Watching ST: Voyager I was thinking about 'Voyager's database' and the sci-fi assumption that everything in a computer system is in a 'database.' I suppose that broadening the term to simply refer to a repository of information would mean that any hard drive, isolinear chip, or filing cabinet is a 'database of information' but then I starting wondering what it would look like if all data really were in a database.

On one level, that would be easy to do: Simply take each file and put its ascii or binary data in a database field, and put its name, modification date, file type, and other metadata in other fields in the same entry and voila, it's in a database, albeit a shallow, general purpose one.

But what about the files themselves? What if, in an XML-like fashion, every file's data were in turn kept in a database? What if individual file contents consisted entirely of its own database, with its own schema, stored procedures, and all the rest? For example, one of the nifty things about mySQL is that each table is kept as a file on the hard drive, and you could back up by exporting a dump of SQL calls needed to reconstruct the database, or you could just copy the table file and put it in a safe place. What if these files were in turn kept in binary format in the fields of another, encompassing database? So that regardless of differences in schema from file to file, data would still be kept in databases within databases, or hierarchical databases?

To take it a step further, what if the SQL language (I hate saying that like I hate saying 'ATM machine' 'RAID array' 'PIN number' or any other redundant acronym) were extended to allow for 'deep queries' that would be able to isolate records and then further qualify and manipulate contents of the databases stored within the data of those records themselves? Excel spreadsheets could be stored in a database format, alongside powerpoint presentations, word files, email repositories (with records being individual email messages, which in turn could have attachments with embedded databases), and so on.

On some level what I'm talking about boils down to hierarchical XML, but with the power of SQL built into it. XML is an ideal format for transmitting information, as databases are for storing it. XML has the added features of DTDs to specify the format particular datatypes should follow, while SQL has unique schemas. Perhaps they both could learn a bit from each other.

Anyhow, no rousing conclusion here, other than to say I've got to get to bed. Stayed home sick from work today, went to the doctor, and the fun goes on and on. I just wanted to type this one into the ether before going to sleep and having it replaced by random dreams...

Christ on a pogo stick I'm stressed. In addition to having a 'get home at 8pm, wake up at 5:45am' schedule with the commute, I have two projects given to me today that need to be done by 9 and 11 am respectively... Ack!

I was planning on driving in tomorrow, but now I need to take the train, just so I'll have the hour to work before I get to work.

No, it's not always like this and I probably shouldn't be venting. This is all just a play for sympathy when you'd otherwise be wondering thy I haven't been posting much.

Dotcom Storytime part 3 will probably be written on the train ride home tomorrow, and I promise you'll get a kick out of it.

Anyone else notice McDonald's response to the $10 million fraud perpetrated against them (and all of us) in their contests?

Well, if you haven't heard, they made a quick decision to give out another $10 million in prizes, only this time instead of giving it out in several promotions over the course of years, they're giving out five $1 million prizes and 50 $100,000 prizes over a five day period, from this Thursday to Monday, Sept. 3.

True, $10 million is a drop in the grease bucket for a company that grosses $15 billion a year, but it's an important gesture, all the better because it was made at the same time the FBI announced the fraud (which wasn't McD's fault, but that of a guard at one of their contractors).

Anyhow, I haven't been to McD's for a while, but I'll be getting a Big Mac or two this weekend!

Am I a money ho?

What good are reviews anyhow? How is it important, before you see the film, to read that "Kevin Smith showed a mastery of the niche-kitsch movie genre"? Basically, all you're going to do with these reviews is either decide whether to see the movie or not, or spout off to others and regurgitate the analysis (like you might quote Vickar's "Work in Essex County" page 98), acting all knowledgeable about a movie you haven't seen.

So the only thing a reviewer can do is suggest whether you should or should not see the film. J&SB^2 is good. Not as good as any of the other View Askew films in my opinion, but mostly because each film in the Askewniverse falls into a different genre, and the slapstick self-referential genre isn't one I enjoy as much. That said, its a really good example of the genre, and not too stupid (read: Airplane 2).

There's lots I could say in a conversation about the movie, but why skirt the line between discourse and spoilage? If you saw it, talk to me. I'd love to gab. If you haven't seen it and you thought you might want to, then see it. It's not bad. If you thought maybe you should catch it on video, then do that. It's not so exceptional that it'd rock the world of a non Kevin Smith fan, but it's a fun romp.Pity this is the one the series ends on though. Of all the films, it has the least catharsis.

