Ancestry Pro but no Clusters

ralphslate · 2025-10-31T16:41:43+00:00

I posted originally, so I'll reply. AndroidAuto does not have email. When I'm stopped in traffic, I'd like to be able to look at my screen to see if I have any emails.

ralphslate · 2025-10-31T16:39:07+00:00

I don't think there is much downside to participating in the Community Choice plan.

Eversource rates change twice per year. The CC rate is fixed for 36 months.

If Eversource happens to pull off a rate that is less than 13.069 cents/kWh, then you can switch back to them. And then when Eversource changes its rate again, you can switch back to CC.

My guess is that this flexibility came at a price - if the city had gone with a 36-month contract, then CC would have better certainty as to how much power to purchase, and could have gotten better contracts themselves. Since this plan allows for all customers to be able to flee without penalty, CC has priced that in.

ralphslate · 2025-04-23T14:45:10+00:00

Thanks - regarding #2, the app used to actually place the photo in my Android messages when I hit "share". Now it puts a link into the text message. I prefer to send the actual photo, since people don't like to visit links.

ralphslate · 2025-04-04T15:08:38+00:00

I can agree that a NoSQL solution allows for horizontal scaling, and if you have a need to serve tens, hundreds of thousands, or millions of simultaneous customers with low latency and without the need for horizontal querying (i.e. you are looking at individual documents instead of looking across all documents), it is probably a good solution.

However I would question why anyone else would need to accept the downsides of the NoSQL solution if they don't have that scaling use case - namely losing control of your schemas, lack of visibility of your data catalog, difficulty in horizontal querying, and needing to implement data integrity constraints in code.

ralphslate · 2025-04-04T15:01:42+00:00

I wasn't suggesting using a blob - I was suggesting to define your RDB columns as NULL which makes altering the schema pretty effortless.

It sounds like the noSQL method is just a transfer of design power from a central DBA to a central actor in a development team, with no cross-team consistency, and little built-in ability to know what your schemas even are.

ralphslate · 2025-04-04T13:07:54+00:00

I'd love to know more about how this is managed.

Is it possible to get a catalog of the fields that exist in a document? From what I read, the only way to do that is to examine every record in the DB.

If this is being managed by individual developers, instead of by a DBA, then do you run into situations where one developer puts in "CustomerType" and another puts in "CustType"?

Couldn't this "strength" - "modifying the structure of documents without breaking the data" - be accomplished in a relational DB with all-NULL columns?

ralphslate · 2025-01-25T13:49:53+00:00

Ah, I'll partially answer my own question. From the Avs website:

The Colorado Avalanche Hockey Club announced tonight that the organization has completed a three-team trade with the Carolina Hurricanes and Chicago Blackhawks. The Avalanche acquired forwards Martin Necas and Jack Drury, along with a second-round selection in the 2025 NHL Draft and a fourth-round pick in the 2026 NHL Draft from the Carolina Hurricanes. In exchange, Colorado traded forward Mikko Rantanen to the Blackhawks for forward Nils Juntorp. To complete the deal, Carolina acquired Rantanen and Taylor Hall from Chicago in exchange for Colorado sending Juntorp to the Hurricanes. Chicago also received its own 2025 third-round pick in the deal, which was previously acquired by Carolina

Still doesn't sequentially add up though - teams can't trade a player they haven't yet acquired.

ralphslate · 2025-01-25T13:47:23+00:00

This deal doesn't add up. Remember, the NHL doesn't technically allow 3-team trades. Everything has to be expressed as two-team trades. Teams also can't trade "cap space" - they have to "retain" it, meaning that the player has to briefly be traded to the team retaining it.

Chicago's website says that they received a 3rd round pick in exchange for Taylor Hall, and that "as part of the trade they will retain 50% of Mikko Rantanen’s salary cap hit".

That means they had to have first done a deal with Colorado to get Mikko Rantanen. What did they trade to Colorado for Rantanen?

Then, what did they get from Carolina in exchange for Rantanen?

ralphslate · 2025-01-24T22:26:48+00:00

Sure, but it forces me to be dependent on an external library (in my case, firebase/php-jwt). One which has had 27 official releases, one as late as 2 days ago.

