquery validation plugin we're using: it prevents the error bubbles from displaying when submit is clicked.
If I can reference a validation value then I can check whether this function needs to execute or not.