Author: David Faden
-
Got a bike
Today I carried out one small adventure I’ve been thinking about for months: walking to Walmart, buying a bike, and riding it home. I had already walked nearby to Trader Joe’s, hoping to buy a couple mini tote bags for a loved one. The cashier told me they ran out yesterday though and wouldn’t be…
-
A couple old Phyla nodiflora specimens
Phyla nodiflora is one of the most aggressive plants I’ve encountered, I think quintupling in size in the few months we’ve had it. Jepson raises some questions about whether it’s actually native to California: “Note: Questionably native; variation in leaf margin, leaf hairiness may reflect multiple introductions from elsewhere, including South America.” The presenter in…
-
Four flowers visited by a hummingbird
While I was sitting in our yard just a little while ago, a green hummingbird visited four plants in bloom in our yard. Earlier I had seen a hummingbird — the same bird? — making loops, flying nearly straight up into the air, higher than a nearby three story building, then diving down, making a…
-
Regex in C++
I’ve missed out on a few things. It was fun to learn (or be reminded?) today that regular expressions have been part of the C++ std library for a while: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/regex
-
Wayback Machine rescues pytest posts
I’ve been curious about how pytest‘s assertion rewriting works. (As someone used to Abseil’s testing framework, the usage of bare asserts was a shock.) I was happy to come across a Reddit post: “How does pytest work?”. Unfortunately, the site it points to, pythoninsight.com, seems to be mostly dead. Luckily, the wonderful Wayback Machine has…
-
Playing with iNaturalist taxonomy data in MariaDB
You can download the iNaturalist taxonomy data (updated monthly) from https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/developers under “iNaturalist Taxonomy DarwinCore Archive” (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/inaturalist-taxonomy.dwca.zip). After unzipping, you’ll find “taxa.csv”. Here’s one way of importing this into MariaDB (and I guess MySQL too). I know that the schema for my table isn’t optimal. (I would love to hear suggestions on how to improve…
-
Snooping on Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine bot
I’m reading Jon Duckett’s “PHP & MYSQL” and got up to a section where he discusses $_SERVER, which contains info on HTTP headers, etc. I thought it might be fun to see what Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine bot looks like in terms of this. So, here’s my take on dumping parts of $_SERVER: https://github.com/fadend/server-vars-php/blob/main/server_vars.php. Hopefully…
-
Wolfram’s Cellular Automata
I’ve had fun reviving another old PHP project — code to draw the evolution of 1D cellular automata using the codes described by Stephen Wolfram in his book “A New Kind of Science”. See https://github.com/fadend/wolfram-ca-php. One thing I added over my 2004 version is the ability to easily start with just a single point turned…
-
J. Gordon Edwards Entomology Museum
Our youngin is interested in entomology so we were happy to get a chance to visit the J. Gordon Edwards Entomology Museum at San Jose State University. We were very grateful to Dr. Fred Larabee for being up for showing us around; from his enthusiastic introduction to the collection and the work being done around…
-
Viceroys aren’t faking it
I finally finished Doug Tallamy‘s book “Bringing Nature Home” today. I’d highly recommend it. You might also like this talk from him and his site homegrownnationalpark.org. One aside in the book that caught my attention: One of my favorite butterflies, the viceroy (Limenitis archippus), is most commonly found near willow hosts… The adults are the…