A B&N Nook

For quite some time now, there have been these things called books.  We’ve made them out of all sorts of plant matter and sometimes we refer to them as scrolls or tomes or whatever.  But in the end, they have all  been essentially the same thing:  dead plants mashed into paper on which we scratched characters to convey information from Brain-A to Brain-B.

Much later, we invented e-readers so that we no longer needed to destroy plants in order to convey information and could avoid the costly movement of heavy dead plants to and fro.  Instead, digital files could surge around the Internet and appear magically on e-readers for our enjoyment or education or both.

Here’s the problem:  if you’re like me, then you have an e-reader but you also have a few hundred pounds of dead plants lining the walls of your home collecting dust.  Even worse, some of the series that you may have been following for years (I’m looking at your George R.R. Martin) have yet to be finished.  Does one continue to buy them in print at a higher cost in both money (for hard-cover editions) and resources in order to have the full set or does one get the digital copy and leave the earlier books to sit incomplete and forlorn on a shelf?

The Book2Nook Program

Okay, that name is mine.  Since I’ve put it here, it’s very unlikely that, should Barnes & Noble ever do this sort of thing, that they’d use it as they’d probably have to give me credit and stuff.  Which is a shame because it’s sort of a catchy name.  Also, this is not a real program (yet) so don’t go yelling at B&N except, perhaps, to try and get them to make it exist.

This is what I’d like to see happen:  I grab up my copies of the first five books of GRRM’s Song of Ice and Fire and head to my local B&N store.  I walk up to their nook counter or customer service (or whatever), I hand them my dead plants, they scan the bar code or enter the ISBN (or whatever), swipe my B&N Membership Card, and then the electronic versions of those books magically appear on my device the next time it connects to the internet.

But, here’s where things work out for B&N and not just for me:  they get to take those books and do whatever they want with them.  At the least, they find a recycler to take those dead plants and help to avoid killing more by giving them new life as some other paper product.  They could also be shipped to soldiers, donated to children in need, or given to local libraries.

This idea supports reading, it’s environmental, there could be huge PR benefits for B&N, and it can help millions of people reduce back strain while moving!  What’s not to like?

Barnes & Noble is uniquely suited to this sort of program since they have brick-and-mortar stores while Amazon.com doesn’t.  Thus, Amazon would have to create shipping labels, incur the cost of that shipment, process the shipment, etc.  Plus, since the dead-tree-owner and Amazon aren’t face-to-face, it’s possible that a nefarious (or clueless) owner would send the wrong book!

But clearly, it’s not quite as simple as I make it out to be.  A mechanism in the Nook software to allow B&N employees to credit an account for a book that’s turned in might need to be created, for example.  Plus, getting the nook versions for free may be naïve; a reduced cost–maybe two or three dollars–is more likely and would help defray costs and pay programmers’ salaries.

Regardless, this whole idea is pretty much a win-win situation for both B&N and readers everywhere.  Or, at least for those readers who have a Nook. And, those that don’t neither gain nor lose anything.  So they’re winning by not losing!  I believe there is only one phrase that can describe this situation:

So here’s the scenario: you want to be sure that a visitor doesn’t submit the same information through a web form multiple times.  Maybe you’re worried about them refreshing the page, for example.  Regardless of the circumstances, all you have is the data they submitted and you need a quick way to try and make sure it doesn’t match earlier data.  The way I recently did that was to use an anonymous function, a handy feature that shipped with PHP 5.3 if I remember correctly, to reduce the date posted to the server to a string and then hash it.  It looked like this:

$hash = sha1(array_reduce($values, function($reduction, $value) { return $reduction.$value; }));

And that’s it.  Here’s what’s going on though:

1. The array_reduce function takes an array and a callback function as parameters and returns a string.
• Before we had anonymous functions you needed to use create_function or define your function elsewhere in your code.  But with anonymous functions, you can just jam it right in there.
• That callback takes two parameters; I’ve named them $reduction and $value.  That callback is called as the array is walked and, in the code above, simply concatenates all of the array values into one long string.
• That string is then the return value from the function.
2. The sha1 function then takes that string and makes a hash out of it.

I suppose you could just leave the string as a string, but in case you need to jam the information into a database sometimes it’s nice to know exactly the size of the data you’re about to insert or update to optimize your table. A cursory glance at the PHP array functions didn’t seem to indicate that my code above duplicates something that PHP could do for me out of the box, so I’m pretty pleased with it.

How does this prevent duplication?  Well if you have a record of these hashes — in a database or in the Session or whatever — you can compare the hash for new information against one or more of the hashes for the old and if you find a match you can be pretty sure that you’ve got a duplicate.  Sure, it’s possible to collide but Wikipedia tells me it’s pretty unlikely to happen.

