A few notes on this & that
Well, what with the Giants games and all, I haven't had much time to post lately.
I've also been up to my ears in a database project. I started off with half a dozen large SGML files that I needed to get into a database. That's been quite a go-round, with several false starts and having to back up -- one step forward and two backwards. Now I think I have it in hand. The data -- about 3500 records -- is in the database, in half a dozen tables, and I can write meaningful queries against them. One interesting problem is that the database records have pointers to JPG files on a server. I need to go through these database records, then download the JPGs, and turn them into PDFs. There are from 2 to 10 (it looks like) JPGs per database item. It's been fun stuff; lots more fun stuff to come.
I spent a couple hours yesterday going through Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python tutorials. They're very nice, though incomplete. The XML processing tutorial is great; I learned a lot from it, and though I didn't use it to solve this SGML problem I had this week, it's been very useful. Python is a fascinating language, though I haven't done any non-trivial work in it yet. I hope to in the next week or so.
I've also been reading Timothy Ferris Seeing in the Dark , It';s a nice tour through the contributions that amateurs have made and are making to astronomy, and it's giving me the itch to get the tubes out again and stay up late by myself gazing into the depths. With fall here and winter coming, this is especially tempting, as some of my favorite objects are up in the winter, and Saturn is on its way.
Then today I got an email from my sister with some surprising info in it. It turns out that up in Spokane half a dozen priests were recently drummed out of the ministry for yes, you got it, child molestation. It happens that one of these priests was one that I new pretty well when I was in high school, was the pastor of my local parish. As I said to my sister, I always had a pretty low opinion of this guy -- he was an arch conservative and seemed to me to be as far from the Christian ideal of love thy neighbor that you could get. In high school we used to get into some heated arguments over politics and nearly every facet of our outlooks on life. I know that many others didn't share this opinion of him. Still, as little as I thought of this guy, I never would have thought he'd he'd have been capable of that. It's one thing to have read about this torrent of molestation in the church that I left long ago; it's quite another thing to have known someone who apparently was doing it himself.
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