If fate frowns, we all perish.— Penumbra: Overture
I worked on a simple substitution cipher. I'll work some more on it, and maybe make a little game out of it.
I also finished those door-stoppers!
And I read three novels:
I added explanations for the fields that a book might have.
I added some more special browsing criteria to the Books page. The neat thing about having a relational database like this working like a charm (as it now finally does) is that you can view your data in all kinds of interesting ways. As an example of this, check out The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (which I discovered in the course of properly cataloging my science fiction books and which is a tremendously useful tool).
And of course, I've read some more books:
I realize that many books lack a synopsis and a review, and that those that have them have very short ones. This will probably get fixed when I re-read some of those books. You see, I have qualms about making my mind up about a book while I'm reading it (or just after I'm finished). If I don't digest it properly, I don't trust my own opinion on it. Better to do a proper review than a hasty one, I think.
I redesigned the underlying code of my Books page, making it cleaner and more easily maintainable. As an unforeseen by-product of this, the two bugs which have been bugging me for some time (the Multiple Role Bug and the String Length Restriction Bug, as I call them) magically vanished! Also, browsing by category or author (or more generally, by any method which requires many-to-many tables to be joined) used to mean that under each book, only the category/author under consideration would show (even though a book might be written by many authors or be in many categories); no more! And there's a new feature: For all non-book views on the main page, you get the number of books in a category in parenthesis.
The Multiple Role Bug meant that for books where some authors had roles (editor, illustrator, translator, etc.), I'd get two sets of roles. (Example: The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction.) I had this fixed with a kludge, deleting every other role. However, this worked most places, but not all. It turned out that I'd get n sets of roles, where n is the number of categories in which a book is (most books are in two categories).
The String Length Restriction Bug would cut off the comma-separated strings containing the authors' names and ids long before its actual limit was reached, so that anthology books with lots of contributing authors were bungled. (Example: Dangerous Visions.) I never could figure out how to fix it.
However, I looked at my database queries, and designed them a little more logically. Before, I had one master query per view (by category, by series, single books, special criteria, etc.) and sent along GROUP_CONCAT()s for author names, ids, and roles, and for category names and ids, and then had my home-grown print_book() function work on the strings. Now, I do two separate queries inside the function to fish out author and category information, so that instead of one massive and unwieldy master query, I have three smaller ones. The lesson? Don't be afraid to use several queries.
I'm so happy with the way it works now that in a spirit of why-not-ism I added all the rest of my books to the database. So in the future when I've read a book, making it appear in the various views is as easy as flipping a boolean value. This should serve as an incentive to read more books (something I've really been neglecting lately).
Opera 11.11 was just released, supporting CSS3 columns, and so I implemented columns on my Books page. Doesn't it look much nicer?
There are also some book updates, but I'm postponing them for another update.
I read (and even reviewed, by the gods!) a whopping two books: The Martian Chronicles and Infidel: My Life. I also listened to The Moral Landscape, which is pending a real review. And I found an awesome Clarke story that I transcribed, The Possessed.
As for my excuse for the drought of updates, I blame it on the exceedingly addictive game Minecraft in conjunction with the immensely interesting lectures of Terence McKenna and Alan Watts (both of whose output is substantial, so it's been a huge time sink). Well. Now I'm finally trying to be more productive, and perhaps I'll even finish some of my door-stopper books (I have some collections from Clarke, Poe, Lovecraft, and Conan Doyle that I've been reading in from time to time that I'd like to finish).
There are 7 posts for 2011.