If you want a more traditional review (that I happen to completely agree with) check out Benjy's take.

This second chapter of Dotcom Storytime comes a few months after the gonorrhea email. I was still working primarily on one-off marketing microsites for Levi.com, usually dovetailing with the Levi's traditional media campaigns composed by Chiat-Day.

This time around we were creating the online component for the "Wore Them" campaign. If you think about it, you might remember this one. Levi's bought hundreds of billboards in 12 metropolitan areas, painted them all white save for the red-tab logo hanging off the top of the right edge, and "Calvin Wore Them" "Tommy Wore Them" or "Ralph Wore Them" in a bold, black rough typewriter font across the center. The campaign referred to Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Ralph Lauren, respectively. It was supposed to be an edgy, controversial campaign, and while there was both an edge and a controversy related to the campaign, it had nothing to do with the billboards.

The billboards were all supposed to be painted simultaneously after the close of business on Friday, the idea being that if Calvin, Ralph, and Tommy were to file injunctions to have the billboards taken down, they would at least have to wait until Monday for the lawyers and judges to get back to work. The funny part here is that, as it turns out, all three of them loved the campaign, and happily admitted the powerful effect that Levi's had on their own aspirations while growing up. The kicker was when, feeling left out, Gianni Versache paid for a New York billboard in the same style that said, "Gianni Wore Them, Too."

But back to the dotcom side... We had to create a site that would live for the duration of the campaign, capture the spirit of the billboards, and not take an inordinate amount of time or effort to implement. In the end, Colleen, Michael and I came up with a single page with the red tab in the corner, a white background, and hundreds of names in alternating red and black type flowing without breaks over the entire page, saying "Kevin Fox wore them. Colleen Stokes wore them. Michael Borosky wore them. John Doe wore them." and so on. At the bottom of the page there was an entry field for typing in your own first and last name and submitting them. Then the page would reload, with your name added to the front of the list. There were also buttons for viewing the list sorted by first name or last name as well as the default reverse chronological listing. I wish I had a screen shot, because by the end it was pretty impressive, with close to 26,000 names engraved like a war memorial to fashion.

But the site would have looked pretty pitiful when it started out with only 4 or 5 names on the list, so Jordan sent out an email to all of CKS (roughly 1800 people in 13 offices around the US) showing off the page and asking them to put names in. And then the fun began.

Within minutes the page started filling up with names, but things quickly got out of hand. For every "Frederick Harrison wore them" there was an "Adolf Hitler wore them." Some were innocuous, like Orrin's "Captain Poopyshanks wore them" and some were political "Chinese Sweatshoppers wore them." The vast majority, however, were part of a running theme along the lines of "[name deleted] is a fucking jerk and wore them. [name deleted] shat-in-his-pants and wore them. [name deleted] carved-up-women-and-made-suede-jackets-and wore them." You get the picture. ([name deleted] isn't anyone I know, by the way).

Jordan was irate. The client hadn't seen the page yet, but they were supposed to within a few hours, and nothing in the email he sent to the company indicated that the site wasn't, in fact, live.

Now you might ask yourself, "How clever of a programmer is Kevin? Is he the sort of person who would store all the responses in a database for easy sorting, and just for kicks include the IP numbers and timestamp of each submission alongside the first and last name fields?" You might think I'm just that paranoid/curious/clever/anal. And you'd be right.

So naturally Jordan's first question to me is, "Can we tell who posted these?" and, sitting in my office next to my officemate Orrin, who at that very moment was typing something along the lines of "Butt Commander wore them," I admitted that, yes, we have the technology.

I'd already been browsing through the IPs and comparing them to a list of subnets I'd snagged from Ely, our IT guy, and I knew that the vast majority of the bad ones weren't coming from our own office. In fact, almost all of them were coming from IPs within the New York office's subnet, and from another subnet outside of CKS, which a little tracerouting and reverse DNSing revealed to be some advertising company in Manhattan. As I expected, Jordan had a little slap-on-the-wrist chat with the handful from our office who contributed less-than-appropriate names, ("Meat Helmets wore them") but placed most of his rancor where it belonged, on the East coast. The SF and NY general managers had a little heart to heart.