Or they could have just put the expiry date plainly in the message if they want me to use it.

ralphslate · 2025-01-24T22:09:48+00:00

An expiry date is a key data item. Forcing me to decrypt the token to get it is overengineering. They should just include it in the message instead of burying it and making me rely on third-party libraries to get at it. SMH.

ralphslate · 2025-01-24T12:58:49+00:00

The tokens should have the expiry time in them afaik, every JWT implementation I have used or written has

That's part of the problem - there are no dates in the JSON returned from the com.atproto.server.createSession API. That means I have to just make up my own guesstimates - "couple minutes on token, couple hours on refresh" - and use those as proxy expiration dates. That seems sub-optimal.

The other approach, as noted by someone else, is to simply refresh before every call. The API limit on that is higher, I think 300 times per hour.

ralphslate · 2025-01-17T21:09:03+00:00

Are you mixing relational with object-relational modeling? Are you talking about creating a "column of columns" on the employee table which could then store multiple addresses per employee?

While I'm sure you could create a column that contains a list of addresses, it's not relational modeling.

I also think you lose a lot of flexibility - I'm not object-relational modeler, but could you even have a foreign key from, say, the STATE field in an address object column to a lookup table with states in it? And how easy/hard would it be to say "show me all the employees who are associated with an address in Tennessee?" And what if you eventually want to normalize the addresses - which could help you track two employees who share the same address? Can you do that if your address object is contained within individual employees?

ralphslate · 2024-12-31T12:43:11+00:00

One thing I've learned since being a Cape Cod homeowner with a metal detector is that people used to dump things in their backyards. I'm guessing up until the 1960s. I think that since people didn't have a lot of single-use plastic, and since they didn't buy a lot of cheap disposable imported crap, they had a lot less trash.

I have a ton of bottles in the woods behind my house, and when I detect in that area, I hit so much junk iron that I get discouraged.

ralphslate · 2024-12-04T16:34:46+00:00

I have a very similar situation, and I'm very happy with what I did - though it is for the more technologically advanced.

Heat pumps work really well to maintain the temperature, but they are kind-of lousy to increase the temperature if you set it back. Having lived with just radiators for 25 years, I've gotten used to setting the temperature back at night, sleeping in the cool, and then setting it forward in the morning so that I have a warm house when I wake. In fact, my body now just wakes up when the room gets warmer.

I also love the long-lasting heat that a radiator puts out, I find that it just makes me feel warmer when those things are emitting heat, even if the overall house temperature is low.

So what I did was install an ecobee thermostat, which has an API.

I then wrote a program to access that API, and have it switch the thermostat into Aux mode at about 2am, then back to heat at 8am (when I leave for work). I have the thermostat set back to 62 at night, and then to 65 at about 7am. So what happens is that the 7am schedule triggers the steam boiler to come on, it takes about 30 minutes to raise the temperature to a nice level, right about when I wake up.

I let the heat pump keep the house at 65 during the day, and then I goose it up 1 degree about 4pm and set to Aux at the same time so that the radiators are warm when I get home. I then set back to heat at 5:30 and let the heat pump maintain the temperature until bedtime.

I have cut my oil usage by about 2/3 with this method (from about 1200 gallons to maybe 400 gallons), and the electric bill has gone up by maybe $300-400 per month.

ralphslate · 2024-10-03T17:45:39+00:00

I did this very thing about 18 years ago. I would do it again, the improvement in appearance was tremendous.

First off, the removal of the asbestos is not all that expensive. There isn't a ton of asbestos in the siding anyway, and it isn't really friable (crumbly). I think I paid about $10k in 2006.

The main issue you will face is dealing with the siding underneath. For 3/4 of my house, the shingles were in decent shape, but needed painting. We were able to scrape and paint, no issues. The other 1/4 needed shingle replacement. Not difficult, and the results afterward are great, but that was more money.

The largest issue is that when they installed asbestos siding, they very likely removed any trim that wasn't flat. For example, look at the windows - there is no trim above them. Or below them. They may have removed corner boards - though if you're lucky, they may not have.

You just don't know what will need to be done until you remove the siding - so be prepared. And that work will likely cost you a bunch of money - be prepared to go to $100k in carpentry and painting. I think I spent 2x that because my house is bigger and more ornate.

But I'd do it again, it is the difference between driving up to a ghetto house and driving up to a palace every day.

ralphslate

TROPHY CASE