Chatting with a Large Language Model

I will try my best to be more accurate in the future. Botbot I had a quick chat with one of those new Chat GPT type bots. They are all basically the same, but I’ll anonymize this one to spare it any pretend embarrassment. The formatting here might be a bit off, but I start … Read more

My very own twitter client.

Followers on Twitter may have noticed that I’m now posting using a client called alanjames. This is really just Spaz but now registered at Twitter under my own name. Here’s the how and why I’ve done that. For some months now I’ve been using the in development versions of Spaz pulled from the GitHub repository … Read more

Within-group aggregates with another wrinkle.

Recently when optimising an SQL query I needed to return a specific subset of records from a large table. The brilliant Common Queries Tree pointed me in the right direction, but the examples didn’t quite cover my specific case. I needed the records with the maximal value of x and the minimal value of y … Read more

Tethering Jolicloud with a Nokia 6500 Classic

Yesterday I plugged my Nokia 6500 Classic phone into my Jolicloud powered netbook, told the network manager I was on a Vodafone contract and bang, instant 3G internet access. It could hardly be simpler. Once its set up, you can edit the configuration and see where it’s put the APN and other connection info, and … Read more

Spaz, the twitter client.

I use a Twitter client named Spaz. Now if you’re from the UK the name might strike you as being a bit distasteful, perhaps even offensive. Get over it, its just a random sound in most of the world. Actually if you don’t like the name you can change it. Just edit the preferences.json file … Read more

MySQL: Row N was truncated; a solution

You’re importing some data into MySQL and using LOAD DATA INFILE so you can do a SHOW WARNINGS afterwards. Every line of your import file has a warning: | Warning | 1262 | Row 1 was truncated; it contained more data than there were input columns | Warning | 1262 | Row 2 was truncated; … Read more