I decided recently that I needed to recapture some of those memories by adding a Duo to household. You can read more about my PowerBook Duo 2300c auction win on my blog at RetroMacCast.

By the nature of my job, probably not much in the way of updates during the day but hopefully I’ll develop some habits to to twitter (or is it post tweets?) in the evening and weekends.

As a side note, the WordPress 2.5 admin look and feel is pretty nice. To bad I’m mostly compelled to upgrade for solutions to exploits and not to get access to new features.

WonderCon has become mostly a TV and movie panel show for me while I concentrate on shopping and autographs at Comic-Con. Compared with the insane lines at Comic-Con, it’s relatively easy to get a good seat and see actors, writers and directors of current and upcoming genre shows. This year had well known television shows and movies like Get Smart, X-Files 2 and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles represented. Actors and creators like Steve Carell, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Chris Carter and Anne Hathaway took the time to show up and answer audience questions. It was a nice, relaxing weekend.

Pictures from the panels and the exhibit hall are available for your enjoyment.

I really need to put more time into this as I’d like to get it up and running in time for field use at WonderCon next month.

I ultimately decided to just go with CakePHP. For the reasons listed before, it ended up making to most sense based on what I’ve already had experienced with and what seemed to be installed by default with my ISP. I just followed the Cake Blog Tutorial, recasting blog postings into comic book titles with the appropriate field changes. Some retyping of code and minor editing of values and voila! a complete web application was born.

As I explained previously, my comic database has been more or less unchanged for the past two decades. While I introduced some relational aspects in the last few years by tracking individual issues (sometimes) along with the titles, my main use has been just to catalog issue numbers. To support my comic logging activities, I just need the following features:

• add, edit & delete a comic title
• browse all the comic titles
• browse only the “active” titles, those that I’m currently most interested in
• search for a specific title, generally based on the comic title’s name

Since I routinely see people at conventions doing similar activities with hand written lists or printouts, there isn’t much more that’s need. Of course in the future I’ll get fancy with issue specific data and tweak the interface with AJAX features or optimized for mobile device viewing, but that’s for another time.

Such a simple requirements meant my schema could be pretty simple:

title VARCHAR(128) UNIQUE,
publisher VARCHAR(64),
time_frame VARCHAR(64),
series_type ENUM('limited','maxi','one-shot','normal'),
main_issues TEXT,
annuals TEXT,
specials TEXT,
missing_issues TEXT,
comments TEXT,
is_active BOOLEAN,
is_complete BOOLEAN,
is_subscribed BOOLEAN


There are of course other columns for tracking and maintenance of titles, but this gives the basic idea of a comic title’s structure. With a table based on this schema added to a little MySQL database, it was relatively painless to stitch together basic CRUD operations using CakePHP’s MVC approach and sample code. Afterwards, I easily added in some other functionality like a dedicated link that filtered out everything except comics marked as active. Getting more daring with my increasing confidence, I dropped in pagination support and even filter functionality. I thought I’d be slogging through data dumps to the browser and looking at SQL queries executed throughout the weekend but, given it was so trivial, it more or less worked without much debugging. I had a few problems because I didn’t read method and function documentation and didn’t realize from the error message that some calls were expecting an array but just receiving a single object. Easily corrected with a quick print_r call.

All in all it really was as easy as cake. Next on my agenda is to tweak the UI and perform some more serious testing with larger data sets.

I’ll have more in depth to say after I’ve finished my reviews. I might settle on CakePHP if for no other reason than to be able to apply increased PHP knowledge to my blog at some point.

I have a lot of comic books… when I stopped counting years ago I must’ve had around 3,000 by estimate. With many short boxes added in the last few years, the count should be over 3,500, maybe even 4,000. Since I’ve long stopped remembering comics by issue number or cover, I’ve turned to databases over the years to keep everything organized.

My first database was a card filing application call Atari Home Filing Manager on my Atari 800. It used a 3″x5″ index card metaphor and I entered a series on each line with issues numbers following. When my mom took me to comic conventions, I printed out the files and took a hard copy with me.

When I was in junior high, I got more serious and used Timeworks’ Data Manager on my Atari ST. I could dedicate whole records to a comic and set up the basic fields for information like title, publisher, issues owned, notable mission issues and so forth. As a side note, I really liked all of Timeworks software and used their Word Writer word processor into high school until I made the jump to Windows 3.0. The New York Times has an old article on Atari computers which mentions Timeworks.

