Checksum Arcanius

Props to whoever discovers and identifies the recent changes to the ‘blog. I’m looking for two items.

Having just taken a couple of gimmicky personality tests, I thought I would re-take a more solid personality test that I believe has pegged me pretty closely in the past. The Jung Typology Test can be taken for free in a number of places on the web. I just took it at the Humanetrics web site. Several times previously, I have taken this test and scored an “INTJ” – an Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging personality. When reading the description of the INTJ, I have thought that it generally fit who I was. Just now, I took the test again, and scored – much to my surprise – “INTP” – Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving. So I dutifully read through its description. I didn’t think it fit as well, although there were some statements that stuck out as true. To be fair, the results listed me as:

• slightly expressed introvert
• moderately expressed intuitive personality
• distinctively expressed thinking personality
• slightly expressed perceiving personality

Furthermore, going back and changing my answer to just one question that I was unsure about how to answer shifted me over to “slightly expressed judging personality.” Also, I was probably not too strongly defined as a judging personality before, so the shift may not have been too major. Nevertheless, I think this signals that a shift in my personality has occurred. I find that very interesting.

So, I decided to read though all the versions of my “nearby” personalities: ENTJ and ENTP, INTJ and INTP. From them, I am quite sure that I am indeed an introvert – the ENTJ and ENTP profiles did not sound much like me (although one parts did ring true). Between mostly INTJ and INTP, I have compiled some of the statements that I feel most accurately reflect who I am. I am interested in the opinions of others as to whether you think these statements are, on a whole and individually, true about me.
Read the rest of this entry »

A wonderful debate has been bouncing back and forth between The Well of Mimir and Carrotlife… In most ways, the debate boils down to the role of government, and there are some good excepts from Theo’s latest post. Here’s my favorite:

But socialism isn’t an elitist creed. Socialists don’t think of themselves as the upperclass trying to control the masses. But the idea of having elite administrators (as opposed to whatever the hell we have right now) does sound appealing, doesn’t it? People who know what they are doing?

You just contradicted yourself. Socialists don’t think of themselves as economically upperclass because they don’t believe in a free market. They think of themselves as politically upperclass. They don’t want to have more possessions than everyone, just tell them what to do and how to do it. Personally, I find the idea of elite administrators offensive – I am a grown man, and I can take care of my own life, thank you. Well, that is not entirely true, but for the most part that reflects my views.

And my reply to Dan: NO “elite administrators” does NOT sound appealing.

But the reason I like this so much is because it reminds me of this time in a recent Philosophy of Science class I took. Basically, the instructor liked to hear himself talk about current social issues. His favorite was the evolution-vs-creationism fray, but he also touched on many other topics dear heart as well. One day, he was pontificating about the glory of some government-administered social program; I forget which one exactly, because he seemed to love them all, but I digress. He gave a specific example of how the program coudl help somebody out. As his soliloquey ended, I responded (highly paraphrased):

You see, that’s the difference between people like you and people like me. You see a problem, and you say “we need a government program to fix this.” I see a problem and I say, “I can do something about this.”

The reality is that my response was magnitudes better than whatever it is I wrote above, and fit the context perfectly. The discussion on that particular topic basically ended right there – as class was also ending. It felt very good at the time.

Along a similar vein… I think this one is a little more accurate than I might like, which is strange I think for a personality test which is mostly a gimmick. You too can discover your file extenstion.

Via Dan and via Jack, I came across this quiz which tells you what OS your personality matches. Honestly, I’m quite happy being matched to Debian. Go find out for yourself what Operating System you are.

Unfortunately as I learned about a week ago, PHP 4 and PHP 5 don’t happily co-habitate. However, the switch between the two is about as seemless as possible. Compiling PHP 5 with the same config string as I used for PHP 4, I was able to switch over by simply changing a comment in my httpd.conf file from:

LoadModule php4_module modules/libphp4.so
# LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so

to

#LoadModule php4_module modules/libphp4.so
LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so

Linux isn’t always great, but sometimes it sure rocks my socks.

I ran into another dilemma in SQL-land today. Working on a money-management application, I had three tables that I wanted to gather information from. This normally leads to some relatively straightforward SQL:

SELECT account.name, contact.name, date, amount, type
FROM transactions, accounts, contacts
WHERE account_id = accounts.id
AND contact_id = contacts.id;

However, this returned results only for transactions that had both matching accounts and matching contacts, while what I wanted was a single record for each transaction, regardless of matching accounts or contacts. For two tables, this would be straightforward with a LEFT JOIN:

SELECT account.name, date, amount, type
FROM transactions LEFT JOIN accounts
ON account_id = accounts.id;

Which would return a row for every entry in the transactions table even if no matching account was found. I tried extrapolating that two three tables, like this:

SELECT account.name, contact.name, date, amount, type
FROM FROM transactions LEFT JOIN accounts, contacts
WHERE account_id = accounts.id
AND contact_id = contacts.id;

However, this didn’t do what I wanted, and I was getting multiple entries for each transaction. So I googled for help, and Google delivered: Left Joins to link three or more tables. From the information in this article, I was able to develop the SQL code that did exactly what I wanted:

SELECT `accounts`.`name` AS account_name,
`contacts`.`name` AS contact_name,
`date`, `amount`, `type`, `detail`, `memo`, `cleared`
FROM (`transactions` LEFT JOIN `accounts` ON `accounts`.`id` = `account_id`)
LEFT JOIN `contacts` ON `contacts`.`id` = `contact_id`
WHERE `parent_id` = 0

This returns a single row for each entry in transactions, even if matching accounts and contacts are not found. Esentially, it is a nested LEFT JOIN. First, MySQL left joins transactions and accounts, then it takes this result and similarly left joins contacts. This way, every row in the leftmost table (transactions) is preserved. I might have simply linked to the site, but I didn’t like the naming scheme in the examples on that site (crypic names like bdg and dom don’t earn accolades from me), and I came up with a better article title, “Nested”.