Hope it’s useful to you.  And if you’re me, then thanks me!

For me, it was 1998, and  I was a rising-senior in High School.  I had been searching for a new faith practice for about five years until a friend of mine introduced me to Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner.  Upon reading it, I knew I needed to know more and on August 2nd I decided to dedicate myself to the gods.  I did so privately in the public park a few blocks from where I grew up.  Since it was a public park, there wasn’t a lot of pageantry.  I spoke some words that I’ve since forgotten and felt a certain sense of purpose as I moved into my final year High School.

I hadn’t really come-out yet, though; that came later.  Considering my mother had to give me the money I needed to buy my first few books on Wicca and Paganism, there was nothing really to tell my folks.  But I hadn’t really said anything to friends and acquaintances.  But, I had purchased a pentacle necklace and was wearing it under my shirt at school.  It was a woman named Nicole who first asked me about it; I hadn’t worn jewelry before so perhaps she noticed the change or perhaps she was just curious.  Regardless, I tried to shake it off as “simply religious” but she pressed further.  “What religion?” she queried.  When I drew it from my shirt and began to explain about modern Paganism, she was supportive, smiled, and then we went to class.  I think it was calculus.

And that was pretty much it.  I realized that, where I grew up, most people probably just didn’t care.  I began to wear my pentacle over my shirt and talked to people about it when they asked but didn’t otherwise really wear my spiritual heart on my sleeve.  Some understood, some were confused, and one — a music teacher — went so far as to ask if i was “into Satan” but most just weren’t really interested.  Perhaps they assumed it was merely teenage rebellion or a phase I’d grow out of, but for what ever reason, my coming out was fairly painless.

But, I realize that this may not be the way it works for everyone.  And, it is for that reason that I continue to live my life without hiding my religion.  Even if my necklace isn’t visible, I always wear a ring with a pentacle on it, too.  I’m active in my local Pagan community and in the growing national community of the PNC — I’m their technical coordinator — and I sit on the executive committee for IPCOD.  Hopefully, I’ll be starting an Illinois bureau for the PNC and I’ve begun to plan and soon will help to execute public rituals locally, too.

But, usually only other Pagans might see these activities.  What others see is my professional work and my recreational activities.  They see that I try to live my life virtuously, and that I’m willing to help others when they need it.  Hopefully, they see me as a loving husband and as a good friend.  These actions speak to everyone around me, Pagan and not.  And, for those who are not Pagan, perhaps my efforts to simply be a good person will help them to realize that Pagans are simply another group that answers spiritual questions differently than perhaps they do and not some evil menace to be avoided or, at worst, obliterated.

My coming out experience was fairly benign.  Hopefully, as more and more of us do so, it will enable even more of us to live our lives publicly as Pagans.  It is with that hope that I try to share myself as a Pagan with those around me and that is why I intend to support IPCOD in whatever way I can moving forward.

Here’s my argument: as a male, it’s already okay to carry a briefcase or laptop bag. However there’s few smaller options for when you don’t need all that space. Take today for instance. I needed to bring with me

• a novel,
• my headphones and their charger,
• an iPod,
• coffee mug,
• a yogurt for breakfast.

That amount of stuff doesn’t require either of the two aforementioned personal bags. They’re almost too big with out smaller pockets for some of the stuff! A purse would have been perfect.

So, without further ado, my solution.  Just add this to your functions.php file:

function dashifen_disable_login_and_admin() {
   if(
      strpos($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"], "wp-login") !== false ||
      strpos($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"], "wp-admin") !== false
   ) exit("Administration disabled.");
}

add_action("init", "dashifen_disable_login_and_admin");

Obviously, you can change the name of the function to suit your needs; just be sure to change it both in the definition and in the add_action() call.  It could also be spruced up a bit.  Even a simple redirection to a specific page on your site that perhaps gives reasons why you’re disabling the administration of your site would be better than a fairly bland message, but it serves the purposes I needed it for until a better solution is presented.

I’ll now go back into my cave and post again in a few months.

I guess there are personal space issues and gods know that not everyone who gets on a bus is a person you wish to sit next to, but at least stand if you want to try and maintain some personal space! Don’t just sit there being a douche as others clearly wish to sit.

Always nice to see the stomping grounds in the news.  Even better to see that it’s a story about higher then expected voter turn out.  Let’s hope that this keeps up.  Whether you’re Republican, Democrat, Independent, Green, Libertarian, or whatever, go vote!