June 25th, 2003:

Movable Type sucks. So… bye bye.

Some stuff is broke. I just don’t care.

Leave a comment.

I really need to just shut off the left side of my brain for a while. So I’m considering going out to the Across the Street Bar for the Wednesday night Drum Circle. Are there any other drum owners that would be interested in going?

I am so frustrated. I don’t know why. Every message that pops up on my screen annoys me. Every time a hear a phone ring, I want to run outside. I can hear someone else’s music, just barely — some screaming country bitch and a very annoying fiddle. It’s driving me crazy. I don’t have any reason to feel this way. Yet I am having a nervous breakdown. I know what causes it: not being mentally or physically capable of doing something that I want to do.

I feel like, if I could find a basebal bat, I would go smash whatever it is playing that music. Do people not know how annoying a fiddle and screaming is when you can’t hear anything except the high pitched portions?

Either Movable Type or my webhoster is such a giant piece of shit that I had to submit this 12 times to get it to go through. This is NOT uncommon. Eventually I gave up, logged into my server and submitted it manually using a small perl script I’ve written. That script took over 45 seconds to do the job, but at least it worked.

I’ll give 500,000 points to anyone who can come up with a database table design to handle the following functionality in a clean way.

I need to implement a filesystem that consists of both directories and files. The directories should be limitlessly nestable. There should be only one root directory. Each item should have a name, a creation date, and a last modified date. Additionally, each file item should have a mime-type, and, of course, possibly binary data. Unix style symbolic links should be implemented. Additionally, Windows NT/2000 style permissions should be implemented (minus the security holes… thanks). For any given “path” there should be one (and only one) file (or directory) that is associated. Items should be reachable by “path”. Additionally, it should be fairly easy to list all the items in a “directory”. It should also be fairly easy to list all files that have been changed recently, either for the entire “file system” or for a single “directory”. The system should be capable of holding in excess of 50,000 items.

Extra points will be awarded if the data is searchable in someway. Even more extra points will be awarded if the directories and files can have arbitrary meta-data associated with them.

Aside from these requirements, you can design the tables in anyway that you desire. They can be normalized, un-normalized, and/or optimized. You can use one table, or fifty. If needed, you can use MySQL specific extensions… but only if it is the only way. In fact, you can even NOT use a database, as long as it is fast with 50,000 items in it.

Thanks in advance!