mindlace

For my own edification and to facilitate the addition of UUIDs to Drupal, I have used SchemaSpy to create an overview of Drupal’s database schema as generated by today’s HEAD.

I have begun my quest to convert Drupal over to using UUIDs instead of IDs so that merging/branching drupal databases will be easier.

The first thing to figure out is how best to generate UUIDs in PHP. The naive pure-php approaches that use rand() have quickly proven to be non-viable (generating 10 of them hasn’t completed after several minutes), at least on my test virtual machine, presumably on account of running out of randomness.

The OSSP UUID module for PHP5 is much better, generating 60k “type 4” (completely random) uuids per second. However, the memory usage grows the more UUIDs you generate, so that could be an issue. So despite the fact that this module implies a C module that has to be available to PHP, I’m going to use it.

I will try to keep my implementation open to creating UUIDs in the DB, as PostgreSQL uses the same library to create UUIDs, so no sense in reinventing the wheel. MySQL UUIDs are broken in any sort of replicated environment (in that you can get the same UUID repeatedly from a given SELECT UUID();) so I must have a language-level version available.

So now that I’ve elected to settle on the OSSP UUID module, I can take the next steps towards making it work in Drupal.

OK I’m older now much older than I was when I was young. It’s been fun going around the sun. Hope to see you all here next time.

I’m almost older now and some people have been asking me what they should get me. I like immaterial gifts like calling me and/or letting me know you forgive me for one of my many transgressions; you could also let me know you want to hang out with me on or near the 22nd and I’ll let you know what I’m doing.

If you want to get me something material I have an amazon wishlist that is pretty well-sorted, and I just deleted all the stuff off of it I’ve already bought.

I am also, of course, interested in surprises. Thanks for caring about my birthday!

So I’m working on a steampunk-ish game that occurs in a gas giant - usual “colonization effort gone bad, descendants with primitive tech” sort of situation, except these folk actually have to stay afloat lest they be crushed to death by the pressure.

• Humans can live at up to 60bar for at least a week; presumably, if you didn’t need to decompress them, they could live much longer.
• Pressurizing quickly without changing the percentage oxygen is a recipe for dizziness, convulsion, and death.
• Long term exposure to high pressure can cause bone death. Not clear whether this is on account of the lower % oxygen necessary or on account of the subjects being de/repressurized.
• The clouds in a gas giant are quite possibly much akin to the atmosphere above 18th century london; full of soot, tarry particles, and metallized hydrocarbons. This is apparently on account of convection, precipitation, and evaporation, and ofc works better the hotter the gas giant.
• Deeper layers (and potentially different bands) would see the precipitation of some pretty spiffy molecules, including diamond, apparently; good reason to risk your life “diving”.
• While I have yet to find a really good excuse for a layer or band of CO2 enriched atmosphere, were there to be one, it could be much akin to venus’ atmosphere, including the sulfuric acid clouds. Soot filled sulfuric acid clouds sounds lovely, doesn’t it?
• Looking into diving bells, I realized that if the colony ship was a big (think km in diameter) concave bell-shape (used to catch the light from solar-system based lasers until the Bussard ramjet can take over) then when the ship has to “land” in the the gas giant, it can serve as a giant diving bell containing enough O2 enriched atmosphere for a small city. Since the rocket nozzle would have to withstand hydrogen plasma accelerated to nearly the speed of light, it would be robust against at least a few bar of pressure.
• Since victorian tech is not too good with the whole membrane thing, the kind of Scuba-style apparatus you’d need to hang out outside is kind of off-limits. If I posit some sort of mutualist parasite that provides O2 in exchange for nutrients, then I have an easy way of differentiating the “working class” from the elites who get to live in a controlled atmosphere their whole lives - it makes the infected literally “outsiders”.

After a very tumultuous month involving lots of financial uncertainty, I landed a job with the most excellent Acquia, where I expect to work helping Drupal become the preeminent open-source CMS/ social software platform. I also have just been able to get back on the wagon with my psychopharmacology so my sketchiness should decline markedly. Thanks for the patience folks around me have been able to muster, and here’s hoping that the rest of the summer is relatively smooth sailing.