My new favorite word—ausperity

Rob Knopf recently had a blog post where he noted that “…observatory facilities are being eviscerated on the altar of ausperity.”

It’s a word that perfectly sums up the Republican attitude towards eviscerating state and local government, science programs, and just about everything not related to defense. Austerity is good for you. It builds character—unless you are a job creator, in which case we don’t dare hurt your precious feelings or you might just take your jobs and go home. And of course, the result of all this austerity is prosperity! Hence, ausperity. It makes perfect sense.

WordPress Twenty Eleven Theme

The Twenty Eleven Theme is a simple theme that works well for one of the sites I manage. Unfortunately, it is broken on iPads. The navigation on the right-hand side is all the way on the bottom. There is an easy fix.

Open the file /wp=content/themes/twentyeleven/header.php

A few lines down, the header block starts. Comment out (or delete) the line <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" /> and you are good to go. The code snippet below shows how I did it. 


<head>
<meta charset="<?php bloginfo( 'charset' ); ?>" />
<!-- Comment out this line to have it work the same on iPads
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />-->

Note: In HTML a comment starts with <!-- and ends with --> so I’ve basically added a text comment and continued it to the next line that contains the offending code.

Concatenating Fields in MySql

I’m working on an iPhone/iPad product that needs to select a word based on the phonemes in it. I have about 40 phonemes that are stored in a MySql table as booleans. I didn’t feel like adding 40 attributes to my datamodel and then I’d have to write 40 conditionals to figure out whether a word contained the phoneme. Fortunately, MySql has a CONCAT function String Operator that I could use to concatenate all the fields into one. Now I can use REGEX expressions to query one field to determine if it is on or off for a specific word.

My first attempt to understand the operator was to just copy the example.


UPDATE `ArticIV_Phonemes` SET `Concatenated_phonemes` = CONCAT(`R`,`VocR`)

This isn’t what I wanted since it treats the stuff between the `s as literals. The result is RVocR. Not the values of the fields. Removing the `s works.


UPDATE `ArticIV_Phonemes` SET `Concatenated_phonemes` = CONCAT(R,VocR)

Now I get, 01, 10, 00, etc. which is what I want.

One minor complication. One of the phonemes is \or\ so naturally I used or as it’s name. My treats this name as a conditional and the CONCAT operation fails. I also used a hyphen in some of the names. My doesn’t like that either. It probably thinks it’s an arithmetic operator.

This is what I ended up using.


UPDATE `ArticIV_Phonemes` SET `Concatenated_phonemes` = CONCAT(R_Words,Vocalic_R_Words,S_Words,Z_Words,L_Words,Voiced_Th_Words,Voiceless_Th_Words,
Initial_R, Initial_R_Clusters, Medial_R, Medial_R_Clusters, 
VocR_aer, VocR_ar, VocR_eer, VocR_er, VocR_ier, VocR_or, VocR_our, VocR_yer, 
Initial_S, Initial_S_Clusters, Medial_S, Medial_S_Clusters, Final_S, Final_S_Clusters, 
Initial_Z, Initial_Z_Clusters, Medial_Z, Medial_Z_Clusters, Final_Z, Final_Z_Clusters, 
Initial_L, Initial_L_Clusters, Medial_L, Medial_L_Clusters, Final_L, 
Final_L_Clusters, Pre_vocalic_L, Post_vocalic_L, Pre_and_Post_V_L, 
Initial_Th, Medial_Th, 
Initial_Voiceless_Th, Initial_Voiceless_Th_Clusters,
Medial_Voiceless_Th, Final_Voiceless_Th, Final_Voiceless_Th_Clusters)

And here are the first few lines.


00001000000000000000000000000000010000010000000
00000000100000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000100000100000000000000000000000

When I want to find all of the words that have say, VocR_ier, in them I use this REGEX


SELECT *  FROM `ArticIV_Phonemes` WHERE `Concatenated_phonemes` REGEXP '[01]{9}1[01]{34}'

Basically this says, look for 9 occurrences of either a 0 or a 1. Then a 1. Then the rest of the string can be either 0 or 1. Note: you must put the final part in. The first part of the REGEX looks for a string of 9 0’s or 1’s followed by a 1. It doesn’t care where they are in the string. They could be the last 10 digits or the first.

One way to get around that is to tell the REGEX to start at the beginning of the string and look for the pattern.
Note the ^ in this example.


SELECT *  FROM `ArticIV_Phonemes` WHERE `Concatenated_phonemes` REGEXP '^[01]{9}1'

Both examples give the same result,


00000000110000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000110000000000000000000000100000000000000
00000000100000000000000000000000010000010000000

Here’s what I used in a different database.
UPDATE `OldArtic_Categories` SET `Concatenated_Category` = CONCAT(A, B, M, D, C, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y, Z, N)

Xcode Nav Buttons

You can change the title of the back button and put a rightBarButton on the screen using the following code.

In the – (void)viewDidLoad method, just after [super viewDidLoad]; put this code.


UIBarButtonItem *backButton =
    UIBarButtonItem *backButton =
    [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithTitle: @"Main"
                                     style: UIBarButtonItemStyleBordered
                                    target: nil
                                    action: nil];
    self.navigationItem.backBarButtonItem = backButton;



    UIBarButtonItem *helpButton =
    [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithTitle: @"Help"
                                     style: UIBarButtonItemStylePlain
                                    target: self
                                    action: @selector(goToHelp)];
    self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = helpButton;
    self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem.enabled = YES;

If you don’t want a back button use this


[self.navigationItem setHidesBackButton:YES];