While I was quickly writing an admin utility to allow us to screen and approve posts before putting them live (along with a filter that would catch likely inappropriate entries (regex: chinese, fuck, hitler, piss, your, mama, etc.) and make guesses that the administrator would use as a guide. For the next three weeks, it was one person's job (Thanks Mark V.!) to check the admin page every 15 minutes or so and approve or deny the names.

At any rate, some things certainly slipped through our filters, but for the most part the page was a big success. It was fun, the page was very popular, and the client never knew that it was anything but a huge success.

Well, not actually weekend, as it's just Friday, but I just wanted to toss out some bulletpoints:

• Stayed working late last night, left at midnight.
• Gonna get a Poang chair for my office. Good for thinking, and napping... Mmm... Napping...
• Comments are fixed. Long story, messy, but suffice to say that UNIX is a magical beast, and not all magical beasts are nice, or fully understandable.
• Comments will be ported to mySQL soon, and will be incorporated into the permalink-version of posts (more like Dave does it.
• I have finalized an order of priorities for projects, as well as a work schedule (well, and 'around-work' schedule) for getting them done during evenings and commutes. The priorities are:
  1. Metacookie
  2. Blogger Purity Survey
  3. Randompixel
  4. Underblog
  5. qwer.org
  6. more...
• Working on my self-evaluation for the annual performance review
• I am sooo telecommuting on Monday. Heck, Yahoo even got an award from the EPA for that stuff.

Okay, lunchtime. Hasta!

Sometimes I'm really glad to be working where I am:

• Report: Phony 'Grassroots' Campaign Orchestrated by Microsoft
• Report: Consumers Nix Microsoft Passport
• AOL Voted Least Trusted on Net

(and for those who keep hinting that Fury is just a front for Yahoo, consider that maybe I chose to work there because I like the company, and not vice-versa)

If 'august' is defined as 'marked by majestic dignity or grandeur' is that why it seems to go by so slowly?

I think December should be called August, since it seems far more majestic than people romping around in shorts, throwing frisbees and generally having a good time.

Oh wait. That's how I spend Christmas anyhow... Besides, Having December as the eighth month only makes slightly less sense than having it as the twelfth.

Calendars are so messed up. What kind of a number is 7 anyhow? It has no place in a structured sequence. I think we should work on days that end with the number 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Then we get 'nosday, firstday, and twosday' off. For holidays we'd have a 'thirday weekend' or we'd get ninthday off.

Actually, I'd rather take of sixthday off for errands, and have a real weekend...

So the brief synopsis of this morning was waking up to my alarm clock, pleased that I didn't have a night of stress and pain like the night before, did the whole shower/email/clothes thing, left the house a little late and, for the first time, got to the train station just in time to see the train doors close as I closed the door to my own car, so I hopped back in and drove to work.

On the way down I was listening to Sarah & Vinnie and, amidst a bunch of other stuff, they mention how much they hate alarm clock,s and how there's not an alarm clock on the planet that doesn't jar them awake, so I used my cell (tsk, tsk! Calling and driving) to call in and tell them about my Zen Alarm Clock.

I get right through, explain the clock to Uzette ('Uze' pronounced "yoo-zee"), the show producer, and she says she'll see if it gets back there (they, naturally, had gone on to other things, but they often jump back to listener calls). I stay on the line, listening to the radio through the handset for about 20 minutes, eventually pulling off and parking because I was a few blocks from work which I know has zero cell-reception, when Uze comes back to me and says she accidentally deleted me from Sarah's screen, and what was my name again? I tell her Kevin and she asks if I'd like to play "Guess the Celebrity," a game they play once a day for fabulous prizes and Alice schwag. "Love to!" I say and I'm back on hold while Hooman does his Jay & Silent Bob review.

Five minutes later, Sarah says, "OK It's time for Guess the Celebrity and we have Kevin on the line. Hello?" "Hey there!" I say, upbeat and excited. "My name's David" I hear, superimposed over what I'm saying through my earpiece. As I talk for another few seconds it's clear that Sarah picked up the wrong line and someone else gets to play and I'm out in the on-hold cold. A few seconds later they realize that they're running so late that they trash Guess the Celeb for the day anyhow, Uze comes back on to tell me that says sorry for the mixup, I'm done with the phone call and back on my way to work. :-(

And I was so gonna plug Ernie-Aid...

...so no deep thoughts from me just now.

But to entertai you, this is one of the most impressive 'webthingies' I've seen in ages: Guess the Dictator or Sit-com Character.

Have a good day. :-)