Jim DeLaHunt, world-ready

For the last six weeks, I’ve been shopping at grocery stores in Venice, Naples, Rome, and Florence. My Carissima and I are self-catering during an extended trip through Italy. My grocery store sample is limited and unrepresentative, but even so, the experience makes me appreciate the treasures at these Italian groceries. And, it helps me appreciate by contrast what they grocery stores back home in B.C. do well. Continue Reading »

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A most extraordinary thing happened last Saturday: Ducky Sherwood and I appeared in the Venice Biennale! We were a (tiny) part of Sun & Sea [Marina], an “opera-performance” by RugilÄ— BarzdžiukaitÄ—, Vaiva GrainytÄ—, and Lina LapelytÄ—, at the Lithuania Pavilion. This work won them the Golden Lion award for Best National Participation. I have been a devoted amateur opera singer for nearly 25 years. I am delighted to join in this performance, in my little comprimario role. It is an unlikely addition to my résumé. Continue Reading »

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I have just seen — and solved — the most remarkable thing in a deep corner of my large archive disk: a single directory containing two entries (subdirectories) with the same name and same inode number. I will describe the problem, the diagnosis, and the cure for the benefit of others who encounter the same problem.

I was moving my archive of old files from one Network-Attached Storage (NAS) file server on my home network to another. Both old and new servers use netatalk AFP software to present Mac=style volumes to my Mac computer. Both run an underlying Unix-like OSs and file systems (but different ones for each).

I moved the archive by dragging the top-level directory data folder, using Finder on my Mac, from the old server to the new. Partway through, the copy aborted, with an error message like,  “a directory with the name .externalToolBuilders already exists”. This is remarkable. Each directory on the old server might have many entries or few, but each entry must has a different name. It is one of the fundamental rules of file systems. I was not combining two directories together, where an entry from one directory might collide with an entry with the same name from the other directory. Continue Reading »

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I’m going to be in an opera! I am in the chorus of Heroic Opera’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth on Friday 5. July and Saturday 6. July in Vancouver. It will be a marvelous show. The singers are powerful and exciting, the direction is incisive, the costumes are lavish.

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I am on the lookout for good songs to sing at bad times. I want songs of grief and loss, suitable for amateur musicians like me to sing at funerals and memorial services, that do not mention gods, creators, heaven, or other fables. I am looking for “Good Godless Grief Songs”.

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Recently I needed to convert a Google Docs wordprocessing document to Markdown format (Github’s dialect). A simple web search turned up several hits, most of them unhelpful. I finally found a Google Apps script to do the conversion, which was almost, but not quite, suitable. But with a simple modification, it did the trick. I am sharing it here, in the hope that it will be helpful to someone else searching for “convert Google Docs to Markdown”.

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January 1st each year is, among other things, Public Domain Day. This is the day, in most industrialised countries, when the copyright period expires on those works which became old enough in the past year. On Public Domain Day, those books, music scores, and artworks enter the public domain en masse. They are free for everyone to use and re-use without asking permission.

This year, Public Domain Day in the USA was notable. For only the second time in 41 years, works actually entered the public domain in the USA on that day. The last time this had happened was in 1998, and before that, 1977. These two 21-year droughts were the results of changes to US copyright law, first in 1976, and again in 1998. “The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years”, quoted Smithsonian magazine.  Cultural advocates celebrated how the arrival of works into the public domain enriches culture generally in the USA. But they focussed more on literature. I am interested in music scores. Continue Reading »

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I post on various forums around the net, and a few of my posts there get some very gratifying kudos. I’ve been a diligent contributor to StackOverflow, the Q-and-A site for software developers. I’m in the top 5% of contributors overall. Here’s my top-voted answer in StackOverflow currently.

The question, How to escape apostrophe (‘) in MySql?,  was asked by anonymous user4951 in March 2012 (and copy-edited by someone else). In abbreviated form, it was:

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 Recently, an innocent attempt to correct an error, in a birth date cited in a Wikipedia article, led me to a lesson in the Solar Hijri calendar, used in Iran. It was another wonderful reminder about how interesting and subtle are the calendars and clocks across cultures. Cultures can can approach the task of keeping track of days and years so differently, despite all of us living on the same planet, orbiting the same star and watching the same moon. Continue Reading »

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