I’m posting very early today because Yom Kippur starts at sundown tonight, and I’ll be offline until after sunset tomorrow. May you be inscribed and sealed for a good, happy, and healthy 5782, and if you fast, may you have an easy and meaningful fast.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah!

I voted in a very important election today. Not the California Governor Recall – I’d voted “NO!” on that almost a month ago (and I’m happy to see that all the networks and the AP have declared that the recall failed).

Today, I voted in the election for the Very Best Wrong Answer for Learned League season 90. The winner won’t be announced until Sunday, but the top 15 will be posted on the League’s Twitter and Facebook pages between now and then. My top vote went to this one:

While a certain book and staple of college writing courses is commonly known by the names of its coauthors (the first of whom originally published the 43-page book in 1918 and the second of whom enlarged it in 1959), it is also well-known by its official title, which is what?

50 Shades of Grammar

But it wasn’t all fun and games today – Apple announced products which will probably cost me money, and the author of osxphotos pushed a fix for the Unicode filename problem I ran into a few days ago. I knew Unicode was complicated, but I didn’t realize it was as complicated as it is – in particular, that accented characters have “composed” and “decomposed” forms and that it matters which one you happen to run into. What you see on the screen is just the tip of the iceberg!

Diane is getting ready to start working on a photo book for our Iceland trip, so I put photos from the first half of the trip into her Forever account so she can use them. I had had a good process for doing that, but I broke it somehow, so I had to figure out what was failing (the environment wasn’t being set up properly when Lightroom runs my export script; I’m not sure why, but I fixed the script to do the setup itself).

Beyond that, I spent most of the day working on the Tripit integration code I talked about yesterday and will probably talk about again tomorrow. I’m cleaning up a lot of the mess I made the first time I wrote the code – it helps that I found an XML Schema Description of the data they send, so I can easily understand what information they provide instead of trying to reverse-engineer a JSON file.

Right now, the code still has lots of issues; it reminds me of the Hverir Geothermal Area in Iceland – smelly, with lots of danger lurking.

And speaking of danger lurking, I’m going to update all of my Apple devices tonight to pick up the fix that Apple released to patch the zero-click exploits that were recently discovered. sigh

A mere 116 days ago, I mentioned that I was going to improve the program I wrote to update our Google calendars using information from TripIt – in particular, I wanted it to tell me what got updated when a trip’s information changed.

I finally got around to working on the program, and I was right – there was a database in my future. A sqlite3 database, not anything heavyweight, but still, it’s a database.

I didn’t forsee the need to create Python classes with multiple inheritance (mix-ins), but it seems to be the easiest way to do what I want with the least amount of code.

And that was what I spent my time on today. I’m not finished, but I’m starting to see results.

This morning, we attended Shabbat Shuvah services at Almaden Lake Park in San Jose. The park does not allow the use of amplified sound; fortunately, the Cantor can sing loudly!

The service was slightly different than our usual Shabbat Shuvah service because, of course, today is the 20th anniversary of the attack on America and the destruction of the World Trade Center. I was surprised that there were at least two people at the service who had lost someone in the attacks.

It was good to be outside with friends today.