My longest lasting database choice has been FileMaker Pro, starting with FileMaker Pro v2. I made a couple of updates over the years before settling on FileMaker Pro v6. One benefit of using FileMaker has been the availability of a Palm OS client, which I’ve used on various Palm compatible devices the last few years. My standard operating procedure has been to sync up my active comic list with my CLIE UX50 before attending a convention, make updates as new comics are added and then sync back. It works pretty well… except that it usually doesn’t remember who the FileMaker user name is requiring a reset before synchronizing. Since I’ve waited so long, upgrading pricing isn’t available but moving to a new version is a requirement if I were to get a more modern Palm. Since I’m undecided (or maybe slightly decided against) getting a new Palm, Treo or Centro, I’ve been looking at alternatives that would work with other devices.

There is comic book management software for the Mac OS. Many like xidiar Comics is issue oriented and not series oriented. This means I have to individually enter in each issue. If I was so inclined it’s actually a really nice piece of software with fields for every detail one needs on an issue. It’s also got a nice Mac-feeling UI. But there doesn’t seem to be any way to import / export the data. Others like Books are more flexible but also single issues / book oriented. And apps like Collectorz Comic Collector sound like they’d work but don’t have a Mac OS version. Gah!

Now I’m thinking just to write my own using MySQL with a PHP frontend. I’ve done some “hello world” PHP applications and there’s no shortage of PHP and MySQL how-to’s available. My database needs are simple. I can start with a flat table and expand to add a per issue table later on, which is how my FileMaker database is. One problem with most of the other solutions is that there’s no easy way to host on my provider, just import and export of data. With MySQL, it’s easy enough to create the tables on my hosting provider’s server and have them run there. With my database publicly available, I don’t need to sync with a handheld device. Of course… my next handheld device would need a readily available network connection to be useful. And, I’d have to figure out a solution if I wanted to have multiple copies of the database available, one on my laptop when I’m on the go and unconnected and one on the web where I can access it. Those discussions are for another time.

Anyways, they’re still working on their temporary set and this week they adorned the fake brick backdrops with shelves holding little items including a little red Robby the Robot tin toy.

Not much to see but it’s always good to see something of Robby.

Continuing with my Japan theme (albeit a week late), I can say that like many things, IC cards have been available in Japan for a while. One of the major retail card I’m familiar with is Edy, a rechargeable debit card accepted in everything from retail stores to vending machines. Edy is quick, just touch the card over the pad and wait for the pleasant tones of money going out of your pocket into the retailer’s hands. Much nicer than the single beep demonstrated on MasterCard’s PayPass site.

I’ve actually had more experience with IC cards for train and subway usage. The Suica card has been available for use on JR trains for years, employing the same technology as Edy. At it’s introduction, the Suica card was a new concept and there was a decent ad campaign to just “touch and go”, referring to the ease at which passengers can get through turnstiles. Recently, the Tokyo Metro subways systems have adopted Pasmo. Pasmo, which I found out after picking one up, is completely compatible with the Suica cards. After years of tiny ticket juggling or buying disposable cards, there’s a single system to get around the greater Tokyo area. These cards are really convenient. It’s easy enough to just leave them in the wallet, slide the whole thing over the reader and run on to catch your soon departing train.

While these technologies in some ways make for a more secure transaction since you’re always in control of the card, it seems that once a thief has hold of the card it’s a lot easier to get away with illegal transactions. The major credit card companies offer no liability policies for lost or stolen cards as a means to mitigate cardholder worries but that only helps after the fact.

Last week’s announcement that Paramount and Dreamworks were going to be moving from an HD media neutral stance to only support HD-DVD called to mind all sorts of past format and media battles that have ended in wasted money and discarded collections and devices. Of course there is the legendary tale of VHS vs. Betamax but at least Betamax lived on in professional circles for a couple of decades after losing to VHS in the consumer space. In the early days of video, my family made what turned out to be the right choice and went with VHS. We stayed clear of dead ends like RCA’s SpectraVision, even when it looked pretty high tech in comparison to VHS and had a smattering of Star Trek titles available at launch. We stumbled a couple of years later when we picked up a Disc film Kodak camera, which I cursed at a young age not only for grainy photos but because I would often take pictures including part of my index finger when holding the camera with two hands. Today, Disc film has been dead for more than a decade and I’d have to mail in the negatives to one of a handful of processing facilities if I ever craved reprints. Even scanning Disc film is an issue due to the center plastic ring that makes it impossible to lie the negatives flat.

With these and countless other tales of short lived media, I’ve yet to truly commit to a new HD format. While I have Blu-ray playback with my PS3 and thoroughly enjoy watching highdef BD movies, I’ve been a poor supporter of the BD as a format by not actually investing in any discs. Shame on me. I’ve pretty much just rented through Netflix. Given both the number of DVDs in my current collection that often don’t get watched very often and that for those that do get watched it’s usually in the bedroom where only a DVD player resides, I’m hesitant to spend money on a format whose future isn’t wholly certain.

Of course, the upcoming Spider-Man High Definition Trilogy looks to be changing my mind on not purchasing any Blu-ray discs.